Joey gaped at him, and Gideon felt a little bit of disgruntled pride kicking in.
“Did you get pictures of the kill board?Harding’s going to want those so we can justify this fucking corpse on the floor.”
Joey had scowled at the man, whose hands had flailed in his own blood as it had pooled underneath him.“Nice job,” he grunted.
“Thank you,” Gideon said, feeling better about the whole thing.“My special forces commander taught an entire class on how to use an attacker’s weapons against him.I was sort of hoping for a cheese knife, because I always thought that would becool!”
Joey’s cackle surprised them both.“That was good,” he said in surprise.“Next time you have thoughts on Schrödinger’s cat, you should let me in on the joke.”
Gideon grinned at him and reached into his pocket to put Kylie out of her misery.“You want to come with me to seeWickedtonight?”he asked.“It was gonna be Kathy Novacek, but she’s going to be up to her eyeballs in paperwork.”
“Yeah, sure.”Carlyle checked out the body again, shaking his head.“A stiletto.Yeah.Well, wait until you see the wounds on the other guys.It’s his favorite toy.”
Gideon stared at the now-cooling body of what had once been Chester Schumer, and resisted the urge to kick the rat bastard in the gut.“Not anymore,” he said grimly.Then, “Kylie, my dear, you need to get a bus out here—coroner’s, not for me—and tell Clint to save the interviews for the Feebies, but we need dogs out here, and searchers and—”
Carlyle was flagging him down.
“What?”he asked.
“Amurder room,” Carlyle told him, like he was expecting Gideon to remember what he’d been saying as Gideon had been brushing glass out of his hands.“Hedocumentedwhere he buried all his bodies.”
“Gid?”Kylie said over the phone.
“Well, we’ll need all those same people, sweetheart, but their job is going to be a lot easier than you thought.”
“Chadwick, you’re bleeding,” Carlyle said, his voice hitching.“Holy shit.I’m partnered one day and you almost die on me.Do you realize what would happen?”
Gideon gave him a dry glance and grimaced because his cuts were starting to drip and he was contaminating the scene.“I’d missWicked?”
“I’d getfired,you asshole!Why didn’t you call for help?”
“Because my special forces commander would take a flight from the fucking desert in California and kill me twice if I had to call for help over this piece of shit and his pigsticker.Jesus, Carlyle, chill out and go take pictures of the murder room.But don’t touch anything.I’mfine.”
HE WASnot, Harding told him grimly one hour later,fine.“Get on the bus, get stitched up, then go home, grab your date, and see your musical—”
“Carlyle’s coming with me.Kathy’s stuck here.”
“You bet I am!”she shouted across the room, where she and her unit had set up an op center using the intel that Schumer himself had left them.“Thanks for the help, Gid—you couldn’t have interviewed this guy on Monday?I was looking forward to tonight.”
“Sorry, Kathy,” Gideon muttered.She was pretty—compact, blond, a fresh girl-next-door face.He might have gotten laid, he thought irritably.Now that they no longer worked in the same department, Kathy had seemed more than amenable to his textbook three moves: self-deprecation, casual kindness, and—his best—“Hey, staying friends is my strongpoint.”Gideon had a lot of casually kind friends, but few long-term lovers.
His passion just seemed to revolve around other things.Kathy’s did too, which had made the idea seem perfect, but Gideon found he was actually more excited about taking Carlyle and popping his theater cherry.Carlyle didn’t smile much—Gideon wanted to see if he’d be as excited about flying monkeys on stage as he was about Spider Monkeys in the jungle.
Harding glanced up at Carlyle, who had been watching the crime scene processing with avid, interested eyes, but who hadn’t left Gideon’s side since he’d taken the pictures of the murder room to show Gideon.For his part, Gideon had allowed himself to be sat on one of the barstools, over the marble-tiled foyer, so he could bleed as sterilely as possible.
“Good,” Harding said shortly.“I’m glad Carlyle can take you home and make sure you have an early night.Why wasn’t he with you when the guy came at you with a stiletto again?”
“He was upstairs finding the murder room,” Gideon said.“I swear to God, Harding, we were textbook—”
“Except for the lockpicks,” Harding said dryly.
“The suspect was acting suspiciously,” Carlyle said, virtue writ large across his puckish features.
Harding eyed the corpse, which was getting zipped into a black plastic bag.“I think you lucked out in that way,” he said.“Given how this fell out, nobody’s going to question the access to the murder room.But next time, keep the lockpicks to yourself unless it’s an emergency, okay?”
Carlyle tilted his head.“Define emergency?”
Harding grimaced.“You’ll know it when you see it,” he said.“But this wasn’t it.Don’t worry.Schumer took care of a lot of our problems by ending up dead.”
