“What happened?” he asked.
Grade moved his chin out of the way. “I’m fine,” he said. “Apparently, my face is extra slappable today.”
Clay brushed his thumb over Grade’s bottom lip and let the anger wash through him. He tried to gauge if he could really be professional and detached if Fisher did something to Grade.
Of course, the answer was yes. Clay knew how to switch on the emotional lidocaine drip that would make that work. It was the hangover that would fuck him up.
“What?” Grade asked as he reached up to cuff his fingers loosely around Clay’s wrist. “What’s wrong, Clay?”
It wasnota good time to tell Grade the truth. Clay couldn’t predict how he’d react. Maybe he’d take the calm, detached approach he took to dismembering corpses, or maybe he’d take a metaphorical ax to the wall of a motel bedroom. It was hard to tell.
“A lot of shit.” Clay settled on that as an answer instead. He took Grade’s hand and picked up his coffee to take a drink. “But I’m focused on the one that’s going to hit us on the head first.”
Grade was visibly dissatisfied with that, but a patrol car pulled up outside before he could ask any questions. Deputy Jones climbed out, adjusted his gun belt absently, and entered the coffee shop. He stopped just inside, the chimes over the door still murmuring, and looked around until he found Clay and Grade in the corner of the room.
He gave a quick, barely-there nod and went up to the counter to order. It was a plain cup of drip coffee from how quickly he got it, payment waved off by the barista, who probably hadn’t tried to upsell him on the Costa Rican wheat. Jones carried it over with him to the seat at the table next to Clay and Grade, angled so he didn’t look at them.
“Don’t want to be seen with us?” Clay asked.
Jones got his notebook out and squinted at it. “No,” he said into his coffee, “I fucking don’t. Somebody with pull has it out for you, Traynor, Adams too. Your life is about to get very fucking uncomfortable. And don’t ask me to cover your ass. This is above my pay grade.”
“It’s a generous pay grade,” Clay said.
“Not generous enough,” Jones said. “I got what you wanted this time, but that’s it. Until this blows over, you don’t know me.”
Clay could have picked holes in that, but he refrained. It would be more satisfying to watch Jones flail when he realized a dirty cop didn’t have the leverage to make that sort of call.
“And I was going to invite you to my birthday party,” he said. “You talked to the cops in Doglan?”
Jones scratched the bridge of his nose with his thumb.
“You were right,” he said. “Some weird shit went down with the Ledger case. The district attorney’s investigators were all over it before the Dogleg cops had time to fuck it up themselves. They didn’t even get to finish the inventory of the house before it pretty much got yanked out from under them. Apparently, they’re concerned that Ledger had confidential information from her time in the DA’s office. Disgruntled former employee and all that.”
Grade looked nearly as uncomfortable as Jones. He still cleared his throat and asked, “So they wanted laptops, electronic devices, that sort of thing?”
Jones nodded. “Investigators seized all of that. It’ll be handed back to the sheriff’s department once they know there’s nothing sensitive on there. Oh, except the laptop. There wasn’t one. Apparently the investigators would not let that go; it was a whole thing right there at the scene.” He stopped and gave Grade a curious sidelong look. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
“No.”
Clay stretched his legs out under the table and watched the traffic outside as it passed by the long window.
“What about the boxes in the garage?” he asked. “Did the investigators take them too?”
Jones shrugged. “Maybe,” he said. “I didn’t see anything about boxes, but like I said, the inventory wasn’t even done before the scene got yanked out from under the locals. If it looked like paperwork, it was out of there.”
“And Collymore?”
Jones paused as someone walked by the table on the way to the toilets. He took a drink of his coffee and tapped his pen against his notebook. Once the person was out of earshot, Jones licked his thumb and turned the page.
“Open and shut case,” he said. “Just a guy with a nice car that thought he was Ryan Reynolds. He got carjacked and tried to fight back instead of giving that shit up to the insurance company. Stupid bastard. Had a wife and kid at home too.”
“No record?” Clay asked.
Jones shook his head. “He had a juvie record, but it was low-level shit,” he said. “Vandalism for tagging the school gym in Doglan after the team lost a match, driving without a license, and underage drinking.”
Grade snorted. “I didn’t even think they bothered to put that in your juvie file in Sweeny,” he said. “Who wouldn’t have one?”
That made Jones give him another interested look for a second; then he nodded his agreement.
