Page 22 of Diamonds in the Mud

“Right,” I said and hung up.

I shut everything down and headed in to take a very cold shower and try to get some sleep.

Chapter Six

“Rough diamonds may sometimes

be mistaken for worthless pebbles.

–Sir Thomas Browne

Rayne

The last thing I wanted to do on a windy, rainy Monday morning was stand in front of the City and County Building. There were a dozen or more cameras shoved in my face as I gave an update on the mayor’s murder case.

I was upset that I didn’t have anything new to tell them from the last time I’d stood there a week ago. What pissed me off was the possibility that whatever I said this time would be taken out of context, like it had the week before.

The photo of me hovering over Sharon Taylor’s body had gone viral after the murder, thanks to Sabrina DeRouen.

Okay, so maybe she was a little pissed at me for hauling her butt down to the station and locking her in an interview room for an hour or so until she finally coughed over the camera drive. Hindsight, I should have seized her computer to make sure she hadn’t already copied the photo from the drive.

The fact that it had been an entire week since the mayor’s death and I was no closer to finding who had stabbed the woman thirty-two times and then tried to skin her face, disturbed me. It wasn’t the gruesome details of the crime that kept me up at night, it was the fact that none of the puzzle pieces fit.

Henry Taylor’s alibi checked out. The man was at the bar until he climbed the back stairs with Faye to her apartment above the bar, where he stayed until he drove home. Apparently, it wasn’t the first time the guy had slept over at the younger bartender’s place.

The Taylor twins were both accounted for as well. Just as they’d said, Beau had been in Lafayette for the week for a job and Wyatt had spent the night with Clara Mangrum.

The biggest clues in the case I’d gotten during my interview with Sabrina DeRouen. The woman had been a wealth of information as far as the Taylor family’s goings-on.

That fact disturbed me almost as much as meeting Jameson Lorenzo at the BBB.

My mind hadn’t been able to relax from the case until after my chat with Aria. She didn’t bring her work to the party so I figured I’d better leave mine at the office and enjoy my makeshift birthday party, which had entailed flirting with Jameson.

Yeah, the first thing I did when I got into the station the next morning was to pull up his info. The fact that he was clean only solidified my thoughts about the man.

Every single member of the Reapers had a rap sheet. Most had several pages full of misdemeanors and time they’d spent behind bars.

Jameson Lorenzo only had two misdemeanors. Speeding tickets.

Which didn’t add up. Then I found out he’d been living in my town for a year. A full fucking year!

How in the hell had I missed the man?

Plus, his address was only a few blocks from the station, and he had worked at the Red River Iron Gym for the past eight months.

I wasn’t a member of the gym myself but had been there a few times with Aria and Tobias. Not once had I seen Jameson there.

Trust me when I say I would have noticed him. I had a radar when it came to men like him.

Which is how I found Quincy Ingram. The man had transferred to our station a little over two years before from Baton Rouge. We didn’t normally get transfers and I’d been upset that we’d hired the position of patrol division captain from outside, but then I’d seen him and, well, you know the rest.

Jesus, why can’t I control myself around men like them? I’d learned my lesson with Quincy though. The man was a snake. Still, I was smart enough to know that not all snakes were the same.

I’d gone out on a few dates with a couple of men after that, some of which went against my physical attraction code, and both of those had been even bigger snakes than Quincy.

With Jameson, however, things felt different. There was something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on about the man. I hoped to bump into him again, but interviewing everyone attached to the case was keeping me busy.

After running through my pre-planned statement, I was stupid enough to take a few questions. When I spotted Sabrina in the crowd, I purposely avoided her hand and answered a question from a state-run news station.