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Debs gave her head an irritated shake. “He’s got the whole weekend and he can’t even get an ID,” she said, and I blinked in surprise. Finding the victim’s name was the most basic first step, and for forty-eight hours to go by without learning who this was seemed to take the Art of Clueless to an epic level.
“That’s pretty spectacular,” I said, and because I knew my sister very well, I added, “So what are you going to do about it, against all orders and contrary to department regulations?”
Deborah looked at the folder on her desk, and then at Jackie. The two of them shared a moment I couldn’t quite read. “I would never go against orders or department regulations,” she said, which did not really agree with history as I had lived it. But Debs said it with a straight face. Then she looked up at me and, wonder of wonders, she smiled. It was so unlike her that for a moment I thought she must have been possessed by demons, and I almost took a step backward to protect myself. But she didn’t unleash any gouts of fire, or even speak in tongues. She just kept smiling and tilted her head at Jackie.
“Jackie thought of it,” she said, and she turned to face the actress again. This time the smirks they traded were clearly looks of great mutual satisfaction. “We are going to run a mock investigation to teach Jackie how it is done,” Deborah said, and then her words took on an odd lilt, as if she was reading from an official report. “In this way, we will parallel the department’s actual investigation, without interfering in the official process or compromising the investigating officer’s mandate, while at the same time constructing a valid simulation and comparing our results to those achieved by Detective Anderson, which will allow our subject, Ms. Forrest, to understand the subtleties of a homicide investigation and all its procedural complexity as such things are conducted in real time by the Miami-Dade Police Department.” She looked back at me again, still smiling. “Pretty cute, huh? I get to slip around Detective Dumbfuck and track this asshole down, and Matthews can’t say anything, because I am doing exactly what he ordered.”
“Plus,” Jackie said. “If we actually come up with something—”
“When we come up with something,” Deborah said.
“Then it’s spectacular publicity. For the show and the department.”
I looked at Jackie with new respect. “Ingenious,” I said, and she gave me a smile that made me want to sing.
“So,” Deborah said, jerking me back to reality, “I wanted to go over the whole thing with you, and see what we got.” She tapped the folder with her finger. “Starting with the forensic stuff.” She gave Jackie another smirk. “You know. So Jackie can see how it’s done.”
“In theory,” Jackie said, smirking back.
“Right,” Deborah said.
I was very pleased that my sister had found a new Best Friend for Life, but their Ain’t We Cute act was getting a little annoying. Happily for me, Robert felt the same way, and he was not nearly as bashful about saying so.
“Well, hey,” he said. “I need to be in on this, too.” Deborah gave him a blank look, and Jackie got very interested in her fingernails. “I mean,” he said, “this is like a perfect way for me to learn stuff, too, right?”
Deborah flicked her eyes at me, then back to Robert. “Sure,” she said flatly.
“Great,” Robert said. He leaned back against the windowsill and folded his arms across his chest, clearly a man taking command of things. “So what would my character do first?”
“Whatever I tell him to do,” Jackie said, and he glared at her. She shrugged. “I’m the detective. My character is. So it’s my case. You are only here to feed me clues.”
Robert looked very unhappy. He unfolded his arms and put his hands in his pockets. “All right, sure,” he said. “But that’s … I mean, I’ve got to have some kind of … I mean, my character has to have, you know. Respect.”
Jackie’s face got hard. She slapped the desk. “Respect is earned,” she said. “Now what have you got for me?”
Robert’s mouth flapped open, then closed. He looked like a man who had just been thoroughly scolded. I, on the other hand, realized what Jackie was doing. It was a near-perfect imitation of Deborah, and I was very impressed.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s good. Just like her.”
Jackie gave a low gurgling laugh that made my toes curl and beamed at me. “Thanks,” she said. “Sergeant Morgan—your sister—we worked on it this weekend. At Bennie’s.” Bennie’s was a cop bar, a place where off-duty police officers hung out—and sometimes stopped in for a quick snort while on duty. The clientele was not known to be friendly to non-cops who wandered in. If Deborah had taken Jackie to Bennie’s, they had clearly bonded even more than I’d realized. “It’s a really good place for background,” Jackie said. “I have to send the writers there to see it.” She winked at Deborah. “We did tequila shots. She’s not so tough with a couple of drinks under her belt.” Debs snorted, but didn’t say anything.
“Sounds like quite a party,” I said,
and oddly, I almost wished I’d been invited. “So now that you’re actually my sister, what would you like me to do?”
For a moment it looked like Jackie was going to say something, but then she bit her lip and picked up the file. “Let’s go over the labs,” she said, and then she glanced at Deborah. “Is that right?”
“No,” Debs said. “The lab work is just background bullshit.”
“Thank you very much,” I said.
“Is anything in there important?” Deborah said.
“Rope burns on the wrists,” I said. “Nylon fibers probably mean clothesline.”
“Which could have come from any grocery store in the world,” she said.
“She was gagged with her own panties,” I said. “They found ’em in the Dumpster.”
