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“Hey, Mac!”
McNally pretended not to hear Detective Gretchen Sandler’s demanding nasal tone. For the love of God, that woman’s voice was like the scrape of nails on a chalkboard. Truth to tell, she bugged the shit out of him.
He was bent over his computer screen, though he wasn’t near as adept at researching on the ’net as he acted. Sure, he could get what he needed from the electronic equipment that had grown and expanded and reached over the whole department like some alien plant life, invading every aspect of law enforcement, even here in Laurelton. But he still liked to examine real evidence, preferred tromping across crime scenes, and he got off on mentally putting pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle in his brain until he reached that “Aha!” moment.
“Mac!”
“What?” He didn’t look up.
“Don’t act like you can’t hear me,” she said from her desk, which was less than three feet behind him. “I’m zippo on fifteen-to twenty-four-year-old missing females through 1993. Either nobody cares that she’s gone, or we’ve got to go back further.”
“Go back further,” he said, trying not to snap.
He sensed something behind him, something quiet and building. Glancing around, he saw that Gretchen was barely holding in suppressed amusement, as were some of the younger men and women in the department, who, upon seeing his dark expression, moved back to their stations. Gretchen, however, was Mac’s latest partner, a woman who’d earned her job as a homicide detective because she was damn good at her job. Damn good. Just ask her. And she resented being saddled with a has-been, obsessed nut job like Mac who’d earned his promotion to homicide detective out of virtue of simply hanging around long enough. This, of course, was Gretchen’s opinion, not Mac’s.
But it might be a lot of the rest of the department’s as well.
“Maybe I should go back to 1989,” she suggested. “Isn’t there a vic named…oh, let’s see if I can remember…” She snapped her fingers. “Jezebel Brentwood?”
His temper spiked and he bit out, “Maybe you should have started there.”
“And keep you from your obsession? No way. I’ll let you begin at that end and meet you in the middle.”
“If I had DNA on Jessie Brentwood, it would only be a matter of waiting for the results from the bones.” He swivelled in his chair and gave her what he hoped was a cool look, but he felt a muscle working in his jaw.
Gretchen was in her early thirties with creamy, mocha-colored skin and straight black hair, a product of her Brazilian mother, and a pair of icy blue eyes, colder than Mac’s own, a product of her father, apparently, one Gretchen had never known. Or so she’d claimed. “You’re that sure.”
“You got any other missing girls from St. Elizabeth’s?”
“I got a few from the surrounding area.”
“You sure like making it hard on yourself to prove a point.” Mac turned back to his computer as Wes Pelligree, a tall African American detective everyone referred to as Weasel, nudged an unwilling, rain-sodden suspect in damp sweatshirt, dirty jeans, and cuffs toward his desk. Hands chained behind his back, the perp had dirty bare feet, lank, greasy hair, a pimply face, eyes at half mast, and a sneer showing bad teeth, and he reeked of his own puke. An obvious drug bust. But then Weasel had a knack for nailing scumbags who sold meth and crack. Rumor had it his older brother, the one who had dubbed him with the nickname in the first place while Wes was still in grade school, before he’d grown to six-three, had died of an overdose before Wes was out of the Academy. Ever since then, Wes Pelligree had been on a mission.
Which was bad news for the drenched white guy protesting his innocence.
Gretchen, standing too close to his desk, watched them pass and wrinkled her nose as the suspect dropped loudly into a side chair at Weasel’s desk. Phones rang, conversation buzzed, and police personnel in uniform or plain clothes weaved through the maze of desks and cubicles that were crowded into a central area with little privacy and few windows. A heating system that had been “upgraded” sometime in the mid eighties was rumbling and blowing air that was five degrees too warm.
“When are we getting some data we can use?” Gretchen demanded. “The lab techs on vacation, or what?”
“Gotta be patient.” Mac was growing tired of always explaining everything to her. She knew it anyway, but liked to hear herself talk.
“Twenty years patient? I don’t think so.”
She walked off and Mac slid a look after her. She was easy on the eyes. Great figure, nice butt, slim waist, and decent enough breasts, he supposed, but she worked really hard on being unlikeable. He watched a couple of other detectives throw her a glance as she passed. None seemed particularly warm a
nd fuzzy. Mac might be the butt of a few jokes because of his obsession with Jessie Brentwood, but Gretchen was the coworker to avoid. No sense of humor. No big-picture thinking. No fun. She dotted all her i’s and crossed her t’s and fell all over herself in her eagerness to catch the high-profile cases-the few that came along here.
Gretchen Sandler was loaded with ambition, and she didn’t care who got trampled in her climb to the top.
“Humph,” Mac grunted at the computer screen. Though he didn’t give a rat’s ass what others thought of him, if those bones proved to be Jessie Brentwood, he’d go from being the goat to the hero of the department.
The same couldn’t be said of Gretchen Sandler.
The afternoon was dark gray and the wind was shrieking around and under the eaves of Becca’s condo. She’d finished up some work on the computer for Bennett, Bretherton, and Pfeiffer, and had luckily not lost any of the documents when the lights had flickered. Climbing out of her desk chair, she worked the knots out of her neck while Ringo, who’d been sleeping curled under her desk, climbed to his feet and stretched. Becca grabbed her now-tepid cup of tea and tossed it down the sink. She was cold inside and out and the storm wasn’t helping.
Deciding to take a bath to warm up, she ran the taps. The lights flickered again. Grabbing her battery-powered radio, she lit the three candles she had arranged in a pewter holder on the tile countertop, just in case. Ringo watched her machinations with interest, his head cocked this way and that.
She’d turned off the lights, opened the shades high over the window of the tub for a view of the sky, and was just climbing into the steaming water when the lights quit altogether, plunging the condo into total darkness aside from her flickering tapers.
