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DETECTIVE ARCHER MALONE
“She’s unusually angry, don’t you think?” Walking the street of our most recent homicide, I duck under the tape that’s supposed to keep onlookers out, and wait for Fletch to follow. “That much bottled-up rage is dangerous, right? It’s unhealthy.”
“Dunno.” Fletch sets his hands on his hips and studies the scene we’ve already examined once.
We were out in the cold in the middle of the damn night, and after that, our second-wave investigators came through and went over the scene with a fine-tooth comb. Evidence was bagged, the scene was recorded. And the truth of the matter is, this sidewalk has been disrupted by so many looky-loos since we left, the chances we’ll find something fresh are slim to none.
Our evidence is already down at the station, and the key to this case is at the George Stanley Building. She’s brunette, she’s sexy, and she wears a coat I never once in my life thought I would find appealing.
“Mayet’s got fire,” Fletch says, then he pauses and glances across at me. “Why are you so hung up on her anger?”
“Because she…” Scowling, I stop at an evidence marker laid down hours ago and crouch to study what was, at three o’clock in the morning, droplets of blood in the snow. They’re covered now, the scene photographed, and samples taken by the affable Doctor Flynn for testing, but the marker remains. “Because she’s…”
“Got you speechless?” Chuckling, my partner and best friend kneels beside me so his jeaned knee rests a few inches from mine. “I have never, in all the time we’ve known each other, seen a woman cut off your tongue, Arch. But here we are. She was a distraction while we were working Saturday night.”
“No, we—”
“You stopped a foot chase to stare at her!” His words are harsh, but his goofy grin remains. “We had our suspect, but sure, let’s stop a moment and chat up the pretty new chick in town. She screwed our case, Arch. Then she was a fucking siren inside Tim’s. And now it’s a fresh new Monday, and for the first time ever, you can’t make full sentences.”
Tutting, he shakes his head and risks me slamming it against the brick exterior of the twenty-four-seven corner store. “Doesn’t bode well, my friend. Doesn’t bode well at all. Now let’s rerun this shit and figure it out, because we’re missing something important.”
Nodding, I push up to stand and think back to a little past two o’clock this morning, when my phone blasted in the dark, waking me up from a dream only Minka Mayet could provoke, and called me into the cold.
“Justin Dowel. Fifty-three years old, five feet, eleven inches. Two hundred and ten pounds, employed at the local steel factory.” I recite the facts I know by heart. “He’s been dragged into the station, questioned, cross-examined, and released on eleven separate missing teens cases.”
“Never could get it over the line,” Fletch picks up where I drop off. “We knew it was him, Arch. We knew it was Justin, but he was slicker than oil.”
“We get a call out in the middle of the night,” I go over the details, and hope something clicks where it didn’t earlier. “Dude is a popsicle, half-buried in snow, and discovered only because someone happened by and practically stumbled on the body. Medical examiner said he’d been dead a couple hours by that point.”
“Are you mad the M.E. who came out wasn’t the beautiful rage machine Doctor Mayet?”
“No. Shut the fuck up and focus.”
Fletcher sniggers under his breath.
“Cause of death was a blade through the throat.”
“Didn’t touch the artery,” he adds seriously. “Dude didn’t bleed out. In fact, there’s hardly any blood at all, and what there is soaked into his shirt before he turned into a human popsicle.”
“I wanna get back to the George Stanley later and talk to Doctor Flynn about this. Hopefully, she’ll have more information on the knife, and once we have that, we can start a search and find out where it came from. Where it was bought. Maybe we can trace it back to a credit card.”
“And your trip back to the George Stanley?” Charlie Fletcher has been my best friend since the moment we were both handed our asses in the academy. I was the recruit who wouldn’t speak a word, and he was the one who wouldn’t shut up. Of course our superiors thought it would be funny to pair us up. But the joke’s on them, because in the end, Fletch became my very best friend. “Your trip back there has nothing to do with the sinfully sexy Doctor Mayet, does it?”
“You call her sexy again,” I look to him, “I’ll tear your fucking tongue out and strangle you with it.”
Turning away from my partner’s taunting grin, I head inside the corner store that remains open, despite the homicide that took place practically on its front steps.
“Mr. Scottsdale?” I make my way to the plastic partitioned counter and look through the scratched barrier to the guy whose belly hangs as far forward as his knees when he’s sitting. “Detectives Malone and Fletcher from the Copeland PD. We have a couple more questions to go over.”
“I already talked to the cops.” He twists his body, like our presence offends him. “Some other lady in a uniform already asked me my story, and I told her what I’ll tell you; I wasn’t here!”
“Okay, so…” I lean on the counter and stare into Scottsdale’s puke-colored eyes. “Where’s the girl whowashere? Where is she now?”
“Arianna,” he says quickly. “Arianna was here. But her shift already finished, and she went home.”
“Does Arianna always do night shift?” I already know the answer, but I’d like to hear what the ugly fucker has to say. “How old is she, Scottsdale? Fifteen? Sixteen?”
“She’s nineteen,” he glowers. “An adult. And the place is basically dead overnight. I make maybe a hundred bucks during her entire twelve-hour shift. She didn’t see nothing.”
