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Immediately, Minka snorts. Though in my mind, Garzo’s little reminder plays on loop. “Hello Detective Fletcher. How’s Moo today?”
“Still in the station’s daycare, Delicious. How’s life for you? Feels like I haven’t seen you in a lifetime.”
“I saw you yesterday,” she says dryly, then adds, “but I miss your face. Which works out, because I’m calling you both in. Can you make it by the George Stanley within the next hour? I have something I wanna show you.”
“Can you tell it to us over the phone?” I ask. “Not that I don’t wanna see you, but if it saves us the hour and gets us closer to finding the baby…?”
“Come,” she reiterates. “I need to show you. But we can keep it under ten minutes, then you can leave again and do your thing. When can I expect you?”
“Five minutes.”
I turn the car when I find a gap in traffic, then hitting the lights, I move everyone else out of our way and pull up to park in the George Stanley’s circular driveway in about four.
“We’re on our way up now,” I tell Minka. “Is Aubree working today?”
A soft snicker vibrates through the line as Minka’s heelstap-tap-tapagainst the tile floor. “She’s here. Alive and in one piece, too. Come on,” she speaks to the woman herself, I assume, then back to us. “Meet us in my office. We’re on our way up now.”
I take the call off speaker and press the phone to my ear, then Fletch and I leave the cruiser in a no-parking space and head through the doors and toward the elevator.
“You’re not there right now?” I frown. “Where were you?”
“Tox lab. I’m hanging up, but I’ll see you in a sec.”
Without waiting for my response, she kills the call and cuts me off so all I’m left with is thebeep-beep-beep. Then the elevator doors open and reveal an empty inside.
I guess I was kinda hoping we’d piggyback on their lift, and I’d get to see her a moment sooner.
“Whywouldn’tAubs be at work today?” Stepping in, Fletch hits the number nine for Minka’s floor and moves back to wait for the doors to close. “Why is it strange she’s alive and in one piece?”
“Because she trashed Tim’s apartment last night and called him a pussy.” I drop my hands in my pockets and smirk. “She was throwing down and waving another guy in his face to get a reaction. Our sweet little Aubs is getting tougher. She might get her way on this after all.”
“Or she might make so much noise, she paints a giant fucking target on her back. In which case, he packs her up and ships her off to the fucking mountains in Montana.” Apparently, Fletch is not as amused by Aubree’s show as I am. “She’s either gonna burn the city to the ground to get his attention, or she’ll end up in the mountains with nobody to talk to but the trees.”
“Or maybe he’ll accept that he really fucking likes her, stop worrying about our father, and he’ll take his happiness when it’s right in his face, demanding to be seen.”
The elevator doors ding open, so I push away from the wall and exit. The girls are already in Minka’s office; her wall-to-wall glass windows reveal all. “Timothy the Second hasn’t come around in a long time, Fletch. I doubt he’s even looking anymore.”
“You aren’t worried about Minka? Asking her to marry you, stepping in front of her when she’s on the news? You don’t think your dad is watching?”
“I think he has a million other things keeping his attention, and he doesn’t want to waste his time on a couple of sons who had no interest in continuing the family business. He’s got three others to do that for him.”
Pushing through Minka’s door, I wink for Aubree when she glances across, then I make sure to stay on this side of the desk and not circle around to take the chief medical examiner in my arms.
I’d like to. But I get the distinct feeling she’s not the type who enjoys public shows of affection while working.
“Alright.” I sit in the visitor chair instead and set my foot on the opposite knee. “What do you have to show us?”
“Straight to the point.”
Minka snags a file from her desk, takes out a stack of pictures, then comes around to the windows that give her a view of the entire city. Handing the pile of images to Aubree, she turns back to get the tape from her desk.
“This,” she sticks the first image to the glass so the light from outside helps illuminate it that much more, “Is Melissa Boyd’s brain. Also this one,” she tapes up another scan, “and this one,” a third.
Then, stepping to the right, she starts at the top and places another column of scans that clearly don’t belong to our vic. “This is someone else’s brain. I won’t tell you his name, because that would violate his privacy and you don’t have a warrant. But I will assure you it does not matter who he is.”
She turns back and pins me with a glare, knowing I’m on my way to my feet to demand better than ‘you don’t have a warrant.’
“This brain belonged to a middle-aged man who, unfortunately, had a head-on collision with something much larger than him. He was also was a type-2 diabetic, took blood pressure pills for the last fifteen years of his life, had high cholesterol, and suffered retinopathy so bad, I suspect it probably played a part in his death.”
