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Satisfied with the comfort of them both, I turn on my heels and head back into the hall, closing the door most of the way as I leave, then I move into the living room and rescue my phone from the sofa.
Scrolling my contact list and dialing Fletch, I head into the kitchen and open the fridge, looking for something to drink while the call rings.
“Archer?”
“Hey.” He’s already left the bar. The music I expected to be in the back of our conversation is absent, replaced with aBlueyepisode. “You’re home?”
“Yeah. Getting Moo ready for bed, then I was gonna settle in for a couple of hours and run through this case to see what we might’ve missed.”
“Same.” I grab a bottle of water and slam the fridge shut, then pulling up a stool at the counter, I sit and rest my elbow on top. “I have time, and I don’t feel good about our John Doe. The fact we don’t even have an ID yet irks me.”
“Agreed. So I was thinking we could run the timeline and straighten this shit out.” Fletch sits somewhere on his end of the call and exhales a breath as he relaxes. “Vic was discovered at just before two p.m. today, Saturday.”
“Yeah. And M.E.s are saying he’s been dead at least thirty-six hours. That puts death around Thursday last week. Can’t be much longer than that, or we’d have seen more decomp of the body, especially after a drop from the bridge and swim in the river.”
“So let’s lock in Thursday,” he confirms. “Till we hear differently, death was Thursday morning-ish. I wanna know why they held onto his body for so long after the job was done.”
“Insurance?” I open my water so the crackling of the cap seal echoes throughout my apartment. “Could be they didn’t get the information they wanted, so they had a new target in sight.”
“So they held onto him as a kind of trade?” he theorizes. “‘Give us the data, and we’ll give you Kyle’?”
“Maybe. Or maybe they didn’t mean to kill him. They might’ve just wanted to threaten him. Hurt him.”
“That’s a lot of hurting, Arch. They cut off his digits. Took his eyes. Speaking of, have y—”
“Wasn’t Felix,” I cut in before he can finish his question. “I spoke to him just before I called you. He denies it.”
“And you believe him?” he growls. “Just like that?”
I shouldn’t. Fuck knows, almost every single perp we’ve ever arrested first denied doing the crime. But…
“Yeah, I believe him. He’s not afraid to go toe to toe with the law, Fletch. And he’s admitted other, worse stuff to me.”Like a murder he’s carrying out right now. “If it was him, I think he’d tell me. He has no reason not to, and if his crime was the cause of Minka’s exhaustion, I think he’d own up to it pretty quickly, purely so she could rest. This one isn’t Malone. We’re looking for someone else.”
“Well…” He draws a deep breath and scratches the stubble on his jaw. “Okay. If you say so.”
“I do. And I’m not gonna lie to you if Felix is dumping bodies on our turf. We learned that lesson already, right?”
He nods so I hear the movement through the phone. “Yeah. Okay. As for our John Doe, NCIC isn’t giving us anything yet. I spoke to the captain just a few minutes before you called, and he—”
“You spoke to the captain?” I cut in and frown. “Tonight?”
“Yeah. I wanted access to Interpol and was getting kickback. So I asked him to clear me through. I was doing that when you called, but it’s coming up clean. Lots of similar MOs, but nothing that hits dead on.”
The captain and I are already somewhat…tense. He wanted me for murder, and when my alibis proved too tight—must be the Malone in me—he instead took my rank and bumped me down to Detective II. Fletch too.
My partner talking to him without me isn’t a bad thing. But fuck, right on the back of last month, it feels like a kick in the gut.
Those thoughts are personal, though, and this is work. So I shake off my intrusive feelings and urge myself to focus. “Okay.”
“Okay?” he asks. “What’s okay?”
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “Everything. It’s okay. So, nothing on Interpol.”
“Nah, go back,” he challenges. “What’s the problem, Arch? You don’t trust me to talk to the captain in private?”
“I said it’s fine. Let’s move on.”
“Because you talked to Felix in private, even though his MO is really fucking similar to our perp’s. But you said you believe him, and so I believe you. I took your word for it, though we both know that wasn’t always possible.”
