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Layla had been right when she complained, often and bitterly, about the crowds. It can be worse than any sporting event. Sometimes, we even have to bring people in for traffic control.
Bystanders on footandtwo wheels.
Detective Jerry McGee stands at the helm of our dawn disaster, no longer on crowd control but overseeing the scene nonetheless. He flashes me the barest bob of his head, a nod of acknowledgment, and I do the same for him.
Ever since the disaster withhispartner two years ago, the same one in which I lost mine—
We’ve never been able to see eye to eye. Jerry can be a douche on a good day and a racist prick on his worst. I never fucking wanted to be on the same page. But something about the experience of losing Clint sobered Jerry and knocked a little bit of the douche out of him. His mustache still bristles when he sees me, but his attitude has improved as much as it can.
Now, he’s onlyslightlyracist.
“Get out of the way! Get out of the way. Empire Bay PD.” Naomi repeats the phrase, solemn yet still chipper and kind.
The crime techs lift their heads at our arrival, their gazes shifting unerringly to me as the senior detective assigned to this case.
“What do we have?” I ask.
“Stabbed in the carotid before someone took a blunt instrument and bashed his skull in,” Jasleen Phillips remarks, her distinctive Texas twang evident even with the mask she’s wearing. “Looks like he’s been killed somewhere else, dumped here. Hard to say time of death without more analysis, but it seems this sucker lost a whole lot of blood, definitely not in this area.”
Clinical detachment marks my quick perusal of the body. The gaping wound at the side of his neck puckers around the edges, where the knife split through skin and tendons and arteries.
“You find anything of interest?” I ask Jasleen.
Even the questions are nothing but rote at this point.
Too long. I’ve been doing this too long. I try to muster some kind of empathy for the dead man and find nothing but emptiness in a place where feelings ought to be.
Jasleen gives her preliminary analysis to Naomi, who has her notepad out and pen whirring across the page like a good girl. I scan the crowd.
The bystanders are closer this time, pressing into the tape until they’re nose-to-nose with our officers. All around. They all wear the same face, too. They’re not horrified by the display. They don’t listen when the officers urge them backward, only watch to see what we are going to do. To see if we will be able to get this solved or if this young man’s death will join the towering tacks of unsolved cases our precinct has to deal with.
Layla always talked about getting too down in the spiral of depression to get up again. So beaten by the constant drone of death and depravity that you can’t muster up the courage to keep caring. Oh, you’ll go on. You’ll put one foot in front of the other every single day, but there will be no joy in the steps. No joy in life.
Which is part of the reason why my fiancée left me.
A flash of red in the crowd stands out from the droll neutrals and shades of black, and I turn back, first noticing the cut of the woman’s blazer. The red comes from the deep auburn of her hair, nearly blood-colored against the paleness of her skin, the black jacket showing a hint of lace at the bust from the shirt underneath.
She’s shorter than the others and stands out like a beacon regardless.
Not only the hair but her presence.
I arch a brow and stare at her, surprised when she turns ever so slightly to meet my eyes and her pert lips tilt up in a rowdy smile.
She’s dressed better than this part of town warrants.
Laundromats and delis, fast cash places, and vape shops, like the one flashing a sign for Lost Vape and Uwell.
This woman looks more suited to a job behind the teller window of a bank somewhere in historic downtown. Even her shoes are expensive and well made, her black pants shapely and showing off rounded hips.
Not a cop.
Not a mere civilian, either. My brows furrow down as I watch her watching me.
But the eye contact she makes, without blinking, marks her as someone of interest. My instincts nudge at me, and for the briefest moment, a tingle starts low in my abdomen.
Who is she?
There’s no way in fuck the stranger should be able to tell what’s going on in my body, yet her brow lifts at some invisible shift and marks some sort of observation she’s made. About me.
