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Anybody could see it was a useless gesture. She was gone.
All according to plan.
117
Iwanted to get the fuck out of there, but Jack demanded we stay.
“We’ll look guilty if we take off,” he said, his voice ragged and his eyes blank.
“We rolled up after she got shot,” I pointed out. “We got witnesses, man.”
“We’re staying,” he said, and that was that.
Dan Peters showed up personally around 1AM. The first officers on the scene pegged me and Jack immediately. They must have let the dispatcher know we were present, and from there it worked its way up the chain and finally to the chief of police rousing himself out of bed.
Dan always did like to put in an appearance at big events, just to remind us that the department’s cooperation didn’t come for free.
After he got the Nice to see you’s and the Too bad it’s under these circumstances out of the way, Dan pulled us off to the side. “Anything I need to know, gentlemen?” he asked quietly.
Jack was in no mood to put up with insinuations and fawning deference. “Yeah – I want you to find out who the fuck did this to her,” he snarled.
“Of course, of course,” Dan said, reading the temperature of the scene perfectly. “Was she on the outs with anybody?”
Jack looked at me angrily.
I stared right back at him, dead-eyed and emotionless.
“No,” Jack muttered, defeated. “Not that we know of.”
“Okay… what were you fellas doing coming over here at midnight?” Dan asked.
“We were supposed to meet her.”
Dan’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”
Jack glared at him.
Ha – bet you’re missing the fawning deference right about now, I thought.
“We didn’t have anything to do with her death,” Jack snapped.
“Of course not, of course not,” Dan said reassuringly, and I could hear the decimal point moving on the total he was calculating in his head.
“What do the rest of them say?” Jack demanded. He jerked his head at the crowd, who were being questioned by uniformed officers and detectives in rumpled suits.
Dan called one of the detectives over. “Hey Morse, what’s the word on what happened?”
Morse looked at Jack and me, then at his boss. I could practically see the gears turning in his head. He eventually decided not to rock the boat with protests about ‘sensitive information’ and ‘ongoing investigations.’
“Nobody saw nothin’. They heard some raised voices out back, but the music was too loud inside to tell what was being said. Then they said they heard a pop – one shot – and they ran outside. The girl was already dead when they got there, and nobody else was around. No sign of a weapon.”
Well, well, well. The kid CAN follow directions, I thought.
Knock on wood.
“Anything else?” Jack asked.
The detective dropped his eyes to the ground. “They said they heard a motorcycle engine in the distance… but… that could’ve just been coincidence.”
