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“Of course, I do. I’ve known Daniel since I was sixteen.”
“You’re what, thirty now?” She didn’t look it. She looked a lot younger than he knew her to be. It was that classically pretty face of hers.
“Thirty-one actually.”
So she’d known Daniel for fifteen years. Half her lifetime.
“You and Dan ever going to make it official? Do the whole wedding, three kids, and a mortgage thing?” He could see her married, with an obsessively doting husband drooling over her like Houghton drooled over Melody. With three pretty kids tugging on her skirt. Kids that looked like a mix between her and Daniel. Kissing Daniel, letting Daniel hold her. Jarrod pushed those thoughts away.
“Not likely. That’s not really any of your business anyway, is it?”
Of course, it wasn’t. One little accidental kiss didn’t change years of animosity between him and his Dr. Haldyn Devil Harris. He wasn’t a fool. “No, Dr. Harris, I suppose it isn’t. So what did you bring me?”
“Evidence reports. What else? Your mugging ring. We had another victim last night. My people got a hit.”
It was time he got back to work. Keeping the streets of Finley Creek safe was a full-time job, after all. And he still needed to run Miguel Rodriguez down. He had a cold case with questions—Miguel might have the answers.
But finding that man was proving harder than it should be. Miguel was six-foot-seven. So why was it so damned hard to spot him in the TSP today?
Jarrod’s work was never done. After the meeting coming up with Daniel and the rest of their crew, he was going to take a minute with Miguel. A cold case just didn’t go cold as fast as this one had.
It just didn’t.
24
Commander Miguel Rodriguez had never been a stupid man. Nor a fool.
Murder cases didn’t just get shuffled under the rug—not on his watch. He’d been stewing about Jarrod Foster’s questions all day. Something wasn’t adding up.
Finley Creek had averaged ten to twelve murders a year for the previous twenty years. Until the last three years, when that number had swollen to an average of twenty-four.
For a city the size of Finley Creek, it was well above the norm. The average murder rate per hundred thousand people in the United States was slightly over six murders per year. Finley Creek held only around sixty-five thousand people, counting outlying areas. Twenty-four was a good five or six times what the city murder rate should be.
It was his job to find out why.
Because he was making it his job, for one thing. He was the head of Major Crimes: Homicide for a reason.
Miguel was going to start with the most recent cold case on his board.
He would ask questions himself and then get with the Major Crimes: Cold Case division—Jarrod Foster and Heather Coleson—and have a little talk. They were his backup team anyway. Homicide consisted of Miguel, Jack MacGregor, Luke Bell, Gary Wright—and Jarrod and Heather, when those two were needed to help run down leads or do interviews, or whatever Miguel needed them to do.
He didn’t need sixpeople in his department full time. But if he’d had his choice, he would have ousted MacGregor and Bell and replaced them with Heather and Jarrod in a heartbeat.
Hell, he’d trade them all, including Jarrod, for just Heather. He’d have that woman at his back in an instant. He’d known her for ten years now. Trusted her. Fought beside her in situations that were so classified he doubted even the chief of the Finley Creek TSP was cleared to know about them. And when the chips had been down for him fourteen months ago, Heather had been the first one to knock on his door. He would never forget that, or what he owed that gorgeous woman. Ever.
But for now…
Ricardo Esteban Ahumada had been killed three blocks from where Miguel stood. The boy had been sixteen years old. He’d had no money in his wallet. He’d carried his driver’s license, a rewards card for a local gas station two blocks from the smaller bungalow his family of seven had shared, and his student ID for Finley Creek South High. There had been no drugs in his system, no alcohol. He hadn’t been in any trouble with the police and had average to slightly below average grades.
And two part-time jobs to help his parents buy groceries.
People who loved him.
And the evidence in his case fit in a shoebox-sized evidence container.
They had nothing more than that.
MacGregor had said he’d misplaced the file two months before Miguel had assumed control of Homicide. MacGregor had said he’d thought the previous commander of Homicide had closed out the case as a gang thing, with the Ahumada boy trying to sell drugs in a rival’s territory.
