Chapter 14

That night,for the first time in weeks—hell, maybe months—I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow. No weird dreams from the nicotine patches, no rolling around like a rotisserie chicken while slapping the shit out of my pillow, no getting up to sit on my bare patio with a dead plant and a bottle of Wild Turkey. I slept like a baby.

For three hours.

The buzzing of an incoming call crept into my rest bit by bit. I came to consciousness slowly, moaning as I woke, my face buried in the pillow.

"Why, Lord?" I mumbled as I peeled one eye open to find my alarm clock. Ten minutes after three. "Are you fucking kidding me?"

I rolled from the bed, eyes bleary, nothing to cover my naked ass, and began the search for my phone. I found it in the bathroom in the medicine cabinet. Why there? Not a fucking clue. I grabbed it, slammed the cabinet door shut, then grimaced at my reflection. Shit, I looked like hell warmed over and topped with crap. A crap pancake. What the hell did Oliver see in this exhausted mug?

The phone continued buzzing like a demented bee. I tapped the green button and placed it to my ear. My hair was a mess, my face pale, and my eyes were like two piss holes in the snow.

"Unless someone is dead…" I growled to my partner.

"As a matter of fact," Mack replied around a yawn. Some of the lethargy left me. A tiny bit. "Some coked-up stripper just found our clinic gunman stuffed behind a dumpster behind the Pickle Palace."

"Did you say Pickle Palace?"

"What? No, what? Pickle Palace? Were you out drinking tonight? I said Purple Palace. It's that ratty strip club over on?—"

"I know where it is. And no, I wasn't drinking."

I was sucking the dick of a key witness, buddy. Bet that beats a few shots at the local bar in terms of worrisome behavior.

"Good. Elena and I worry about you. Meet me at the Palace in ten. Beat cops are locking down the scene, but homicide has already been called. If we want any chance to even get a peep at the body?—"

"Yep, I'll be there in ten. Eight, if I can skip putting on underwear."

"You do you." Mack hung up.

I splashed water on my face, rushed to dress, and jumped into my car. The ride took exactly six minutes if one raced through a few yellow lights.

Several girls in skimpy attire stood around the rear of the seedy establishment known as the Purple Palace. I parked next to a brick wall the color of a plum, grabbed a stick of gum, and walked over to where a couple of uniformed cops were talking to a woman in a thong and sparkly fishnet stockings. Her upper half was covered with a towel she clasped to her breasts. Tears flowed down her face.

Mack stood over the body, his hair as mussed as mine, chewing on a pen cap.

"Imagine meeting you here," I quipped as I strolled up, showing my badge to one of the patrolmen as I ducked under some flapping yellow crime scene tape.

"We have to stop meeting like this. My wife is going to get jealous," Mack replied, yawned, then pointed at the body with a pen. "Meet one Periapsis Lane."

I took a knee beside the dead man, careful not to kneel in the ever-widening puddle of blood and brain matter. "The witness who called it in, Helga Smithers, over there," he jerked a thumb at the dancer with the fishnets sobbing on a cop's shoulder. "Said she stepped outside to have a smoke and found him hiding in the space between the wall and the dumpster. Thinking the man was sleeping one off, she gave him a shout and a push. That's when he toppled over, showing Ms. Smithers that one side of his head was missing. She screamed, ran inside, and then someone in the club called the cops. Midge over there gave me a heads up when they arrived because of the small tattoo on the back of his hand that matched the one on our suspect."

My focus left Mack's tired face to focus on the back of Mr. Lane's left hand. Yep, same stupid smiley face. "She and her partner made jokes about it when the initial APB went out a few weeks ago. And before you asked, yes, Midge and I dated for about two weeks when I first joined the force. Elena knows. You can stop thinking dirty things."

"As if I ever think dirty things," I replied as I rose, taking careful steps around the corpse. "Looks fresh. Blood is barely congealed, and it's warm tonight. I gather no one inside heard the gunshots?"

"Doubtful, what with the music. Midge and her partner are ready to sign off on the scene now that we're here."

"Okay, yeah, we'll start talking to the witnesses before homicide shows up waving their dicks around."

Mack muttered something, then walked off to get as much information as we could. I eyeballed the guy on the ground for a moment longer as his unusual name tickled something in the far corner of my sleep-deprived and suddenly smitten mind. When it hit me, I pulled out a pair of latex gloves from my back pocket and eased Peri's wallet from his back pocket. Nothing much in it. A few stolen debit cards—his name was not on the cards—a small cube of hash wrapped in foil, a condom, a few twenties, and a California driver's license. Bingo. I took a picture of the license, shoved everything back into the wallet, and placed it on his chest. Then, I noticed the corner of a photo and tugged it free. This was the original photo from the clinic, and I held it up to the light, then bagged it.

"So, he did take it then," Mack commented.

"Seems he did." I passed the bag up to Mack and something caught my eye, and I pointed at it. "Writing on the back."

He turned it over, and we stared at random words and letters on a list.

"Jesus Christ, tell me this isn't some coded shit that leads to buried treasure," Mack snarled.

I snapped a photo of the back and pocketed my cell. Then, I peeled off my gloves and turned to Mack, who had been pulled away by an older man who, it seemed, ran the club given that his T-shirt read MANAGER on the back. And my first boyfriend had said that all those years of studying Criminal Justice at UC Irvine were a waste of time. Fuck you, Adam. I'm now a detective making tons of… well, okay, maybe not tons, but… fuck Adam anyway, just because.

"Mack, let's see if we can wake up a judge to get a warrant for Peri's home address."

"But the witnesses," Mack began, and I waved it off.

Homicide was en route, along with the coroner. Both of them would rip me a new one for messing around with the body, so us leaving to do something else seemed a good idea. I'd fill in the showboats in homicide later because I was a good Joe who always played nice with other people's toys. If we could tie the dead man to Ivan Baladin, which I assumed we could, since the moron had shouted Baladin's name after hitting Joe the Good Doctor, we could pull Baladin in for questioning. It might be flimsy at best, but if the judge went along with it, we'd be able to haul Ivan in for a chat. I liked to chat with criminals at the crack of dawn. It always got me hard. And it would postpone my talk with Franks, so a win/win.

* * *

Ivan Baladin was nota happy camper. Mack and I were seated in a viewing room with another cop, Dennis, watching the man slowly simmer—like a pot of marinara, but far less appealing. The micro-camera in the corner was damn good. Showed us the little droplets of sweat on his brow and picked up all the mutterings he was making. Nothing of use, sadly, but he was agitated, that was for sure.

"How long has he been in there now?" Mack asked. I poured some fresh coffee from my Minnie thermos into my Minnie pink cup, sipped, sighed, then grinned at my partner.

"About an hour."

I opened the file one more time, checking through the information we'd pulled from evidence at our dead attacker's shitty apartment. Two names had been prominent—Ivan Baladin, wannabee gangster, evil asshole, and all around fucked-up fucker, and much to our surprise, the name of the sweetly innocent, always crying, Heloise Grant.

Turned out, Heloise was as deep into Ivan's money laundering shit as she could be, which was why we had her cooling off in the next room over.

"Always the crying ones," I muttered as we stared in at her.

She wasn't crying now. We'd left her sitting there, back straight, staring at the door with a dead expression. Gone was the simpering and the crying and the innocent act. Instead, she'd demanded a lawyer and clammed up.

Her financial records were on their way, and not the surface stuff we'd already requested, but a deep dive into where the hell she was keeping the money she'd skimmed from the clinic. Turned out, she'd been laundering money as donations through Haven of Hope, and Ivan was about to go down.

He just didn't know it yet.

"Think we should go in and harass Ivan now?" I asked.

Mack scratched the red whiskers on his chin and nodded. So, we eased out of our chairs, gave Dennis a pat on the shoulder, and made our way to interrogation room 4. Dennis would be watching and recording what went on throughout the conversation, as he would be with several other interrogations. Technology had made the old one-way mirror a thing of the past.

We sauntered in as if we had no cares in the world. Ivan's shark-like eyes darted from his hands resting on the cold steel table to us.

"I want a lawyer," he said immediately.

"You're not under arrest, Ivan," I pointed out while lowering my tired-as-fuck ass into a chair across from him. "We brought you in for some routine questioning in relation to the murder of one of your employees. A Periapsis Lane."

"Never heard of him. I want my lawyer," Ivan barked, his upper lip damp with perspiration.

"Sure, sure, of course you do, and she's on the way. Lawyers hate early wake-ups," Mack said as he shoved a cup of black coffee across the table to Ivan with his most engaging smile. Ivan wasn't buying our nice cop routine. He was smarter than the average bear, or the average hood, who got easily identifiable tattoos, then attacked innocent people. "Have some coffee. It's not great, but it's free."

Ivan glowered at my partner, then turned his sights to me. "You're violating my rights."

"Are we? I don't see how. When we arrived at your home at five-fifteen a.m., your wife let us in of her own free will. You agreed to come down and shoot the shit. So now, here we are, having a little talk."

"I got nothing to say to either of you until my lawyer arrives."

"Aw, that's too bad. We have so many things to talk with you about, Ivan. I enjoy chit-chatting and discussions with upstanding citizens such as yourself. Sometimes, I learn new words and phrases when I spend time bullshitting with others. Just the other day, I discovered that the Korean word for horse is mal, but it's pronounced my, or that was how it sounded to me."

Ivan's eyebrows knitted. "You hauled me from bed to talk Korean?"

"No, we're talking about new words and phrases. I have one for you." I leaned over the table just a little. "Do you know what the term probable cause means?"

His thin lips pressed tightly together.

"No idea? Well, it means that the police, that's us, can bring in people whom we strongly suspect have been involved in a crime. Sometimes, like this morning, the police get a warrant to enter the home of a low-level guy who beat up a veteran in a medical center. Then they find all kinds of incriminating stuff that some poor slob left lying around his place. Stuff like journals with the names of people they work for and what kind of jobs they were hired to do because that person liked to think of themselves as a writer. Can you imagine anyone being so stupid as to work for a criminal sort, then jotting down his daily activities? Me either, and yet here we are, me, you, and Mack here, sitting on four notebooks full of that incriminating evidence that has your name in just about every entry. Ain't life funny that way, Ivan? So, want to tell us why you hired an attacker to go after Joseph Quinan?"

Ivan grew eerily quiet. I saw that brief glimmer of worry in his feral gaze.

"Did you know that we found all kinds of evidence of… well, hell, what is that phrase, Mack?"

"Money laundering?" Mack supplied, then took a sip of coffee.

I snapped my fingers. "That's it. Money laundering. Your boy Periapsis was a religious note taker. You'd think that he might have been trying to protect himself in case something untoward happened to him. Anyway, those notes tell a really interesting story about medical fraud, Ivan. Yep, I know, I was shocked as well. Seems your name came up a lot, as well as the name of one Heloise Grant, who takes care of the books at the Haven of Hope clinic. We haven't had time to sort through it all yet. Oh we will, rest assured, but there"re all kinds of hinky stuff going on. Phantom billings, over billings, and even a shell company owned by your wife in which you seem to be the sole member of the governing board. How on earth did that happen, do you think?"

Ivan began to sweat in earnest. Yeah, morning chats with felons were great fun. Not. Neither was watching some scumbag walk away after paying tons of cash for bail, but that was part of the legal system. Even dirtbags deserved a day in court to be judged by their peers.

* * *

Chatswith your partner later in the day, however, weren't half as much fun.

"Okay, so here's the thing," I opened with. "My relationship with Oliver crossed a line last night that I cannot step back from any longer, nor do I want to."

Mack looked gutted. "Was that what the big talk with Franks was earlier?"

I nodded. "I told him that I was developing feelings for Oliver Cowan, and he for me, and asked to be removed from the case. I assume either you'll get the nod, or the dynamic Boomer duo will. That's Franks' call, obviously."

"I told you not to get involved with him," he moaned as we sat outside the precinct on a stone bench donated by the family of an LAPD officer killed in the line of duty fifteen years ago. The sun was bright, the winds warm, and my mood bittersweet.

"The heart wants what the heart wants," I said with a sluggish lift of a shoulder. "I don't think I've ever felt this way about anyone before. It scares the living shit out of me, Mack."

He sighed, then nudged me in the side with a bony elbow. "Now you know how I feel about Elena."

"Yeah, I guess I do." I'd teased him pretty hard the first two years they'd dated. When things had gotten serious, and he'd proposed, I'd been even more of a sarcastic twit. "I don't know what he sees in me, to be honest. I'm a rundown cop. He's a fucking superstar athlete. He has kids, and a house, and green plants on stands in the windows. I got nothing like that, and yet, when he kisses me…"

"Okay, yeah, I don't need all the gory details of gay butt stuff." He stood and looked down at me, his freckled cheeks rounding into a warm smile. "I'm glad you found someone. Fuck knows you needed something good and pure in your life."

My cell vibrated, and I answered the call. "Winwood."

"Hello, Officer, this is Gemma. I'm Joe's sister."

"Gemma, hey. Is everything okay?"

She exhaled noisily. "He's doing well. Some of his memories are coming back; he seems steadier, wants to go back to work. Can you believe that?"

Yeah, I could. "He's dedicated."

"Yeah, well, he said something that I wanted to tell you, and it didn't make much sense at first, and I don't want to bother you."

I flicked the phone to speaker and held it between me and Mack. "Go on?"

"He said that the photo from the board had bank passwords on the back, something he used to do to keep it secret. Does that make sense? I mean, I get he shouldn't have done that, but it is what it is."

"Passwords. Okay."

"He said Heloise knew where they were, that you needed to talk to her."

"Thank you."

"He also said it didn't matter about those passwords, because he thought he'd spotted errors in the bank statements, so he'd changed them all."

Fuck. He'd changed codes; Heloise had been locked out? So she couldn't do her skimming? Well, that explained the break-in, if Periapsis was looking for replacement passwords.

"Thank you, Gemma. That's very helpful. We'll come in at some point and get a full statement."

"Thank you, Detective."

I ended the call, and Mack and I exchanged knowing glances. "Passwords, eh? Cops 1, Heloise 0," Mack observed.

"Yep."

He fist pumped, then grinned at me. "You hungry?"

"Starved."

"Cool, I'll go get us some burritos from down the street."

"Sounds good."

I watched him jog off as the sun warmed the top of my head. I sighed as a flickering memory of last night with Oliver played out in my thoughts. I was free now to date him openly, if he still wanted that kind of thing. Fuck knew what I would do to win him over. My knowledge of romantic words and deeds was zero. I'd probably fuck this up before it even had a chance of really taking off, but in for a penny… as the old folks say.

I yanked my phone out of my front pocket. A gum wrapper fell to the sidewalk, then blew away in a gust of hot air. I dialed Oliver's number, my gut a mishmash of anxiety and excitement.

"Hey," he said after picking up.

"Hey yourself."

"You sound raspy. Are you getting a cold?"

"No, I'm just… I have something in my throat. Exhaust probably. I'm outside waiting for Mack to bring us some food. First time I'll have eaten today."

"That's not good. A machine needs fuel to run."

That made me chuckle and feel oddly fuzzy inside. The man was preaching to me about unhealthy habits. Like my sister. Like someone who cared. The thing in my throat got thicker.

"Yep, and this machine will be running on burritos soon. The other thing that I wanted to tell you was that I recused myself from your case, citing a conflict of interest."

A long beat of dead silence followed. Fear that I had fucked things up already blossomed in my belly.

"So, we can date now?"

"Yeah, we can; I mean, if you want…"

"Oh, trust me, Detective, I want."

If I'd not been a chonky-ass cop, I'd have floated away on those gusty Cali winds.