Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,22

guesthouse either. The place was supposed to be empty.”

“Her husband hired me in the past for a case,” I replied, leaving out any mention of her confirmed infidelity and fondness for bondage and leather. “He also contacted me to look into her murder because he doesn’t have a lot of faith in the cops. Doesn’t think the LAPD can bring her killer to justice.”

“That is the understatement of the century.” Stevens chuckled, reaching for his own cup of coffee. “The LAPD misses more than it hits.”

“You’re hooked up with a cop,” I reminded him. “A pretty good cop.”

“Whose dead partner tried to plant evidence on me to frame me,” he shot back. “Montoya is a good cop—a great one—but they’re few and far between, and even he can get tunnel vision sometimes. Let’s not fuck around with this. Someone told you I was on the wrong side of the law at one point, and you’re here to poke at me to see if I knew about any potential heist that could explain the diamonds you saw. Right?”

“I’m also looking at whoever pulled a home invasion on her husband this morning. When I got there to meet with him, I was greeted by a bunch of gunfire, and after the shooter bolted out of the house, I found him beat up and clearly out of it.” I risked another sip of the coffee, bracing myself for the moment when the stuff would make me see time slip away around me. It hadn’t happened yet, but I was certain it wouldn’t be too long before I started to see pink elephants dancing by. “O’Byrne said nobody reported any thefts, so either no one’s missing those diamonds yet or—”

“Whoever had them shouldn’t have had them,” Stevens finished for me. He flowed back into the couch with a fluidity so smooth it made me wonder if he had any bones at all. “What did O’Byrne tell you I allegedly did?”

“O’Byrne told me nothing,” I corrected. “Somebody else told me you used to be a thief. Now I don’t think there’s a coffee shop where criminals meet to chat about what they’ve pulled off, but if you operated at the monetary level those diamonds live on, then there’s hope you would at least know who Adele could have been working with. If it was a burglary.”

“Montoya told me you’d been a detective on the force. I can tell. You think like one,” he muttered, raking a hand through his long caramel-streaked hair. “I’m not going to point you toward someone who can give you information, because that’s how people end up in jail. I didn’t know about the beating the old man took, but that doesn’t change anything. I’m sorry about the lady you found, but I really don’t know how she got there and I sure as hell don’t know who she was working with.”

“I’m not asking for anything other than a place to start,” I replied, leaning forward. “I don’t care about the diamonds. What I do care about is Adele Brinkerhoff’s death. If she was caught up in something illegal, that’s one thing. But someone busted a hole through her chest and left her literally holding the bag.”

“If I had to come up with a theory,” Stevens began, scratching at the bit of scruff along his chin. “She was set up. Probably by her partner or partners.”

“She was kind of old. That’s what doesn’t make sense to me. You’re talking about a woman who looked more like Granny from those Tweety Bird cartoons than a cat burglar.”

Stevens laughed at me, to the point of a tear forming in his green eye. Wiping it away, he said, “Burglars come in all shapes and sizes. Some guy dressed in black in that neighborhood is going to get a lot of people to notice him, but put an old woman in Chanel or a sweater set, and people are going to give her directions to their silverware drawer. The best thieves look harmless. The fantastic thieves look helpless. She sounds like the perfect setup to get a gang to slip into a house with nobody inside of it.”

If I hadn’t seen Adele Brinkerhoff in action, I would’ve scoffed at Stevens’s theory, but she’d been more than competent in hunting me through a topiary while wielding a shotgun. The woman who came by with her husband a few days later had been somebody totally different, still strong-willed but meeker, a staunch, law-abiding citizen who wouldn’t ever