Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,34
criminals until she came along, and she knew those diamonds were fake. Did someone on the LAPD tell her that? Or did she already know?”
“I’ll have to check with Bishop.” A thunderstorm briefly rolled over O’Byrne’s face, and I didn’t envy Bishop when the lieutenant caught up with her. “That’s not something we’d tell her.”
“Rook Stevens brought that up too. Asked if the LAPD brought in an expert to look them over.” I began picking at a pile of papers on the floor, arranging the sheets into neat stacks on a long table next to me. “If she’s a district attorney up in SF, she might have contacts down here. Someone could be feeding her information.”
“Because that’s what this case needs, an out-of-town DA raised by crooks and an information pipeline O’Byrne here won’t be able to throttle.” My stacks of paper weren’t meeting Bobby’s strict organizational guidelines because he picked up the whole mess from the floor and plopped the papers on the couch next to him. “You’re making me crazy. You’re not even looking at them. How do you know what goes with what?”
“I was looking to see if any of it was connected to a storage unit,” I informed him with a smirk. “They may not have anything in the house, but they could have stuff hidden elsewhere. Stevens told me he has a couple warehouses where he keeps his high-end merchandise. Maybe that’s something they teach them in cat-burglar school.”
“If Marlena Brinkerhoff has somebody talking to her, I’m going to have to put a stopper on it. And good call on the storage unit. We went over this place as best we could, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary—a small safe with important papers and a few bits of jewelry but nothing worth killing over.” O’Byrne pursed her lips, lost in thought. “And you said Stevens didn’t know her. Think he was lying?”
“He was harder to read than a comic book written in Enochian Pig Latin.” I handed over the stacks of paper I’d pulled together when Bobby held his hand out for them. “He seemed pretty blasé about the whole burglary thing. I don’t know him well enough to tell you if he was lying or not. I don’t even know Montoya that well, but Bobby here says he wouldn’t be with someone pulling jobs.”
“He wouldn’t,” she agreed. The room was stuffy, and O’Byrne shrugged off her jacket, her shoulder holster squeaking when she twisted about. She favored Glocks, just like me, carrying two along her rig. Sighing, she blew a strand of dark hair out of her face and looked around the room. “I’m going to guess our shooter didn’t find what they were looking for. He spent some time beating up the old man, then spent even more of it tearing the house apart. Either Brinkerhoff didn’t tell him anything or the guy didn’t like the answers he was given.”
“I’m guessing Brinkerhoff said shit,” Bobby interjected. Putting another stack of papers down on the table, he began to sift through a handful. “Our shooter didn’t know we were coming, but Brinkerhoff did. I think the old man kept his mouth shut because he knew he couldn’t fight back and was gambling on us—or at least Cole here—to show up.”
“That’s a big risk,” O’Byrne pointed out. “He would’ve been gambling on Mac here coming into the house and not assuming Brinkerhoff blew him off.”
“If you didn’t know in the first five minutes meeting Cole that he would scale a castle wall and fight off the dragon if he thought something was hinky inside of your house, then you would have to be the stupidest motherfucker on earth.” Bobby grinned at me when I flipped him off. “Brinkerhoff knows him. Hell, he called Cole to hire him to dig into his wife’s death, the same wife Cole investigated before when Brinkerhoff suspected she was skipping around in somebody else’s garden. He knows this idiot. What’s more important, he knew our gunman wasn’t going to shoot him.”
“He beat him half to death,” I reminded them. “The doctors weren’t even sure he was going to wake up. You can’t get information out of a dead man, so maybe the guy figured he would go through the house, see what he could find, and if he came up empty, he could do Brinkerhoff in. We just got here before he could get to that point on his to-do list.”