now, there’s still a lot of the good old boys left over from those days, and they’re just as filthy now as they were back then.
“I’m lucky enough I’ve got Book as my captain, but some cops, like Bishop, are stuck with some real assholes. This case is already screwed up, because it crosses over several departments and there’s some infighting going on, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do my job.” She did another circuit of the room, stopping at odd points for reasons she didn’t share. But I got the feeling she really wasn’t seeing anything beyond her frustration. “If I find out Bishop didn’t say anything, then I’ve got a damned leak. That means I would have to watch my back and my mouth around everybody in the department except for probably Captain Book. Well, and the two of you. So, someone’s got to speak for the dead, and in this case, Adele Brinkerhoff seems to only have the three of us. Are you assholes in or not?”
“Do I get paid the same rate as Princess?” Bobby cocked his head, smirking at her. Since he pretty much rewrote the definition of cocky, I wouldn’t blame her if she decked him, but O’Byrne was a better person than I was.
“Have McGinnis pay you,” she shot back. “He apparently doesn’t need it.”
Their now-lighthearted bickering faded into a waterfall of white noise, because the odd feeling I got about the room finally settled in and I took a good hard look around. The place was a mess, but I got the sense of a comfortable placidness to the home, something violently disturbed by the intruder who’d beaten the hell out of Arthur Brinkerhoff. Picking up one of the books, I glanced at the spine, curious as to what Adele or Arthur would find interesting to read, but somehow a dry account of animal husbandry written by an Englishman in the early 1900s didn’t seem like a titillating choice. The books were all stripped of their dust jackets, or perhaps they never had any to begin with. Scattered about like confetti after a three-year-old’s birthday party, I was struck by how they were all shades of dark green, oxblood, and brown.
Their subject matters were a range of nonfiction and the occasional unheard-of novel by an unknown author, not something I would have chosen to line my shelves with, but I didn’t know either Brinkerhoff, so I couldn’t really say what held their interest. Leaning back, I tried to see the room as a place where I spent my evenings, sitting with my spouse and talking, because if I wasn’t mistaken, the television wasn’t plugged in, and it was too far away from an outlet to get any power.
“This is all window dressing. This room. Their lives,” I said, standing up to join O’Byrne in her pacing. “These books are like the kind you buy by the yard to make your shelves look good. But they’re worn, more homey. And look at the walls. What do you see?”
“Other than some really nice wainscoting, they’re kind of drab. I think they call that paint color oyster,” Bobby said. “It looks just like my grandparents’ house used to. My mom’s house probably looks this way now. Don’t give me that look, Princess. You know things went to shit when I came out. I just haven’t been over there.”
“Look, we know they live here. All of the neighbors we talked to say the same thing—nice older couple, raised their grandkid right and put up Christmas lights every winter. The old man hands out full-size candy bars at Halloween,” O’Byrne commented. “There’s clothes and toiletries thrown about upstairs in the bedrooms, and the guy even went through the hall closet and pulled out all the towels. I think there’s even a half-eaten gallon of butter brickle from Thrifty’s in the freezer.”
“Did you find any BDSM gear?” I asked, turning to face her. “Anything out of the ordinary? A rubber ducky in a leather mask?”
“No.” If O’Byrne could have tossed me into a cell on a 5150 at that moment, she would’ve buckled the straitjacket on me herself. “They’re, like, fucking seventy years old.”
“Adele Brinkerhoff had a thing going with at least one other woman—a thing that included bondage gear and French ticklers, which I only know about because I had to look it up. And when she died, she was wearing a leather jumpsuit. Or a romper. I’m not sure what the difference is,