Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,52
her eyes giving me any indication of how tired she was.
“You must’ve just gotten here, then.” I knew all too well what she was going through, and there weren’t any words I could say to make her feel any better. She’d been delivered a one-two punch, and I was going to have to scrape at her freshly inflicted wounds to see if she had any information about the blond bombshell posing as a Brinkerhoff. Going slow was probably my best bet, especially since she hadn’t called security yet to have me removed. “They said they were going to be a couple of hours. Do you want to head down to the cafeteria and get something to eat or a cup of coffee? You’re probably dead on your feet.”
She stopped staring at the bed, focusing on me for the first time since they wheeled Arthur Brinkerhoff out to be lubed and x-rayed by trained professionals. There was a hardness to her face I recognized from her grandmother’s expression on the night Adele chased me through a topiary garden with a shotgun. I could see the woman Arthur had probably fallen in love with mirrored in Marlena’s strong features. There was a quiet beauty to her, a strength and resolve I hadn’t seen in the fake Marlena. The other woman who’d tried to pass herself off as a Brinkerhoff had packaged herself as sexy and mysterious—something to tickle a man’s fantasies—but the woman sitting in the unforgiving, much-too-hard-on-the-ass hospital chair promised nothing but the truth. And possibly if you were man—or woman—enough to win her over, you would be set up for life with someone who would love you and fight to the death for you.
The fake Marlena definitely wouldn’t even consider getting a hangnail for someone else. I’d fallen in love with Jae when he wrapped himself in secrets and frothy familial lies, but I’d seen the man who ached to live out in the open—a snarky, intelligent soul who longed to be held in bed and loved being kissed on the neck while cooking. I’d been willing to walk away from him loving me, but I hadn’t been willing to let him be smothered by his family’s hatred. It’d taken years before he felt comfortable enough to hold my hand at a farmers’ market. Marlena Brinkerhoff was definitely not that person. The only reason she wouldn’t hold her lover’s hand was because it was filled with bags of groceries and possibly an anvil she picked up on sale.
I was surrounded by strong women, and I knew I was in for a battle if Marlena intended to kick me to the curb. So I was going to have to talk fast.
“While your grandfather hired me, the LAPD has asked me to help consult on the case. If you like, you can contact Lieutenant Dell O’Byrne at the main number, and she can verify I’m here to help.” Reaching down into the dregs of my logic, I pulled a rather anemic rabbit out of my hat. “Your grandparents worked through their problems, and your grandfather thought enough about me to call me about Adele. He understood I was doing my job, and despite me being the person who found your grandmother that night, called me for help. So you’ve got to ask yourself, Marlena, who would do this to your grandparents and whether or not you’re going to share that with me?”
TO SAY hospital coffee was shitty was being cruel to every pile of feces ever shat out. I could have added an entire cow’s worth of cream and possibly all of the sugar that they’d ever grown in Hawai’i and it still probably would be the color of pitch and taste like the oil scraped off of a pig’s armpit. I don’t know what Marlena was drinking in Mongolia, but she sipped at the coffee as if it were the finest wine. But then, she was also dead on her feet and mourning the loss of her grandmother.
I made some mention of what food was actually edible, but she shook her head, murmuring her stomach probably couldn’t take anything in it. I was mildly surprised she was willing to drink the battery acid served up to us as coffee, but it was probably more to give her something to do besides stare at the nothingness stretching out around her.
Marlena wandered outside before I could steer us to a table, and I followed, guessing she needed a bit of fresh air or