Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,6
Rick. Rick didn’t survive the shooting, and I wasn’t so sure I had.
I did. And I’d grown a lot since then. Fell in love. Got married. And now stood over the corpse of a case I’d left behind me a long time ago.
O’Byrne took shots of her own a few years ago while working on a case with me, and she’d pulled out of the wreckage of her body a lot better than I had. She went back to wearing a badge, while I was rolled out, too devastated and scarred up to be any good. I didn’t know a lot about Dell or her personal life. We weren’t the kind of “get together on a Sunday and have a beer while watching a football game” friends, but it was safe to say we respected each other. Or at least I was willing to admit I respected the hell out of her.
I just hadn’t planned on having one of the craziest evenings of my life when I kissed Jae goodbye that afternoon and walked out our front door.
“Tell me what you know about Adele Brinkerhoff,” O’Byrne said, nodding to a passing uniform who’d wrangled the Dobermans into the back of his police car to wait for the ex-nun’s husband to arrive and take them home. “You say her husband hired you a few years back to catch her cheating?”
“They came to an understanding, paid off my bill, and thanked me for my time,” I replied. “I haven’t really had much contact with either one of them since then. It seemed like they were going through a rough patch and worked it out. Or he just decided he could live with a bisexual, leather-wearing dominatrix who had torrid love affairs on the side. I didn’t really ask, because it was none of my business. The check cleared. That was the only thing that counted.”
“She was wearing leather when she was killed. Was it like what you saw her in the last time?” She cast a quick glance around the neighborhood, probably scanning the high walls and tall hedges blocking any commoners from peering at the sprawling estates tucked in above Koreatown. “If we start knocking on a few of these doors, do you think we’ll find she had a thing going with someone around here?”
I hadn’t spent a lot of time staring at Adele. There’d been other concerns, like the dog and then the guy with the gun, not to mention dealing with the shock of seeing her grandmotherly face slack with death. Thinking back on what I could remember of that moment, I shook my head.
“This is going to sound crazy, but it seemed to me like what she was wearing wasn’t sexual in nature. I mean, the first time I saw her, there wasn’t any question that she was dressed for a good time and to deliver a firm spanking. She looked more like… I don’t know, like she was going to a party?” I realized at the bite of a breeze against my arm that I was still wearing my tattered jacket. I shrugged it off and left it on the hood of the police car, assuming someone would come gather it as evidence for the dog attack at some point. “The woman kind of led two lives. When she and her husband showed up at my office, she was bordering on frumpy. I really can’t tell you much about her.”
“What about the diamonds she had in her hand? Know anything about those?”
That question rocked me back. My brain had decided they were gems the first time I spotted them, but the idea didn’t fit into the narrative I’d conjured up to have the evening make some kind of sense. It was already crazy enough without discovering Adele Brinkerhoff dead, and tossing a handful of diamonds into the mix only tipped things over into the land of grinning cats and talking playing cards.
“So they’re real? I wasn’t sure.”
“I’m going to assume they’re real, because I don’t have any explanation for why I have a little old lady shoehorned into a black leather jumpsuit and found dead in the middle of a neighborhood where it costs five dollars just to take a whiff of fresh air,” O’Byrne drawled, a faint sneer on her face.
“I’m feeling attacked,” I shot back. “I live in this neighborhood. Okay, not on the huge-mansion side of things but still in this neighborhood.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen where you live. So it only costs four bucks.” The