Back in Black (McGinnis Investigations #1) - Rhys Ford Page 0,7
sneer grew, but the humor in her face did as well. Jollity looked good on her. I didn’t see it very often. Usually my presence brought annoyance or slight ridicule to her expressions. “I’d like to see your case notes from back then if you still got them.”
“It’s been five or six years, but all of my case notes are kept digitally, so I’ll be able to send over everything I’ve got. I’ve got a contact number for her husband, but it’s been a while, and he seemed a lot older than she was. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.” I was beginning to regret taking off my jacket, because the wind began to carry a bit of ice in it. “Did you consider that Branigan might have killed her? I mean, it would be kind of cold-blooded of him to blow a hole through her and then go back to the ex-nun for a bit more fun, but that Desert Eagle of his would sure as hell explain the crater in her chest.”
“I’d considered it, but from the looks of things, it seems like Adele Brinkerhoff’s been lying there for more than a couple of days. Branigan and his associate were in Sacramento until early this afternoon. She lives down the street and knew the place was empty and on the market.” O’Byrne closed her notebook, tucking her pen away into her jacket pocket. “She told her husband she was going to take the dogs for a walk, then scooted down here to hook up with Branigan.”
“Well that explains the dogs but not the sheep.” Whenever I closed my eyes, I still could see Branigan’s pale fleshy bits swinging back and forth as he ran, framed by tufts of woolly white fur. “I mean, I guess when she was a nun, her old job was pretty much tending to her flock, but that’s just going way too far.”
There wasn’t enough bleach in the universe for me to get that out of my memory. With any luck I would get bashed on the head on the way home somehow, giving me a bit of amnesia. At the very worst, I would totally lose every memory of my past, but I had a lot of faith that I would fall back in love with Jae as soon as I saw him. He would understand. He’d understood much worse.
“He connected to the lobbying she does in Sacramento?” I was curious, because somehow coming after me with a gun powerful enough to take down a giraffe seemed like a bit of an overreaction to being discovered having sex as a sheep. “Because I’ve got to tell you, he seems like the kind of guy who would gun down an old lady.”
“See, that’s where this gets very sticky,” O’Byrne said, making a sour face. “She’s been punching at the government to get more religious programs into California’s prisons, and two days ago, Branigan became the deputy director for one of the Corrections and Rehabilitation departments. So, once news of all of this spreads around, something tells me he’s going to be losing that corner office and she’s going to be out a connection to the state’s purse strings.”
I contemplated what O’Byrne laid out. Then I turned to her, crossed my arms over my chest, and said, “I get all that, but it still doesn’t explain the fucking sheep suit.”
IT WAS three in the morning by the time I fit my key into the front-door lock. I’d sent Jae a text telling him I was okay but some shit had hit the fan so he might as well go to bed without me. I was surprised to find the living room lights were on and my husband curled up in the middle of one of our couches, our black cat, Neko, stretched out alongside his thigh, her tiny body extended as far as she could and taking up as much of the cushion as she could, mostly to prevent Honey, our poof of a dog, from taking up residence.
I’d bought the Craftsman following Rick’s death. Without him and Ben in my life, I’d been left adrift, riddled with scars and brain groggy from a coma. Back then, I didn’t know which keloids hurt more, the ones on my body or the ones in my heart. Weak, exhausted, and soul sick, I attacked the decrepit sprawling two-story house with an intense fervor, working to resurrect it as if somehow bringing it back to its