gun shop. A woman gets murdered in my brother’s driveway, then other people die too, and everybody thinks it must be a story I liked to revisit.
It wasn’t. But the detective was looking at me all official-like, so I copped.
“That was me.”
“Yeah, I thought so. Seaver was involved in that too, wasn’t he?”
Involved. Trey had been the freaking linchpin. I nodded and didn’t elaborate.
Cummings shook his head. “I knew him back in the day, before he went to SWAT. A lot of potential there. Then I heard about the accident.” He shook his head, which was what everybody did at the mention of The Accident. “What’s he doing now?”
“He’s with Phoenix Corporate Security. Risk assessment and premises liability.”
“Phoenix, huh? I heard they did some serious downsizing after the Beaumont thing.”
“That’s putting it mildly. But Trey’s position is solid.”
Cummings pulled out a notebook, waved his pen at me. “You want to tell me what happened here tonight?”
“I’d love to, except that I don’t have a clue. I know there was a fire. I know Lex is dead, and that it wasn’t from the fire. That’s the sum total of what I know.”
I said it lightly, but with exasperation at the edges. Cummings smiled in sympathy. Soft-bodied with bark-brown receding hair, he cinched his slacks under a generous Buddha belly. He was gentle, patient, chatty. Exactly the kind of disarming guy you’d open up to and then spill something that would send you up the river for a decade. Good cop all the way. His kind didn’t need a bad cop. You handed yourself over on a silver platter.
So I knew the banter for what it was—a cop’s way of working his fingers into my brain, unraveling my story, looping it like rope into a noose he could hang me with.
He looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, Ms. Randolph. You know how it goes. You find a dead body, you get to talk to cops.”
“I wasn’t the only one who found the body.”
He consulted his notes. “Yes, a Mr. Jackson Bentley was there too. How did he react to all this?”
“Jackson? Pretty calmly considering his life savings were literally going up in smoke.”
Cummings wrote that down, and I regretted letting it fall out of my mouth. I bit my tongue, resolving to stick with just-the-facts-ma’am.
He kept his eyes on the notebook. “So tell me what happened tonight. Start at the part where you saw Lex for the first time.”
I filled him in. We were in the parking lot, cordoned off from the rest of the scene. Uniformed officers guarded the doors while a crime scene unit worked the interior. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw other detectives interviewing other people, including Trey, keeping them separate as much as possible. I couldn’t see anyone else I knew, however—no Rico and Adam, no Cricket and Jackson, no Frankie.
A large chunk of the crowd still hung at the edges, fresh faces interspersed. I was betting every single one was a squeaky-clean innocent bystander. Anyone with a whiff of misbehavior on their record had hightailed it before the black-uniformed wave swept the vicinity.
Cummings jabbed his chin toward the restaurant. “Did you see any kind of weapon?”
“No.” I remembered the body on the floor, the neat circle of blood on Lex’s chest. “Was he stabbed? Shot?”
“We won’t know for sure until the autopsy.”
“There wasn’t much blood.”
“A fatal wound doesn’t always involve a lot of blood.”
“So you’re saying—”
“I’m asking you to keep an open mind—it may not be a gun or knife we’re looking for. Did you see anything, however unusual, that could have killed him?”
I thought hard. “No. I’m sorry.”
“Anybody acting out of the ordinary?”
“There were so many people here tonight, most of them people I didn’t know.” Then I remembered. “Have you talked to a guy named Vigil?”
Cummings shook his head, interest piqued. So I explained that story, soft-pedaling the part where Trey showed up because of said Vigil, who had a bone to pick with Rico.
“Did you see this Vigil person here tonight?”
“No. But I’m not sure I’d recognize him in a crowd. I’ve only seen him on stage.”
Cummings kept writing. “So this was the first time you’d met Lex?”
“I’d seen him perform, but this was my first time meeting him, yes. Rico pointed him out.”
“You mean the poet who was performing when the alarm went off?” He checked his notes. “Richard Worthington?”
It took me a second to make the connection. I hadn’t heard his full name since high school. “He goes by Rico