Darker Than Any Shadow - By Tina Whittle Page 0,26

a bag of groceries in one arm, a box fan in the other. Cricket turned her red-eyed face his way, and he put both on the floor fast, slammed the door, and marched right in Trey’s face.

“What’s going on? Why is my wife crying? What did you do to her?”

Trey looked puzzled. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Then why is she crying?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yeah? Really? You weren’t asking a bunch of sneaky cop questions, were you?”

The assault in his manner was potent. He was standing too close to Trey, and while Trey’s expression remained as bland as vanilla pudding, I saw him shift into neutral stance and drop his shoulders. Jackson was two seconds away from getting his ass shaken and stirred, and I did not feel like making any more visits to the police station.

I put one hand on Trey’s stomach. “This is not happening. Separate corners. Now.”

Neither of them budged, but then the sound of Cricket’s sobs punctured the alpha male standoff. Jackson spun around and lurched at Cricket, catching her in his arms. He pulled her against his massive chest, one hand stroking her hair, murmuring in her ear. She threw me a look over his shoulder—angry, almost calculating—then buried her face in his neck, sobbing even harder. Trey watched impassively.

I stepped toward the door to the parking lot. “I think it’s time we left.”

Trey nodded. “Of course.”

Chapter Fourteen

We left quickly. I closed the door behind me, but I could still hear Cricket’s sobbing and Jackson’s boom box voice, tamped down but audible.

I patted Trey’s arm. “Thank you for not beating Jackson into pulpburger.”

“I wasn’t going to do that.”

“In that case, thank you for not doing whatever it was you were going to do.”

Trey examined the door frame. I saw more fingerprint powder residue, especially around the deadbolt, but Trey ran his eyes over it, not his fingers.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

The parking lot was three thousand square feet of heat and humidity and thick afternoon light. I tried to remember it dark and crowded with wet bodies, but that memory seemed more like imagination than reality.

Trey stepped back and took in the view of the building. Two stories, but no windows, no other way in or out except the fire exits on the side and the front doors in the main room. He turned around and took in the other perspective—the two dozen empty parking spaces, the cracks where the grass had pushed its way up through the pavement.

I stood next to him. “What did you make of Cricket’s version of events? Was she lying?”

“Not lying so much as not ever telling the entire story. Only once did she slip into generative narrative.”

Generative narrative. Trey talk for making up a story.

“When was that?”

“When you asked if she’d talked to Lex Friday night.”

“I knew it! But what about the rest of it?”

“She told the truth.”

“So she didn’t kill him?”

Trey squinted against the sun, shielding his eyes with his hand. “She didn’t say she didn’t kill him—she said she didn’t want him dead. And that’s a different thing entirely.”

He kept his eyes focused on the ground in front of us. As we cleared the parking lot, he stopped and knelt at the edge of the concrete, examining the pavement bordering the sparse dry grass.

I bent down to look. “What?”

“I think it’s blood.”

He stood and walked forward, very slowly. I followed the line of his finger. Sure enough, a thin brown dribble led from a dark stain on the concrete into the grass.

“The cops didn’t ask me about that.”

“Me either. But it would have been very hard to see at night, over here, away from the main crime scene, especially with so many people milling about.”

I remembered Rico’s story—the threat, the punch, the bloody shoes. I’d filled Trey in on the details, so I knew he was thinking the same thing I was.

I looked over at him. “So what do we do now?”

“We call Cummings.”

I watched him do just that, and for a second, he was a cop again. The routines seemed so imbedded in his programming, like deep code. He appeared utterly comfortable in that role, and not for the first time, I wondered how it must have felt to give up the only piece of his life that made any sense at the time.

I knelt at the edge of the parking lot. Heat shimmered the asphalt into a mirage, a flat pool of illusion. The stain had the illusion of being liquid too, warm, freshly dripped. I knew people could