trick, to bitch someone out and win him over simultaneously.
“So, walk me through this, Albie,” she said. “We got a body outside, and we got a bunch of nice people sitting around inside, and you’re empty-handed—no clipboard, no pen. As a highly trained detective, this tells me you know exactly what took place here and I can go home already, because you stole the collar right out from under my ass before I even showed up—am I right?”
He shook his head, blushing deeper. But she’d made him laugh.
“So what can you tell me?” she asked. “You got any leads on who’s in charge here?”
He pointed at Cate.
“Excellent,” she said. “Now, who found the scene?”
He pointed at me.
“Keep this up,” she said, “they’re gonna make you commissioner.”
He smiled, and Skwarecki told him to get the kids’ names and contact info, then send them home.
She gave him a friendly punch to the shoulder, turning toward me and Cate.
8
Skwarecki told us her first name was Jayné, pronounced Jen-NAY.
“My mother was some kind of French,” she said, and shrugged. “But no one ever calls me that.”
She’d brought Cate and me back outside.
The medical examiner’s van pulled up, and a grim-looking guy climbed out of it with a large black case. Giving Skwarecki a dour wave, he ducked under the crime-scene tape and disappeared into the bushes.
“You gotta be anywhere?” she asked. “I’d like to bring you both down to the precinct.”
Cate told her no and I said not really, but that I’d like to call home.
I felt in my pocket for change. “Okay if I run out and find a pay phone?”
Skwarecki was cool with that, so I started toward the cemetery’s gate.
Dean picked up when I dialed the apartment.
“Yo,” I said, “Intrepid Spouse.”
“What’s up? You sound kind of bummed.”
I sighed. “I might be late for dinner.”
“Do tell.”
“I’m at the cemetery. With a homicide detective.”
“Bunny, you okay?”
Here’s the great thing about Dean: he doesn’t get freaked out by much. This has proved to be a necessary attribute in a person who finds himself married to me.
“I found a skeleton,” I said.
“In a cemetery.”
“It’s a little kid,” I said. “And it doesn’t look like it was ever buried, so, you know, we called the cops and stuff.”
“You sure you’re okay?”
“Kind of.”
“You sound shaky,” he said.
“More sad,” I said. “The kid was really little.”
“You want me to come out there?”
“That’s okay, but I appreciate the offer.”
“We’re supposed to have dinner with Nutty Buddy.”
“Crap,” I said. “Astrid.”
“Want me to postpone it?”
I looked at my watch: just after five o’clock. “I think I could make it by eight. Can you call her?”
Dean said he would and I thanked him and placed the phone back on the hook.
I’d just stepped onto the sidewalk across from the cemetery when a second dark Crown-Vic-esque sedan pulled in behind the ME’s van.
As I crossed the street, the driver’s door opened, disgorging a hard-ass-but-elegant-looking African American chick in crimson lipstick and a chalk-striped navy power suit.
The woman wore her hair short, her neck graceful as an egret’s. She had feline cheekbones and a complexion the color of strong, clear tea—richly brown and gold and red, all at once.
She glanced around for a nanosecond, fists on her hips, then made the proverbial beeline through the gate for Skwarecki.
I watched the muscles of her long stocking-sheathed calves bunch up as she shifted her weight forward to keep her spike heels from sinking into the crabgrass.
Shoes that expensive, she had to be a lawyer.
I followed her through the gate.
Ten feet in she stopped walking, calves still clenched as she balanced on the balls of her feet.
I ducked past her, trying to act unobtrusive until I pulled up alongside Cate, who was looking down at the clipboard in Skwarecki’s hands and nodding while the detective jotted down notes.
The elegant attorney called out, “Yo, Jayné!”
Skwarecki lifted her head. “You get dragged into this mishegoss already, Bost?”
The chic stranger shrugged. “Yeah, right?”
“ME hasn’t weighed in a hundred percent yet,” said Skwarecki.
“You know the drill. Your guys call my guys. My guys call me. I go, ‘How high?’ ”
Skwarecki nodded. “Looking like we maybe got something.”
“Nice day for it.” The woman rested her knuckles back on her hips. “You planning to introduce me?”
“Like you need some engraved invitation?” asked Skwarecki.
The attorney started picking her way across the grass toward the three of us, hands held out a little for balance.
“Behold Louise Wilson Bost,” said Skwarecki, “assistant district attorney for the Borough of Queens—top prosecutor in our homicide division, but she