theory that all middle-aged New York men were suckers for women with southern accents. The fact that Jake’s former partner Detective Reese had later managed to get the ticket dismissed hadn’t tempered Darla’s displeasure over the situation. Would the officer remember her now, with equal annoyance?
He did.
“You again,” Hallonquist said with a shake of his head as he trudged through the open door to join them. Giving Barry a curt nod, he turned back to her and went on, “Dispatch says you got something worse than an illegally parked Mercedes this time.”
“Hello, Officer Hallonquist. Nice to see you again, too,” she said with deliberate politeness, stretching her Texas accent into an even more exaggerated twang for his benefit. “And, unfortunately, yes. There’s been a bad . . . accident.”
“I’ll show you,” Barry interrupted and pointed toward the open basement door.
He led the way down the steps, Hallonquist behind him and Darla bringing up the rear. Not that she cared to see Curt’s body a second time, but she wanted to be there when Hallonquist took his first look at the scene. With luck, the officer would immediately tag the incident as a likely accident, so that she could stop worrying about scrap thieves and random, bloody violence. But then she remembered something Reese had told her once: that unless a doctor was holding the corpse’s hand, any unexpected death was treated as a homicide until proved otherwise. “Stop right here, sir,” Hallonquist told Barry when they were a few steps from the bottom. “Homicide will be here in a minute to secure the area, but in the meantime we don’t want you wandering around the scene any more than you already have.”
He’d drawn his oversized police flashlight, and now he clicked it on, the burst of LED illumination far brighter than the clamp-on lights that Barry had set up earlier. He swept his beam in the direction that Barry indicated, the white light washing over Curt’s stiff form. Hallonquist reached for his radio, and Darla heard him speak briefly into it, though she couldn’t make out his words or the answering squawk he got in return from his dispatcher. But from the stern expression on his face, she suspected that he had decided there was nothing natural about Curt’s death.
“All right, folks,” Hallonquist announced as he turned his radio down again, “time to go back upstairs so we can get some statements.”
He swung his flashlight beam over the scene again, and that was when Darla noticed something she had not spied earlier. At the sight, her stomach gave a small lurch.
Half a dozen rust-colored paw prints, each successively fainter than the previous, led away from Curt’s body.
EIGHT
��HELL, DARLA, IF YOU’D WANTED TO SEE ME AGAIN THAT BAD, you could’ve just dialed my cell.”
Detective Fiorello Reese—known simply as Reese by those who wished to avoid extreme bodily injury—had walked through the open front door just as she, Barry, and Officer Hallonquist exited the basement. She’d almost not recognized him, however, given that he’d exchanged his usual personal uniform of jeans and black leather jacket for navy slacks, striped tie, and brown tweed sport coat.
Tall and blond, with the physique of someone who hung out in the gym a lot, Reese was a year or two younger than Darla and possessed of what she called midwestern corn-fed good looks—this despite the fact he was Italian on his mother’s side—though he was saved from being a pretty boy by a strong nose that had been broken and never reset. And he had the reputation to go along with the nose. In fact, Reese had been the one to pull an injured Jake to safety during the gun battle with a homicide suspect that had left her permanently disabled.
Darla’s relief that Reese was the homicide detective apparently assigned to the case had been tempered by a flash of annoyance at this bit of levity on his part. Reese didn’t seem to notice her consternation. After delivering that offhanded greeting, he switched into detective mode and hustled them all outside again.
“Sir,” he addressed Barry, “I need you and the lady to wait out here until I can take your statements. Please don’t leave the scene yet.”
Not waiting for Barry’s assent, Reese turned to confer with Hallonquist for a few moments. Then he headed back inside the brownstone and presumably down into the basement for a look while a dour Hallonquist remained behind to stand guard over her and Barry. As he was jotting down their