case, Detective Jazz?”
“Trying to,” I say. “Anxious to talk to Roberts. Do you have a number for him?”
Irritation flicks across his face. “He’s in the system.”
“That number’s disconnected.”
His brows sink. “That’s odd. He isn’t leaving town until Friday. Did you dial wrong?”
I’d like to introduce him to Lang right now, the other guy wasting his time with that conclusion, but I refrain from that offer. Instead, I watch him punch a number into his phone, only to end the call almost immediately. “You’re right. It’s disconnected. Huh. Let me call Captain Newton down in his Houston precinct, or soon-to-be precinct. He should be able to reach him. I’ll let you know when I talk to him.”
In other words, get lost, but I don’t follow that direction. Not yet. “Captain—”
“No. This has nothing to do with your father’s scandal.”
Scandal.
That word sours in the air and in my mind. So much so that I want to ask him if that’s what we’re calling my father getting caught on tape, commending a cop for his “good work” after he killed a suspect. But I don’t. I bite my tongue and hard. It should be bleeding right about now.
The captain might not be my best friend, but I believe he absolutely hated my father for justified reasons. Moore’s hard and difficult, but he’s a good man and a good cop. My father was the reason I joined the force, and he was neither of those things, but that’s a complicated piece of my psyche that most people, me included at times, wouldn’t understand.
Feeling that double pinch in my chest that the counselor the department made me see after my father’s death helped me identify as grief and anger, I fade back into the workspace and quickly return to my desk.
“You’re right,” Lang concludes. “His line’s disconnected.” He lowers his voice. “Is this—”
“No,” I say before he can ask about Roberts’s relationship with my father, because that’s where this is going. I know him. He knows me. Five years of sharing a desk and a good hundred cases investigated together has that effect, and yet I didn’t really know my father, whom I grew up with. Or maybe I did, and that’s my real problem. I leave it at that one word and move on. “The captain’s getting me a new number.”
“Right.” He doesn’t look convinced or satisfied. “What’s the case we’re taking over?”
We’re taking over.
I could shut him out, but I’m not going to do that. Not on this one. Not when he’s already looking for a connection between the case and Roberts’s departure. I am, too. I hand him the file and sit down, watching him scan the contents, waiting for his reaction.
“Obviously not connected,” he says, glancing up from the file, “but it feels like old territory. That mother and her kids who were poisoned. Reads like a cyanide poisoning.”
“Yes. I had the same thought.”
He taps the file. “Did you notice that this guy threw up, but the poem that was in his mouth was clean?”
“I did. The killer must have washed out the mouth.” I grab my phone. “I’m going to find out if the body is still with the medical examiner.” A quick call and I have my answer. “The body is confirmed present,” I say, disconnecting the line, and glancing at the time on my cell phone to confirm it’s one thirty, safely after the sparsely operated lunch hour at the ME’s office. “I’m headed in that direction. Want to join me?”
“If it includes a stop by Roberts’s place first, I’m in.” He flaps a piece of paper in the air. “I have the address.”
Lang and I do not like the same movies or share the same politics, but when it comes to investigations, we collide and connect in all the right ways. We home in on the same things when it matters, and this is one of those moments. Something with Roberts isn’t adding up. And when your life is all about death, you never ignore what doesn’t add up. Or you end up dead, too.
Chapter 4
Lang and I decide to rally some computer forensics support on our way out of the precinct. My approach to such support is that while the way to a man’s heart might not really be his belly, it seems to work on that team, all of whom tend to be overworked and underappreciated. Today, as is often the case, we find Chuck Waters, a man particularly fond of such attention, especially if