A horn honks.
I turn away from Lang, and traffic is now moving. He sets us in motion, and silence is a sharp blade between us, ready to cut one or both of us. Lang turns up the radio, pumping out a country song, his way of telling me that he’ll back off, at least for now. My foot is tapping on the floorboard, fingers playing a tune on my knee, neither of which has anything to do with the music. It’s about the ten million nerves he’s hit. It’s a solid five minutes before the tension in the car eases to the point of being tolerable. My foot stops moving, my fingers still with it.
My cell phone buzzes with a text message. I welcome the entry back into a case that occupies my mind. It’s Officer Jackson, letting me know that all voluntary DNA has been collected. He’s achieved that goal in record time, but this doesn’t surprise me. Jackson continues to impress. I forward the message to Lang. I just don’t want to open a conversation with him again right now.
A few minutes later, he pulls us into the station parking area and into his assigned spot before killing the radio, but not the engine and air. “Jazz,” he prods.
“I get it,” I say. “You care. We’re friends.” I look over at him. “Maybe even best friends.”
“I guess that’s why having sex won’t work, right?”
I laugh. “Do you ever stop?”
“Made you laugh, and you’re the one who suggested I sleep over and we get naked.”
“You know I wasn’t suggesting that. We are never having sex, and I don’t even think you want to have sex with me.”
“What I want,” he says, somber now when he is rarely somber, “is for you to stay alive and keep giving me hell. I thought you were dead that night, too. I knew you were with your father that night. When that call came in, I died inside. You know that, right?”
I recognize in that moment that I’ve been so burned by my own personal hell and desperate to escape that burn that I’ve blocked out everyone else’s. Including my mother’s. “I know you were affected, too. I do. But my father dying didn’t make me a lesser detective. I need you to trust me again.”
“I trust you more than anyone on the force. This case is not like other cases, and you know it. One of our own is missing.”
“If The Poet is really following me, then me jumping off this case won’t stop him from coming at me. And before you suggest I leave town or hide, I won’t. If I don’t have his attention, someone else will. My job is to protect that someone else. That’s my oath.”
“I know that.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“To stay alive.”
“I plan to.”
“Not everything goes as planned. Let’s just go inside and find what we need to arrest this asshole.” He opens his door and gets out.
Chapter 31
Lang and I enter the precinct prepared to divide and conquer, but before we even reach our desks, Chuck steps into our path. “We’re still waiting on the apartment building footage,” he says. “But—” He motions for us to follow. “I’ve got something to show you both.”
We don’t resist. Like good little detectives, we follow the information god toward a conference room. On the way there, he motions to three people sitting at a table outside of his cubicle—two men and a woman—pounding away on laptops.
“Our new interns,” Chuck informs us, and when all three of the interns look up, he motions them back to their computers. “Keep working. We’re trying to save lives. Time is critical.” Chuck is already walking again, expecting us to follow, in charge and taking names.
“What is it with you short people?” Lang murmurs. “Are you all bossy and shouty?”
I laugh at the “shouty” word because he’d learned it from a little old lady just three days earlier when she’d told him to back off or she’d get shouty with him. It had not been in his official capacity. He’d stopped at a doughnut shop. They’d clashed over who got the last glazed doughnut. I’d sipped my coffee and watched him hand over the last glazed doughnut, losing that war. “What is it with you giants?” I counter. “Are you all incapable of listening unless we get shouty?”
He scowls. “No. Do not get shouty. It hurts my head.”
I’m laughing as we step into one of several conference rooms on this floor to discover a quite elaborate crime board is in fact already set up. Lang and I step to one side of a long conference table, facing the board. Chuck claims a spot on the other side of the table and beside the board, which is a mix of corkboard, whiteboard, and pictures and maps pinned directly on the wall.
Chuck waves a hand over a row of photos. “These are the people who were at the reading that we know of, including three staff members. I have their names, ages, and the models of the cars they drive. We’re searching camera footage, looking for suspicious vehicles. I’ve also started information notebooks for us all, which include all evidence logged in to date, maps of the area near the crime scene, and much more.”
“I’m impressed,” I say. “You recruited help and it looks like you have a heck of a lot of detail already on that board.” I give him the side-eye. “Why aren’t you a detective?”
“I’m scared of guns, blood, and spiders. And you need me doing what I do.”
“You look at photos of guns, and blood, and spiders in decayed earth all day long,” I remind him.
“And even the photos give me nightmares.”
I don’t laugh, nor do I ask why he does this job. Neither does Lang, and with good reason. There aren’t many of us in this line of work who don’t have nightmares, but we still fight this fight. It’s who we are. It’s all we know. I settle my bag on the table and prepare to dig in. “Here’s what I need right now. Reviewing the footage near my apartment is number one. And we should have a photo of Newman on the board. He’s our focus right now. You did well finding him, Chuck. We need to get something, anything, substantial enough to support an arrest before he kills again.”
Chuck’s chin lowers, eyes keenly on my face. “He must have bombed the interview for you to be this convinced it’s him.”
“What we think doesn’t matter. What we can prove does.” I walk to the whiteboard at the end of the table and write “The Poet.” I glance at Chuck. “That’s his name until we have his real one.” I don’t wait for his reply. I start writing down the profile I’ve already done in my head:
An organized killer, a planner.
Highly intelligent.
Well employed.