“Med Center,” Jackson told her. “I can’t believe you guys don’t know.” He grimaced, and let some of his anger slide down his spine. “To be honest, the two flatfoots at the scene were….” He pursed his lips, and tried to remember he was being a nice guy. “They weren’t you guys,” he said after a moment. “We couldn’t get them to even call the forensics team, and we had prints on the doorknob.”
“So they don’t know who did it?” Hardison asked.
Jackson kept his expression neutral, but he arched one eyebrow.
Again, that partner eyeball communiqué. “You’re a PI, right?” Hardison asked when it was over.
“I am.”
“You’re a pretty good one, right?”
Jackson gave a one-shoulder shrug. “I get by.”
Fetzer snorted. “You’re a hot dog—we can see it. Do you know who did it?”
Jackson gave them a cat and canary smile. “Wanna see a picture?”
Their eyes lit up. “Oh, do we,” Fetzer said. “You’re not going to give us crap about it?”
“I’m not trying to defend the kid who knifed my friend,” Jackson told her, voice hard. “I’m trying to defend the kid who got charged for a murder I think this kid committed.”
Fetzer swore softly. “You are just a bag full of grenades today, aren’t you, sweetheart?”
Augh! He’d pushed too hard. He knew it. He took a deep breath. “We’ve seen some connections between this guy and some other people in the community. For example, your murder vic, No Neck—”
“James Cosgrove,” Hardison said. “Aged eighteen. Not too bright, not too rich, big guy who liked to throw parties.”
Jackson nodded. “That’s the one. Did you know that the night before his death, he hosted a party where a kid got busted for drugs?”
They frowned. “It happens,” Fetzer said.
“One kid. They walked into the house, looked for the one Black kid at the party, and searched him.”
Fetzer got it first. “Was he the only kid with drugs?”
“No, he was not,” Jackson told her.
“Where did they get the drugs?” Hardison asked curiously.
Jackson felt like he was back on an even keel again. “Would you like to see a picture?”
“How do we prove it?” Fetzer snapped. “All we know for certain is you’ve got a picture on your phone. Big deal. I’ve got hundreds.”
Jackson nodded. “Me too. Mostly of my cat. But I’ve got a picture of something else. It won’t hold up in court,” he told them, “because we couldn’t get forensics to come take the print, and it’s in the sun and will probably be too degraded if they get to it tomorrow. But we took the print, and I have a scan of it, and we’re running it right now. We got it off the doorknob—the doorknob our scumbag on my phone was holding while he was trying to break into our office before he—” Jackson had to take a breath for this. “—before he stabbed my friend,” he finished. “Are we interested in this at all?”
“Very much so,” Fetzer said. “And we’d like the names of the two officers on scene because they should have called for backup and forensics. It’s not right,” she said, looking at Hardison. “That boy’s in the hospital and nobody’s there.”
Hardison nodded. “Nope. Someone’ll be there.” He pulled out his phone and started texting.
“I’ll give you all of it,” Jackson said, feeling easy in his stomach again. The world was not all evil. Not all of it.
“That’s real generous,” Fetzer sneered. “What do you want in return?”
“Tell me about the Dobrevk case,” Jackson said, meeting her world-weary cop eyes with a hardness of his own. “I read that file twice, and I don’t see how you guys came to the conclusion that he did it.”
“We didn’t,” Hardison snapped. “That’s no fucking fair. That kid was barely coherent. We got there and the EMTs were busy pronouncing the dead kid, and suddenly this kid sits up and starts babbling—”
“In Russian,” Fetzer clarified. “He must have made some sort of sense, because his father burst in, and they, you know, had one of those conversations without words.”
Jackson smiled faintly. “You guys have been eyeball talking since I walked in.”
And that got him his first smile from Fetzer. “Is that so? What have we been saying?”
“You’ve been saying this case is driving you nuts, and you don’t like the idea of that kid in gen pop any more than I do.”
“He’s in gen pop?” Fetzer asked, her voice pitching the same way Jackson’s had when he’d heard.
“Hopefully not for long,” Jackson said grimly. “We just got this file today. Mr. Cramer is headed to the jail as we speak, trying to get that kid tried as a kid and taken out of general population. We’re doing our best, but we really need some more details.”
“All right, then,” Fetzer said, nodding grimly. “Here’s the details. We get called to the scene, like I said. The EMTs are already there, and the dead kid is on the ground with his throat slit. Dobrevk is on the ground knocked out—he had a concussion or I didn’t raise three boys. He’s sitting up, babbling in Russian, and his father comes in and tells him something, and he goes limp. Still. I tried to talk to him, I had Jimmy here talk to him in case he didn’t like the Black or the woman. He just shut the fuck down and cried.”
“You don’t think he did it,” Jackson said.
“I know he didn’t,” Fetzer told him. “He couldn’t even look at the body.”
“But your lieutenant was on site?”
“Chambers. Got called because it was a murder, and because the kid who got killed was some sort of local football hero. Anyway, Chambers had us arrest him and then signed off on it. But Jimmy and me, we would have brought him in for questioning, maybe, turned him over to the detectives on site, but we didn’t see that kid as the killer.” She grimaced. “We’ve seen a few, you know?”
Jackson nodded. “You said his father was there. Were his mother and the other two kids?”
Fetzer’s eyes went so wide, the whites showed all around the irises. “Two others?”
“Yeah. I know this kid. He has a brother and sister, look a lot like he does—sort of sandy hair, small pretty faces, big gray eyes. Girl dyed a pink stripe in her hair, but it might have washed out.”
“But…. Jimmy, you remember, right?”
“Yeah,” Hardison said. “His father—we went in to arrest the kid, and his father starts to wail, loud, in English. He’s all, ‘My son! My son! My only child, my son!’”
Jackson’s breath stopped. “Oh, I think we have a motive,” he said, not sure he even should have spoken.
“For killing the bigger kid?” Fetzer asked, horrified.
“No, for lying about it.” He watched as they both met horrified gazes and saw the dawning comprehension steal across their faces.
“Someone’s got his brother?” Hardison asked.