“He couldn’t see very well without them, and he was new to the city, and he needed help. I helped him call an Uber to get home. When I put him into the car, he slipped me a business card with his number.”
“And the rest was history!”
But Leda shook her head at Niki. “No, it wasn’t history. That’s what people say when somebody gets a happy ending, and we didn’t.” She sniffled, but it might’ve just been the wildfire smoke that was hanging over the city. Usually it cleared out by fall. Sometimes it stuck around. “We got almost two whole years together, and I got an engagement ring in a box that I now keep in a drawer, because I don’t have the heart to wear it.”
“Why’s that?” Grady asked, a polite prompt, since she appeared to need one.
“Because one day, Tod went missing. Eventually they found his body in the back seat of his car. It had run off the road, and it sank in a culvert.”
“It was completely submerged,” Niki added. “Some kid with a drone spotted it and called the cops.”
“Right. He’d been underwater for… for a while. Like, a few days, I mean.”
Grady nodded, gently sympathetic. “Did you have to identify him?”
“No, his mom did that. She came in from Spokane, and she… I think she saw him through a video monitor. I don’t think they let her see him in person. They did a DNA test and everything, since he was pretty waterlogged. His mom said he didn’t even look like a person, much less her son.”
Leda’s voice caught, and Niki picked up the thread. “After that, Leda and his parents cleaned out his apartment. About six months later, his mom died.”
“Yeah, and I haven’t heard from his dad since Tod’s birthday, a year after. We’d tried to stay in touch, but you know how it goes.” She took a deep breath to make up for all the shallow ones. “At any rate, Tod’s gone and nobody knows what happened to him.”
“Was it some kind of freak accident, or not an accident at all?” Grady asked.
Leda grunted down into the chai and took a big swig before answering. She’d been quietly hoping Niki might jump in again, but no such luck. She had to do the hardest part herself. “It was pretty freaky, but it wasn’t an accident. Tod was shot through the stomach, and then he drowned.”
“Shot? In the back seat of his own car?”
“They think he was shot outside the car, then stuffed inside it, then the car was pushed into the water,” she said. “But it gets even weirder. A few days later, while the cops were dredging the culvert and the streams that fed it… they found a woman’s body. She was shot, too. With the same gun, or that’s what they learned when ballistics came back.”
“Wait a minute… wait. Hang on.” Grady tapped one finger against the edge of his cup. “This rings a bell. You said this was about, what? Three or four years ago?” When the women nodded, he said, “Okay, I didn’t come to homicide for another year after that, but I do remember hearing about it.”
Leda asked, “So you didn’t work the case at all? Not even in a supporting role?” She and Niki exchanged a look.
“No, back then I was still doing car thefts and break-ins.”
Niki shrugged. “Must be some other connection, then.”
“Wait, what do you mean, connection?” Grady asked.
Leda pushed her chai away. She didn’t want it. “When you and I were parting company yesterday, and you shook my hand… I got a flash. It was so bright I couldn’t see anything at all for a few seconds. Sometimes it happens like that, like an ocular migraine. Not usually so hard and sudden, though. Then I saw Tod, underwater in the back of the car. His eyes were open, but he was dead. He still looked like himself, at least.”
“If she’d seen him all grody and decomposed, she’d still be holed up in her house, drinking,” Niki explained solemnly.
“I didn’t mean to shriek at you, and I’m sorry I didn’t stick around to explain myself. I was really thrown for a loop, and I needed to… to collect myself. Now you’re all caught up, and now you understand why I fled the scene of the crime. I mean, the crime scene you took me to visit—not the one I caused. Since I didn’t cause any. As I’ve established.”
“I guess?” he replied without conviction. “Except, why did you flash on your dead boyfriend when you shook my hand? It wasn’t the first time we’d touched; I shook your hand at the office the other day, too.”
Niki said, “We don’t know. We thought you’d maybe worked the case and that was the connection that set her off.”
“No, I never had anything to do with it. Who was the detective, do you remember his name?”
“Whiteside,” Leda said confidently. “He was old and mean.”
Niki disagreed. “He wasn’t mean. You were just mad because he didn’t solve Tod’s murder.”
“And he didn’t exactly hustle to do so, now did he?”
Grady held up his hands. “Wait a minute, Jim Whiteside? He was a friend of my dad’s, back in the day. Jim’s all right, but I’ll grant you—‘hustle’ was never a big part of his vocabulary.”
“I think he retired a little while ago,” Leda said grumpily.
“Couple of years ago,” Grady supplied. “He lives out in Lake City with, like, a thousand little dogs.”
Niki jacked up an eyebrow. “Really?”
“Half a dozen, at least. Dachshunds. Yippy ones. They’re cute, but it’s basically an army of short things with sharp teeth that reach halfway up to your knees. They’re not even his late wife’s—they’re his. It always blew my mind. At any rate, I can run past his house and have a word with him, if you want. Maybe he’ll be game to talk about an old case with another old cop.”
“You’d do that? For me?” Leda asked, her eyes as big and wet as a dog staring through a meat-shop window.
“For you, sure. But for me, too. I want to know why the Powers That Be think I’m connected to your old case.”
Niki nodded. “It could always be something else. It could be a sign that you’re supposed to help Leda find out what happened to Tod, with your fresh eyes and your younger-dude hustle. Hell, for all we know, you could be the murderer.”
Leda gasped. “Nik!”
But Grady only laughed. “I’m not too worried about that.” Thoughtfully, he concluded, “Then again, it might not be anything like that at all.”
“Then what do you suggest?” Leda asked. The look on his face said he was still thinking. So did his tapping fingers, drumming a little tune on the paper coffee cup.
He quit running his fingers. “Here’s a thought: What if this isn’t about me personally? What if your flash was prompted by the work we did, on the case at the Shoreline hotel? The first time we shook hands we’d only just met—and it was a neutral location, your office. The second time, we were standing at a crime scene.”
“Keep talking,” Niki urged.
“That’s it,” he admitted with a shrug. “That’s all I’ve got. Playing by the rules you’ve given me, there’s a chance that I’m not the one connected to Tod’s murder. It could be this other case.”