Leda bobbed her head, thinking. “The cases do have some similarities.”
Grady Merritt eyed Niki cautiously. “We should probably keep the details to ourselves,” he said.
Niki cackled. “Oh, honey. She told me everything as soon as I got a half bottle of wine in her. There’s a key to the Leda brain vault, and it’s about twelve percent alcohol.”
Grady rolled his eyes and clutched his coffee. Leda apologized, immediately and profusely—but he cut her off. “No, stop it. This is my fault for looping you into the case in the first place. All I can do is ask you not to blab any further, please?”
Leda mimed locking her mouth and throwing away the key.
Niki mimed tipping back a glass, then waved her hands to show she was kidding. “Don’t worry! Anything you can tell her, you can tell me—and it won’t leave our cone of silence. If anything, you should think of me as her backup brain.”
“External hard drive?” he tried.
“Right! Except better. I’ll stop her from telling anybody else. I’m an external hard drive that comes with insurance. It also comes with Mace, and I’m not afraid to use it.”
Grady’s slowly shaking head suggested that he wasn’t in love with the idea, but he was resigned to it. “You understand that we could all get in a lot of trouble if word gets around that we’re looking into these cases together. Don’t you?”
It was a grim prediction, but Leda lit up like Christmas. “We’re looking into these cases together?”
“Sort of. Between us, we might be able to scare up information that might not have been… let’s say ‘readily available’ in the immediate aftermath of the murders.”
“And the Seattle Police Department won’t be super thrilled with this?” Leda asked, but it wasn’t really a question.
“No, they will not,” Grady admitted with another shake of his head. “I’ll even have to leave my partner out of it.”
“You have a partner?”
“Sure I have a partner,” he told her. “I’ve left him out of everything so far; I can leave him out of whatever else happens. We’ve only been working together for a few weeks, and he’s got his own problems—namely a new baby at home. We don’t hang out much, outside of work. As long as I keep all extracurricular investigating to my personal time, he shouldn’t hear anything about it. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
“I like the cut of your jib, Detective,” Niki said.
“I just want to solve some crimes, and I think you… you two”—he adjusted on the fly—“can help me do it. Leda already gave me a hint I’m planning to chase for the hotel killings; all I have to do is take a step back, you know? Look at the big picture. If I step back far enough, maybe I’ll see how the cases are connected.”
“If they’re connected,” Leda said carefully. “We’re still shooting in the dark here.”
Grady shrugged. “Then we’ll shoot in the dark, and maybe we’ll hit something. Give me a day or two to chase down the new lead, and I’ll report back.”
“You mean the silver fox, right? You’re going to talk to him?” Leda asked.
“The alleged silver fox. Right.”
“Cool. Can I come, too?”
“What? No.”
“Why not?” she demanded. “I can’t help you if I can’t see what you’re doing.”
“It’s police business.”
“It’s my business now. If the hotel case is connected to Tod’s case, you have to keep me involved. I deserve to know. I have a right to know.”
Grady picked up his coffee cup and took a long swill of the cooling brew. “First of all, that’s not strictly true. And second, there’s always a chance that you won’t like the answers, if you find them. You’re aware of this, right?”
“Yeah, I can’t possibly hate the answers even more than I already do—and Tod needs justice.”
“You need justice,” he corrected her.
She didn’t like it, but she couldn’t argue. “Fine. I need justice. If I can get some by tagging along with you, then that’s what I plan to do. Like it or not, you’re stuck with me. With us.”
Grady Merritt smiled and downed the last sip of his coffee, then tossed the empty cup into the nearest trash can via a tidy three-point shot. “Okay, ladies. But if we’re going to do this together, we need to establish some ground rules.”
“Like what?” Niki wanted to know.
“Like if I share information with you, you can’t go running off doing your own investigating without me. And sometimes, I’ll have to give you a hard no when it comes to police-work ride-alongs. I don’t want to lose my job, and I don’t want you to get arrested for interfering with a case. If we do this together, we do it together. But I’m the one calling the shots.”
Leda sulked. “Just because you’re the cop.”
“Yes, because I’m the cop. My badge can open doors, and your psychic powers can open… I don’t know, windows or whatever. But the whole world believes in my badge, and maybe a handful of people believe in your psychic powers. Is that fair? No. I won’t tell you how to do whatever it is you do. You have to loop me in, though. If you get a big hit, you call me before you go free-diving in any culverts, or breaking into any buildings, or stalking any suspects. Can you live with that?”
Leda wasn’t 100 percent thrilled, but she understood. Furthermore, she was prepared to disregard him if the situation called for it. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. “I direct you to the clues, and you protect me from the consequences of sharing them. That’s… fair.”
He held out his hand. “Shake on it?”
She held hers out more slowly. “Shake on it.”
They did. This time, absolutely nothing happened.
11.
“I’ve been putting together a murder board,” Leda solemnly informed Grady. They were riding in his low-key cop sedan, wending through a posh and hilly neighborhood alongside Lake Washington called Leschi—dodging cyclists and dog walkers and skateboarders and random joggers wearing earbuds.
His eyes audibly rolled. “A murder board? You don’t say.”
“It’s a whiteboard. It’s only about the size of a poster, but it does the job. I’ve got Tod Sandoval written on one side, and Gilman Murders written on the other. Below that, all the clues for each case.”
“You have basically zero clues for the Gilman case. Except for the one you gave me, and we haven’t even talked to that guy yet.”
“But we’re about to, so I put him up there anyhow.”
Curious, he asked, “What did you put under Tod’s name?”
She adjusted her seat and accidentally kicked her purse. “The basics. The name of the woman who died by the same gun, where the car was found. You know. Stuff like that. I’m just trying to do what you said—take a step back and look at the big picture. See if there’s any place where the two cases overlap, or meet up, or whatever.”
“That’s not a bad idea. Visualizing all the details in one place can be helpful.”