“Over there,” he said, pointing to a woman seated near the windows, at a small table surrounded by four comfy chairs. She was a young white woman with hair that had never been a natural shade of red on anyone, anywhere, in the history of hair. She was pretty and soft, with a bright blue tattoo of what looked like a bird on the back of her wrist.
As Grady and Leda approached, she closed a notebook. She rose to her feet. “Detective Merritt.”
“Ms. Cowen.” They shook hands, and Grady turned to Leda. “Kimberly Cowen, this is my associate Leda Foley. I mentioned her on the phone.”
Kim smiled and extended her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” Leda attempted to reply, but she choked a tiny bit on the second syllable. Her hand in the grip of the other woman’s hand had sparked something. A moment of light. A promise. She blinked repeatedly, reclaimed her hand, and said, “Sorry, I don’t mean to be strange. Just a touch of vertigo.”
“Tell me about it. This place takes some getting used to, doesn’t it?”
Grady dropped himself into the chair across from her, and Leda took the one to her right. “I love it here,” he said. “I was so excited when it opened. I was still in school, and the old library was nothing to write home about. Mostly just shelves full of mysteries and romances with beat-up covers.”
“No, it hadn’t been anyone’s priority in a while,” Kim agreed. “This place is a palace in comparison.”
“A sci-fi palace,” Leda observed.
“Some of the neon accent lighting is a little much. But hey, someone picked it out, thought it was cool, and paid for it. Who am I to complain?” Kim asked with a shrug. She crossed her legs and leaned back in the overstuffed chair. She’d been there long enough to sprawl out; her end of the table was covered in folders, open books, a cell phone, and a tangled strand of earbuds that were tethered to a very old iPod Nano. The Nano’s screen had shattered at some point and was being held in place with a strip of clear packing tape. “Now, what’s going on with this case, Detective? It’s been… what? More than a year.”
“I know, I know. But I’m still here, and I’m still plugging away at it. We’ve gotten a few new leads, and—”
“Ooh, what kind?” Kim asked.
“Nothing I can really discuss at this time. However, I believe that you can help us, otherwise I wouldn’t be here.”
She settled more deeply into the chair. “Fair enough. What do you want to know?”
“Thank you, Ms. Cowen. We appreciate your cooperation. First of all, for the record, you were Christopher Gilman’s assistant for how long?” He whipped out his little notebook and a thin ballpoint pen.
“About eight months,” she said confidently, as if she’d been asked to calculate this particular detail more than once. “He hired me right out of grad school. It was maybe the worst job I ever had, though it helped me get some professional experience on my LinkedIn profile. Except for that, yeah. It was the worst.”
Leda sat forward, elbows on the top of her thighs. “How so? If you don’t mind me asking. Was he a creep? Did he try to sleep with you, in exchange for… for a good reference? Is that how it works these days?”
Kim laughed again. “Oh honey, no. He did not want to sleep with me—which is, I always assumed, why his wife let him hire me. In case you haven’t noticed…” She sat forward and whispered the rest with an air of conspiratorial intent. “I’m a bit fat.”
“No, no. You’re not… don’t be ridiculous. You’re lovely!” Leda protested.
“Damn right I am—and lucky for me, my flavor of lovely was not Chris’s preferred type. I know he burned through a couple of skinny girls before he brought me on board. I know that his wife eventually decided that she’d tolerate my existence in his orbit. I can do the math. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty sure he tried to sleep with everyone else. But either his wife thought he wouldn’t try to poke me, or she figured she outranked me from a social capital standpoint, so she didn’t care.”
Leda was surprised. “Good God, you’ve got a mercenary attitude about all this.”
“Mercenary? I prefer to think of myself as practical. I know how the world works, and I’m prepared to operate within its parameters, at least until I can change them. But no, to come back around to your initial question: I wasn’t shagging him, not in the office, not out of the office, not anywhere. If he was creeping on his wife, he did it on his own time—and he didn’t do it with me. That’s not why the gig sucked so hard.”
Grady did not pause in his fast-paced scribbling. He didn’t even look up when he asked, “Then why did it suck so hard?”
“Oh God,” Kim said, with a stretch of the vowels that said she had a rant on deck—and she’d let it fly more than once, on more than one person. Over drinks, unless Leda missed her guess. “For starters, I was salaried at twenty-five grand a year. Do you know how far twenty-five grand a year goes here in Seattle? I’ll tell ya: not very damn far.”
Leda said, “Yikes,” even though she was really, really hoping that she was going to make that much in the current year. Too much less, and she’d have to fold the travel agency and look into some other form of day job to support her singing and crime-solving hobbies. She didn’t have a super-great track record with day jobs.
Her first “real job” had been answering phones at a streetlight outage hotline. She’d lasted four weeks before getting fired for experimenting with sex-phone-operator voices when she was bored. Then it’d been all of a single shift at a hospital laundry because she was desperate, but not desperate enough to get bags of sheets soaked with bodily fluids dumped on her head. It only happened once. The once was enough. After that, she’d taken a barista position at an indie coffee shop, but she’d somehow set the grinder on fire and melted half a plastic cabinet full of muffins. Next she’d tried petitioning with a clipboard and a lanyard, collecting signatures to protect Olympic National Park. She had no idea what the meth-head with the plastic shiv had wanted with the signed petitions, but she’d let him have them and run the other direction when he grabbed her boob and screamed in her face. After that, it was a series of receptionist and retail jobs—abandoned or evicted from—for an assortment of reasons.
She was still mad about being let go from the Clinique counter at Macy’s. It wasn’t her fault that a customer didn’t mention a fierce allergy to talc.
If you’d asked Leda, after a couple of rounds of death by bananas, she would have freely admitted: Going back to a nine-to-five was essentially her deepest fear.
Kim was excited to have found a fresh audience, so she leaned forward and used her hands to talk when she said the rest. “Oh, I know. For a part-time gig, sure. For a freelance gig—something I could work while also working other gigs? Okay, maybe. But for a fifty- to sixty-hour-a-week full-time grind with no overtime and no benefits?”
Grady winced. “Ouch.”
Kim shook her head and stared briefly at the ceiling, as if remembering all the times she’d openly prayed that someone would murder her boss. “And then he would call me—any time of day or night—with more work, more questions, more stuff he either couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do for himself. That man ate my life, and I’m glad he’s dead. Is that what you want to hear?”