“I’m trying to be serious here, McGinnis.” Another glance up, but this time there was a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
“O’Byrne, I just spent the last half hour of my life running away from a gun-toting crazy man in a sheep costume with his dick waggling around through a flap in the front because I caught him having kinky sex with a former nun who is now a powerful California lobbyist for faith-based charities. He was trying to kill me. Sicced the ex-nun’s dogs on me, who thankfully thought it was all just a game of tag, apparently, but the damned bullets were real.” I held my hand up, pinching at the air with my thumb and index finger. “He missed me by this much. And just when I thought I’d gotten away from him, I stumble across a former client’s dead wife. If I can’t laugh at any of this, I’m going to lose my mind.”
O’Byrne was a whipcord-lean Latinx with a beautiful face, a serious demeanor, and a scowl fierce enough to stop a herd of rampaging toddlers dead in their tracks. We hadn’t seen eye to eye when she first rolled into her position with the LAPD as a senior detective, but over the years, I must’ve done something right, because she eventually retained me as a consultant with the department. I’d been a detective with the LAPD when I was shot by my partner and best friend, Ben, who’d somehow gotten into his head he was in love with my boyfriend, Rick. Rick didn’t survive the shooting, and I wasn’t so sure I had.
I did. And I’d grown a lot since then. Fell in love. Got married. And now stood over the corpse of a case I’d left behind me a long time ago.
O’Byrne took shots of her own a few years ago while working on a case with me, and she’d pulled out of the wreckage of her body a lot better than I had. She went back to wearing a badge, while I was rolled out, too devastated and scarred up to be any good. I didn’t know a lot about Dell or her personal life. We weren’t the kind of “get together on a Sunday and have a beer while watching a football game” friends, but it was safe to say we respected each other. Or at least I was willing to admit I respected the hell out of her.
I just hadn’t planned on having one of the craziest evenings of my life when I kissed Jae goodbye that afternoon and walked out our front door.
“Tell me what you know about Adele Brinkerhoff,” O’Byrne said, nodding to a passing uniform who’d wrangled the Dobermans into the back of his police car to wait for the ex-nun’s husband to arrive and take them home. “You say her husband hired you a few years back to catch her cheating?”
“They came to an understanding, paid off my bill, and thanked me for my time,” I replied. “I haven’t really had much contact with either one of them since then. It seemed like they were going through a rough patch and worked it out. Or he just decided he could live with a bisexual, leather-wearing dominatrix who had torrid love affairs on the side. I didn’t really ask, because it was none of my business. The check cleared. That was the only thing that counted.”
“She was wearing leather when she was killed. Was it like what you saw her in the last time?” She cast a quick glance around the neighborhood, probably scanning the high walls and tall hedges blocking any commoners from peering at the sprawling estates tucked in above Koreatown. “If we start knocking on a few of these doors, do you think we’ll find she had a thing going with someone around here?”
I hadn’t spent a lot of time staring at Adele. There’d been other concerns, like the dog and then the guy with the gun, not to mention dealing with the shock of seeing her grandmotherly face slack with death. Thinking back on what I could remember of that moment, I shook my head.
“This is going to sound crazy, but it seemed to me like what she was wearing wasn’t sexual in nature. I mean, the first time I saw her, there wasn’t any question that she was dressed for a good time and to deliver a firm spanking. She looked more like… I don’t know, like she was going to a party?” I realized at the bite of a breeze against my arm that I was still wearing my tattered jacket. I shrugged it off and left it on the hood of the police car, assuming someone would come gather it as evidence for the dog attack at some point. “The woman kind of led two lives. When she and her husband showed up at my office, she was bordering on frumpy. I really can’t tell you much about her.”
“What about the diamonds she had in her hand? Know anything about those?”
That question rocked me back. My brain had decided they were gems the first time I spotted them, but the idea didn’t fit into the narrative I’d conjured up to have the evening make some kind of sense. It was already crazy enough without discovering Adele Brinkerhoff dead, and tossing a handful of diamonds into the mix only tipped things over into the land of grinning cats and talking playing cards.
“So they’re real? I wasn’t sure.”
“I’m going to assume they’re real, because I don’t have any explanation for why I have a little old lady shoehorned into a black leather jumpsuit and found dead in the middle of a neighborhood where it costs five dollars just to take a whiff of fresh air,” O’Byrne drawled, a faint sneer on her face.
“I’m feeling attacked,” I shot back. “I live in this neighborhood. Okay, not on the huge-mansion side of things but still in this neighborhood.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen where you live. So it only costs four bucks.” The sneer grew, but the humor in her face did as well. Jollity looked good on her. I didn’t see it very often. Usually my presence brought annoyance or slight ridicule to her expressions. “I’d like to see your case notes from back then if you still got them.”
“It’s been five or six years, but all of my case notes are kept digitally, so I’ll be able to send over everything I’ve got. I’ve got a contact number for her husband, but it’s been a while, and he seemed a lot older than she was. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.” I was beginning to regret taking off my jacket, because the wind began to carry a bit of ice in it. “Did you consider that Branigan might have killed her? I mean, it would be kind of cold-blooded of him to blow a hole through her and then go back to the ex-nun for a bit more fun, but that Desert Eagle of his would sure as hell explain the crater in her chest.”
“I’d considered it, but from the looks of things, it seems like Adele Brinkerhoff’s been lying there for more than a couple of days. Branigan and his associate were in Sacramento until early this afternoon. She lives down the street and knew the place was empty and on the market.” O’Byrne closed her notebook, tucking her pen away into her jacket pocket. “She told her husband she was going to take the dogs for a walk, then scooted down here to hook up with Branigan.”
“Well that explains the dogs but not the sheep.” Whenever I closed my eyes, I still could see Branigan’s pale fleshy bits swinging back and forth as he ran, framed by tufts of woolly white fur. “I mean, I guess when she was a nun, her old job was pretty much tending to her flock, but that’s just going way too far.”
There wasn’t enough bleach in the universe for me to get that out of my memory. With any luck I would get bashed on the head on the way home somehow, giving me a bit of amnesia. At the very worst, I would totally lose every memory of my past, but I had a lot of faith that I would fall back in love with Jae as soon as I saw him. He would understand. He’d understood much worse.