“Whatever you gotta do to keep all this up, I’m fully in support of it.”
“Same, mama. Same.” He grins and winks at me. “I guess I’d better see what’s happening for lunch.”
I sit up, letting the sheet fall to my lap. “No. Let me. My turn to cook.”
“You don’t need to do that,” Moses says, following my lead and sitting up. “I can cook, or Jules can, or we can order out. Trust me, you don’t want Trey anywhere near the kitchen, though. He’s a take-out-only kind of guy. He’d burn rice too.”
“I know I don’t need to. Obviously, you’ve made it this long without me keeping you fed, but I’m in the mood for it. Don’t worry, I won’t poison you.” I shoot him back a wink as I rise from the bed, and Moses’s hand darts out, snagging my forearm.
I glance down at him expectantly.
“You’re incredible, Mags. And if there’s one thing I could do differently, it would be coming back a hell of a lot sooner. That’s my biggest regret.”
Sometimes I’m unsure of how to react when he says things like that. I’ve never had this before, but I swallow my emotions and tip my head to the side. “No point in wishing for what’s already been and gone. Let’s make the most of what we have now.”
He squeezes my hand and releases it. “Beauty and brains. A deadly combination. There will never be another woman like you, Magnolia. Never.”
I straighten my back and right my posture under his praise. “I know.”
Six
Moses
While Magnolia digs in the fridge, deciding what she’ll make, I sit across the table from Trey.
I keep my voice low as I talk to him. “You gotta give me something, brother. We gotta put this bastard in the ground. I’m not letting him get a shot at Mags. We need information.”
Trey bobs his head. “Dude, I know. I’m digging everywhere. I can’t find any record of family. Anything that would connect him to another person is missing. If he ever had family, it appears they’ve been wiped too.”
My frustration escalates, because this isn’t a problem we’ve ever run into before. In this day and age, where everyone records their every thought online through social media, plus pictures and family affiliations, it’s easy to track down damn near anyone. Frankly, it’s a criminal’s dream. Your average person doesn’t think twice about what they share and how it could be used against them.
Want to find a house to rob? Watch for people posting all their vacation pics. Then stop by during the day, in broad daylight, in a work van, wearing a collared shirt and a name tag, and no one looks at you twice.
But this bastard isn’t some petty criminal, and we need to examine every angle.
“Spend some time digging on Alberto Brandon. Mount told us this morning his wife was murdered the same night of the break-in at Mags’s condo. He’s the reason the Feds were watching the house. There’s a connection.”
Trey’s brows shoot up to his hairline. “How was she killed?”
“Throat slit.”
“Damn. That’s ice cold,” he whispers, his fingers still tapping on the keyboard. “We have any idea who or why?”
I crack my neck, annoyed at how the whole situation makes my body tighten. “Feds were watching the house because of him, and now his wife is dead. There’s something there, I just don’t know what. We need more info. Anything you can find.”
Trey nods, lifting his hands from the keyboard to crack his knuckles. “I’ll hack the NOPD. Find out what they know about the woman’s murder. It has to be connected. I’ll check in and see what they’ve got on the break-in too. Maybe they’ve determined if the blood is animal or human yet. That might give us something.”
I rise and tap the top of his laptop screen. “Thanks, brother. Work your magic. We need to get some answers quick so we can take care of this shit once and for all.”
“How does jambalaya sound?” Magnolia calls from the kitchen with her head buried in the fridge.
“Perfect, mama.” I look at Trey. “You hungry?”
“Damn right. I’m always hungry.”
“Me too,” Jules says, chiming in. “Especially if I’m not cooking.”
Magnolia smiles from where she stands behind the island. “All right. One big ol’ batch coming up.”
By the time Magnolia has the whole house smelling amazing, Trey is in the NOPD system.
“Okay, here we go,” he says, his fingers flying.
“What do you have?” I ask, coming around the table to stand behind him.
“Damn, man. That’s some fucked-up shit,” he says under his breath.
“What?” Magnolia asks from across the room.
Trey glances over in her direction, but his fingers never stop moving. The guy can literally carry on full conversations and keep typing without ever missing a keystroke. As someone who still has to look at his fingers on occasion to remember where a few letters are, I can’t help but be amazed.
“Crime scene pictures. You don’t want to see them, mama,” I tell her, wishing I wasn’t witnessing them either.
“Take his word for it,” Trey says, shaking his head like he’s trying to get the vision of Laura Brandon out of his brain, and I don’t blame him. “You can’t un-see shit like this.”
He clicks out of the photos as fast as he clicked into them.
“Any suspects?” I ask, squatting down to read his screen.
He clicks around and shrugs. “No. Nothing so far. But they’re definitely digging. Your buddy Cavender is on the case.”
Magnolia clangs the lid onto the top of the stockpot. “Fuck. He’ll probably be trying to pin this bullshit on me too.”
“Not a chance that’ll stick. You have an alibi, and even if you didn’t, the good detective isn’t going to suspect a woman did this. This was . . .” I trail off, thinking of how to describe the gruesome scene. “Different. And I’d stake my money on the fact it was a man, for sure. Women don’t generally do that kind of thing.”
“It was that bad?” she asks quietly.
I frown and scratch the back of my neck where the hairs are still on end. “Yeah. But nothing you need to see or think about.”
Trey keeps poking around in the case file on Brandon’s wife, but there’s nothing helpful we can find. Fingerprints were lifted from the scene, but after Brandon and his wife’s were eliminated, there were three other sets of prints that haven’t resulted in any matches yet. No sign of forced entry. No shoe or boot prints found in the yard.
Whoever did this isn’t an amateur.
“That’s a big fat zero for information,” Trey says, clicking out of the murder case. “Let’s see if they have anything on the break-in.” His fingers go speeding across the keys again, and he pulls up the file on Cavender’s investigation of the incident at Magnolia’s condo.
“Check the forensics first,” I tell him.
He’s already on it, though, and we both scan the report as it pops up on the screen.