I glanced at the digital clock on the dashboard above the broken AM/FM radio and cassette player. When I got out, I greeted Drake by saying, "Aren't you supposed to be at work? Your nighttime crowd is going to be stumbling in soon."
He sat on the steps, gnawing a toothpick, watching me approach. "I was worried about you."
"You could have called."
He stood and slid his hands around my hips. "That's not nearly as intimate."
I laid my head over his heart and let him hold me. "I'm not feeling terribly up for intimacy just now."
"Intimacy doesn't have to be sex. This is intimate."
And it was. It was literally the most intimate thing I could imagine, being held and loved, unconditionally, by this amazing human. Tears came then, and they were the ugly, snotty, noisy kind of tears you can only shed in the presence of people you're truly safe with.
Mandrake sank back down onto the step, settled me on his lap, and rocked me. He stroked my hair and kissed my head and never indicated in any way that I should pull myself together. He waited with the patience of a saint until I wept myself dry and then sniffled and shivered and, finally, settled down.
"Is Nick okay?" he asked.
I wiped my face with the cuffs of my sleeves. "I guess. He's alive. He's in custody."
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"I don't know."
"Do you want to eat? I brought pizza."
"Why haven't I married you yet?"
"Because you love adventure more than anything, and as soon as you commit, the adventure is over."
I drew back and studied his face.
He gave a sly little half grin. "I've asked myself that question. Just once or twice, of course. That's what I came up with."
It was a day for gaping and gawking.
His bronzed cheeks took on a rosy tint. "It could be I understand that because we're not so different, from each other. It wasn't just the one sorority party." Then he prompted me to stand, and he rose and took my hand and we climbed the stairs to my apartment.
After we'd piled our plates with pizza and hot wings drenched in ranch dressing, we sat on opposite ends of my new overstuffed couch, backs against the poofy arms so we could face each other. Around mouthfuls of Veggie Lover's Supreme, I explained about Nick and the siren, Officer Price, Joseph Benny, and the house full of supernatural creatures. By the time I finished, Drake was on his third helping of wings, and he'd cracked open a beer for each of us.
"What's Benny like?"
"He's kind of a nerd, actually. Not very impressive at all."
Drake took a long drink. "Impressive enough to get two demons to work for him and a third to marry him."
"Not just any demon, either. She's a succubus."
"I've heard nerd lovin' is the best lovin'."
"Is that why you like to make it with me?"
He grinned, adorably. "You're not a nerd."
"What am I?"
"You're a sparkly black unicorn kick ass goth princess."
"Good answer."
We toasted my sparkly gothness by clinking our beer bottles together.
Reality reasserted itself in my mind and my smile faded. "I have no idea how to do an investigation."
"Why don't you ask Chantelle?"
It was beautiful, straight-forward, clear and brilliant logic. But...
"Chantelle doesn't know the whole score."
"Maybe she should. The supes exist and they're out there roaming the streets doing things that are legal to them and horrifying to us, and things that are illegal even for supes, and things that we would never even think could be done. What's going to happen to her if she gets in a bad scrape and pulls a gun on somebody who isn't affected by bullets?"
Ignoring the fact that he was speaking about supes as if he wasn't one of them, I had to admit that I'd had the same thought and even argued with Scoob about it once. Her stance was that telling one cop means telling all the cops, and The Organization was not okay with that. But this wasn't all cops. It was my best friend.
I set my plate aside and ran a hand over the food baby straining against my waistband. "It's not my secret to tell." That was it, in the end. If Nick or even Mandrake wanted to share their business with someone, that was one thing but me outing them was entirely inappropriate. "Hey, hold on. Why haven't you told?"
He avoided making eye contact. "I don't know. The secrecy gets kind of drilled into you from a very early age, you know?"
Fair enough. But still, she already knew I was working as a bounty hunter, and she'd met Nick on at least one occasion. Maybe I could ask and just leave out the details.
Afraid that I'd wake her if she'd had an early night, I sent a text. Still up? I have a question if you've got time to talk.
My phone rang ten seconds later, and Chantelle's voice came through the line. "You are my savior, Olivia Nowicki. Frank is watching basketball with his boys and I swear to god it's like having a house full of junior high kids to look after." Then, obviously to someone else, she shouted, "This is important. I'm going out to the patio. You'll have to get your own French onion dip."
Chuckling, embarrassment apparently forgotten, Drake stood up and started gathering plates and beer bottles.
"What's up, sis?"
"I have a work question."
Her tone turned instantly wary. "Go on, then." She'd come to a grudging acceptance that I liked my job and was reasonably good at it, but she wasn't thrilled about what I was doing. She said it was too dangerous, which seemed a bit hypocritical to me, but, so far, we'd successfully avoided any major fights about that point.
"Okay, well... So Nick was arrested."
"Your boss, Nick?"
"Yeah."
"For what?"
"Uh... murder."
I heard the squeak of metal springs when she dropped onto her patio glider. "Your boss killed somebody?"
"No."
"Girl..."
"He didn't do it," I insisted.
Mandrake peeked over at me with a raised brow.
I waved away his concern, and he went back to washing dishes. "Let me get it all out in one go, okay? And then you can ask questions."
"Alright, then." It was her Serious Cop Voice.
I cleared my throat. "Okay, so there's stuff you don't know and I can't tell you, but I swear to you on twenty years of friendship that none of it is shady or illegal. It's just private. Like... classified."
"Alright," she said again, her tone as cool as Lake Superior's icy, dark depths.
"It's like this; Nick's ex called him up. Said she was nervous about something. She wanted his help, but she didn't want to be seen with him in public or overheard because that would only make whatever the thing is that much worse. Last thing he remembers, he showed up at her house and walked inside."
"Whoa, hold up. Last thing he remembers? He's saying he has amnesia? Like in a telenovela or something?"
I stood up and started pacing from the sofa into the teeny bedroom, around the foot of the bed, back to the sofa again. "He has a bump on his head."
Chantelle made a noise that I chose to interpret as her suggesting I go on.
"Next thing, one of the household staff—"
"This house has staff?"
"Yeah."
She blew a raspberry.
"One of them found him in a locked room with his ex's body."
"He did it," she said.
"No, he didn't." If I said it enough, I could make it be true, right?
"Ex-lover? Locked room? He did it." She sighed. "Look, much as I hate to admit it, there are some scary statistics about law enforcement and domestic violence rates. You tell me all the time bounty hunters are basically cops with fewer rules, right? It stands to reason the statistics carry over from one group to the other. But even apart from that, nine times out of ten, it's the significant other when it comes to violence toward women."
I plopped back down on the couch and pinched the bridge of my nose. "He didn't do it, Chantelle. I'd sooner believe you murdered Frank."
"Oh, Imma murder Frank if he don't stop acting like he can't get his own damn onion dip!" she shouted, clearly for someone else's benefit. In a more reasonable voice, she asked, "Who's the lead detective?"
I chewed my thumbnail. "Me."
"Excuse me?"
"Well, I mean, there are people... you know... above. Higher ups. But they specifically picked me to investigate this case, and they assigned Moose to help me."
"You're not an investigator."
"I'm aware."
She paused so long that, if not for the vague, distant chatter in the background, I'd have thought she hung up on me. "I interrupted. My apologies. Get it all out in one go."
I was expecting an argument. Her complete lack of resistance unanchored me. "Well... I mean... I think... He's not... That's all I can tell you, I guess. But I was hoping you could help me because... I was only just starting to really figure out the bounty hunting thing and this is... I can't... It seems like..." I gave up and sat there with my forehead in my hand and my elbow propped on one knee.
Mandrake came over and perched on the arm of the couch beside me. He rubbed my back in slow circles.
In the background of the phone call, the men all started cheering loudly. Chantelle sighed. "I am really struggling right now with believing this is legal and above board, but I trust you." She paused again. "I can trust you, right?"
"Yes, I promise it's all legal. It's just a really unusual kind of classified information."
"See, now that right there is some shady shit, sis. Things are classified or they aren't. Kind of classified is not a thing. And cops might work together with bail bondsmen for any number of reasons, but this... This shit is weird."
I certainly couldn't argue with that, but despite everything, my girl came through like she always has, every single time, for twenty years. After heaving a great sigh, she said, "This is my take. First instinct as a cop—the lover did it. If he's got a rock solid alibi, which your boy Nick certainly does not have, but if he does, then you start to look at whoever is closest first and work your way out. Seventy-six percent of homicides against women are committed by someone they know. If we look at women killed in their own homes, I'd be willing to guess that number gets real close to one hundred percent."
Suppressing a shudder at those statistics, I found myself nodding along. "Okay. I can do that. We've already started interviewing the others in the household."
"Next circle is the people who know those people. If there's a maid that lives there, talk to her boyfriend. Her father. Don't discount the women, but typically your killer is a man. Particularly if it was an especially violent kind of murder. Poison? It might be a woman, but if there's blood, it's much more likely to have been a man."
"Okay." I jumped up and went rummaging for a notebook and paper. Taking notes would be way better than thinking about how very much blood there had been.
"While you're looking at those folks, you need to look at whoever assigned you to this case."
That stopped me in my tracks. "What do you mean?"
"Did the person who assigned you have a connection to the victim? There's money under all this or there wouldn't be a household staff involved. Money stinks almost as bad as love. Somebody pulled strings to get an unexperienced, unqualified investigator on this case in the hopes that it would get screwed up. No offense."
With my notebook in hand, I shrugged, as if she could see me. "None taken." I mean, she was right.
"My gut says if you can figure out why you're on the case, you can figure out the case itself, but Liv?"
"Yeah?" My voice sounded small and meek to my ears.
"You be careful. It's some shady shit."
"Yeah." Just how shady was starting to sink in.