Do You Want To Play: A Detroit Police Procedural Romance (6 page)

THE BOMB SQUAD was able to scan the box and find that it was not an explosive. The forensic analyst didn’t find any fingerprints, so Tobias and I are finally back at the desk with the box.

“How certain are we that this isn’t a bomb?” I ask.

“I never had much faith in the bomb squad, but why would the killer blow us up? Then he would have no one to play his games with,” he says. “And, clearly, he likes you.”

Tobias begins to slowly unwrap the box, each comic strip getting ripped in half by his fingers. He opens the cardboard box with a pair of scissors and flips it open.

“It’s…one of those Chinese lucky cats,” he says. He takes it out. The plastic cat’s upright arm ticks back and forth.

“They’re Japanese,” I say.

“Well, I’ve seen them at Chinese food restaurants,” he says. “So, it’s Chinese to me.”

“They’re meant to bring luck to businesses,” I say. I flip it over to check the back of it and find that the back of the cat is missing. A piece of paper is tucked into it. I take it out and unfold it.

There’s a bed with pale blue sheets. A woman with light brown hair, wearing a white tank top and plaid boxers, lies on the bed. On the bottom of the drawing, a typed note states: I do more than take photos. Maybe you can put this cat in the police station for luck.

“I told you he likes you,” Tobias says. He notices the blood has drained from my face. “What? I don’t see how this is different from the video. He’s trying to freak you out with his crazy fantasies.”

“This isn’t a fantasy.” I bite my lip. “That’s my bed. And those are my pajamas. He’s seen me in my bed. This means he knows where I live and which apartment I live in. He knows where my bedroom is.”

Tobias grabs the drawing and his eyes scan it. There isn’t lust in his eyes—only determination and anger.

“You need to go into protective custody,” he says. I shake my head.

“No, you were right before. He’s just trying to freak me out,” I say. “It’s nothing. He’s pushing back since he knows that we’re getting closer to figuring out who he is.”

“He knows where you live,” Tobias says. “He knows what you look like when you sleep. This is a guy who sent over a cartoon version of the two of you involved in intercourse.”

“He doesn’t have the right profile to be someone who would attack—”

“Fuck your profile,” he snaps, standing up. “You don’t risk your life like this.”

“I would risk my life if it got him caught,” I say. “But I really don’t think I’m risking anything. He’s not that brave. He kills people to feel powerful, but in the end…he’s scared. He isn’t willing to confront people unless he has a gun or a knife in his hand.”

“You’re not going back to your apartment,” he says.

“Where am I going then?” I ask. “To a hotel, like Jasmine?”

“No,” he says. “That’s not safe either. You can…you can stay in my apartment. It has a great security system and I’ll be there. Two people will be able to protect each other better than one person by themselves.”

“I’m not going to stay at your apartment,” I say. He taps his pen against his desk.

“You stay at my apartment or I’ll tell the rest of the station about this,” he says. “And you know that they will insist on a protective detail.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “This is coming from the man who didn’t want me as his partner?”

“I didn’t want you as my partner,” he says. “But I’m not cruel enough to want you dead.”

He picks up his telephone and begins to dial.

“Who are you calling?” I ask.

“As much as I hate it…the FBI needs to get involved,” he says. “They may be sanctimonious pricks, but they have better tools to use.”

He keeps his eyes on the drawing of me as his free hand curls up into a fist.

~~~~~

“THAT IS SO COOL,” Lauren says as an FBI agent shows her their biometric technology—the kind of tools that can categorize a whole population by their habits, such as the way they walk, or by their physiological factors, such as the veins in a person’s hand or their irises.

“A computer can’t do the same thing as a human mind,” I say. “It can’t think on its own.”

“No, it can’t,” the FBI agent says. He told me his name, but I’m doing my best to ignore him. I hate his FBI coat, his neatly combed blond hair, and the way he leans back into his chair as if we were looking up what kind of pizza to order. He types something into his laptop. “But if we type in the amount of people who regularly buy video games, those who get newspapers delivered to their house, and those who match Miss Williams’ profile of the killer, it can whittle down the suspect pool.”

I glance over Lauren’s shoulder as the computer searches through the world’s private information.

“The killer could have bought the newspaper off the street,” I say. “Which means that part of the information could throw the whole search off.”

The FBI agent shrugs. “Well, if we go through the new suspect pool and nobody in it is the killer, then we can take that off the specifications.”

“And by
we
you mean the FBI,” I say. He smirks.

“What can I say? You don’t trust us to do the job right and we don’t trust you to do it at all.”

I leave the police station’s break room that the FBI has set up in and go to my desk. I lean back in my chair, then remember the FBI agent’s casual behavior, and sit up straight. Lauren walks up to my desk.

“It’s almost seven,” she says. “Should we…go to my apartment to pick up my things and then go to your apartment?”

I glare over at the break room. “I shouldn’t have called them.”

“Well, they don’t like you either,” she says. “He told me that you’re a jerk.”

“Really?”

“No.”

I laugh. She holds out her hand to me and I take it. She helps me to my feet and we walk together.

“Do you really think their stuff is cool?” I ask as we step into the elevator.

“Almost as cool as the human mind,” she says. I press the button for the first floor and feel my whole body lurch as we begin to move. Even as we walk out of the station, my heart continues to pound hard in my chest and it takes me a moment to recognize what I’m feeling is excitement and hope.

~~~~~

The air is beginning to get cold, with the crisp scent of autumn leaves wafting through the air. Usually, I would be annoyed by the drop in temperature, but today it feels refreshing. It makes me think of the phrase “turning over a new leaf” or how your life can be divided into different seasons. It’s just strange to think how my life has been the desolate wasteland of winter and now it’s switching over to autumn, where everything feels so…serene and leisurely. It feels easy when I’m next to Lauren. My life seasons are messed up, but I suppose that’s fitting.

Lauren picks a red leaf off a maple tree.

“My mom used to keep pressed flowers and leaves,” she says. “I found it a bit strange because all they do is die, but now that I’m older…I can see why someone would want to preserve beauty.”

“Your mom seems like she was a good woman,” I say, kicking some leaves on the sidewalk.

“She was,” Lauren says. “She was the kind of mother other mothers aspired to be. She baked a different kind of cookie every week, put notes in my lunch pal, and she kissed me every night before I went to sleep.”

“That sounds like a nice way to end the evening,” I say. I flush. “I don’t mean kissing you. I mean…I just meant having your mother kiss you good night. I wasn’t trying to be…you know…I wasn’t flirting—”

“Tobias, it’s fine,” she says, a small smirk on her lips. “I get it. This is my apartment.”

She gestures to a brownstone. It’s beautiful, with caramel brown walls and red carnations in the window boxes.

“I’ll just wait down here,” I tell her.

“Tobias…it’s going to take me at least twenty minutes to pack,” she says. “And you shouldn’t wait outside an apartment for that long—one of my neighbors will definitely call the police and tell them that I have a stalker.”

“You do have a stalker.”

“…who kills people for fun,” she says. “So, it’s better if you come inside.”

I open my mouth to argue, but she grabs my hand and drags me up to the door. She unlocks it. We rush up to her apartment with our fingers interlocked. She lets go of my hand as we walk in. I lock the door and turn around to see a room that can only be described as cozy. The furniture is plush, it’s clean without being too neat, and the colors are a mixture of earthy and pastel.

Lauren goes into a different room. I take a few steps sideways to get a peek of where she went. I see a twin-sized bed with blue sheets. I remember the drawing that the killer made, and picture her sleeping there in her white tank top and plaid boxers. I can’t help but despise the PVP killer for spying on her…for seeing her in such a vulnerable state. At the same time, I feel the urge to see her in the same way. I want to know how she looks when she falls asleep and the way she looks as she wakes up. I want her to be the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning.

I shake my head. This is my partner. The extreme factors in this investigation are messing with my head.

“Do you need help?” I call out to her.

“No,” she yells back. I hear something crash to the ground.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It was just…everything in my closet.”

I walk into her room. An avalanche of clothes and shoes are strewn out of her closet. She’s hurriedly picking everything up and throwing it back. I pick up a hanger and slide a ruby red dress onto it. She blushes.

“Sorry,” she says. “I’ve been so busy lately that I just throw everything in here when it’s in the way.”

I shrug. “It’s better than my apartment. I pretty much only sleep there, so it’s mostly empty.”

“Maybe I can fill it up,” she jokes. I smile. I think she could fill up a lot of my life.

~~~~~

TOBIAS’ APARTMENT REMINDS me of an old warehouse with a lot of empty space and where everything is made of metal. When I walk into the apartment, the first thing I see is a dining room, except it looks a lot like the interrogation room with only one chair.

“Where do your friends sit when they come over for dinner?” I ask, setting my suitcase down.

“I don’t bring friends over,” he says. He grabs two beers from his kitchen. “Actually…I don’t think I really have friends. Occasionally, I’ll go to the bar with one of the other detectives, but…I don’t even like them.”

“You don’t seem to like a lot of people,” I say.

“I think you’re okay,” he says. I smile.

“That has to be the kindest compliment you’ve told anyone all year,” I say. I follow him to his living room and he sits down on his black couch. He gestures for me to sit too, so I do. He opens one of the beers and hands it to me. I take a sip. He opens his own beer and drinks from it. He rubs the rim of the beer against his bottom lip.

“Do you want to hear about my first homicide case?” he asks. I rest my elbow on the back of the couch and lean my head against my hand.

“Definitely,” I say.

“So, I had just been promoted to detective. The crime scene is in an alleyway, and it’s a woman. She had been shot twice in the chest,” he says. “Rather upsetting, but not rare. Everyone around me is telling me that it was a robbery gone wrong and I’ll never solve it because…how do you figure out who the murderer is when it’s a random robber? But something about the scene seemed off to me. Later I realized what it was: she had a cross around her neck, earrings shaped like crosses, and a Bible in her purse, but it was Sunday morning and she had died around 9 a.m. She hadn’t died anywhere near a church, so why was she in that alley?”

“Why was she?” I ask him. He takes another sip of his beer, thoroughly enjoying divulging this story.

“I went to her church to ask why she wasn’t there that morning. It had to be something important for her to miss church. Almost nobody knew why she wasn’t there that morning…except when I mentioned what road was close to where she died, this one woman told me that the murdered woman volunteered for an abused women’s shelter, and one of the women she helped lived on that street. We went to see the abused woman…we found out her husband had the same gun that killed the murdered woman…we matched the gun to the bullets and he was arrested.”

“You solved your first case,” I say, smiling. “That’s awesome.”

He nods. “Her name was Cheryl Burke.”

“Cheryl Burke,” I echo. I raise my beer and we clink our bottles. We talk through the rest of the night. I forget about eating dinner, I forget about the PVP killer, I forget that I’m in an apartment that is the exact opposite of mine. We talk about past cases, about teenage embarrassments, about Detroit. We talk until we’re both fighting to keep our eyes open and we’re both weaving toward being drunk. We talk until Tobias is lying on his back on the couch and I lean forward until I’m lying beside him.

I can only imagine that it feels as good as solving your first case.

~~~~~

When I wake up, my head feels full and the space beside me feels cold. I open my eyes to realize Tobias is gone. I stand up, thinking that the PVP killer has gotten to him, before I see him standing in the entrance between the kitchen and the living room, watching me.

“Sorry that you had to fall asleep like that,” he says. “I guess we were just worn out.”

“I guess,” I say.

“You can take the bed next time,” he says. “I’ll be on the couch, so I’ll know first if someone tries to break in. The window in the bedroom is sealed shut, so there’s no way he’s getting in there, but I’ll get curtains, so he can’t look inside here.”

“Thanks,” I say. I rub my face. “What time is it?”

“Six,” he says. “You should get ready for work.”

I sit back down on the couch. “Should we go to work in separate cars, so nobody knows we’re staying in the same apartment or should we just not care what the other policemen think?”

“We’re not going back to the station,” he says. “I can’t think with the FBI up my ass. I was thinking about the last box that the killer gave you.”

“You mean the lucky cat?” I ask.

“No, I mean the box,” he says. “Timothy Wood had an envelope, which nobody would think much about if they it saw left somewhere in a train station. But if you saw a box in the train station, what would you think?”

“…I would think, Wow, someone is going to steal that,” I say.

“Exactly,” he says. “I don’t think Jasmine was telling the truth. Plus, we got the box after we talked to her, and I think that comment about luck that the killer made was commenting about how we never found the photographer of the blackmail.”

“Well, he has been watching us the whole time,” I say. “Clearly, from the drawing he made of me. It doesn’t mean that Jasmine was the one who told him about our conversation.”

“You’re the one who said the killer didn’t have to be a man,” he says. “I mean, I kind of doubt it’s her since she’s tiny, but she could have lured all of those victims to the places that they were murdered, by her innocent act. Even you have a soft spot for her.”

“The video that was sent of the killer and me…the killer was a man,” I say.

“It was a silhouette of a person that looked like a man,” he says. “It could have been a woman…it could have been made to throw us off her tracks.”

I shake my head. “She should still be at whatever hotel she chose. I just can’t see her doing that.”

“I looked up hotels that had doorman nearby the police station,” he says. “If she is involved with the murders, she might not have stayed at one, but I figure it’s worth checking out.”

I yawn. “Alright. Just give me thirty minutes to get ready.”

He nods. “Just so you know…I hope I’m wrong. I know you like her.”

“Thank you,” I say. I can hear the sincerity in every syllable he says, and it makes me feel more cared for than I have ever felt.

~~~~~