Murder and Mayhem (10 page)

And for all his flaws and cunning, Rook Stevens was definitely not cold.

“I don’t think it’s in him. It all feels… weird… off-weird. I can’t explain it.” Dante shrugged. “My gut says we’re looking at it all wrong, but he’s the one covered in blood. So that’s my take. He’s not who we’re looking for.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that,” Hank grumbled. “You thinking he’s innocent. Could have called that before I found out you played grab-the-weasel with him.”

“Oh?” Dante frowned. “I
just
decided that before you tried to kill us.”

“You called him
baby
, Montoya.” His partner shot him a dirty look. “I was just trying to figure out how the fuck to bring
that
up. Thought maybe you’d gotten soft on me. Didn’t know you’d already gone hard on
him
.”

“Didn’t get that far,” Dante protested. He tried to recall what he’d said when Stevens fought him, but for the life of him, all Dante could remember was the feel of Stevens’s long, hard body against his and the warm scent of vanilla soap on the man’s skin. “And shit, I didn’t—baby? Really? Damn it.”

“Between you and me, not a problem.” Hank started the car, prompting the
abuelita
inside the taco stand to pop her head out again. This time both men waved, and her returning scowl made Hank laugh. “I’m not convinced Stevens isn’t ball-deep in trouble with this shit, but I guessed you’d say he was good to walk. As much as you want to nail him for what happened back in the day, you wouldn’t pin him for this if you weren’t sure. I just didn’t know you wanted to nail him for other things too.”

“You sure it’s not a problem?” Dante asked. “’Cause I’m having a problem with it all on my own. He’s… a complication.”

“Nope, not a damned problem,” Hank replied. “Just don’t put your prick in him until after he gets clear of the charges. Got it?”

Snorting, Dante said, “What makes you think I want my prick even near him?”

“Because I saw your face when you called him baby, Montoya.” Hank put the sedan into drive, then checked the mirror to see if the car was clear to go. “You want in his ass so hard,
I
can almost taste it.”

The coroner’s brick building dominated its corner on Mission, an officious-looking edifice built with a nod to East Coast architecture. Solid and red, the main structure was the center of the coroner’s compound, a stamp of authority among lesser pale gray buildings squatting at its stone foundation and swallowing up a good portion of Los Angeles’s milky blue sky as the partners drove in.

Dante thought the place stood out like an angry ruffled cardinal among the pale, sparrowlike city buildings surrounding it, a disgruntled preening autocrat forced to wallow with the area’s toiling peasants.

They drove to the back, narrowly missing a meandering pack of visitors intent on shopping at the department’s gift store. A tour guide smiled tightly, then mouthed
take me with you
as Hank eased the sedan by. They kept driving, leaving the woman to herd her charges up the main building’s enormous steps.

Inside the cold rooms, the playful macabre atmosphere changed, growing serious and heavy with the smell of the dead. Hank coughed as they walked toward the examination rooms, bringing out a tin of strong peppermints from his jacket pocket. Shaking a few out, he handed one to Dante and sighed happily when he popped a couple into his mouth, obviously relieved at the mint oil’s effects on his nose.

Dante was smart enough to slide the mint into his mouth and suck on the pungent lozenge. No matter how cold the morgue kept its hall, the dead worked their way through the building, reminding everyone who worked there or visited of their existence. Under the bitter cold in the air lingered a flat, oily smell, an unpleasant aroma subtle in its presence yet acrid enough to trigger a primal fear of decay and rot in the most primitive corner of his brain.

Rochelle O’Rourke was already hard at work on the women from the crime scene when the partners walked in. A British import, she hummed and half sang as she walked around the room, her startling purple hair pulled into a ponytail and tucked up into a cap to avoid contaminating her work. Her scrubs were visible through the thin layer of protective coveralls she wore, bleeding dancing lavender and red cats through the white fabric. Compared to the room’s sober grays and steels, she was an eye-stunning block of color nearly vibrating across their line of vision as she moved.

“Hey, Rochelle, what do you have for us?” Hank edged into the coroner’s peripheral vision, startling her.

“Camden. God, you’re an arse. Warn a girl.” She nearly edged Hank with her elbow, giving Dante a quick smile. “Why haven’t you killed him yet? I’d have done him in a long time ago if I had to share a car with this git.”

“Because everyone would know I’d done it?” Dante quipped.

“Shit, you’re not killing him here, are you? ’Cause if you are, I’m going to go on break, and you can do it without any witnesses. I’ll even turn off the cameras for you.” Rochelle stepped closer to the table she’d been working at before they’d come in. “Stay out there. Mind the line, now, and what the hell are you two doing here anyway? It’s too early for me to do anything on these two. I don’t even know which piece goes to what head yet.”

“Just wanted your prelim,” Dante reassured her. “We weren’t even sure there
were
two.”

“So far, based on the legs, arms, and heads I’ve got, I’m going with two. If something doesn’t match up once I’m done matching the bits, then I’ll revise.” Rochelle reached under a bled-gray limb and lifted it up carefully, turning it around to see if it matched one of the trunks she’d laid flat on a nearby work table. “Not as much mess as I’d expect. Too much damage to the skin and flesh but not a lot of blood.”

“So killed elsewhere,” Dante commented softly as Hank began to take notes, “and then brought to the scene.”

“Scare tactics?” Hank muttered under his breath. “The other one, Anderson, she was killed onsite?”

“I think so, but I didn’t catch that one. Could have been just killed and dumped on the scene. Are these all connected, then?” Rochelle turned the leg, carefully manipulating it into place. The squeak of latex on skin was disturbing, and as Rochelle aligned the limb, she checked the torso. Frowning, she sighed. “God, whoever did this is very sick. Get out of the way, Camden.”

“I’m not even near you.” Hank shuffled back.

“I can see you. That’s enough.” The examiner bent over, skimming her finger inches above the severed leg’s end. “Rough cuts. Someone didn’t know what they were doing. I have to wait until tox gets done with their runs to know if they were drugged, but what I can say is the cutting happened after they were killed.”

“Definitely not at the scene.” Dante’s partner rocked back on his heels. “We’re going to have to shake Stevens’s tree a little bit. See if he knows anyone who’d want to kill these two. Processing should be done with him by now. If some asshole hasn’t let him walk out the front door.”

“Can we get the pictures as soon as you get them done? We’ve got the prints, but those are going to take a bit. Walking through facial IDs helps. That assistant of his might know who they really are if Stevens doesn’t.” Dante examined one of the severed heads. Unable to step in closer without suiting up, he squinted, trying to get a better look at one of the victims’ faces. “Are they identical twins? Or did the women just try to look alike? The one on the right seems a bit off. Different from the other one?”

“Women?” Rochelle looked up from her leg matching. “I don’t know how to tell you this, Montoya, but that one? That’s a man, baby.”

It’d taken a bit longer to shake himself out of the cops’ hold than Rook would have liked. Too many protests and a phone call got him wiggled free before Montoya and Camden returned to pull his teeth, but the whole ordeal left him uneasy—and indebted further to his grandfather.

Sliding past a patrol car parked too close to his back door for his liking, Rook muttered desperately, “Fucking Archie is going to own my soul if I’m not careful.”

Archie was Satan, complete with contracts and fiery hells. He liked the old man, but Rook didn’t need his mother around to figure Archie out. The more threads and obligations the old man could wrap around someone, the better he liked it, and Rook was at his own breaking point. One more favor called in, and Rook was going to ask the cops to just throw him into a prison cell and lock the door behind them when they left.

“Rather go to prison than dance for
anyone
.” He dug his keys out of his pocket, eyeing the wall of blue uniforms standing near his SUV. “Fuck, that’s not a coffee table. Don’t put your damned cups on the hood of my car. Assholes.”

The lot behind the shop was definitely off-limits. Even with the clearance to go into the shop so he could assess the damage done to the front room, Rook’s skin itched when he spotted the sea of people combing the parking lot behind his building. From what he could make out, investigating a crime scene mostly involved wandering around and talking up a bullshit storm while a couple of people crawled about on their hands and knees looking for needles in a haystack.

Working his key into his shop’s back door lock, Rook breathed a sigh of relief when the tumblers clicked apart. “Now to get out of this mess and see what kind of shit hole they’ve left me in here.”

Potter’s Field was silent. Too silent for Rook’s liking. Even from the back of the building, the eerie quiet of the front salesroom reached through to halls and seeped into the storage areas near the rear door. The main storage area seemed untouched except for a few large boxes someone’d taken down and left open. Most of the toys had been moved around, shuffled about on shelves and tables, but for the most part, it was a disorder he could deal with.

The front would be a different matter altogether, especially after Dani’s life was left drying on the floor. The hallway to the front seemed like a long walk to a fate Rook wanted to avoid but couldn’t. His Converses made squeaking noises with every stride he took, and he paused to take a breath before taking those final few steps. Beside him, a knockoff 1960s robot standing at the end of the corridor slowly flashed away the seconds, and Rook braced himself for the damage, then stepped out onto the main floor.

It was worse than he could ever imagine.

The first time he’d snuck in, there’d been no time to take a good hard look at what the cops and their ilk had done to Potter’s Field. Even before hitting the switch to the storefront’s floodlights, Rook could make out the devastation to his shop’s interior.

Turning the lights on made him want to weep.

Dani’s blood streaked black and flaky swaths near a smashed-in display case, smeared out from a curved negative space where her body had been. Speckled with glass from the window, the floor sparkled with tiny diamond-like shards, the tempered scales throwing back the white and blue beams caught on their edges. Nearly every case bore some sign of distress, and at least two were total write-offs, bullet holes shattering their frames and glass. The small ticket items he’d used to chum casual browsers were ruined, dusted with the same residual fingerprint powder that coated nearly every surface in the shop.

They’d also shot the shit out of his Wookie.

Rook ached inside. He’d poured every bit of his life into the shop, nearly every second of his time, working to bring Potter’s Field to a point where he could say he’d made it. On his own. With no help from anyone else and not a con taken.

Now it lay in ruins at his feet, and he was suspected of killing people he might have actually wanted dead in his not-so-recent past.

“Why Dani? And why the Betties?” He skirted the blood smears, his Converses squeaking as he made a quick turn. “Dani, sure. We’ve got some history, but the Betties? I don’t even know if the dead ones are the ones I know.”

The large case he’d set up as a wall between the front and the back of the store was broken as well, but from what he could see, the movie props he’d placed there were intact, although he couldn’t say the same for the enormous papier-mâché griffin he’d found at a Harryhausen tribute auction. Peppered with bullet holes, its body and head were marred with crumbling white holes, a scatter pattern large enough to make Rook’s stomach turn.

“Shit, they were trying to kill me.” He leaned back, trying to do a visual count on how many bullets pierced through the window and into the shop while he’d been plastered to the floor to avoid being shot.

“Go in but do not touch.” Rook echoed what his grandfather’s lawyers told him, trying to absorb the destruction. “I can’t even move without touching something. And how the hell am I going to document the damage? What isn’t damaged? Fricking lawyers.”

“Are these the same lawyers that told you to return to the scene of the crime and screw up any residuals that might be here?” Montoya’s deep voice rumbled out of the darkened doorway leading from the storefront to the elevator up to Rook’s apartment. “If they wanted you to be thrown into jail, they could have just left you there instead of this catch-and-release program we’ve got going.”

Montoya looked… good. Again. Too good. Too ruffled, too scruffy hot, with broad shoulders and his burned-honey eyes fringed with thick, long lashes. A hint of a dimple threatened to spread when his mouth quirked to the side, and Rook had to swallow around a lump in his throat when Montoya shoved his hands into his jeans pockets, sliding his black leather jacket back with his elbows to expose his gun harness.

Even from a few feet away, the man was a tall, dangerous complication in Rook’s life. One he wanted as badly as he didn’t want him around. Rook wasn’t sure what was worse—being accused of murder or being tailed by a man he’d gladly bend over for but who wanted him in handcuffs instead.

“What are you doing here, Stevens?” Montoya’s rumble tickled Rook’s belly, licking hot flames down his crotch and over his ass. “You shouldn’t even be here. What were you thinking?”