Murder and Mayhem (9 page)

One of the legs was female—or to be fair to the general populace in Hollywood, a very attractive indeterminate-sexed leg in a silk stocking and wearing a mauve pointy-toed high heel sharp enough to pierce litter if its wearer wanted to. The other limbs were poking up out of the box’s large donation hatch, gnarled fingers tipped with bright green nail polish tangled in with a broken halogen lamp and cracked window shutters. Blood matted a shock of vivid gold-white hair dangling over the lip of the hatch, but Rook couldn’t make out if the hair was real or a wig someone’d tossed into the bin in the hopes of brightening the day of a bald cross-dressing Carol Channing impersonator.

Rook was suddenly stuck on the shoe. Staring at it, he lost the ability to breathe. He’d seen that shoe. He’d teased Charlene about how they’d cut off the circulation in her toes, laughing when she’d told him they’d been on sale at the fetish shop near the Kodak. His legs didn’t know if they wanted to pitch him forward or fold in on themselves. The drying blood seeping out of the wooden box’s uneven seams drove Rook on, and he broke free of Dante’s grip, shaking off the cuffs before he took three steps away from the detective.

There was noise, lots of buzzing, irritating noise, but Rook paid about as much attention to it as he did the arms struggling to hold onto him. He fought off the binding hands, a dirty brawl of punches, kicks, and bites he’d learned while growing up rough and untamed. His world spiraled down to a single pinprick of blood-splattered flame-red leather and its wearer’s delicate pale foot sticking up out of a smashed-together twister of body parts and trash.

With the noise came a blow to his head, and Rook snarled, furious at being unable to reach the box. A strong pair of arms locked around him, and the sky tilted briefly into Rook’s view as he was lifted off the ground. The world spun a bit, taking him away from the bloody box, and Rook twisted in the embrace imprisoning him against a solid wall of muscle.

“Stevens, take a breath. Please. I don’t want to bring the paramedics over to tranq you. I
need
you here. Shake it off.” Montoya’s accent tickled Rook’s brain, sending licks of reason to splash cold water over the rage burning through him. “Breathe, baby. Just breathe.”

“Char…. Montoya, I think that’s…. Charlene. Fuck. No.” He choked, and his stomach rebelled, tossing up the coffee he hurriedly drank before joining the cops in his grandfather’s library. Montoya cradled him, holding Rook’s back into his hard belly, his arms pressing dangerously into Rook’s tender stomach. “Fucking let me go. I’ve got to go… see.”

“Listen to me. I need you to look at a few pictures. We’ve got faces, two women, and I want to see if you can ID them. We can do this here or at the station, but—I’ve got a guy over there that says you were here last night, and now I’ve got two dead women here. Something’s off here, Stevens,” Montoya muttered into Rook’s ear. “So get your shit together and help me out.”

“You think
I
killed Dani, you fucking asshole. And now Char?” Rook swallowed the sour tide washing up from his belly. He refused to puke in front of the cop holding him, but it was going to be close. “Fuck you.”

“You might have had something to do with Dani Anderson, but I don’t think you’d kill your assistant. Yeah, you’re a lot of things, Stevens, but killing someone you’ve taken in? I’ve got doubts there. Now I’m going to let you go, and Camden’s going to show you their faces, got it?” Montoya gently lowered Rook to the ground and grabbed him again when Rook’s legs almost gave out. “Hey, I’ve got you. No worries. Okay?”

“You two done doing the salsa there, Montoya? Or are we going to do this thing?” Camden’s disgusted look was met with a steady glare from his partner. “What?”

“That some kind of racial thing or gay thing?” Montoya asked in a low voice. “The salsa?”

“Shit, it just was a crack about the two of you whirling around the parking lot like you’re at a prom,” his partner spat back as he thrust a sheaf of papers at Rook. “Crimes took these a little bit ago. They tried to get just the women’s faces, but it’s hard to get some good angles. Whoever did this just shoved them in hard, so shit’s a bit crazy in there. Take a good look, Stevens, and tell us what you know.”

The photos were bad, dark and smeared pixels across a thin roll of paper used in portable printers. Resembling a heat-imprinted receipt more than an actual photo, the women’s faces were lines of horror and overbright spotty grays, but Rook could make out enough of their features to welcome the sickeningly sharp feeling of relief he got when he realized neither one of the women were Charlene.

“Fuck, it’s not Char. Neither one of them is Char.” His stomach’s taint was back, and he gagged on the taste in his mouth. “Jesus, thank fucking God, but… that’s… a shoe. Charlene had those shoes on….”

“When was the last time you saw them?” Montoya pressed.

Rook looked up from the photos and did the one thing he never thought he’d ever do with a cop—be straight-up honest. “Last night. Well, more around three in the morning. I broke in. I was planning on red-lighting. Well, I was going to take care of Char. Wouldn’t do that shit to her, but… she was already there. Picking through the closet because she wanted a costume.”

“Jesus fuck, wasn’t anyone watching the place? We had two cars here last night,” Camden grumbled.

“Yeah, don’t take this wrong, but most cops are blind, deaf, and dumb when they’re sitting in a patrol car.” Rook shrugged at Camden’s disgusted hiss. “If they saw her, chances are they were too busy watching her boobs bounce around to see anything else. Hell, she makes straight women horny.”

“Red-lighting. I take it that means you were planning on jumping bail and taking off?” Montoya asked. “What happened?”

“Char happened. She kind of talked me out of it. Told me to grow some balls and stick up for myself.” There was a wall behind him, sticky with Los Angeles’s grime, but Rook didn’t care. He leaned back, grateful for the support. “She’s blonde. Really blonde. I thought that was her.”

“The blond is from a wig,” Montoya reassured him. “It was probably in the bin when they were dumped. It doesn’t look like either of the victims was wearing it.”

His nerves were shot, and he was shaking, probably from lack of food and shock, but something bothered him about the photos. Shuffling the papers, he stared at one of the faces, studying the woman’s slack-eyed expression and folded-in features.

“Recognize one of them?” Camden stepped closer and tapped the paper Rook held up.

“Yes. Maybe?” Rook squinted, trying to see through the blurry lines and into his past. “This one looks like one of the Betties, but I can’t be sure. Hell, for all I know it could be both of them in there. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, and these are for shit.”

“What’s a Betty?” Montoya shushed his partner when Camden snorted. “Besides a hot chick.”

“You know about Betties but not about the six-fingered man? Montoya, you’ve got shit taste in movies, dude.” Rook shook his head and handed the papers back. “The Betties are… were… a couple of women who do whore stings. They work in teams. This is probably one of them… teams, I mean. Maybe?”

“Explain. In English.” Camden motioned for Rook to continue.

“It’s where a girl, or a guy, connects up with a rich, married guy and blackmails him for cash. Usually you’d want it to be a quick hit. Hanging around means the guy gets too used to the fear and finally says fuck it one day and either blows you away or calls the cops. Not my thing.” Rook shook his head. “Seriously, this could be one of them. Char was friends with one of them… maybe both, but it’s not like I keep track of everyone Char knows. That’s like trying to find good literature off of the bathroom walls at Griffith Park.”

“You’re talking but not making much sense, Stevens.” Camden took the page, folding it in half. “Give us something to go on if you’ve got it. This Betty got any connection to Dani Anderson?”

“The woman who ran the Betties’ stings hated Dani. So did the couple of Betties I’ve met in the past. They used to run cons off of each other’s marks if they could. That’s how much they hated each other. Dani wasn’t good at making friends.” Rook frowned, looking up to see a man dressed in a bubble suit slowly ease a woman’s arm out of the donation box. “But killing Dani and then the Betties doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does if you’re the mark,” Montoya murmured, grabbing one of Rook’s wrists and cranking a cuff down on it. “I think you’ve got something in that shop of yours, Stevens. Something people are willing to kill for… or kill to prevent someone getting before they do.”

“Dude, do you really think I murdered them?” Rook gasped when the cop wrangled his other wrist into the cuffs. “Shit, for a second there I thought one of them was Char. How fucked-up do you think I am? I didn’t
do
any of this. What the fuck do I have to do to get you guys to believe me?”

“It’s not that we don’t believe you, Stevens,” Montoya practically purred. “It’s just that we don’t trust you. And somehow, I don’t think there’s anything you could say or do to change our minds.”

“I almost fucked Stevens.”

It felt good to finally say it. In retrospect—as their unmarked slid across two freeway lanes while Hank fought to keep the car under control on the slick road—Dante could have chosen a better time to confess his sins than when his partner was driving them from the station to the coroner’s office.

Horns blared, and for a moment, the unmarked hydroplaned sideways, skimming over the oil drawn up from the misting rain. A second later, the tires caught traction, and Hank spun the wheel into the turn, narrowly avoiding a lumbering old Buick held together by rust and duct tape. They were nearly in the clear when a motorcyclist skirted the slow-moving behemoth, nearly plowing into the front of their car. Hank hit the brakes, smoking the air with a thick, stinking gray cloud before jerking them to the relative safety of the slow lane. Easing them off the freeway, Hank swore as a rush of air from a passing semi buffeted the heavy car as he coaxed the shuddering vehicle to a taco stand’s half-empty parking lot.

Los Angeles continued on with its day, churning cars and people about on a carousel of noise, clutter, and rain-soaked chaos. A few blocks away from Union Station, the causeway was packed with tourists and locals hurrying to reach the train platform and avoid the grimy slush splashing up from passing cars. The walk-up taco stand’s makeshift tin roof chimed low tones as the rain struck it, the water running down its length and splashing onto the uneven asphalt below. An old Mexican woman peered out at them from the shanty’s side window, her hands moving quickly as she worked a flour tortilla into a flat round. She ducked back into the darkness when Dante smiled, but he could hear her scolding someone in rapid-fire Mexican about salting a pan of cooking pork.

The sedan rumbled softly, and Dante felt his heart finally slow down from its panicked beat. Shaking his hands out, he asked softly, “We going to park here and talk, or do you want to get a free shot in while I’m carsick from your driving?”

Hank turned off the engine, waited a moment for the car to settle down, then turned to Dante, practically spitting as he struggled to speak. “What the fucking hell?”

“Stevens. Me. In a club.” Whatever relief he’d been expecting for his confession seemed to be missing, and Dante was left with the heavy push of his stomach cresting into his throat. “Before this. Way before this. Back when Vince and I were chasing down the whole damned ring Stevens was a part of. I was looking for a hookup, and shit, it was almost him. Well, it was him. We just didn’t… it didn’t get that far.”

“The case Vince fucked up. Crap. Is that why he did it? Vince, I mean. Did he plant that shit on Stevens to protect you?”

“Vince—I don’t know why Vince did it. He didn’t have to protect me. I didn’t
do
anything. Shit, even IA barely blinked, but I don’t know. Maybe he knew we were going to go down and thought if he put their eyes on him, they’d ignore me.” Dante rubbed his face, tired and worn-out from the day. “And before you ask, the captain already knows. I told him before we left the station, but—”

“He knew from before. It’s why he didn’t want to give us the case. Because he already knew you had an almost thing with Stevens.” Hank opened and closed his mouth several times, wringing his hands around the steering wheel. “Jesus, Montoya.”

The captain’d been hard. Going into the man’s office ready to eat crow and be kicked off the case had been a given. Book’s annoyed expression and grunting dismissal had been like standing in front of his father and admitting he’d been the one to crash the family car. Internal Affairs had done their job, smearing his record with veiled references to inappropriate behavior, and Dante couldn’t say one damned word to the contrary.

He’d been the one to walk into that club looking for a piece of ass to take his mind off the man he’d been hunting. It was just bad luck he’d found out exactly what Rook Stevens tasted like that night.

Even worse, he hungered for yet another sip from the man’s mouth, despite knowing down to every single cell in his body that Stevens was nothing but bad news.

Finally, Hank sighed. “I don’t know what the fuck to say, Montoya. This is….”

“I should have told you as soon as I took him down, Hank. I just didn’t….”

“Just tell me there isn’t anything else, Dante. Spare me any more revelations.” Hank groaned softly. “And for God’s sake, are we still primary on the case? Or has he handed it over to his favorite pet, O’Byrne?”

“We’re on the case. Captain’s got no one to give it to. O’Byrne’s stacked up, and so is everyone else.” Dante gave his partner a rueful smile. “And no, there’s nothing else. But truthfully—”

“God help me. What else have you got up your sleeve, Montoya?”

“I don’t know if Stevens did it. The murders, I mean,” Dante ventured. “I want him to be…. Fuck, you have no idea, but…. Camden, I don’t know.”

He’d stared at Stevens’s face when Rook broke down in front of him. There’d been fear in the man’s odd eyes, fear and horror at what he saw before him, then the spark of relief when he’d been told his friend wasn’t among the dead. Dante’d seen his share of liars and cons, smooth-talking actors able to fake nearly everything but the fluttered rush of a panicked heartbeat and the sting of terror under their gulping inhales. Stevens feared for his friend’s life, mourned her in an instant of heartbreak and sorrow. Dante felt the pain in Stevens’s body as it worked through him. A man couldn’t fake that ache—not without being soulless and cold.