Page 8 of Sinful Sorrow

“We’ll follow her up to the hospital. How’d she know it was her kid?”

My heart thunders when Minka disappears into the darkness. Her trim frame. Her brown locks. For every moment she stays in the shadows, my nerves stretch and strain.

“Archer?”

“Yeah?” I swing my gaze back to him. “What?”

“How’d she know? Sure, the place is lit up and on the news. So if she saw it, she’s gonna panic. But there were countless others here tonight. It could have been anyone. A parent might come here screaming and crying and demanding to know where their kid is. But she knew, right away, that was her daughter in the bag. How’d she know?”

“Um…” I risk another look across to the van and breathe easier when Minka steps into the back to ride with her newest patient. Then Aubree slams the doors closed and taps the steel so the driver knows to start the engine. “Mother’s intuition, maybe? If something happened to Mia, you’d know, wouldn’t you? You don’t have to see inside the bag to be certain.”

“Maybe.” He brings his hand up and rolls his bottom lip between his thumb and finger. “Or maybe someone who knows what happened called her. That someone is gonna race up my list of persons of interest.”

“So we’ll ask her.” I glance back down at the trio not so far from my feet, the woman laid out on her back, but fortunately, still shielded by cops so the cameras don’t get to see. “They’re gonna transport her to the hospital, for sure. We’ll give her a minute to be seen.” But then a new thought hits me, so I move closer and tap the first guy’s shoulder. “Hey?” I stand over the small crowd and wait for him to look up. “Don’t drug her, okay? We need her lucid and able to talk.”

“She a suspect, Detective?”

“No.” She’s a victim. “But for us to find out who did this, we need her mentally able to answer questions. The longer that takes, the cooler our scene becomes.”

“My priority is with my patient, Detective. Not to your investigation.”

“Your patient would prefer I solve her daughter’s murder! Long term, your patient benefits from me being able to do my job. Help us both. Calm her down and make her comfortable. But I need you to not knock her out until we’ve had a chance to talk.”

“Dad’s at work,” Fletch murmurs, reading the screen of his phone and drawing me back around. “He has a second job at night to make ends meet. I’ve called the place and confirmed he’s there. He has no clue about his daughter yet. Unless,” he concedes on a gusty exhale, “the person who hypothetically called Mom also called him.” He spins on his heels, just two steps ahead of me, and takes off toward the car. “Let them get her into the hospital,” he calls out as I match his steps and follow. “Uniforms are gonna put our witnesses into separate rooms down at the station. Our next step is to get to Dad before we have a repeat of that bullshit that just happened.”

He reaches the car a beat before I do, swinging his door wide and dropping in so the vehicle bounces on its frame. Then he looks across, his honeycomb stare burning into mine as I slide in on the passenger side. “There’s no ideal way to be told your daughter was murdered. But finding out because some Nosey-Nelly called you so they could be first? Or seeing it on the news? Or hearing about it from fuck knows where? That would be way worse.”

He shoves the key into the ignition, starting the lights and sirens, since I guess we’re crossing the city hot. Then he reverses one handed while he uses the other to fix his seatbelt. “Mom is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, with a side of cardiac distress. We gotta get to Dad before our case continues to leak. Goddammit,” he growls, “I hate when the media gets to our crime scenes before we’ve told the families.”

“Do you wanna pass on this one?” I fix my seatbelt and hold the handle above my door, though my movements are easy. Calm. I trust his driving, even as wheels screech and the car skids around a corner. “Someone’s daughter has been murdered. You have a daughter. Sometimes these things hit close to home, even when we don’t want them to.”

“Mia’s fine. She’s safe.”

“Yeah, and it wasn’t that long ago we had a brush with something that could’ve been devastating. Your ex-wife is spiraling right now, back to her addicted ways. Your daughter has just started kindergarten. And your nanny isn’t feeling so great. Life is noisy right now. So if we need to pass on a case, that’s okay. I’ll support you if you think this one is gonna hurt your mental space.”

“Don’t bring Jada into this conversation.” He tears the car around another corner, righting the wheel even when our tires slide on a slightly wet road. “She’s worse now than she was before we put her in rehab last time. She’s setting her world on fire, and even with Mia in my home, under my protection, she’s still getting burned.”

“Which is why I said we could?—”

“My private life is a fucking inferno right now and, frankly, I’m pretty tired of dealing with it. So let me keep work and home separate for today. Give me this opportunity to escape into my job without you rubbing my ex-wife’s bullshit in my face.”

“Dude.” I tap his shoulder to get his attention. “I’m not rubbing anything anywhere. I’m trying to offer you a little grace. I’ll tell Lieutenant Fabian it’s on me. I’ll take the rap on the knuckles and claim I knew Naomi Wallace or something. He’ll reassign us, we’ll get a different case, and you’ll have one less thing you need to worry about. Most importantly, you won’t have to speed across the fucking city to tell a dad the very thing that makes up your every nightmare.”

“She’s already dead.” He licks his lips and sends us hurtling through a red light like he thinks we’re invincible. “Naomi’s already gone, Arch. Mia is safe. If we pass on Wallace now, her investigation loses steam and her killer walks free. Whoever that asshole is, who planted a real knife where a prop should have been, has pissed me off.”

“Ya think?” I drag my focus from the side of his face and watch the road instead. “You’re bringing a helluva bad mood along for the ride.”

“Fuck you.” He firms his lips, but at least his snarled words release a little of the tension bubbling in his veins. His tossed insults, like a pressure valve given a little mercy. “I don’t like killers in general. That’s a given. But this one didn’t even have the guts to do it on their own. They didn’t look into Naomi’s eyes and tell her why they wanted to hurt her. Instead, they hid. They made a seventeen-year-old, earning twelve bucks an hour, do it. And now his life is over too. Even if he gets lucky with a lenient judge, he’s never gonna heal from this.”

“Naomi’s killer is a chicken. They may as well have fed her poison and watched her eat it from across the restaurant. Same level of cowardice.”

He zooms through traffic, but holds my stare as we go. “Makes me wonder if our killer is a woman.”

“Because I said poison?”

“Because the hit was non-confrontational. No blood on her shoes. No weapon in her hands. It was vicious and nasty, which is usually indicative of a woman. A proxy was used, either because the killer knew she wasn’t strong enough to swing a knife and get the job done, or because they didn’t want to break their nails or look into Naomi’s eyes while she was dying. Pull a profiler in on this one, or a psych, and I bet my measly paycheck we land on female suspect. But not the mom.” He shakes his head and slows down in front of a massive grocery store amidst dozens of other big box stores where folks buy bulk items.

Who would buy twelve rolls of toilet paper for six bucks, when you can buy twelve hundred rolls for sixty and live lavishly for the next year?

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