Page 5 of The Butterfly Killer

Patrice’s eyes widened. “No way! He’s back?”

Marcus looked around the room. “I don’t know if they’ve officially announced it, but it looks that way.”

Patrice took the hint, nodding as he looked around the room too to make sure no one had heard his little outburst. “But you got close to the case, right? Are they letting you work on it?”

Marcus gave him a look. “Does it look like anyone is going to be asking me to help them out? I don’t even have my own computer.”

He waved his hand to his desk where he tried to make it more homey. The picture of him, his sister, and mom was tucked in the corner. He had the original in his wallet, but even the copy looked like it had seen better days. He smiled as he remembered when hard times seemed like the best of times. If he could, he’d take back the starving nights to see his mom again.

Patrice let out a sigh. “I wish you’d let me talk to someone.”

“No,” Marcus lifted his finger as he grabbed his coffee. He decided he didn’t want to sit in his sad corner after all. He’d rather sit in his police car that didn’t have air-conditioner. “Absolutely not.”

“Come on. Rosanne is nice and she might be able to sway the Chief?—”

“You want to take advantage of an old man that just lost his wife.”

“It’s been ten years. It wasn’t like it was just last week.”

A silence fell over the two of them. Marcus took a sip of his coffee and winced when the bitter flavor almost took him out.

He looked down into the dark liquid. “I think some grounds got in.”

Patrice shook his head. “I told you I’d pick you up some coffee and not to use that nasty communal coffee pot.”

“I’m not going to be a leech.” He picked up his paper work and started toward the doors. Patrice started to come along when Marcus stopped.

“Actually…are you using your office?”

Patrice cracked a smile. “How about you use my desk and I grab us coffee? My treat.”

Patrice pulled his keys out of his pocket and tossed them at Marcus. Marcus caught them just barely with his hand holding his paperwork.

Marcus’s shoulders sagged. “Alright. But I’m paying you back.”

Patrice waved his hand as he went out the front doors. “Yeah, yeah.”

Marcus did crack a smile. He was about to take another sip of the coffee but didn’t. The smell was pretty awful as well. He thanked Patrice for stopping him from downing that shit.

He went back to the small kitchenette in the building to the pour it out. He tossed the cup in the trash on his way out. As he headed toward Patrice’s office, the dark and dreary hallways started to turn more modern and cleaner. This part of the building had been expanded on.

Patrice was a high ranking examiner in the building and had an office of his own that Marcus was very jealous of. Patrice was five years older than Marcus and had been in his respective field for that much longer so it was expected he’d be further up in his career. But it still made Marcus depressed about his own which was stagnate.

He thought about Agent Mercer questioning Blevins earlier that day about how he was a detective already. It was no secret that Blevins had money. His family was full of politicians. While it went unsaid, it was quite obvious his dad—who was friend’s with the mayor—had some influence in the decision that made Blevins one of the few detectives in the city.

Marcus knew he shouldn’t compare himself to Blevins at all either. They were two sides of a coin—two sides of the tracks. Blevins had been raised in wealth and socialite heaven while Marcus had barely scraped enough loans to get through the academy. He’d be paying those back until the day he die.

Marcus once again got lost in his head. He walked right by Patrice’s office. He had to backtrack. Marcus used the key and got in, leaving the door unlocked.

The office was decorated like Patrice’s personality: boldly. The rug alone was an eye-catcher. The tie-dye print popped out along with the hand-painted art hung up on the walls. When Marcus had first walked into the room fives years ago, he’d been god-smacked by the dark art Patrice had picked to put in his office.

He’d asked Patrice why he’d want to be surrounded by more depictions of death when he was already around it most of his day.

“Because it’s a different depiction. The death I see on my examiner table is grotesque and full of anger. The death in these paintings are joyful—it’s natural.”

Marcus could never understand what Patrice meant. Death was death to Marcus—whether it was murder, sudden, or as like Patrice liked to call it, natural.

He sat his things down on Patrice’s desk. He avoided the incense burner and the open journal graced with Patrice’s messy penmanship. He cracked a smile as he closed the journal andpushed it away so Patrice didn’t think he’d gone snooping around his things.

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