Page 65 of Sinful Seduction
“You got it.” He squeezes my shoulder. “I’ll ask around and see what I see. Who’s the dude?”
“The boyfriend? Benjamin Saxon. You remember Torrence Saxon from back in the day? That shady-ass motherfucker who?—”
“Shot you in the back for a dime bag and thirty bucks.” His jaw tightens with the memory. “You’re telling me your baby girl was dating that prick’s… what? His kid? And you let it happen?”
“I never told her what that family meant to me, and Torrence was dead before Ben was old enough to walk in a straight line. He never said shit to me, and if he said anything to my daughter, she never brought it up. I figured the kid was blind to the history, and even now, I have no proof he knew otherwise.”
“And now he’s dead?” Shube whistles between his teeth. “Like father, like son. They live by the streets, they die on them.”
“I guess…” I draw a heaving breath. “I don’t know who did it. The cops aren’t saying too much, and the folks on the news only report what they see and the shit they make up. Last I knew, my baby girl was safe in her room, so I took my wife to bed and slept like a fuckin’ baby. Next thing, cops are asking questions, and doctors are telling me about her heart. About how her injuries were too serious, so it gave out. How they zapped her back and repaired the damage to her spleen. They say she’s out of the woods now, but she considered herself in love with this kid, Shube. She fuckin’ cries for him. I need to know who did this, but I don’t have the same contacts I used to around here.”
“I do. It’s okay, G. I gotchu.” He reaches into his back pocket, bypassing the 9mm on his hip and snagging his phone instead. “I’ve got a friend who hangs in high places, so I’ll check in with him and see what he knows.” He swipes his phone to unlock it and taps on a name to start a call. But then he hesitates, his eyes coming back to mine. “These things don’t come free, G. If I’m asking him for a favor, he’s gonna need payment.”
I dig my hands into my pockets and swallow. “I know. I’m good for it.”
“He won’t want cash.” He brings the phone to his ear. “He knows whoyou are, G, and he knows you work with numbers. I know for a fact he has a bunch of dirty money, so if you have the skills to wash it…”
“I do.” I drop my gaze and exhale. “I’ll pay my debt, so long as he delivers answers.”
MINKA
Ifall into a working rhythm, processing a body, signing the certificate, annotating the files, and then moving on to the next. One person. Then two. Three. Four. A standard autopsy can take anywhere from thirty minutes to thirty hours, depending on the complexity of the case and the hardheadedness of the detectives breathing down my neck. But the bodies rolling through my door today are relatively simple.
They’re unhoused folks dying of heatstroke, or the elderly… dying of heatstroke… or in an exceptionally unfortunate case, a sweet toddler who sat in a car too long while mom snuck inside her boyfriend’s house for a quickie… dying of heatstroke.
These autopsies are easy enough to process, and the stack waiting for me in the fridges on the second floor grows smaller with every hour that passes.
“New York Malones are arriving tomorrow,” Aubree murmurs from behind her full-face plastic shield. She slices into a male patient’s abdomen—mid-sixties, approximately twelve hours post mortem, yellow-stained fingers, yellow-tinged eyes, and partially rotted teeth. Making the Y incision all the way to his stomach, she trades her scalpel for the chest separator. “Felix is staying at your place, apparently.”
Unimpressed, I peek up from my notes and hit her with a severe scowl. “Nope.”
“Not, like, your apartment. But the house house. The Waterfalls.”
“Mm.” I look down again and continue mapping our vic and his wounds… as in, none visible. “I knew that.”
“Will you stay there, too?”
“Nope. I have a perfectly good apartment down the street from here, and if Felix is in town, chances are Cato will hang at the house, too. A quiet apartment is a rare experience these days.”
“But they’reyourguests.” She digs into Doug’s chest—Douglas Hamerway, according to the friends who ID’d him on scene—and slides her hand into the cavity. “They’re staying at your house… makes them your guests.”
“The house technically belongs tothem. It’s their own house. Their vacation home, if you will.” I mark up the long-ago healed scar on Doug’s thigh, and three inches below it, another. But it’s deeper and longer. “Felix is coming to stay at the home he owns on the opposite side of the country from where he normally lives. And since we’re talking technicalities, they’re here foryourwedding. Makes them your guests.”
“If you move to the house, we can be almost neighbors again.” Glancing up, she flashes a wide smile. “Please? I could drop in at your place before work, and then we can share a ride down the hill. We could make a boring commute significantly more fun.”
“Moving wasyourchoice, Doctor Emeri. Now you must live with the consequences of your actions.”
“But I’m lonely!” She lowers her shoulders, and with them, her lips. “Tim wanted the big dumb house, and he likes living on the big dumb hills. He doesn’t mind driving into town, since he never actually has to come in for a standard commute. But I still have a nine-to-five job, and sometimes that nine-to-five extends to midnight strolls at the Bay and dead bodies at the local Chipotle. I like being there with him, but I’d like it even more if you moved, too.”
“Sounds like ayouproblem. Just because you’re feeling a certain way about your mansion with all those floors and all those bedrooms and way too many stairs, not to consider installing a whole-ass elevator right down the middle, doesn’t meanIshould uproot my life. I currently live mere blocks from my job. Blocks from Archer’s job. I’m next door to the bar that serves excellent coffee, and there’s a restaurant on every block, no matter which direction I look. Ilikeliving where I live, but don’t stress so much.” I smirk. “I heard the apartment above the bar is still empty. If you divorce T3, you get half his shit, anyway.”
“T3?” She extracts Doug’s heart with an easy one-two slice, twistingand placing the organ inside a stainless-steel bowl. “Calling him T3 is crass, even for you.”
“I feel it has a certain ring to it.”
“Oh, shit!”
I swing my focus to the left, to the shouted gasp from a tech in the next suite over, only to catch in real time, Doctor Flynn’s DB falling clear off the table andsplattingto the floor.
