As she pulled over at the curb in front of his building, the guy hefted himself off the front steps and waddled his way over, his bulk making him seem much taller than he really was.
“Have I told you lately how much I love you?” she asked as he got in.
Tony grinned. “If that’s breakfast, then yes, you have.”
“I got you a matched set.” She handed the bag over. “One of the coffees is mine.”
“Better than a pair of earrings.” He unwrapped one white package. “Mmm, edible.”
“I really appreciate your letting me borrow your baby.”
“Come on, where do I have to go? Long as I can get to work and back, I’m good.” As he chewed, he frowned and picked a receipt out of the ashtray. “You were at the Marriott yesterday?”
Mels put the directional signal on, and pulled out into traffic, wishing that her friend wasn’t so damned observant. “Ah, yeah, I was.”
“What time?”
Mels kept her eyes on the road ahead, recognizing the Reporter Voice she was getting hit with. “It was last night. I was just visiting a friend.”
“So did you see all the commotion?”
“Commotion?”
“You don’t know what happened?”
“I was called out to that murder scene in the west end. What are you talking about?”
“Wait, you got put on that prostitute with the hair color?”
“I did. So what went down at the Marriott?”
As Tony took his own damn time finishing the first Mc-whatever-it-was-called, Mels’s stomach churned. Man, if he tried to start the second one, she was going to jump out of her skin—
“There was a shooting in the basement of the hotel. Eric’s assigned to it. There were bullets exchanged in the alley, and someone broke in through one of the rear delivery entrances to the restaurants. Nine-one-one was called and they found a man with no identification and no weapons on him dead from a knife wound.”
“I thought you said there were bullets involved?”
“Oh, he’d been shot at all right. But that wasn’t what killed him.” Tony made a slicing motion across the front of his neck. “Slit wide.”
A shiver went through her.
Because you’re going to die if you don’t get away from me.
Mels told herself to calm down. That was a big hotel in a not-good-after-dark part of town. Murders happened, particularly among drug dealers and their clientele—
Tony rifled around in the bag to get out biscuit number two. “Apparently, the guy would have died from the gunshots, except he had one hell of a bulletproof vest on. Eric said the guys at the CPD were drooling over the thing. They’d never seen one so sweet.” The gentle sound of another white wrapper being turned back was followed by a fresh whiff of unhealthy-and-awesome.
“So what did you find out last night?” he asked around his mouthful.
Mels pulled a rolling stop and hung a left onto Trade, her head tangling up: Matthias had been going to bed when she’d left him—although that didn’t mean he couldn’t have gone out after she’d—
“Hello? Mels?”
“Sorry, what?”
“When you were at the motel. What’d you find out?”
“Ah…right, sorry, not much. The woman was killed after she colored her hair—her throat was slashed.”
“Two in one night. It’s an epidemic.”
Well, there was that, she thought. No one could be in two places at once, right?
Okay, now she was being crazy. “Yeah. Weird.”
Five blocks later, they came up to the CCJ building, and she parked around back, giving the keys to Tony as they walked over to the rear entrance.
“Thanks again,” she said.
“Like I told you, whenever you want. Especially if you buy me breakfast. And will you stop putting dollar bills in my drawer when you take a Twinkie? You know you’re welcome to my stash.”
It was true. Tony had a boatload of food grade petroleum in his desk and she had been known to partake from time to time. But she wasn’t a mooch.
Mels opened the door and held it for him. “I’m not going to rob you.”
“If I give you permission, it’s not robbing. And besides, you don’t take, like, what, more than a Ho-Ho or two a month.”
“Pilfering is pilfering.”
They hit the shallow stairs that led up to the glass doors of the newsroom, and he got the door this time. “I wish everyone felt like that.”
“See? It’s not your job to feed us all.”
The instant they stepped through, the ringing phones and fast voices and scurrying feet was a familiar theme song, sweeping into her body, carrying her to her desk. As she sat down, the dull roar smoothed over the anxiety about Matthias, and she signed into her computer without conscious thought—
The manila envelope landed on her desk with a slap, startling her.
“Got something pretty for you to look at,” Dick said with a sly smile.
She reached for the packet and slid out…
Well, wasn’t she glad she’d given both those sausage biscuits to Tony: They were photographs of the prostitute’s body, eight-and-a-half-by-elevens in color, all up close and personal.
As Dick hovered over her like he was waiting for her to chick out, she refused to give him any satisfaction, even though the center of her chest ached at the images…particularly the one that showed the neck wound in detail, the deep slash cutting through the skin and into the pink-and-red muscle and pale gristle of the throat.
When Mels put the photos down, she made sure that was the one on top, and noticed that Dick, for all his Big Man attitude, refused to look at the image.
“Thanks.” She kept her eyes steady on his. “This is going to help a lot.”
Dick cleared his throat like maybe he’d pushed the ass**le act a little far, even by his own low standards. “Let me see your follow-up ASAP.”
“You got it.”
As he sauntered off, she shook her head. He should know better than to give her father’s daughter a challenge like that.
And P.S., the fact that he would at all was just gross.
Kind of made her think about the way Monty used tragedy for his own purposes.
Frowning, she went through the photographs again, and then focused on the one that was taken on the morgue slab. There was a strange rash on the lower abdomen, a reddening of the skin, as if the victim had been sunburned—
As her cell went off, she answered it without looking at the number. “Carmichael.”