Cerulean Sins - Laurell K. Hamilton [206]
“We played fair with you,” Zerbrowski said, “play fair with us, and we all win.” His voice was almost normal. He’d lost that frightening bass.
She pointed a finger at me, rather dramatically, I thought. “But it’ll be her name in the paper.”
I shook my head. “Jesus, O’Brien, is that all this is about? You want your name in the headlines?”
“I know that cracking a serial murder could make me a sergeant.”
“If you want your name on this case, fine,” I said, “but let’s worry more about solving the case than who’s going to get credit for it.”
“Easy enough for you to say, Blake. Like you said, you don’t have a career in law enforcement. Getting credit for this won’t help you, but you’ll still get the credit.”
Zerbrowski pushed away from the wall where he’d been leaning. He touched the files on the edge of the table. He opened one just enough to pull out a photo. He half-slid, half-threw the picture across the table at O’Brien.
It was a splash of shape and color. Most of the color was red. I didn’t look too hard at it. I’d seen the real deal, I didn’t need a reminder.
O’Brien glanced down at the picture, then looked again. She frowned, and almost reached out for the photo, then stared harder. She concentrated on the image. I watched her try to make sense of what she was seeing, watched her mind rebel at making sense of it. I saw the moment she saw it, on her face, in the sudden paleness of her skin. She sat down slowly in the chair on her side of the table.
She seemed to have trouble looking away from the picture. “Are they all like this?” she asked in a voice gone thin.
“Yes,” Zerbrowski said. His voice was soft, too, as if he had made his point and wouldn’t rub it in.
She looked up at me, and it looked like a physical effort to pull her gaze away from that photo. “You’ll be the darling of the media again,” but her voice was soft, like it didn’t matter.
“Probably,” I said, “but it’s not because I want to be.”
“You’re just so damned photogenic,” her voice had held a hint of her earlier scorn, then she frowned and glanced down at the photo again. She seemed to hear what she’d just said, and with that awful, hideous photo sitting in front of her, it seemed the wrong thing to say.
“I didn’t mean . . .” She rallied, and put back on her angry face, but it seemed more like a mask to hide behind now.
“Don’t worry, O’Brien,” Zerbrowski said, and he had his teasing voice back. I knew enough to dread what would come out of his mouth next, but she didn’t. “We know what you meant. Anita is just so damned cute.”
She gave a weak smile. “Something like that, yes,” she said. The smile vanished as if it had never existed. She was all business again. O’Brien never seemed to get very far from business. “Seeing that this doesn’t happen to another woman is more important than who gets credit.”
“Glad to hear we all agree,” Zerbrowski said.
O’Brien stood up. She pushed the picture back towards Zerbrowski, doing her best not to look at it this time. “You can question Heinrick, and the other one, though he doesn’t say much.”
“Let’s have a plan before we go in there,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“We know that Van Anders is our guy, but we don’t know for sure that he’s our only guy.”
“You think one of the men we have here helped Van Anders do this?” O’Brien motioned towards the piture that Zerbrowski was tucking away.
“I don’t know.” I glanced at Zerbrowski and wondered if he was thinking the same thing I was. The first message had read “we nailed this one, too.” We. I wanted to make sure that Heinrick wasn’t part of that ‘we’. If he was, then he wasn’t going anywhere, not if I could help it. I really didn’t care who got credit for solving the case. I just wanted it solved. I just wanted to never, ever have to see anything else as bad as that bathroom, that bathtub, and its . . . contents. I use to think I helped the police out of a sense of justice, a desire to protect the innocent, maybe even