The Quickie - James Patterson [13]
My brain made itself semi-useful by locking onto one word as I sat there. It banged against my skull, ricocheting off the inside like a trapped bird looking for an escape.
Why?
Why? Why? Why?
Scott had been alive. I’d heard him moan when Paul put him in the car. I was a Homicide detective, a trained expert in these kinds of things. Scott had been alive.
Had been, I thought, alternating glances between the tarp and the ground between my feet. After a while, I noticed that it wasn’t actually a tarp. It was a Neat Sheet.
I shook my head in disbelief. I remembered clearly the trip to Stop & Shop when I bought the picnic blanket for Paul to keep in the trunk of his car.
Paul, you idiot, I thought as tears sprang hot from my eyes.
You stupid, goddamn idiot.
“I know, Lauren,” Mike said as he sat down beside me.
“That might as well be you in there,” he said. “Might as well be me. Imagine, everything he ever worked for. Everything he ever enjoyed. Ever planned.”
Mike shook his head grimly.
“Dumped into a Bronx fountain like so much garbage.”
For a moment I felt the immense weight of my guilt. The idea of owning up hovered over me like a waiting avalanche. All I needed to do was turn to my partner and spill my guts. Tell him everything. Commence the end of my life as I knew it.
But I just couldn’t make the words come out. Not now, anyway. Was it some instinctual desire to protect Paul? To protect myself? I don’t know, I sincerely don’t.
But I didn’t say anything to my partner and the moment passed.
I kept my thoughts to myself and shook as I cried.
Chapter 20
I WAS STILL WIPING MY EYES when a pair of clunky black shoes appeared in front of my rubber boots.
I tilted my head up and saw my boss, Lieutenant Pete Keane. Irish, fair-skinned, baby-faced, and near-skeletal. The overseer of the Bronx Homicide Task Force could have passed for an aging altar boy if not for the flat nail heads of his hard gray eyes.
“Lauren,” he said. “Came in when you heard the bad news, huh? I’m really glad you did. Saves me a call. I want you to be the primary investigator on this. You and Mike’ll be the perfect team. You’re my go-to guys, right?”
I stared at Pete Keane. Things were happening at warp speed. I was hardly reconciled to the fact that Scott was dead, and now my boss wanted me to be in charge of the case?
I wondered suddenly if Keane had learned about our affair. Jesus. Maybe he suspected I knew something about Scott’s death and was testing me. Was that it?
No, I thought. That was impossible. Nobody knew at work. Scott and I had gone to painstaking lengths to make sure of that. Besides, nothing except flirting and a few meals had even happened between us. Until tonight, of course.
Actually, it felt like just about every conceivable thing had happened between me and Scott tonight.
It was only that Pete Keane liked me for big cases, I realized after a paranoia-dissipating breath. There were detectives on our squad who were senior to me, but I, his “lady lawyer cop,” as he liked to call me, was a perfectionist. I put my law school training to work in the Homicide squad. I went methodically by the book, was completely thorough, completely organized, and I had a very high success rate. Bronx assistant DAs practically fought to take my cases because they could just about read my reports aloud for their prosecutions.
In a big-daddy political-shitstorm case like this, it would be all about reports, I realized. The ones that would have to be sent up the chain of command on practically an hourly basis.
I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there. I needed time to think, to sift through the pieces of my blown-apart life.
I felt the knot in my stomach twist like a corkscrew. In the end, it all came down to my inability to come up with a plausible excuse for not taking the assignment. For the moment, words failed me.
“Whatever you want, Pete,” I found myself saying.
My boss nodded.
“Scott Thayer,” he said, shaking his head wearily.