“You told me to delete the wind.”
“She’s going to lose herself for one night of pleasure and passion.”
“And then what? They’re only going to get hurt.”
“So they get a little sand in their nether regions. What’s sex without a little chafe?”
She held out my laptop. I took it with a begrudged sigh. She didn’t understand. It had been different with the attorney. The stakes had been low. There’d been no risk in being intimate with him because he didn’t have the power to arrest her.
The cop was different. What happened to the assassin in the morning? Was she just supposed to wipe the sand from her ass and turn herself in? There was no resolution to their story that didn’t end in a shitstorm of pain and aloe vera. “I’ll figure something out.” I kicked off my shoes and collapsed onto my mattress. “How was your ride-along with Roddy?”
“Bo-ring.” She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. “He wouldn’t let me drive. He kept blathering on about rules and policies. Blah blah blah. He wouldn’t even let me put the lights and sirens on. We spent two whole hours clocking radar and he didn’t give anyone a ticket. He let every one of them off with a warning and I fell asleep twice. Roddy felt bad that it was a slow day, so we bought a box of Twinkies to split between us and hung out in the parking lot with a few of the other patrol officers.”
“Talk to anyone interesting?”
“No one of note.”
“What about Roddy? You think he could be EasyClean?”
“Hell. No. The guy’s way too boring to be EasyClean. I’m serious, Finn,” she said at my cynical look. “Case in point, I asked him why he isn’t a detective after twenty years in the department. Want to know what he said? That he never really cared about getting promoted, he just likes the job. His wife’s a cosmetic surgeon in McLean. He drove me past his McMansion in Clifton. He doesn’t need money; his wife’s loaded. There’s no way he’s EasyClean.”
“Did you ask him anything about the night of the shooting? Were you able to corroborate Joey’s story?”
“Yes and no.” She rolled onto her side to face me and propped herself on her elbow. “Roddy definitely remembered calling Joey and asking him to cover our house that night so he could grab dinner and do a little last-minute Christmas shopping for his wife. He said he left as soon as Joey’s car arrived. They flashed their headlights at each other, but they never got out of their cars. And according to Roddy, Joey was gone by the time he got back.”
“Meaning he has no idea how long Joey was actually there. Or if the person who covered for him was even Joey.”
“Precisely.”
“Which means Joey is still high on the list. And you’re sure there’s no way Roddy could possibly be our guy?”
She blinked at me. “He put his roof lights on and stopped four lanes of traffic to help a turtle cross the road, Finn. I think we can safely scratch him off our list of suspects. How about you? What did you get out of Detective Coffey?”
“He’s not a detective. Not anymore.” I relayed both of my conversations with Charlie and Wade, including everything I’d learned about him—why he carried a different gun than most of the other cops here and why he behaved differently. I told her about his competitive streak and his rivalry with Nick. And yet, while every clue seemed to point to Wade as a likely suspect, it wasn’t Wade who had left me feeling ill at ease.
“What do you think of Charlie?” I asked, turning to Vero.
She looked me up and down. “Don’t get me wrong. He’s a little old for you, but you do you.”
I tossed my pillow at her head. “I mean, do you think Charlie could be EasyClean?”
Vero hugged my pillow to her chest. “He seems too nice,” she said doubtfully.
“Maybe, but consider the facts. He and Nick still see each other every week. Nick practically said he tells Charlie everything. Charlie was a cop who was forced out of his job before he was ready, which probably left him hurting financially. The pieces all fit.” But more than that, something Wade had said kept replaying in my mind.
We’re all liars. Some of us are just better at hiding it.
Charlie was charming, but he was also a rule bender. Not a breaker, per se, but he seemed to have no problems pushing boundaries. Like when he’d sneakily revealed the location of the booze in the faculty lounge while admonishing me for being there. Or when he’d suggested I get to bed early tonight, for what reason I didn’t know but Nick clearly hadn’t felt was appropriate to share with me. How he’d encouraged Nick to take me to dinner even though Joey had been adamant that it was a flagrant violation of a rule that didn’t exist but probably should.
I thought back to two nights ago in the gym, to the argument I’d overheard between Charlie and Joey.
Nick Anthony is no fool, Charlie had said as he’d shoved Joey. If he hasn’t seen through you yet, he will.
The hair on my arms stood on end as I remembered Joey’s response. The way he saw through you? He’d implied that Nick hadn’t seen something he should have—that Charlie was hiding something.
It’s always the nice ones that have something to hide, Joey had warned me during his class.
But if Charlie and Joey were both liars, which one of them was the bad guy?
CHAPTER 19
I shot upright in bed, jolted awake by a series of loud thumps. Blinking away the fog of sleep, I scrambled to catch my open laptop before it could slide off my thighs to the floor. The screen awoke, illuminating my manuscript. The cursor blinked behind the last words I must have typed before I’d drifted off. Vero dragged her blanket over her head, burrowing deeper under her pillow as someone pounded on our door.
“Wake up, trainees!” The booming voice sounded disturbingly like Joey’s. “You’ve just been called to a crime scene. This homicide isn’t going to solve itself. You’ve got ten minutes to get to the drill field. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” More banging, more shouting, the noise becoming muffled as he made his way down the hall.
I closed my laptop and swung my legs over the side of the bed, shaking Vero by the shoulder. “Get up and put on some clothes. We have to be at a crime scene in ten minutes.” When she didn’t respond, I grabbed the corner of her blanket and flipped it away from her.
Vero curled into a ball, clutching her pillow. “If you make me get out of this bed, this room is going to become a crime scene.”
“Fine. You can do the push-ups.” I shucked my pajama pants and dragged on a pair of jeans.
She rolled over to glare at me when I switched on the light. “What time is it?”
“A little after one.”
“Someone had better be dead.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the point,” I said, pulling on my coat. “Here, put these on.” I grabbed a sweater and a pair of warm pants from Vero’s suitcase and tossed them on her bed. Grudgingly, she got up and dressed, following me into the hall where we melted into the pack of bleary-eyed faces filing out of the dorm. By my rough head count, only half the teams had bothered getting out of bed.