Lovers & Monsters, page 3
“Yes, sir. In fact, hiding from that abusive spouse is why she initially gave us such a hard time about going into protective custody in the first place. She didn’t want to come forward about the shooting she witnessed for fear of her husband finding her. Only now it looks like he’s found her anyway.”
“I hate to be the one to point out the obvious, Taylor, but I think your new girlfriend might be a drama magnet.”
Hayes’ tone was serious, but Isaac could still hear the slight amusement behind it. Or maybe he saw it in the man’s eyes.
“It’s really not like that, sir,” Isaac sighed. “She’s actually a very sweet, drama-free kind of girl. She just happened to get completely lost and stumble onto the wrong street corner when she got mixed up with all that Rivas-Solis shit.”
“Umm hmm,” Hayes mumbled. “And this thing with her ex?”
Isaac shrugged his shoulders. “You know how these things work, Lieu. Like so many others, she ignored all the red flags and warning signs until after she had already married the bastard and he let loose and knocked her on her ass one day.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Hayes nodded and sighed. “So now what? She’s just staying with you indefinitely while Rocky River investigates?”
Isaac’s arms lifted a little, palms forward, before they lightly slapped the sides of his legs.
“For now, yeah. I figured she would be safer with me.”
“You know there’s actually nothing they can do until this dirtbag makes a real move against her.”
Isaac’s lips tightened and he grimaced.
“Yeah, unfortunately I do. But at least it’s all documented now and she’s filed for a restraining order. With your permission, I’d like to start my own investigation into this guy though. Just to be on the safe side.”
Before he’d even stopped speaking, Hayes was already shaking his head.
“Absolutely not. You know I can’t let you do that, Ike. Not on the city’s dime.” Then he pointed a finger at him as though he were warning an unruly teenager. “And there is no legitimate reason for you to go poking your nose into Rocky River’s investigation either.”
“But Lieutenant, I can…”
“No!” Hayes cut him off. “It is a clear conflict of interest, Ike. You’re dating this woman.”
“We had one date! We’re not actually a couple or anything.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
Isaac opened his mouth to respond, but shut it just as quickly and his gaze snapped away.
Lieutenant Hayes nodded. “You care about her, you’re sleeping with her, and she’s staying at your place. Conflict. Of. Interest.”
“Okay, can I just…”
“I will not allow you to use this department as your own personal private detective agency. You took it to Rocky River, now let them do their job!”
They glared at each other for a moment.
“And get me that Rivas-Solis paperwork!”
Isaac wanted to stay and argue, to persuade Hayes to change his mind, but he knew it was pointless. His jaw clamped tight, he tuned and marched from the office and out to his desk.
He sat down with a huff, ignoring the what’s-eating-you expression Vega shot his way, and got started on his paperwork over the Rivas-Solis shooting.
He worked steadily, letting his frustration over the disagreement with Hayes fuel his progress. When his report was finally completed half an hour later he stood up to take it to Hayes’ office, but before he could take the first step Hayes was at his desk waving a case file at him.
“What’s this?”
“You two have a new case,” Hayes said.
Isaac glanced over at Pete Vega and then back at Hayes. He handed the man his report and took the new case file in exchange.
“What is it?”
“Dead body in an alley in Fairfax. Something to keep your mind from fixating on things it shouldn’t.”
Hayes turned to walk away, but stopped short and turned to look at him again.
“You’ve also got a date with Dr. Newman. He’ll be expecting you to stop in later today.”
“Oh, come on, Lieu!”
“You know the rules as well as I do, Detective. You’re not getting out of it.”
Yeah, he knew the rules. He’d just never had to deal with it before. He supposed it made sense, in theory. But in practice, seeing the department shrink sounded like the very last thing Isaac wanted to do.
He cursed under his breath and grabbed his blazer from the back of his chair and slipped it on.
“Let’s do this,” he said, motioning to Vega with a nod of his head.
Vega stood, frowning at him and followed him out of the pit. “What’s going on? You and Hayes have words or something?”
“Or something.”
“Well, are you going to tell me what it was about?”
Isaac glanced at him and kept marching for the stairs. “I would if it concerned you.”
Vega stared at him for a beat and then snickered.
“You know what? You’re an ass, Ike.”
Vega pushed past him and descended the stairs. At the first floor, he marched straight for the main doors and stepped outside and headed for their unmarked cruiser.
Isaac nodded and followed after him. He climbed into the driver’s seat without another word.
Ten minutes later they climbed out of the car and stepped into the alley in question. Dr. Hiroshi Sato, the chief medical examiner, was already on the scene along with half a dozen uniformed officers who had the whole alley quartered off with bright yellow police tape. They were now working to control the small group of gawkers with eager cellphone cameras from getting too close.
“What can you tell me, Hiroshi?”
“I can tell you that our friend here was not killed in this alley.”
Isaac’s eyebrows lifted at that news and then he slowly looked around the scene with a careful eye. The victim was an African American female, probably in her early thirties, wearing a filthy and torn waitress uniform.
Isaac knelt down to get a better look.
He could clearly see defensive wounds and broken fingernails on both of her hands. His eyes narrowed and he leaned in closer. As he did, a breeze caught the sash of the dead girl’s uniform and the end of it wrapped around his hand like a ribbon.
Instantly engulfed in pain, Isaac made a sharp inhale sound, bracing himself against the onslaught. The images came in rapid fire succession.
The victim smiling at a customer in a diner.
The same woman screaming in horror and clutching the end of a table she was bent over.
Then a man’s face, full of anger and rage as he choked the life out of her.
Isaac gasped for air, frantically untwining the sash from around his hand. When he was free of it he stood and stumbled backward a step or two.
What the fuck just happened?
He hadn’t touched the girl’s skin at all, only a piece of her clothing.
That was new.
And unsettling as hell.
“You okay, Ike?”
Vega placed a hand on his shoulder and Isaac jerked away from him like he had leprosy. The last thing he needed right now was another flash.
His lightning-fast reaction caused Vega to jump back as well, and they glared at one another.
“I’m fine,” he mumbled, still trying to get himself together. He knew Vega was staring at him like he had three heads, but he didn’t care. Hell, he was used to it by now.
He swallowed and took a deep breath. Then he looked at Hiroshi.
“She was raped. And strangled.”
He sounded bone tired, as if he might drop from exhaustion any minute.
“How do you know that?”
Vega’s voice held more than a little skepticism, and Isaac could see the disbelief in his new partner’s eyes.
“We won’t know definitively until I get her on my table,” Hiroshi spoke up, inching his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose with one bent finger. “But the marks on her neck would seem to confirm Ike’s psychic assessment.”
Hiroshi was matter-of-fact in his speech, but Isaac rolled his eyes and pulled a pair of his thick nitrile gloves from his pocket. He could see Vega studying both him and the medical examiner from the corner of his eye, but he didn’t have time to be embarrassed or self-conscious right now.
“You know I hate that word, Hiroshi.”
“And yet that doesn’t make it any less fitting.”
Isaac chose to ignore that last comment and just do his job. He slipped on a second pair of the gloves, doubling up as he normally did, and looked the scene over carefully one more time. Then he glanced up and down the street to get a fix on their exact location.
“The uniform she’s wearing.” He gestured to their victim’s attire and looked at Vega. “She must work at that all-night diner just a few doors down. I suggest we start there.”
Vega nodded. “According to the badge on her uniform, her name is Deondra.”
Isaac took out his cellphone and leaned down one more time to snap a picture of the victim’s face.
“Let’s go.”
They took off on foot, stepping out of the alley, crossing the police tape, and walking a few yards down the street to the little all-night diner.
As soon as they entered, Isaac could feel the harried vibe of the place. Things here were tense. Almost overwhelmingly so. The place was packed with people, and a couple of guys in overalls headed for the door in a huff. The fry cook at the grill shouted out that orders were piling up and one waitress in the corner hustled between four tables as another slightly disheveled waitress blew past them with two plates in her hand.
Isaac lifted the detective shield from his belt and raised it as he approached her.
“Detective Taylor. This is my partner, Detective Vega. You look severely short handed this afternoon.”
“Yeah, no joke. So just feel free to seat yourselves, Detectives. I’ll be with you as soon as I can!”
She turned to walk off, but Isaac laid the shield on her arm, using it to stop her instead of his hand, even though he still wore the gloves. She turned to look at him with a slightly annoyed expression.
“We’re not here for lunch, Noreen…?” Isaac said, glancing at her name tag.
“Bishop. Noreen Bishop.”
“Do you know this woman, Ms. Bishop?”
He held up the cellphone picture of their victim in the alley.
The waitress’ gaze zoomed in on the photo, and Isaac could see the recognition dawn in her eyes.
“Yeah, that’s Deondra! She didn’t show up for her shift this afternoon. Actually, she’s missed a few shifts in the last three days. Chuck hasn’t heard a word from her, and she won’t answer any of our calls. Just left us in the lurch.”
“Hey, I only get an hour for lunch, you know? That’s my sandwich. C’mon!”
An impatient customer yelled at the waitress, tapping on his watch as he glared at her.
“I’ll be right there!”
She turned back to Isaac.
“I really have to get these plates to that table, sir.”
“Yeah, okay. But where can I find this Chuck?”
“He’s the big guy behind the grill.” She motioned that way with a nod of her head and hurried over to the waiting table.
Isaac and Vega headed through the diner and back toward the kitchen. When they stepped into the area a heavyset white guy wearing a dirty apron and a hairnet pointed a spatula their way and glared at them.
“Hey, you go take a seat out front like everybody else, buddy! I know Noreen’s working her ass off, but we got reinforcements coming, all right?”
Isaac held up his shield once more. “Detectives Taylor and Vega. We understand you’ve been missing a waitress for a few days. Is this her?”
The man frowned at them and stepped closer to look at the image on the phone.
“Yeah, that’s Deondra Markland. Is she in some kind of trouble or something?”
“Kind of,” Isaac answered, studying the man’s face. “She’s dead.”
“What?”
He looked genuinely stunned by the news.
“How long did you know Ms. Markland?”
“S-she’s worked here for nearly two years now. Never had the first problem out of her, she’s an exemplary employee. Hard working. She’s putting herself through school. That’s why this disappearing act was so strange. I mean, she sometimes complains about the long hours and not having enough time to study, but she is one of my most reliable waitstaff. I wish I had ten of her.”
“When was her last shift here at the diner?”
“Four nights ago.”
“That may be the last time anybody saw her alive. Did anything unusual happen then?”
“Not that I recall. It was a routine night. All the drawers added up correctly, so that’s always good.” The man was quiet for a moment. “There was this guy that I heard the girls talking about though.”
“A guy?”
“Yeah. I think he was hitting on Deondra or something. Noreen would know more. She was here that night too.”
Another conversation with waitress Noreen Bishop after the lunch crowd had cleared out yielded a little more information. She claimed that the last night she and Deondra worked together, there was indeed a man hitting on her coworker. Seated at one of the tables, Isaac questioned her further.
“Do you know this man? Is he a regular here?”
“I had never seen him before,” Noreen said. “I haven’t seen him since either.”
“And did Ms. Markland seem bothered by him at all?” Isaac asked.
“Just the opposite actually. She seemed flattered. Even interested. I could see why at first. I mean, he was charming. Cute. He made us laugh.”
“What changed?”
“Changed?”
Isaac’s gaze narrowed. “Well, you said you could see why she was interested at first. So what changed?”
“Oh.” The girl’s shoulders slumped a bit and an expression Isaac couldn’t quite name marred her face. “I don’t know. He suddenly gave me the creeps, I suppose.”
Now they were getting somewhere.
He leaned in.
“Why did he give you the creeps, Ms. Bishop?”
For a long moment the girl looked at her hands as they rested in her lap. Then she finally looked up at Isaac again.
“Something he said made me uneasy.”
“And what was that?”
The girl hesitated, as though she didn’t want to repeat the words.
“I promise you, there is nothing you can say that my partner and I haven’t already heard,” Isaac said. “That’s sort of the nature of our jobs. We see it all and we hear it all. Nothing fazes us.”
It was a sad truth of police work.
Noreen bit down on her lip and twisted her fingers together. Then she took a deep breath. “They began flirting the moment he sat down in her section. He came on strong. Their conversation got… explicit. I overheard him tell her that he’d like to… fuck her up. Those were his words,” she said, her cheeks growing red.
Isaac nodded.
“Deondra thought it was hot, I could tell. But the look in his eyes when he said it. There was something else going on there. He wasn’t turned on by her, he was, I don’t know. Excited. But like, in the wrong sort of way. I can’t explain it.”
Isaac stared at her, feeling a strange sense of something. Kinship maybe? This waitress. She felt there was something wrong with the mystery man. Felt it. Something she just couldn’t put her finger on, yet she somehow knew.
This waitress was like him.
To what extent, he had no clue, and it didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. It wasn’t like he was going to ask her to join some secret club or something. It was just that knowing she had some measure of whatever his monsters were made him uncomfortable.
He swallowed and got to his feet. “Thank you for your time, Ms. Bishop.”
“Sure. I hope you find whoever did this to her. Deondra was good people, you know?”
“One more thing. Can you describe this mystery man for me?”
“Yeah. He was tall, but not quite your height. Well built. Black guy. He had a near shaved head and dark brown eyes. Clean shaven. He was good-looking in a rugged kind of way.”
Isaac flinched as the memory of his flash came back to him. What he had seen in the alley when the victim’s uniform sash touched his hand. The guy smiling at Deondra Markland in the diner. Yeah, he could be the guy in Noreen’s description, easy.
“Thank you.”
They had the diner’s owner go through all the receipts from Deondra Markland’s last shift at the diner in an effort to find the bill for the mystery man. But once they did, it led them nowhere because he had paid with cash. Also the diner had no surveillance equipment for the establishment so that was a dead end too.
“We’ll contact next of kin and go from there. But my gut is telling me this dirty-talking mystery man from the diner is our guy.”
Vega shot him a look as they both got back into the unmarked cruiser. “Is that a regular old police hunch or something else, Ike?”
Isaac knew what Vega was getting at, but he ignored the question and started up the car.
In the passenger seat of the unmarked cruiser Detective Gerri Miller silently kicked herself.
She was so stupid.
There was no other word for it. How stupid could she be to expose herself the way she had back there with Lieutenant Hayes?
How had she let it come to this?
She was like a school girl with a raging crush on her teacher. And now she’d all but flat out told the man that she had a crush on him. She’d let the cat out of the bag, waved a big red warning flag over her head. Ripped her chest open and exposed her giant oozing heart to the object of her affection. And he ignored her.
Yep. Stupid fit.
How would she look him in the eyes now? How would she continue to do her job knowing that he knew how she felt? God, he’d probably start to avoid her now. Things would get awkward and weird, he’d look into having her transferred from his division. Maybe she should just save him the trouble and request a transfer herself. Maybe she should…
