Kill the Messenger

4

Don’t step on his brain,” Kev Parker warned. Kev Parker, forty-three, Detective 2, kicked down to one of the lesser divisions to finish out his career in disgrace and oblivion.

Renee Ruiz, his latest trainee, looked down at her stylish beige suede and leopard-print shoe. The spike heel was already stuck in a squishy gob of gray matter that had splattered some distance away from the body.

“Jesus Christ, Parker!” she squealed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I just did.”

“I could have ruined my fucking shoe!”

“Yeah? Well, your fucking shoe is the least of your problems. And since you were standing behind a door when they handed out common sense, I’ll tell you again: Don’t wear stiletto heels on the job. You’re supposed to be a detective, not a hooker.”

Ruiz narrowed her eyes at him and spat a few choice words in Spanish.

Parker was unfazed. “You learn that from your mother?” he asked, his attention going to the body on the floor of the office.

Detective trainee Ruiz stepped wide of the mess to try to get in Parker’s face. “You gotta treat me with respect, Parker.”

“I will,” he said, not even glancing at her. The dead body had his undivided attention. Massive trauma to the head. Whoever killed this guy enjoyed his work. “When you deserve it,” he added.

Again with the Spanish.

Parker had been breaking in new detectives for going on four years, and this one was at the top of his shit list. He didn’t have a problem with women. He didn’t have a problem with Hispanics. He had a problem with attitude, and Renee Ruiz had attitude coming out of her pretty Jennifer Lopez–esque ass. Or she would have, if her skirt hadn’t been so damn tight. Parker had been working with her for less than a week and already he wanted to strangle her and throw her body into the La Brea tar pits.

“Are you paying attention here?” he said impatiently. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re at a homicide. There’s a dead guy on the floor and his head is bashed apart like a rotten cauliflower. What are you supposed to be doing instead of giving me shit about your shoes?”

Ruiz pouted. She was a knockout. A body that would turn any unsuspecting straight man with a pulse into a drooling idiot. Her lips were full and sexy. She outlined them in a color three shades darker than the shiny wet gloss she used to fill them in. The “Mall Mexican” look was the way Detective Kray described it.

Kray, another of their Homicide team, had problems with women and Hispanics, and blacks, and Jews, and every other definable ethnic group that wasn’t a stupid, racist, redneck cracker from Bumfuck, Louisiana—which was how Parker described Kray.

“Where’s your notebook?” he demanded. “You have to write everything down. And I mean every thing. You should have started writing the second you got this call. What time the call came, who told you what, what time you wedged your ass into that skirt and put on those ridiculous shoes. What time you arrived at the crime scene, who you spoke to first, what you saw when you came in the front door, what you saw when you came into this room. Position of the body, location of the murder weapon, which way his brain splattered and how far the pieces flew, whether or not his fly is open. Every damn thing in sight.

“You leave something out and I can guarantee you some dirtbag defense attorney will get you on the stand and ask you about that one seemingly insignificant item, and he’ll unravel the DA’s case like a cheap sweater. The worst two words in the English language, babe: reasonable doubt.”

Parker refused to call her “Detective” Ruiz one second before she had her shield in hand. She was not his peer, and he would remind her in subtle and not-so-subtle ways every day of her training period. He didn’t have control over a hell of a lot in his job, but for the time he was partnered with Ruiz, he had at least the illusion of control over her.

“And measure the distances,” he said. “If you find a booger on the carpet, I want to know exactly where it is in relation to the body. Put the exact measurements in your personal notes, approximate measurements in the notes you’ll take to court. If you put your exact measurements in your official notes and your measurements don’t match the criminalists’ to the millimeter, you’ll have a defense attorney all over you like a bad rash.”

Ruiz came back with the attitude. “You’re lead. It’s your case. Why don’t you do the scut work, Parker?”

“I will,” Parker said. “I sure as hell am not trusting you to do it right. But you’ll do it too, so when the next vic comes along and you get the lead, you at least look like you know what you’re doing.”

He looked around the room cluttered with crap and crime-scene geeks. One of the uniforms who had answered the initial call stood by the front door, logging in every person who entered the scene. The other one—older, heavy-set, and balding—was on the other side of the room, pointing out to one of the geeks something he thought might be significant evidence. Jimmy Chewalski. Jimmy was good people. He talked too much, but he was a good cop. Everyone called him Jimmy Chew.

Ruiz looked right through the crime-scene techs and the uniforms. Having passed the written detective exam, she now considered herself above them. Never mind that she had been in a uniform herself not that long ago, she was now a princess among the lowly hired help. To Ruiz, Jimmy Chew (Choo) was a pair of fuck-me shoes.

Parker made his way over to the officer, leaving Ruiz to figure out how to bend down and look at evidence without flashing her ass to everyone at the scene.

“Jimmy, where’s the coroner’s investigator?” Parker asked, stepping gingerly around the body, careful to miss a sheaf of papers that were strewn on the floor. The coroner’s investigator had the first dance. No one could so much as check the dead body’s pockets until the CI had finished his or her business.

“Could be a while,” Chewalski said. “She’s helping out at a murder-suicide.”

“Nicholson?”

“Yeah. Some guy blew away his wife and two kids ’cause the wife brought home a bucket of regular KFC instead of extra-crispy. Then he goes in his bathroom and blows his head off. I heard the scene was so bad, the detectives had to take umbrellas in the bathroom with them. Most of the guy’s face ended up on the ceiling. And, as we all know, what goes up must come down. I heard an eyeball dropped and hit Kray in the head.”

Parker chuckled. “Too bad he couldn’t have scooped up some of the gray matter. Then at least he’d have half a brain.”

Chew grinned. “That guy’s head is so far up his ass, it’s popped back out of his shoulders again. He’s a fucking French knot.”

Parker turned his attention to the dead body again. “So what’s the story here?”

Chew rolled his eyes. “Well, Kev, we have here dead on the floor an unlamented scum-sucking member of the bar.”

“Now, Jimmy, just because a man was a soulless, amoral asshole doesn’t mean he deserved to be murdered.”

“Excuse me? Who’s in charge here?”

Parker swiveled his head around to see a pretty twenty-something brunette in a smart Burberry trench coat standing three feet away, near the hall to the back door.

“That would be me. Detective Parker. And you are?”

Unsmiling, she looked directly at him with steady dark eyes, then at Officer Chewalski. “Abby Lowell. The scum-sucking member of the bar, the soulless, amoral asshole lying dead on the floor, is my father. Leonard Lowell.”