Private: #1 Suspect

CHAPTER 20

I swallowed some aspirin, then stole a few minutes at my desk, attacking the backlogged avalanche of e-mails and phone calls. When I looked up, Sci was sitting in front of me. I hadn’t heard him come in. Had he materialized out of the air? If anyone could do that, it was Dr. Sci.

“What the hell?”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

Sci was wearing a red shirt, tails out over his jeans, bowling shoes up on the edge of my desk. He had the face of a cherub and the brain of Einstein-if Einstein had lived in the digital age. Since he hadn’t, Dr. Sci was arguably smarter.

“Thinking about what?”

“I’ve got news, Jack. I can’t find anything good in it.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“I spoke to someone.”

Along with Sci’s advanced degrees, he’d worked in the LA crime lab for a couple of years, doing rotations in ballistics, fibers, DNA. He had deep contacts at LA’s hundred-million-dollar lab, and his tech friends were close to the cops. One of those friends was hoping that Sci would bring him over to Private.

We had agreed long ago that Sci would give me off-the-record intel and I wouldn’t ask any awkward questions.

“There was a witness,” said Sci.

“Someone saw Colleen?”

“Someone saw you, Jack. On the beach. A neighbor, Bobbie Newton. You know her?”

“Slightly. She lives a couple houses down the beach.”

“She said she was jogging last night and she saw you on the beach, talking on your phone. She waved at you and you waved back.”

“When was this?

“Approximately six something. She doesn’t know for sure. She wasn’t wearing a watch.”

“She saw me? ”

“So she says.”

“For Christ’s sake, Sci. I wasn’t on the beach.”

I didn’t want to have the thoughts that were turning in my mind, but the tumblers were clicking into place. A riddle. Who was me yet not me?

My womb-mate. My enemy.

“Tommy,” I said. “What else?”

“The fingerprints in your room were all yours.”

“We’re identical,” I said.

“Yes, but your fingerprints aren’t identical. They’re shaped by the currents in utero. Tommy’s prints will be a little different than yours.

“Jack, you really think Tommy killed Colleen?”

“He knows her. He knows me. He could get close to her and he could force her to give up her key, press her finger to the biometric lock. He has motive. He fucking hates me.”