However, one glance at his phone’s screen told Jackson that the persistent caller had nothing to do with his father’s health.
He ignored the vibrating phone and looked at Brianna. “We done here for now?”
Rather than answer him, Brianna turned toward Kristin. “You should have seen what he was like before I sent him to charm school. Yes,” she said, turning back to Jackson, “we’re done here. Call me if you have anything new to add,” she stressed again, glancing at Kristin. “Night or day, doesn’t matter when. Call me.”
“You got it,” Kristin answered. “Nice meeting you, Jackson,” she called after the departing detective, raising her voice.
Jackson paused before the morgue’s threshold for a second. “Yeah, you too,” he replied in a surprisingly sociable tone.
“Nice effort,” Brianna commented quietly just after they left the morgue.
“If I were in her place,” Jackson responded as they made their way to the elevator, “knee-deep in decomposing body parts, I would have been snapping everybody’s head off who came within ten feet of me. She was being nice. Least I could do was be civil. After all,” he said, getting into the elevator and pressing the button for the first floor, “I can’t let those charm-school lessons go to waste.”
It was hard to miss the sarcasm. “You think I went too far,” Brianna guessed.
“You?” The elevator door opened and Jackson held it in place as she exited first. He followed her. “Never.”
Brianna nodded. “Point taken.” Leaving the square building, they returned to the parking lot. “If I hurt your feelings, I’m sorry.”
He didn’t bother to look at her. “I have no feelings,” Jackson informed her with a dismissive shrug of his shoulders.
They’d parked his vehicle close to the building’s entrance and crossed the lot to it now.
“There was a time I would have agreed with you, but I’m not totally sure about that anymore,” Brianna admitted.
Getting into his vehicle, she buckled up, then looked at her watch as Jackson started the car. “It’s getting kind of late, and I don’t know about you, but I’m getting really hungry. We haven’t stopped to eat all day. What do you say we grab something at Malone’s and call it a day? A few more hours isn’t going to make a difference. We can get a fresh start tomorrow, tracking down those old hotel guests to see if any of them can shed some light on what was going on in that hotel all those years.”
They were on the main thoroughfare now. “Are you asking me or telling me?”
“Take your pick. Whatever’ll get us to Malone’s faster has my vote. And if it helps to clear things up for you,” she added, “I am lead on this, but we are partners and I’ve never been the type who throws her weight around.”
“So you wouldn’t mind if I said no?” Jackson asked, his expression totally unreadable.
Brianna smiled. “I didn’t say that.”
He nodded. That was what he thought. “Then I guess I’d better not say no.”
Her smile widened. “Good choice, Muldare. Drop me off at the precinct. I need to stop off in the squad room and check with Del Campo to see if there’s anything new and pressing that came up. If we’re in the clear for the night, I’ll meet you at Malone’s.”
“About that,” he said, his voice trailing off as he took a right turn toward the police station.
She knew what he was going to say. “You don’t want to go to Malone’s. Okay, I’m not unreasonable. I’m open for someplace else.”
“That’s not the point,” Jackson told her. Obviously, he didn’t want to go anywhere for drinks or for food. He just wanted to be left alone.
But Brianna had no intentions of letting her temporary partner wiggle out of at least having drinks with her. She had already made up her mind that the man needed socializing, and Malone’s was the place where police officers and detectives alike threw back a drink and threw off the heavy shackles of depression that the job sometimes snapped on them.
“Look, Muldare, I know for a fact that you do eat on occasion and I’m fairly sure that your cupboard probably rivals Old Mother Hubbard’s—” Brianna began, about to launch into what she hoped was a persuasive argument.
Jackson pulled his vehicle into the rear parking lot, coming to a stop near her car. He glared at her, confused. “Who?”
“It’s a nursery rhyme,” she prompted. “You know, ‘Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get her poor dog a bone—’” She stopped when she saw that her reference and the recitation was going right over his head. “Guess you’re not the only one who can come up with obscure references. My point was that you probably don’t have anything edible in your refrigerator or pantry, which is why I’m saying we should grab something to eat once we leave here.”
“Have you always had this smothering-mothering attitude, or is that something I just seem to bring out in you?” he asked, doing his best not to tell her what she could do with those mothering instincts surfacing.
“Let me put it to you this way,” she told him patiently. “Right now you’re my partner, which means you’re supposed to have my six. You can’t do that if you wind up passing out from malnutrition.”
Jackson sighed as he waited for the bossiest woman he knew to get out of his car. “I guess you’ll meet me at Malone’s, then,” he said.
Brianna slid out, then paused for a second to look into the car. She smiled at Jackson. “See how easy that was?”
“Not hardly” was his response. The moment she closed the door, Jackson took off.
She stood for a moment, watching as Jackson retraced his path. He drove out of the parking lot and then onto the street that went parallel to the police station. Within a minute, she had lost track of him.
The odds
