“Hello, how are you, the pizza was good,” Jackson parroted. “How the hell do you know where I live?”
“I’m a detective,” she told him cheerfully. “I detect.”
“Why did you detect where I live?”
There was no reason for her to have sought him out and left a freshly prepared pizza on his doorstep. They were working on a case together—most likely for only a short term. They meant nothing to each other.
“Well,” she answered, sounding serious, “after I picked up the pizza, I couldn’t very well go driving up and down the streets of Aurora, shouting, ‘Pizza delivery for Jackson Muldare. Come out, come out wherever you are, Muldare.’”
Jackson bit back a number of choice words. The woman won the prize—she was officially the most frustrating person he had ever tried to carry on a conversation with.
“That’s not the point,” Jackson insisted, struggling not to shout.
As far as Brianna was concerned, she had done a nice thing and he was biting off her head. She was in no mood for his temper tantrum.
“No,” she said, measuring out each word, “the point is I dropped off dinner for you and you come in this morning acting like a wounded bear.”
“I didn’t ask you to drop off dinner,” Jackson retorted.
She took a breath, counting to ten. She wasn’t going to lose her temper. “I didn’t say you asked me to do it. I did it because I figured you were hungry and sometimes it’s nice coming home to a warm meal.”
“I don’t need coddling—”
Okay, that did it. Being nice to this man definitely wasn’t working. “No, you need to be hit upside the head and taught manners and I’d love to be the one to do it, but hey, we all can’t have what we want,” she snapped, raising her voice in order to get through his thick head.
“Anything wrong out here?” Lieutenant Eric Hendricks came out of his small office to investigate the shouting.
Brianna tamped down her temper. “No, nothing’s wrong, Lieu. Muldare and I were just having a difference of opinion on how to proceed with the case.”
Rather than retreating to his office the way Brianna had hoped, the newly appointed lieutenant crossed to her desk. “And just how are you proceeding with the case?” he asked. “Winston Aurora called me last night asking questions about the department’s progress. I told him I’d get back to him. Give me something to get back to him with.”
She nodded. “He left a message on my landline asking the same thing while Muldare and I were out, questioning one of the hotel’s live-in residents.”
“And?” he asked.
“We’re checking out a few things,” Jackson said. When the lieutenant raised a quizzical eyebrow in his direction, Jackson elaborated, “Like the names of the various contractors involved in renovations on the hotel at different points in time. Lots of ways those bodies could have gotten into the walls.”
Listening, the lieutenant nodded solemnly. “I just hope none of those ways involved anyone from the Aurora family. Not that I like any of those snobs, but they can make life hell for the department if they think one of their own is under suspicion,” he told the two detectives. “Okay, carry on. Just not so loudly.”
“Yes, sir,” Brianna answered.
“Sorry. My fault,” Jackson told the lieutenant.
Hendricks nodded. “Nothing wrong with having a passion for your work, I guess,” he responded just before he closed the door again.
Once the lieutenant had returned to his office, Brianna turned toward the major crimes detective. “Why did you just lie to the lieutenant? I was expecting you to feed me to the wolves.”
Jackson shrugged carelessly. “Not my style. Besides, I didn’t lie. Everything I said we were doing we discussed last night on the way back from San Francisco.” Just about to cross over to the desk he was currently occupying, he paused to look at Brianna over his shoulder. He felt himself softening. Again. This had to stop. He had to put a stop to having these feelings about her that popped out of nowhere. “And the pizza was good,” he told her grudgingly.
Brianna smiled, pleased. “Good,” she echoed just before she got back to work.
* * *
“Man,” Del Campo declared, walking into the squad room some thirty minutes later, “I wish all our suspects were out in wine country.”
“Mr. McNamara wasn’t a suspect,” Brianna pointed out to the other detective. “He was supposed to be a possible witness.”
“Not in his present condition, he wasn’t,” Del Campo told her. “The guy couldn’t tell cartoons apart from regular people.”
Del Campo had completely lost her. “Come again?” Brianna asked.
Johansson was walking in right behind Del Campo. “The old guy was watching some cartoon movie when we came to see him,” he explained. “He kept getting confused when he saw the commercial breaks, thought the actors were chasing away the cartoon characters. That’s when he started narrating, trying to make us understand what was happening.” Johansson shook his head. “Because he thought we weren’t following what was going on.”
“Yeah,” Del Campo recalled. “There was this old guy and this young girl in the cartoon. McNamara kept telling us what was going to happen next.” Del Campo frowned, shaking his head. “For an old man, McNamara had one hell of a grim imagination.” He underscored his statement with an exaggerated shiver. “That part really sucked,” he murmured before he finally walked off to his desk.
But Brianna’s interest had been piqued. “Why?” she asked, following Del Campo. “What did he say?”
Del Campo shrugged. “Just all sorts of weird stuff. McNamara was telling the girl—she was a squirrel, by the way,” he interjected with an incredulous laugh. “He was yelling at the TV, telling her to be careful. That the old guy—a polar bear, by the way—was going to make her disappear. Bury her inside a block of ice. Just weird stuff,” he reiterated.
“Did you try to get him to talk about what made him say that?” Brianna pressed.
Maybe McNamara was reliving something he might have witnessed going
