“Six days, I think. Celine, too.”
“Celine? Who’s that?”
“You don’t keep up with the latest in gangster rap?”
“I’d rather pluck out my eyes.”
“Celine is Xenon’s latest girlfriend, sidekick, squeeze, whatever. She was with him for three weeks before the two of them vanished. It’s been in the news. A lot.” I watched his face as I said it, but nothing registered.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Might’ve heard somethin’ about his girl gone missing, too. It’s not the kind of thing I pay attention to.” He stared into space, then said, “Sonofabitch.”
A forensics crew arrived and trooped into the garage. A few of them came out a minute later and began to spread out, through the yard, into the house.
Fairchild handed me to Officer Day. “Put him in your car.” Before Day hauled me away, Russell grabbed my arm and said to me in a deathly whisper, “Don’t say nothin’ to nobody. And I mean nothin’.”
Several local news crews aimed telephoto lenses at us as Day put me in a squad car, in back where the handles don’t work, and I tried to decipher the true meaning of Fairchild’s triple negative. Get it wrong and I’d be in trouble. Day leaned against the car, folded his arms across his chest, and watched the hum of activity around the house.
Alone in the quiet, I had time to summarize the situation and determine that, even though I was in the thick of all this and in for a grilling, it wasn’t likely that they would hold me beyond an interminable, boring afternoon. Jo-X was partially decomposed, so he’d been dead a few days, no more than six, and he’d been strung up in Danya and Shanna’s garage. A garage that came with a rented house, so they would have to check out the owner, Thelma Johnson, see if she’d been nursing a grudge against Jo-X and was using her garage for . . . shall we say, storage.
Continuing my private summary of recent events—Danya was the beautiful daughter of Reno PD’s most senior homicide detective. Both Danya and Shanna had run, Danya having more or less hired Mortimer Angel, a gumshoe, for reasons unknown the night before Jo-X had turned up in what the police would take to be her garage as much as Thelma’s.
Fairchild would work his way through all that in the next ten minutes if he hadn’t already. What he didn’t know, and what I had up my sleeve, or up a drainpipe, not that I knew what to do with it, was that Shanna and Danya had found a note in their mailbox a few days ago demanding a big chunk of money and they’d been given a cryptic and ultimately unworkable reason for parting with it. And there was the flash drive, which might or might not have something relevant and useful on it, but the name “Celine” written on it was intriguing.
I didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on, but like the previous summer, as a finder of missing persons I had no peer.
None.
Ma was gonna be so damn proud of me. I couldn’t wait for her to find out.
The interrogation room at RPD headquarters hadn’t changed one iota since my several visits last year, so I had a nice case of déjà vu working as I stared at my reflection in the one-way mirror. Heavy wooden table, chairs bolted to the floor, one sturdy door, and a vent high on one wall giving off an exhausted sigh.
This was going to play hell with today’s judo lesson. I was due at Rufus Booth’s private dojo at 1:30. My now-deceased fiancée, Jeri, had used judo to toss me around in her home workout room less than twenty minutes after we first met, and her brother, Ron, was one of the top judo masters in the United States in active competition. I thought judo made sense. If Jeri could toss me around like a sack of rice, what might I be able to do with a little training? In the hierarchy of martial arts, Ron was a sixth-dan judo master. He lived over a hundred miles away, not convenient for lessons, but he put me on to Rufus Booth, a ninth-dan master and not the kind of guy you’d ever, ever want to attack in a dark alley, not that that’s on my bucket list.
But . . . no judo lesson today. I’d been at it for three months, got my yellow belt last week. Jeri would’ve approved.
Russell Fairchild and Day came in. Russ Mirandized me while a video camera in a corner near the ceiling got it on tape or DVD. Then he reached up and switched the camera off, something they do in Russian prisons all the time.
He turned to Day. “What you are about to hear doesn’t leave this room, Cliff.”
“You might want to Mirandize him, too,” I said.
Fairchild glared at me. “You’re a piece of work, Angel. Got a mouth on you that won’t quit.”
“But I’m a dynamo when it comes to missing persons.”
Day’s lips lifted a tenth of an inch.
Russell gave me a “come on” gesture with the fingers of his right hand. “Let’s hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“Guess.”
“Starting where?”
“Wherever all of this began, hotshot. Up to you.”
I could have had my lawyer present, but Russ and I don’t do that since I’m never guilty, just lucky, so I started with quitting my job with the IRS last July and becoming a PI trainee at my nephew’s investigative firm.
“Don’t start there,” he growled.
“After that, huh? You sure? You’ll miss out on a couple of great stories. Decapitated heads, severed hands—”
“How about last night? You said my kid came to see you at the Goose. How would she have known where to find you?”
“You’ll have to ask her. She didn’t say. If she’s stalking me, it’s probably your fault.”
“Pick it up from there, Angel.”
That part didn’t take long. He seemed to like the part where Danya said her father didn’t
