He laid the photo back on the table, shaking his head. “It’s strange. I can remember the events, but I can’t remember…me. I was me, of course, but not. Does that make sense?”
And the thing was, it did. I understood completely and utterly.
Trey’s phone buzzed with an incoming text. He looked at the readout. “It’s Price. She said she’s bringing the files.”
“When?”
“Right now.”
I laughed a little. “Well, that was fast.”
Trey was thinking hard. He didn’t look settled.
“Why are you making that face? She’s giving you the files.”
“She didn’t say she was giving them to me. She said she was bringing them.” He closed his eyes wearily. “And that is an entirely different matter.”
Chapter Twelve
Thirty minutes later, Keesha met Trey at the front door with her sidearm on her hip. It was camouflaged by a flowing block-dyed vest the color of the ocean, but even in a sleeveless tank and frayed-hem jeans, she carried smackdown the way other women carried mace. Her only adornment was a tattoo on her bicep, a Latin phrase underneath a stylized square labyrinth. I recognized the image—Trey’s SWAT uniform bore a patch just like it—but not the Latin.
She kept one fist wrapped around the strap of the messenger bag on her shoulder. “You got sunburned.”
Trey touched his cheekbone, freshly scrubbed. “A little.”
I watched from the kitchen as she held the bag close and came inside. She made straight for the armchair, sat with her legs tucked under her. Then she pulled a deck of cards from her pocket, bright green and worn at the edges, and smacked them in the middle of the coffee table.
“You want those files, Seaver, you gotta earn them.”
Trey sat down on the sofa opposite her. “The game?”
“Slapjack.”
He picked up the cards and started shuffling. Whatever was going down, it was old and familiar and strictly between the two of them. Trey dealt. Keesha looked at him, not the cards. The expression on her face reminded me of someone watching old home movies, seeing long-dead relatives talking and walking around.
She draped one arm along the back of the sofa. “You remember the last time we played? We didn’t get to finish because we got that call to the Botanical Garden about the shooter on top of the greenhouse, and it turned out to be some naked drunk girl with a dildo?”
The corner of his mouth twitched, but he remained focused on the cards, one to him, one to her. “I remember. You called that one before we’d even set up.”
“I know how to tell a sex toy from a firearm.” She narrowed her eyes in a mock glare. “You made me go up there and get her all by myself. Said you wanted no part of trying to wrestle a rubber penis from a crazy woman twenty feet off the ground.”
He dealt out the last card, the deck now split evenly between them. “You handled the situation.”
“Of course I did.”
“Of course.” He looked up. “Are you ready?”
She nodded, placed one hand on top of her stack. On some signal I couldn’t see, she flipped the top card face-up in the middle. Trey did the same on his turn. Back and forth they went until a jack appeared, and they both slapped a hand on top of it, Trey first. She cursed as he collected the cards.
“Damn, you got faster in your old age.”
He shuffled the cards into his deck. “Perhaps you’ve gotten slower.”
“Like hell.”
Then back to flipping cards. She claimed the second jack, Trey the third. He didn’t take his eyes off the table, didn’t even look at the messenger bag.
She slid closer until she was on the edge of the chair. “You still think Nick Talbot did it?”
“I do.” Trey turned over another card. “Do you still think Macklin did it?”
“Yep.”
Trey snagged the fourth jack, and Keesha cursed. He gathered the last of the deck to himself.
“Macklin had no motive,” he said.
“Greed not good enough for you? The man was up to his eyeballs in debt. Gambling debt, hooker debt, God knows what other kind of debt.”
“He also had an alibi. His dash cam.”
“His first visit is at 8:45, lasts approximately five minutes. Then he’s there again an hour later, talking about some gut feeling. Gut feeling, my ass. He killed that woman somewhere in that hour between and then pretended to find her body, pretended to catch her killer in the act, hit his own self upside his own head and pretended to find that weapon on the edge of the property. And then everybody eats this story up like it was a damn doughnut.”
She slapped her hand on the jack and dragged the stack of cards toward her. Trey took his stack and sat back. They regarded each other over the coffee table like gunslingers at the OK Corral.
Trey put his cards down. “Talbot bought that gun the month before.”
“Because of the burglaries. Hundreds of Buckhead residents bought new guns.”
“Still, Macklin knew better than to go back to the house. He knew Jessica was there. He’d spoken with her at 8:45.”
“In gym clothes. He thought she was about to leave the house and go for a run.” Keesha put her cards down, flipped the top one over. “So he parks the cruiser and sneaks back, thinks she’s gone, she’s not, she walks in on him stealing her jewelry and makes a break for it, he grabs the gun from the side table…pow pow. Twice in the back as she’s running down the stairs, once in the chest when she falls. He makes the scene look like a burglary gone bad, goes back to his car, starts driving around again. Goes back to the house to pretend to find
