“What about the woman standing in the background with the mop?”
“No,” Erica said.
“It’s important,” I said. “The woman with the milkshake could be in trouble. In danger. If you know something—”
“¿Por qué?” asked Lupita, then flushed. “Why is she in danger?”
“She was seen near where Noah’s body was dumped. We think she might have been trying to get a message to us.”
The women remained silent.
I set the photo of the necklace on the table. “This might have been hers. Does it look familiar?”
“Lady of Guadalupe,” Erica said. “Sure. A lot of the women here wear them.”
“I have a Lady of Guadalupe necklace,” Lupita volunteered, then looked surprised at her own boldness.
“May I ask where you got it?”
“From my tía. She gave it to me at my christening. Many years ago.”
“And the other women? Do you know where they got theirs?”
She shrugged. “We’re Catholic. Almost everyone has at least one.”
My gaze went back to Helen. Her brow was furrowed, and she was worrying her lower lip.
“Helen?”
“Is that blood on the necklace?”
I nodded.
She released her lip. “If I can take a picture of that drawing with my phone, I can ask around.”
I nodded, and she snapped a photo. I considered trying to push things with her. But something told me she was the kind of woman who’d go silent under pressure. I’d have to work my way back to it.
One picture to go. I set the photo of Noah and his friends on the table.
“The Superior Gentlemen. Ever hear of them?”
Once again, the women leaned over the photo. Their faces were blank canvases on which I could draw anything—surprise, ignorance, even fear.
I said, “Any of these men look familiar?”
“No,” said Helen.
“They look like every other privileged white man,” Erica said with unmistakable heat.
“You’ve had run-ins with their kind?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I took a small leap. “You’ve been harassed?”
She flushed, looked down.
“By who, Erica? Clients?”
“No one,” she said. Then more firmly, “No one.”
My phone rang. I went to silence it, then saw that I’d missed a call from Bandoni. A text flashed on the screen.
NOAH’S PARENTS IN TOWN. BROWN PALACE. NOW.
CHAPTER 14
That day, I sat with her and her dead son and watched as she slowly unraveled.
And I wondered, for the first time, if it was possible to resurrect the living.
—Sydney Parnell. Personal journal.
The only easy thing about my time in Mortuary Affairs was that I didn’t often sit with those who had lost a loved one. The exception was whenever a Marine stumbled into our bunker, chasing a rumor that his friend hadn’t made it back inside the wire in one piece. These Marines often zeroed in on me, assuming that a woman could best share their grief. And of course I sat with them. I did whatever I could—held their hands, brought them food, hugged them.
It shoved ground glass through my veins every time.
But for all the darkness of those hours, for all the memories I carried of a man weeping in despair over a body bag, the hiss of the hose against concrete and the Sir shouting, “Shade it black” as mortar fire ruptured the world outside . . . for all that, I could not imagine the agony it was to lose a child.
In this, I would gladly be a coward and let Bandoni handle the interview.
But cowardice was one thing. Shirking my job was something else entirely.
Clyde and I joined Bandoni on the sidewalk in front of the Brown Palace Hotel.
The Brown had been designed in the style of the Italian Renaissance and built in the late 1800s, during the Colorado Gold Rush, when carpenter-turned-entrepreneur Henry Brown wanted to bring luxury to the Wild West. The hotel’s exterior boasted Colorado red granite and Arizona sandstone and an attentive array of uniformed doormen. As we approached, one of the doormen opened a brass-trimmed glass door and ushered us in with only a hint of disapproval at our cheap suits and the gold-and-black hairs wafting from Clyde’s coat.
The doors closed, and the hush of thick carpet and thicker wallets settled over us. We took in the marble, the elegant sconces, and the ornate grillwork railings.
“Hell of a place to sit with bad news,” I said as we headed across the lobby.
“The fucking Roosevelt suite.” Bandoni pressed a call button for the elevator. “Every fall should have such a nice cushion.”
The elevator spilled us out into softly lit opulence. Bandoni said, “Let me do the talking.”
“All yours.”
Our knocks were answered by a young man whom I recognized from the photo in our victim’s home. Noah’s utterly unidentical twin, Todd Asher.
We held up our badges.
“I’m Detective Bandoni. And this is Detective Parnell and K9 Clyde.”
Todd opened the door wider. “Yes. Come in.”
The door opened on to an elegantly appointed sitting room with leather furniture and paneled walls. Two Tiffany lamps were probably worth my annual salary.
A man and woman stood as we entered—Hal and Julia Asher.
“We’re very sorry for your loss,” Bandoni said as we all shook hands.
Like Noah, Hal Asher was meaty and solid. Unlike his son, he was well over six feet. Meeting Bandoni was probably one of the few times in his life when he had to look up to make eye contact. He had receding blond-gray hair, a day’s worth of stubble below a thick mustache, and an expression that hung, perfectly poised, between disbelief and devastation.
Julia Asher looked like she’d already gone through shock and moved on to heartbreak. A slender brunette with a gentle face, she stood with her hands clasped and her shoulders down around her ankles. Her face was white except for her red eyes and her lower lip, which she kept biting.
While Bandoni went over our bona fides and offered the police chief’s sympathy, I looked at Todd Asher with interest. Nearly as tall as his father, but slim in a way that managed to look aristocratic, Todd had fair, wavy hair, pale-blue eyes, and patrician features. He wore tailored slacks, a
