I glanced at him as he bent over to plug in the cord, the view pleasant enough to momentarily distract me from the horror I had just witnessed. He was wearing his blue uniform. He had gained a little weight since Bella’s death, but he looked good, thicker and less like every vein on his body had been pumped full of steroids.
In either laziness or depression, he had let his hair grow out and it was no longer buzzed so close to the scalp his skin looked blue. His hair was a bit ragged, giving me the inexplicable urge to lick my fingers and run them through it. He was the kind of guy who cared about his appearance in the way a gearhead cares more about the engine under the hood than the bodywork, and he wouldn’t use hair gel if there was a gun in his mouth.
He stopped to smell the artificial breeze. “This is one heck of a place for a barbecue.”
I had just witnessed a woman I knew burning to death and I wasn’t in the mood for any jokes. In fact, I didn’t know if I’d ever be in the mood for jokes again.
“Your face is a bit red,” Mettle said. “I told you to use sunscreen when you’re out on the harbor.”
“Not funny, Matt.”
“Too soon? Please tell me you gave her the pointer and said, You’re fired!”
“Matt, seriously.”
“You went there to question her, right? I bet you gave her the third degree.”
“Matt, stop it!”
“What? Why? You want me to have pity for Phyllis Martin? She tried to kill me. She was a total bag of feces. And you know what you do with bags of feces? You put them on someone’s doorstep and you light them on fire.”
“She wasn’t what she seemed,” I said.
“Obviously. I heard she had become some butch’s little pony. One of my buddies at the prison told me she had brayed so loudly they called her Goat.”
I buried my head in my hands.
“I hope you’re not taking her side, Rosie.”
The flames lit up inside my palms and I had to lower my hands and look at the table and blink repeatedly to make them go away, like purple splotches from looking at the sun.
“It was a terrible way to go. For anyone.”
“I told you a million times not to go see her,” Mettle said. “But you kept going anyway.”
“She knows things, Matt.”
“Yeah, so? You can’t just ignore her moral transgenders—”
I rubbed my eyes. “Her what?”
“Transgenders.”
“You mean transgressions?”
“Yes, transgressions,” he said. “C’mon, you’ve got to admit, what happened is nuts. A woman bursts into flames right in front of you? That’s freaky. They’re already calling you a witch.”
I dropped my hands and glared at him. “Who is calling me a witch?”
“The guards. They say they’ve never seen anything like that before. Not even close. And they’ve seen a lot of dangerous shenanigans: shanks hiding where the sun don’t shine, little packets of drugs sewn into people’s cheeks, needles hidden under fingernails, you name it, but they have never ever seen spontaneous combustion before.”
I drew my finger across the table. “I’m not a suspect, am I?”
“That’s not for me to decide,” he said. “Above my pay grade.”
He glanced to the mirror and then nodded and turned to leave. “Good luck, Rosie.”
He opened the door and left.
A moment later, Detective Slate entered. He was wearing the same tight black T-shirt he had been wearing when I first met him nearly a year ago, his police badge dangling from his neck, the barbs from his once-trendy, but now trashy tattoo sneaking out his sleeves.
In a different world, one where inbreeding was acceptable, he would have been handsome. He was my cousin—not by blood, but I drew no distinction. If you shared a family tree, either naturally, or hanging from it, boom boom was off limits.
Detective Slate smiled. “So. Rosie. We meet again. Under similar circumstances.”
One body had been in the water, the other in the fire. I failed to see how that was similar. “Yes. I would have preferred a family picnic.”
“Me too,” he said. “Let’s cut to the meat, here.” He leaned across the table and pushed a button on the monitor that Mettle had brought in and then looked to the giant mirror and circled his finger to say “roll the tape.”
A black and white video played on the screen. It was the security feed from Phyllis’s side of the glass. You could clearly see me sitting on the other side of the glass and giving it a tap before the guard told me to knock it off.
“I don’t want to see this,” I said. “I just lived through it.”
He motioned for them to pause the video. “Why did you tap on the glass?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“Right now, you’re a subject, not a target,” Slate said. “Depending on your answers of course.”
“Those guards are far more guilty than I am. As you can clearly see, I was on the other side of the glass.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Have you spoken to all the guards yet?”
Slate was standing over me, his arms crossed. “It’s in progress. Either way, you need to cooperate. You can talk with me or they can send another detective in here to take my place. Which do you prefer?”
I groaned. “When I tapped the glass, I was merely seeing how sturdy it was.”
“Why?”
“I was curious.”
“You didn’t read the sign?”
“Of course I read it, but you’ve been to the zoo, haven’t you? No one listens to those signs. It’s practically an invitation.”
“Why did you choose that particular seat?”
“Because it was close to the wall. I needed a buffer zone.”
“Why? So someone else didn’t get burnt?”
Great. I walked into that one. “No. More like a
