Daemon’s Mark by Caitlin Kittredge (web ebook reader .TXT) 📕

I muttered. There was nothing to do but wait for the public defender to show up. “Andy.” I snapped my fingers at him. “What’s going on with the security footage from the port?”

“No joy, ma’am,” he said. “They cycle the tapes every twelve hours and they’d already been erased.”

“Fucking perfect,” I muttered. Andy gave me his sad-puppy look, and I waved him off. I hate waiting for a case to break when there’s nothing I, personally, can do to dispense justice. I looked at Russ Meyer, sitting in the interrogation room staring at the ceiling, drumming discordantly on the tabletop.

Pete Anderson, our CSU investigator, was still collecting evidence in the scuzzball’s apartment, but I had Russ’s cell phone, bagged and tagged. I slipped on gloves and took it out of the evidence baggie, scrolling through the call history.

There were a series of photos from the night before, and I perched myself on the edge of Lane’s desk to look through them, just to be a pain in her ass.

Lane cleared her throat, and I turned the screen toward her. A waitress’s ample bosom filled the screen, poured into a black lace top with a nametag that read, improbably, trouble. “There’re about twenty of these,” I said.

“Looks like a bar-hop.”

“I can’t believe what passes for a night out these days,” Lane sniffed.

“Yeah,” I said, scrolling past three more rack shots, “it’s sure a far cry from a wholesome outing at the roller disco with the musical stylings of Andy Gibb and Leif Garrett.”

Lane slammed her hands down on her keyboard. “How much older am I than you, Lieutenant? Five years? Seven? What gives you the right to judge me, just because you batted your eyes and got into a desk job early instead of being stuck on the streets because you didn’t suck the right cock?”

“You don’t want to go there with me,” I said, still looking at Russ’s cell phone. “I worked my ass off on the streets. I didn’t sleep my way into this job and if I did, that would just mean you were jealous of my good looks and charm.”

A long stretch of quiet. I deliberately kept my eyes on my work, not giving Lane the satisfaction of a reaction. I wasn’t losing control of my squad because of some self-righteous sex detective.

“Maybe I was mistaken,” Lane said stiffly, looking back at Lily’s autopsy report.

“Maybe you were indeed,” I said. The next photo in the text history was a self-portrait of Russ and the type of bar skank who thinks that a shredded denim skirt and a cowboy hat are a look.

Lane opened her mouth, but I shushed her. “Hex me.” The timestamp of the photo was 2:23 A.M.

“What?” Lane demanded. I flipped through my notes from the scene, finding Kronen’s estimate of how long Lily had been in the water.

“Time of death was between one and three A.M., best guess. You know how hard it is when a body goes in the water…”

Lane lifted her shoulders. “So?”

“Look,” I said, showing her the phone. Lane sat back, her plump face folding into lines of displeasure.

“Shit. You just gave him an alibi.”

“That I did,” I said. “Let’s figure out where this is so we can confirm it.”

Bryson came over and looked at the screen. “That’s the OK Corral,” he said. I cocked an eyebrow at him.

“Do a lot of clubbing on your off nights, David?”

He smirked. “I’d recognize those cute little cowboy hats anywhere. They do a line-dancing contest on the bar Saturday nights…”

I held up my hand. “I got it. You and I are going down there. Lane, Meyer is all yours when the lawyer shows up. Maybe you can irritate something else out of him about Lily.”

“My pleasure,” Lane said, pushing back from her desk with a glare and going toward the elevators and the bathroom.

“You’re being kinda hard on her, aren’t you?” Bryson said as I grabbed my jacket from my office.

“I don’t like some overgrown honor student foisted on me,” I said. “She’s way too eager and she’s a pain in the ass.”

“That’s fair,” said Bryson. “But you were a way bigger pain when you came to Homicide.”

“David, don’t go making sense. It goes against the natural order of things.”

We took the Nova down Devere, to the wasteland of cheap bars, biker hangouts and piercing parlors behind Nocturne University. The OK Corral was on the outskirts, beyond the safety zone that college students populated, out in tweaker, hooker and bad-guy territory.

I automatically noted a few road bikes parked at the curb, flying gang colors, and shrugged out of my suit jacket, unbuttoning the top button of my shirt and pulling it loose to hide my badge and waist rig. I didn’t want to look threatening if I didn’t have to.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Bryson said, shoving the metal fire door open like he owned the place. The smell of stale beer, sawdust, vomit and sex slapped me across the face along with a loud blast of Brooks & Dunn.

“Clearly,” I told Bryson.

A blonde girl was winding herself around a pole on one of the raised platforms at the rear of the bar, apathetic as if she were waiting for a bus. The décor, a few token hay bales, longhorns and strands of barbed wire crisscrossing the ceiling, was about as sad as the rest of the place.

I tapped on the bar and motioned the bartender over, showing him the cell phone picture. “You see a skinny tweaker kid in here last night snapping these?”

He shrugged one thin shoulder, his bones poking against the skin. “Maybe. What you want him for?”

Bryson and I showed our shields and the bartender’s eyes darted around, taking inventory of his scant customers. Probably trying to remember any outstanding warrants.

“We’re not looking to bust you,” I said. “Just tell us if the kid was in here or not.”

“Yeah,” the bartender sighed. “Threw him out at last call. Drunk off his ass.”

Last call was 4 A.M. in the