Paper Bullets (12 page)

Or had she? Was she one of those women who had no boundaries? She’d told me once that she didn’t know Ryan was married when they first started going out, but what if that had been a lie?

Kyle tapped some keys on the laptop, scrolling back and forth between the pictures I’d taken. “You have pictures of the guy you think is Richards on here?”

“Keep scrolling forward. The only good pictures I got of him were later, after I ran into Melody at the gym.”

Instead of scrolling all the way to the end, he took his time looking at each picture I’d taken. The ones of the white SUV pulling out onto the street and driving past where I had been parked were blurry. If I hadn’t run into Mr. Muscles at the gym, and then seen him go out to the SUV, I wouldn’t have been able to find out who’d been driving just from the pictures I’d taken.

“Who’s this?” Kyle asked, pointing at the screen.

The shot must have been taken right after the SUV passed my car. The SUV was a white blur off to the left side of the frame. I hadn’t really studied the shot before since it didn’t seem to be important.

Kyle was pointing at the older guy who’d been sitting by himself at the table for two in front of the cafe. The guy I’d thought had been annoyed when Justin Sewell was standing on the sidewalk taking cell phone pictures of Melody.

“He was eating lunch by himself while he was reading something on his tablet,” I said. “I only noticed him because he looked pissed off when Justin got in his personal space.”

In the shot, the guy wasn’t looking at Justin. He was looking across the street toward the area where I had parked.

“How do you make this thing zoom in?” Kyle asked.

I worked the controls, and the guy’s picture enlarged just like Melody’s had.

“He made you,” Kyle said.

Sure enough, once the picture was big enough and focused on the random diner, I could see that the guy was looking directly at the camera. Which meant he’d been looking at me.

“He must have seen the camera,” I said. I’d been fairly subtle with the camera when I’d been trying to get a picture of Justin Sewell. The SUV had startled me enough that I’d forgotten to be covert. I’d just raised the camera and fired off shot after shot hoping that a picture would show me who was driving the car.

Kyle scrolled backwards through the pictures. This time I focused on the man sitting by himself at the table. He wasn’t in many of the shots. Except for one early shot I’d taken of Justin before I’d tried to zoom in on his face, the man hadn’t paid attention to anything except his tablet. In that early picture, he’d been looking at Justin, an expression of annoyance clear on his face.

“You think he’s important?” I asked Kyle.

“I think he’s familiar.”

“Bad guy familiar?”

“Maybe.” He spent another minute staring at the guy’s picture before he shook his head. “It’ll come to me,” he said.

“In the shower.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“That’s where things I’m trying to remember come to me,” I said. “In the shower, or in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.”

“Or on stakeouts.”

He rolled his shoulders like he was trying to stretch out stiff muscles. I’d been on a few stakeouts myself, waiting for hours in a car for a witness trying to duck a subpoena. I rubbed his shoulder, and he leaned into my touch.

“You’re good at that,” he said.

“Years of practice.”

Kyle wasn’t a big man, but he was solid. He worked out just enough to keep himself in the kind of shape he needed to be in to run down a suspect. The first time I’d slept with him, I’d been pleasantly surprised to discover that he didn’t have six-pack abs.

Ryan was one of those men who was naturally athletic and built, and he had to do very little work to keep his six pack in perfect shape.

I wasn’t naturally athletic, and even though I was trim enough, I’d always felt a little inferior in the body department compared to Ryan. With Kyle, I felt like we matched.

The relationship was still too new to figure out where it was headed, but I had a good feeling about us. I might even learn to like baseball.

As I rubbed his shoulders, Kyle scrolled forward through the pictures, not slowing down until he got to the pictures of Mr. Muscles that I’d taken while I was waiting in line to put gas in my car. He studied the last picture, one where I’d zoomed in on Mr. Muscles’ face.

“That’s him,” he said after a moment. “Lewis Richards. Bulked up and a few years older, but that’s the guy. He’s bad news.”

I stopped rubbing. “What kind of bad news?”

The shower had stopped running. I heard the bathroom door open. Samantha, headed back to her room. Once she was dressed, she’d be out in the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge for something that had the fewest possible calories for breakfast.

“Not the kind of news she should hear,” Kyle said.

I closed the picture file and shut down my laptop. It wasn’t too hot outside yet. We could sit outside and discuss the kind of things Kyle didn’t want to mention around my daughter.

Two outdoor conferences in two days. The way things were going lately, maybe I shouldn’t have let Ryan take all the good outdoor furniture with him when he moved out.

CHAPTER 16

I WASN’T SURE I LIKED the idea of my backyard becoming the place I went to talk with people about unpleasant things. The memory of the discussion I’d had with the detectives the night before was still too strong, but at least Kyle wasn’t here to arrest me. Not that I’d technically been under arrest, just the next best thing.

Kyle sat beside me on the glider, his arm around me, my head on his weary shoulder. The glider was still in the shade, so I wasn’t in danger of burning the pale skin on my legs.

I’m not a sun worshipper like my neighbor. The couple who lived in the house on the other side of mine were in their late twenties, had no kids, and were gone most weekends. When they were home, she liked to sit out in the sun on a chaise lounge in the backyard, country music playing on a portable stereo. She was the tannest woman I’d ever seen. I wondered sometimes if she realized what her skin would look like in another twenty or thirty years.

My neighbor wasn’t out in her yard this morning. The leaf blower had gone quiet, but another lawn mower had started up somewhere a few blocks over. A dove sat on the power line that ran down the backyard fence line between the houses on my block and the ones the next block over. It cooed at another dove hidden in the full branches of a tall Ponderosa pine that shaded the back corner of my yard.

“So tell me about Lewis Richards,” I said.

We swung gently back and forth for a moment before Kyle responded.

“A lot of this comes from the guy I was on stakeout with last night. He used to work in the gang unit until he got assigned to Robbery/Homicide. He was part of a county-wide task force, one of those inter-agency, we’re-better-off-pooling-our-resources things.”

“He knew Richards?”

“He didn’t work with him directly, but gangs and drugs go hand in hand, and he’d been given a heads up about Richards in case he ran into him in connection with his work.”

Richards had apparently been the kind of undercover cop—at least back in those days—who immersed himself completely in the role. While no one ever proved it, everyone thought the way he got in close with the major drug dealers was by using whatever drug they happened to be selling.

“My guess is that his captain chose to look the other way,” Kyle said. “I suppose I can understand it, from his perspective. Richards had an impressive track record. His information was responsible for putting a bunch of drug dealers behind bars.”

“Wouldn’t the bad guys eventually make the connection to him?” I asked.

“If he was sloppy, sure, but from what this guy told me last night, Richards wasn’t sloppy. He had a network of informants who didn’t have a clue they were passing along information to a cop. They thought they were just flying high with a fellow druggie, telling stories while they passed around the bong or snorted lines or did whatever other drug they were sharing. In a way I can admire the guy. It takes a certain level of focus to keep your head in a situation like that, and Richards had been on the job for years.”

“Had been?”

“He was suspended six months ago. The press never got wind of it, not like when an officer’s involved in a shooting, and the department kept it quiet, but apparently Richards was told to clean up his act or he’d be out for good.”

I wondered if that’s when he became Mr. Muscles. Spent all his time at the gym working out to get the drugs out of his system. Either that, or he’d replaced street drugs with steroids. One thing I knew about chronic steroid users was that they could have short tempers.

“I saw him arguing with Melody yesterday,” I said. “You think he could have had anything to do with what happened to her?”

Kyle shrugged. “My guy said department gossip pegged Richards as a hot head, that he either mouthed off to his handler or belted the guy when he didn’t like what he was getting told, so yeah, I guess it’s possible.”

“It’s a lot more probable than Ryan torching Melody’s car while she was inside.”

“Where did they find the car?”

“I don’t know exactly. All the cops mentioned was that it was in some vacant lot downtown and that someone passing by called it in. Norton might know. Or it might be on the news. I haven’t checked this morning.”

I hadn’t wanted to look at the news. I’d been too afraid to see my picture or Ryan’s mentioned in connection with Melody’s murder.

Kyle stretched out his back, and I heard his jaw creak as he yawned.

“You should go home,” I said. “You’re exhausted.”

His arm tightened around me. “I don’t want to leave you alone today.”

“Because you think I’m an emotional wreck, or because you’re afraid I’m going to keep investigating this?”

He kissed me on the top of my head. “A little of both, but more because I’m worried you’re in over your head and you haven’t realized it yet.”

A ginger cat hopped up on the back fence and walked along the top of the boards that gave me a little privacy from my neighbors. The dove on the power line tilted its head and gave the cat a beady-eyed stare, secure in the knowledge that it was out of the cat’s reach.

“He’s always going to be my daughter’s dad,” I said. “I can’t just stand by and not do anything.”

Kyle sighed. “I know. That’s why I debated whether to tell you about Richards, but I figured you’d find out on your own anyway. These people are dangerous. Even if he didn’t do it, the people he’s run with are more than capable of killing someone just to send a message.”

“But why kill Melody to send a message to Richards? She’d have to be someone important to him for that to matter.”

Which brought me back to the question of why an undercover—former undercover—cop would be tailing her. What in the world did Melody have to do with any of that?

I didn’t know, but I sure as hell was going to find out.

CHAPTER 17

SAMANTHA DECIDED TO CALL her dad around noon. I wasn’t surprised when the call went straight to his voicemail.

I tried not to listen in, but the house was still quiet. Kyle had gone home to sleep, and I’d been pretending to read a book in the den, but all I was doing was reading the same paragraph over and over again because the words refused to make sense.

Samantha cried a little, her voice thick, when she left a message for her dad telling him how sorry she was about Melody, that she loved him, and that she wanted to help if there was anything she could do. After she was done, she asked me if she could call Jonathan, and when I said yes, she took her cell phone into her room and shut the door.

I had a feeling it was going to be a long call, so I powered up my laptop again. I had work to do.

Ryan had suspected that Melody had a stalker, and the evidence he’d told me about had sure pointed in that direction. I had no proof that the stalker was the same person who’d murdered her, but I had no proof that he wasn’t, either.

Kyle and Norton were both right, too. I couldn’t investigate her murder the way I usually went about most investigation—by going backwards from the incident. Not only did the police have access to reports and data and investigation techniques that I didn’t, if I butted in on their investigation, I’d just end up in jail for real on a charge of obstruction. I was better off concentrating on the stalker. At least it gave me a place to start.

According to Ryan, Melody’s stalker had started by sending her flowers. A single red rose a day for a week to her at work.

Melody hadn’t wanted to talk to Ryan about the roses. Okay, fine. But the roses had to come from somewhere.

Like a grocery store.

A guy could buy a single red rose along with a loaf of bread and a stick of salami at any number of grocery stores around town, but if that’s where the roses came from, the guy who bought them would either have to deliver them in person or make arrangements for someone else to do it. If the women at the gym were like women everywhere, a red rose a day would get noticed.

So would whoever delivered it.

Stacy, the fashion-model thin woman behind the front desk at the gym, struck me as the kind of person who’d pay attention to a man who’d make that kind of romantic gesture, whether the gesture was wanted or not. If the roses had been delivered by a florist, she might even remember which one. The only way to find that out was to talk to her, something I wasn’t looking forward to.

If a florist was involved, they might have a record of who bought the roses. Even if the guy paid in cash, a lot of retail stores had video cameras trained on the cash register. I couldn’t compel them to let me look at surveillance tapes, but I’m pretty good at talking people into showing me what I needed to see.

Most days, anyway. Today I might look a little too stressed around the edges to carry off my normal, easy-going, you-can-tell-me-anything manner.