Tequila Mockingbird (26 page)

“I
DON
’
T
know what you’re asking about,” Ginger Ackerman simpered when Senior Inspector Duarte set a cold soda down in front of her. “I went to go see my kid. He owns that place now.”

“What I’m asking you, Ginger,” Kiki replied softly, waiting for the woman to open her diet Sprite and take a sip before continuing. “Is whether or not you’d seen who killed Brian Collerton, the man we found in the coffee shop, and more importantly, what the hell were you doing there?”

“We
did
find boxes of the Amp’s supplies in your truck, as well as a couple of the higher-end appliances.” Duarte pulled out a chair, positioning it at an angle near the table before sitting down. “Did you come with someone? Did Collerton see you guys, and the person you were with jumped him?”

“I didn’t
come
with anyone. My kid asked me to help move some of his stuff out because it was expensive.” Ginger smacked her lips after she drank, nervously plucking at her lower lip. “He didn’t want anyone to steal it. I was moving it to a storage place for him.”

“That’s bullshit,” Connor said aloud from his spot behind the one-way glass of the interrogation room’s antechamber. “We even talked about moving it, but the place was locked up tight. The renovation crew was going to move it over to the studio space in a week. Why the hell would he
pay
for that stuff to be in storage?”

“That, my brother, is what we inspectors like to call a lie,” Kane informed him, crossing his arms over his chest as he listened in on the discussion. “Kind of like what Mum does when she says you’re pretty.”

Reflected in the glass, Connor was struck by how similar he and his younger brother looked. Only a couple of years separated them, but while they’d been growing up, those few years seemed like such a chasm. Now, he had to double take when he saw Kane—always a little bit surprised to find the scrawny, clumsy young boy’d become a wide-shouldered, tall man.

Glancing at Kane, Connor noted he was
still
taller—if only by a couple of inches.

Straightening up, Connor squared his shoulders. “I know what a lie is. I grew up hearing you do it.”

“I learned it from you, brother,” Kane shot back. “I learned it all by watching you.”

“You’d think you’d be better at it,” Con muttered, but his attention was on the woman Kiki was questioning.

It was odd to see a woman—an older, dried-out woman—having the same gestures as his lover. Forest played with his lower lip when thinking, and sometimes when he needed time to gather his words, his fingers tapped along the table, much like Ginger was doing at that moment. And while the brittleness in her son was evident in Ginger, there was also a cloying, manipulative air about her, as if she were waiting for the chance to gut the person next to her because she knew the going rate for a black-market kidney.

He couldn’t imagine having the reaching, grasping woman as a mother, and Connor made a mental note to send Brigid flowers or chocolates as soon as he could. Still, she was fascinating to watch, her behavior going from outraged to submissive, oftentimes within the space of a second. One thing was for certain, Ginger had a loose grasp on reality and an even looser grasp on the truth, because Kiki and Duarte kept having to circle around her and hammer at her story, breaking apart every supposed fact she trotted out.

They were taking a break in the actual questioning. Instead, Duarte was pulling out photo after photo of the crime scene, asking Ginger to take a good look at what was going on in the main room when she supposedly was helping her son move his shop’s equipment. Ginger looked at the pictures with an impassive stare, nothing registering on her face as photo after photo was placed on the table.

She asked to go to the bathroom, and the partners conversed a bit. It was an old trick used by people familiar with being dragged in by the cops. Still, Kiki motioned for Ginger to stand up, and there was a mild grumbling about being shackled up again, but the woman acquiesced. Duarte was left cooling his heels, and the brothers returned to their conversation.

“Your guy came out surprisingly well, considering he crawled out of that,” Kane said softly. “And that’s not something I thought I’d ever say in my lifetime. How’re you doing with that? The gay thing.”

“We’re going to do this here?” Con asked, sliding a look at his brother.

“Might as well. They’re sitting down for a game of let’s play shake the lying witness right now,” Kane remarked. “Really, just quick. Tell me how you’re doing, and I’ll leave it be for a bit.”

“I’m doing—okay,” he admitted slowly. “It’s kind of a punch to the teeth sometimes, but honestly, I fucking can’t imagine him not being there. He feels good—feels right, even. I love him. It isn’t even a question—between us, it just
is
. I don’t know if I can explain it.”

“You don’t have to. I know exactly what you mean.”

“Yeah,” Connor murmured, thinking of how Kane’s eyes lit up when Miki walked into the room. “You do.”

“People giving you shit at work?” Kane studied his brother. “You giving yourself shit too?”

“Little of both.” It was hard to admit, but Connor owned up to the qualms eating at the edges of his belly. “Some asshole put a pair of panties in my locker. Shoved them through the slats but wasn’t man enough to come confront me.”

“Asshole is right.”

“Gotta tell you, brother.” Connor turned and leaned his shoulder against the glass, crossing his arms over his chest. “It hurt a bit. I don’t know who did it. I told my team directly. They’re all fine with it, but someone on the squad’s got some shit. I don’t want to have to worry about who’s got my back when I’m going in under fire.”

“And you can’t say shit without looking like some whiny bitch,” Kane snorted, then grew serious. “How are
you
doing with it?”

“I talk a lot to God,” he admitted. “I make deals, mostly. Begging him to let me have patience. To help me convince Forest we’re good together. We’ve gotten to be good friends, me and God. It feels like it happened so fast, and Forest—God, he needs to be loved. I worry I’ve forced him into this, but when he looks at me, I can see he cares—shit, I make him smile. I don’t think he’s smiled a lot before. He’s under my skin, K, and I’m just going to run with it. Put my arms around him and never let go.”

“You’ve known him for months now. Not that quick, really. Gotta admit, you seemed to have gotten the easier one,” Kane teased. “Less wild than mine.”

“Miki’d chew your face off if you piss him off,” he grunted. “Forest’s more… mellow. He’s not a pushover, but more like he’d rather flow around things. Honestly, that woman in there didn’t do him any fucking favors, but he’s—strong. In his own way. He’s more like water—most of the time, like a gentle rain, but then when pushed, it’s like drinking from a fire hose. Tear your lips off if you get too close.”

“Mum adores him.” Kane laughed. “Said she was finally glad she got a son-in-law in her corner instead of Da’s. You’d think it was a competition or something.”

“Hard to live up to a man like Da,” Con replied gently. “Trust me. I know.”

Kiki returned with their prisoner and sat Ginger down. While they were gone, the senior inspector’d laid out all the photos he had of Collerton’s murder as well as the other victims. The table was washed in death and blood. Ginger visibly recoiled when seated in front of the collage. Duarte cleared his throat, and the Morgans’ attention snapped back to the room as Ginger’s agitation rose.

“I don’t know what happened to the guy!” Ginger growled out. “I was in the back. Okay? I just got there, and then I heard some screaming, so I hid.”

“It would have taken you at least half an hour to get this stuff into the truck,” he pointed out. Duarte tapped at a photo of a truck, its bed partially full with sloppily boxed supplies. “Now, either you had help and someone cut fifteen minutes of that, or you were there a hell of a lot longer than a few minutes. That tells me if you heard screaming, it had to have started while you were ripping your own son off. Let me tell you what I think happened, and I’m cutting you slack on this, Ginger, because I’m going to assume you are telling me the truth and
were
alone, got it?

“You knew Forest wasn’t going to be around. He’s been staying with a friend while he recovers, so you thought maybe now was a good time to help yourself to a few things in the shop. Maybe you thought he owed you—hell, Marshall probably owed you because you let him have the kid when he asked to adopt Forest. You had it coming to you,” Duarte said.

“Reasonable,” Kiki interjected. “But see, I’d say she heard Collerton come in and hid then, because she didn’t want him to catch her shaking the place down. Am I right? Did you hide when you heard him come in?”

“I thought someone was going to rip the place off—”

“Someone was already ripping the place off, Ginger. That was
you
,” Duarte pointed out. “But you came in the back door—probably because you got a key from someplace and you
guessed
the alarm would be off. No one turns on an alarm when the building’s been beat up. Stuff falling, plywood instead of windows—none of the glass connections were working anyway, so the alarm would have kept bumping up with alerts. You
knew
they’d be off.”

“Marshall
gave
me a key.” The woman shifted. “I—”

“Let’s say Marshall gave you a key. For whatever reason he’d give you a key,” Kiki said. “And even if Forest
did
say, hey, Mom, come help me move some stuff, why didn’t you call the police when you heard a man screaming in the front of the shop? You had your phone on you.”

“I didn’t think—” Ginger’s eyes shifted, bouncing between the detectives. “You’re confusing me.”

“Why didn’t you leave out the back? You’ve seen Collerton. He didn’t die easy. You were sitting there and listening to it. Unless you were helping. Maybe it was you who’d spotted Collerton and knew he’d IDed you.” Kiki leaned in. “Is that why you’re covering up for who helped you out? Because the guy who came with you killed for you; then he split? Is all of this on the walls just to cover it up? And then you hid when you heard the door opening again? Or maybe you were scared your friend was coming back for you?”

“I didn’t kill anyone! Fuck, the guy was already there when I showed up. The fucking back door key wasn’t working, and I went to the front. It was already open!” Her lips peeled back from her teeth, and Ginger snarled at Kiki from across the table. “He was
already
there.”

“So no screaming, then. No opening doors. No one else coming in. Just the cop who caught you red-handed.” Duarte stood up from the table, letting out an exasperated breath. “You walked past a dead man and thought what? Time to go rip my son off? Nothing else? No worries about the man’s life? His family?”

“He was already dead,” she sneered. “Who the fuck cares about that? Not like he was going to get any deader while I was in the back. I was going to call the cops when I was done.”

“See, that’s how I know you weren’t there to help your kid, Ginger.” Kiki’s snarl shoved Ginger back in her chair. “A decent person would have stopped worrying about storing equipment and called for help. A
thief
would just continue stealing.
That’s
why you’re being arrested, you piece of shit. For whatever we can pin on you.”

“I want my fucking lawyer,” Ginger screamed at Duarte. “I want my fucking lawyer, and I want someone to call my damned kid. He’ll bail me out. You’ll fucking see, and he won’t press any goddamned charges—”

“See, I don’t need your son to press charges, Ginger,” Duarte said, calmly flicking a bit of lint from his jacket. “You were caught breaking and entering by an SFPD officer, in addition to having already discovered a murder victim and doing nothing. If we can show there was a speck of life in Brian Collerton at any time you were in that shop, I’m going to nail you for accessory to murder. Because you did
nothing
.”

“You can’t—” Ginger sputtered. “Look, my kid—”

“Might as well start hoping he’ll even pick up the phone when you call, Ginger,” Kiki said as she gathered up the crime scene photos. “Because really, what kind of mother walks past a dying man just to fuck over her own son?”

Pick up the beat, Sinjun. You’re falling behind.

Fuck you, I’m the goddamned singer. Not the bassist, man.

I already got you a drummer, what the fuck else you want?

Brigid got me the drummer. What? You wanna add something, Fore?

Nah, I’m just trying not to geek out and say Damn it, D, I’m a singer, not a bassist, but you two go on and work that shit out.

—
Home Studio Session #1

“I
CAN
’
T
believe you arrested my mother,” Forest grumbled under his breath while he paced around the Victorian’s family room. He ran his long fingers through his blond hair and rubbed at his skull. “No, forget that. I can believe it. She’s my mother. Of course I fucking believe it.”