The Man Who Walked in Darkness (Miles Franco #2) (Miles Franco Urban Fantasy) (2 page)

“I was working. I’m not your babysitter, Miles.” She jerked her head toward her shiny sedan parked across the road.

“I don’t know what you are anymore,” I said. The drink had done a nice job on my inhibitions, what little I had. “All the shit we went through, and you couldn’t even look at me during the cross examination.”

She opened her mouth, then closed it again and pursed her lips. “Not now.”

She strode across the road in a break in the traffic, leaving me to catch up.

“Should I write you into my schedule?” I asked. “Only I was hoping we could be adults and talk.”

“We’ll talk about what happened when you’re sober,” she said as she opened the driver’s side door. “For now, we need to ask you a few questions.”

“We?” I said, getting into the back seat. “Who’s we?”

There was an asshole in a sports jacket sitting in the front passenger’s seat. I knew he was an asshole from the way he turned and flashed an immaculately white smile in my direction. He had a jawline that could cut stone, and the sort of perfectly sculpted yet dashingly unkempt blond hair you saw on commercials for men’s perfume. Christ, his chin even had a dimple.

“Detective Gunnar Wade, Special Investigations,” he said, twisting in his seat to offer me his hand. “Good to meet you.”

“The name’s Gofuck,” I said, shaking his hand. “Gofuck Yourself.” I tapped Vivian on the shoulder as she climbed in behind the wheel. “What’s with Pretty Boy?”

Wade’s smile didn’t slip, which just infuriated me more. “I’m Detective Reed’s partner.”

“Yeah? I got her last partner sent to jail. He was a lot bigger than you, as I remember it.”

His grin just got wider.

Vivian started the car. “You two want a pissing contest, do it outside. I just got the upholstery cleaned.”

TWO

I sobered up when the pathologist pulled back the sheet to show me the woman’s face. She was young, blond, and dead. They’d stripped her naked, and now she was lying on a metal table in a room that predated the rest of Bluegate by about thirty years. She didn’t have any goosebumps on her pale skin, even though the room was cold enough to make me shiver. That’s how I knew this was real.

Detective Asshole was somewhere behind me, leaning against the wall next to the double doors. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Vivian watching me, but I never took my eyes off the body. Maybe it was just the light, but the dead woman’s cheeks had a tinge of green in them. That didn’t make sense. She always had cheeks that would make roses feel inadequate.

“You know her?” Vivian asked quietly.

I nodded. “Name’s Claudia. Claudia Hennel.” I ran a hand through my curls. “She’s…she was a singer. Jazz, mostly. Sang with me and my band sometimes. Not for a while, though.”

“How long?” Wade’s voice came from behind me.

I didn’t have the strength to be snarky. “Not since before…before all that stuff with the Chroma.” I tried to work it out. Everything was getting muddled in my head. “A few months before all that.”

“A year ago, then?”

“If you say so.” Jesus, had it been that long? “How’d she buy it?”

The pathologist was a portly man, his lab coat stretching over his pot belly. “Won’t know until we do the autopsy,” he said. “She just came in from Bluegate Hospital this morning. She’d only been there a couple of hours before they called time of death.”

“Murdered?” I asked. The word sounded hollow in my head. I had a sudden urge to vomit, but I swallowed it back.

The pathologist shrugged. “She had a few bruises, but no serious physical trauma. Drug overdose, maybe.”

“No,” I snapped, tearing my eyes from her to glare at the smug-looking bastard. “She was clean. No Ink, no nothing. Didn’t even drink, not once.”

He shrugged again. “We’ll know soon.”

I returned my gaze to the off-color veins snaking up Claudia’s neck. She was German originally. Not much of a beauty, but she had a voice that’d make a gangster cry. She hadn’t hit thirty. She should’ve been healthy.

A sick thought twisted its way into my mind. I balled my hands into fists. “Was she…tell me she wasn’t…”

“Raped?” Vivian asked.

I swallowed back the bile in my throat and nodded.

“We don’t think so,” she said.

“No signs of vaginal or anal trauma,” the pathologist chipped in. “We’ll examine the contents of her stomach for semen—”

I slammed my shoe into the metal frame of the table, making Claudia’s body rock back and forth. The pathologist took a step back, mouth clamping shut.

“Thank you, Stan,” Vivian said, giving him a look she usually reserved for me.

A hand came to rest on my shoulder while I tried to quell the burning in my skull. “Come on, pal,” Wade said. “Let’s go have ourselves a chat.”

“Get your hand off me,” I said, “before I turn it inside out.”

He took his hand back and crossed his arms.

“Miles,” Vivian said. “You might be able to help us. But to do that, you have to talk.”

“Fat lot of good that’ll do,” I said. “I couldn’t do much to help her, could I?”

Vivian silently took my arm and tugged. I held my ground, feet planted wide, fists balled and ready to take a swing at Wade or the pathologist if either of them came too close. But they stayed back, and it was just me and Vivian and Claudia, the only people who mattered right then.

“Miles,” Vivian said again.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. I reached out and brushed a stray hair away from Claudia’s face. “See you, kid,” I whispered to her.

Vivian led me away while the pathologist slipped the sheet back over Claudia’s head. He gave a sigh of relief as I left the room.

Wade found us a quiet interview room at the station filled with off-white walls and unpadded furniture. I walked in like a clockwork robot and dropped into the closest seat, the last dregs of alcohol in my system giving the place a dreamy feel.

Claudia’s face swam in front of my eyes. It mingled with the others, with the gangsters I’d killed last winter outside John Andrews’ mansion. I’d been off my head on Chroma at the time, but the photos the prosecution showed at court left no doubt about what I’d done. Burned, crushed, mutilated, human and Vei skulls cracked open, leaking their contents onto tiled floors.

And now Claudia.

“I should have been there,” I whispered.

Wade and Vivian pulled out seats opposite me. “Thought you said you hadn’t seen her in a year,” Wade said.

“Yeah,” I said. “So?”

“So why you looking so guilty?”

“Bite me, Pretty Boy.”

“What do you know, Franco?”

Vivian raised her hand a little. “Gunnar,” she said warningly. He shot her a look, then shut his yap and settled for giving me the eye.

Vivian reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a little notebook. “You have to cooperate, Miles. You aren’t a suspect. But you knew her, and you might be able to give us something to go on.”

I chewed my lip and knocked on the table with my knuckles. I couldn’t bring myself to meet Vivian’s eye, even now.

“I wasn’t lying, I haven’t seen her in forever. But…but a couple of days ago she called me.”

“Is that strange?”

“For her, it was. She didn’t much care for phones. She was like me that way.”

Wade sat there with a little smirk on his face, but Vivian dutifully scribbled a couple of notes down and nodded. “What did she call about?”

I closed my eyes. Jesus, Claudia. She had no sense, calling a loser like me. “I don’t remember.”

“Ah, enough of this bullshit,” Wade said. “He’s trying to pull a fast one.”

“I’m telling the truth.”

He rolled his eyes. “I’ve read your report, Franco. Forgive me if I don’t believe you. Maybe you can call up your pal, the mayor. From what I hear she was all too keen to swallow every line you gave her.”

“Huh, whaddya know.” I cocked my head to the side. “You really are dumber than you look. Fancy that.”

“All right, that’s it.” He stood up and pulled a pair of cuffs from his belt. “Let’s see if you feel like talking after a few hours in a cell.”

“Gunnar,” Vivian said, “it’s okay. Miles is going to talk.”

The asshole shook his head, but he tossed the cuffs down on the table and returned to his seat.

“I don’t remember,” I said, “because I was drunk.” I fixed Wade with a look. “Got it?”

He made a disbelieving noise. “If you were drunk, how do you know she called?”

“I was at home, waiting for the next day of the trial so I could go back in and hear them tear me apart again. I felt like having a bit of a break from it all. So I knocked back half a bottle of bourbon. Nice break, huh?”

“Get on with it, Franco,” Wade said.

“The phone started buzzing, so I stumbled over and picked it up. I was pretty plastered by that time. It was Claudia, of course. She wanted to meet, wanted my help with something, I think. Only then…” I screwed up my eyes.

“Then what?” Vivian said.

“It’s all a blank. Next thing I knew I was waking up on the couch. I’d passed out.” I slammed my hands down on the table and got to my feet. The chair spun, so I picked it up and hurled it against the wall. “I fucking passed out when she needed my help!”

The chair clattered to the ground. My face burned, my eyes burned, every bit of me burned. Christ, I was a screw-up. I’d managed to go my whole goddamn life as one, but it’d never hurt anyone but myself. Now, I couldn’t seem to go two steps without destroying someone’s life, without leaving a trail of bodies behind me.

Wade slammed into me, knocking the rage out of me. He wrenched my arm behind my back and pushed me up against the wall.

“Enough!” Vivian yelled.

The pressure on my arm didn’t ease, and to be honest, I didn’t want it to. I should’ve gone to prison. At least there I couldn’t do as much damage.

“Are you going to be calm?” Wade said into my ear.

“He’ll be calm,” Vivian said. She appeared beside me, close enough I could smell the hint of cinnamon in her perfume. “Right, Miles?”

I took a few deep breaths and nodded. Wade lessened the pressure on my arm, giving me enough room to turn and shove the bastard away by his sports jacket. I half-hoped he’d sock me one, but he just picked up the chair I’d thrown and thumped it down in front of me. “Sit.”

I sat. Vivian rested against the table while Wade folded his arms and leaned menacingly in the corner.

“Tell us about her,” Vivian said.

I nodded and tried to get my thoughts together. “Like I said, she sang with my band sometimes.” Calling it a band was a stretch, to be honest. A trumpet, a double bass, and a keyboard do not a band make. “She first showed up at one of our gigs about two years back, when we sucked even more than we do now.”

I could still remember the white cocktail dress she’d worn, in a biker bar, no less. You couldn’t not notice her. Bubbles, our keyboardist, nearly fell over himself when he saw her sitting there, waiting for us to start playing. I can’t say I was much better. I’ve always been wary of women. But Claudia was something else.

“She can’t have been off the plane for more than a couple of months,” I continued. “Still had an accent thick enough to spread on your toast. But she had a pair of lungs on her, that’s for sure. Salin, our double bassist, convinced her to come sing with us a few nights a month. She didn’t take much convincing, really.”

“Were you two intimate?” Vivian asked.

My face grew hot. Why couldn’t it have been Wade who asked me questions like that? “No, never. She lived alone, I don’t know where. I don’t think she even had a boyfriend. Never once heard her talk about stuff like that. The music was enough for her.”

Vivian scribbled away in her notebook. “And you don’t have any idea what trouble she was in?”

I suppressed the urge to punch things again and settled for shaking my head. “I wish I did. Christ, you have no idea.”

Vivian nodded and gave Wade a look. I couldn’t tell what secret cop signals passed between them, but he just twisted his mouth up and shrugged.

“Okay, that’s great, Miles,” Vivian said. She sounded tired. Had I done that to her? “We’ll get in touch with your bandmates, see if they know anything.”

“What are you going to do with her?”

“We’ll do the autopsy, see what we can find out. Then we’ll return her to her family.”

I nodded. This was a nightmare. Wade opened the interview room door while Vivian stood up. I got to my feet as well, feeling like I was carrying a sack of rocks on my back.

“One thing, before I go,” I said. “I didn’t think you were a murder cop.”

“I’m not.”

“Then what is this to you?”

She shrugged and gave Wade a glance.

“There’s been others, hasn’t there?” I asked.

“We’ll call you if we need to ask you anything else,” Vivian said. She stepped aside and gestured to the door.

I chewed my lip and nodded slowly. “Yeah, all right. You still owe me that talk.” I waved to Wade. “See you round, Pretty Boy.”

He smirked and said nothing. I walked out of the interrogation room alone. The two cops shut the door behind me. A uniform escorted me outside, back into the oppressive heat. He didn’t talk, and neither did I. Everyone was happier that way.

He left me on the footpath, where cars spewed out smog that billowed in the heat. I walked along the block a little way, avoiding all eye contact with the strangers that passed, until I found a cool alley free of homeless people.

I bent over behind a dumpster and heaved my guts into a stormwater drain. Again and again I threw up, acid burning my nose, tears welling in my eyes. I could see Claudia standing in front of me, clear as day, her eyes wide open. I stretched out my hand toward her, but I couldn’t touch her. Enough sanity clung to my mind to tell me she wasn’t really there. That sure as hell didn’t make it less spooky. What the hell was wrong with me? Was it the drink, or the stress of the trial? Or was it something worse? My aching stomach clenched. Had something taken a bite out of my mind? I looked to Claudia for answers, but she wasn’t in a talking mood. Silently, she accused me of failing her. She was right.

When my stomach ran dry, I stumbled back and dropped down onto a flattened cardboard box. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the notebook I’d swiped from Wade’s jacket pocket after my little tantrum.