The Pattersons were a distinguished middle-aged couple who were clearly grief-stricken at the loss of their daughter in such a sudden and unexpected manner. Viewing her body in the M.E.’s storage facility had pushed them over the edge, causing the grief they’d been barely holding at bay to overwhelm them. They sobbed and wept openly, the mother gripping her husband’s hand while he used the other to try to stifle his own weeping. Lewis regarded them with one eye while making certain he could see Sgt. Noble clearly in his peripheral vision. The interim leader was clearly uncomfortable around such an overt display of emotion. He masked it well, though. His face seemed calm and patient but there were tell-tale signs in the way he shifted in his seat and his fingers twitched. His dark brown eyes were hard and, from time to time, his mask slipped slightly when he gnawed his cheek. It was only sheer luck that the Pattersons had not noticed the overt discomfort. Well, luck and the fact that Lewis excelled at comforting victims and their families. It had been one of the things his former bosses used to keep him around even when he insisted on ignoring policy and doing what would work instead of blindly following departmental or union regulations.
“Once again, you have our deepest sympathies,” Lewis repeated. “If there is anything we can do to help you during this time, please let me know.”
“Us,” Jim muttered. “If you can’t get in touch with Sergeant Harding, feel free to contact Alex or myself.”
“When will we be able to take her back home?”
“It’s too soon to say, I’m afraid,” Lewis replied carefully. “Until we have her killer behind bars, we have to keep your daughter here. However, I will look into trying to get you a better answer than that. I know how difficult it must be to not know when you’ll be able to begin making funeral arrangements.”
“Who would do this to her?” her mother asked, her voice shrill with near-hysteria. “Amanda didn’t have any enemies and she wasn’t into drugs or anything.”
“Did she have any friends or ex-boyfriends who might be upset with her?” Jim asked, switching instantly into investigator mode. Lewis managed to repress a sigh. The last thing the Pattersons needed was to be interrogated with seeing him go off on his boss being a close second on that list. “Perhaps some former acquaintances who harbor a grudge — no matter how small or insignificant it seemed to you and your daughter.”
“No,” her father replied quickly. “Nothing like that. Everyone loved Amanda.”
“Well, there was this one boy she’d dated off-and-on over the last year…” her mother said slowly. “He took their relationship a bit more seriously than Amanda did. When she told him she wasn’t interested in moving to Shreveport with him where he had just gotten a job offer, he got very upset with her. She said she thought she’d seen him back down here a month ago.”
“What is his name?” Jim asked, pulling his notepad and pen out of his pocket.
“David Eckels. He worked as a legal assistant in New Orleans before he finally got on as a lawyer for some company in Shreveport. Something in the shipping industry is all I can remember,” Mrs. Patterson said helplessly. “I’m sorry that I didn’t pay better attention. Amanda just wasn’t that serious about him. We never even met him.”
“That’s fine,” Jim nodded. “We’ll see if we can track him down.”
Lewis stood in the doorway to Jim’s private office and studied his new boss. He’d taken a page from the rest of the team and spent a few hours pulling Jim’s records and trying to learn more about the man he now worked for. He’d tried to do the same for Alex Masters but information on him was damned near impossible to find. Even permutations of the name “Alex” had yielded very little. Regardless, Sgt. Noble’s history was an open book to Lewis. Clearing his throat to make his presence known, he managed not to glare at the way that Jim shot him a look of pure annoyance as the chestnut-haired man cradled the phone between his ear and shoulder and gestured for Lewis to enter.
“I can come back later,” Lewis mouthed silently. Jim shook his head and gestured more emphatically for Lewis to enter and be seated.
“I’m on hold,” Jim mouthed back as he reached over and put the phone on speaker before setting the handset back in the cradle. Tinny muzak poured through the speaker and Jim grimaced. “If I turn the volume down any further, I won’t hear it when someone finally comes on. You would think though,” he grimaced, “that as much money as the phone company charges, they’d find better music to annoy us with.”
“Don’t say that,” Lewis teased, “otherwise all those jingle writers and failed jazz musicians will cry.”
“What do you need, Harding?” Jim asked, his tone brisk, annoyed, and businesslike.
“I’m just curious as to how a child prodigy with two Ph.D.s manages to reach his thirties without learning how not to be a complete ass in front of a victim’s family,” Lewis said, his tone light, silk covering a steely blade. His icy blue eyes bored directly into Jim’s frozen amber gaze.
“My degrees are in Criminal Justice and Astrophysics, not handholding and love-ins,” Jim winced.
“With Masters in Philosophy, Legal Studies, Biology, Accounting, Computer Science, and Linguistics. You speak twelve languages, hold four patents, and are worth nearly two million dollars…”
“You forgot my degrees in the Classics, Chemistry, Political Science, the Humanities, and Business Management as well as the JD I’m working on.”
“Suffice it to say, somewhere along the line, you should have learned how not to be an ass.”
Jim steepled his fingers and began tapping them against each other. He leaned back in his chair. Lewis could have laughed at how cliché the other man’s pose was. “I see someone has done a background check on me. I also see that someone didn’t bother to pull my personnel file and see all of the fun notes in there.”
“Actually, I did pull it. Just haven’t had time to read it yet.”
“It’s best read while on the can,” Jim quipped. “Since you haven’t read it, you wouldn’t know that the reason I have all those degrees is because I’m terrible with people. All of us in this department are.”
“Even Lt. Masters?”
“The worst of us. Alex has yet to go more than thirty seconds without making some smartass remark or doing something that offends normal people. It’s charming, in its own way. We’re facts, figures, and theory people here, Seregant. We’re not emotional at all nor do we worship regulations and rules unless they work and make sense. We’ll argue a position we don’t agree with just because the argument itself is interesting and the worst thing you can do is bore us. Emotions bore us.”
“How the hell can you be a detective without being able to establish some kind of rapport with your subjects?”
“Oh that? That’s acting. It’s an acceptable form of lying to accomplish a goal,” Jim shrugged dismissively. “Alex and I realized that we would need to learn to pretend to be normal in certain circumstances so we took some acting classes back in college. We’ve had everyone else do the same. You won’t need them, though, because for you, it’s not an act. We can fake being sympathetic, angry, cold, whatever. Since we control the environment most of the time and rarely have had to deal with the victim’s families other than interviewing them for reports, it’s not an issue most of the time.”
“And yet you still had to bring me on.”
“Because we still have to deal with the administration and the occasional victim family for a homicide or sexual assault,” Jim admitted candidly. “Those are the situations where we break down. That’s why we need you. The fact that you’re a damned good and highly competent detective is a bonus because we don’t have to discount you entirely. Alex originally wanted to just hire a secretary or assistant but we couldn’t get approval on that so we decided to expand our merry little band of misfits.”
“I see,” Lewis said, studying Jim carefully. The man was being perfectly frank. “Knowledge of your weakness is a strength?”
“Something like that. Look, we come across as arrogant. I have two doctorates. Alex has four. Yann has an MD and a JD, Jonah speaks fifty languages, Sam can reprogram any computer, and David can play any musical instrument ever invented. Between the six of us, we know damned near everything and we know it. However, between the six of us, we also know that we aren’t normal and we don’t get people. We know what we know but we also know what we don’t know. Make sense?”
“I guess.”
“Was that all you came in here for?” Jim asked, quirking his eyebrows.
“Actually, no,” Lewis laughed. “I found Eckels.”
“Jeez,” Jim groaned as he reached over and hung up the phone, “you couldn’t have opened with that?”
Jim stood outside the interview room looking through the one-way mirror watching as Lewis and Sam interviewed David Eckels. Tucked under his arm was the file they’d amassed on the man in the past few hours while they waited on him to drive down from Shreveport. This interview would, more likely than not, remain an interview. Eckels had a solid alibi for last night. Also, based on his credit reports, the man considered salad suitable only for rabbits. He also had no real motive considering that he had begun dating a woman he’d met through a colleague. Still, Jim planned to check her out — an insecure girlfriend could have motive to kill off any perceived competition. For his part, Eckels’s shock at finding out about Amanda’s death seemed unfeigned and his confusion over why he was being questioned about it made Jim think the man was probably innocent. Seeing that Harding had everything well in hand, Jim moved back down the hallway to sit and go over the rest of the files he had with him.
It would be a good way to keep his mind off the case they all wanted to be working — the one case they were forbidden from even thinking about.
Shaking his head to clear the thoughts away, Jim scanned through the files quickly. One name kept cropping up from the other interviews — Jean-François Blanchard. From what he could see, Jean had some connection to Patterson and Eckels. Her neighbors said he’d been over several times in the past month but were all fairly certain he was not romantically involved with the victim. Lewis had notes to ask Eckels for more information on Blanchard. Until the interview was done, though, Jim knew that chasing that lead would be like banging his head against a brick wall.
“How’s Alex?” Yann asked quietly, startling Jim from his thoughts.
“She’s fine. All things considered,” Jim muttered, giving Yann a look of pure frustration.
“That’s good to hear. Lil staying with her now that Cher Mère is on her way back east?”
“Lil and I are both crashing there for the next little bit. Makes my commute a bit shorter and gives Lil the chance to play sister. She’ll love that.”
“Jonah and David pulled up something on the surveillance cameras from the 7-11 just down the block. You might want to come see it.”
“Why? What is it?”
“Well, we think we found the murder weapon. Maybe the murderer as well.”
“Jesus Harold Christ,” Jim swore as he stood up. “You people need to learn how to prioritize.”