Cuts Like a Knife: A Novel (A Kristen Conner Mystery Book 1) (29 page)

“You must be trading notes with Barry Soto.”

“Barry Soto. Haven’t heard that name in a long time. What’s that tough old bird up to these days?”

“Apparently the same thing as you. Trying to keep me alive.”

43

“I’VE BEEN SOBER for eighteen years, seven months, five days, and about seventeen hours.”

I’m in a crowd pushing a hundred people at Holy Family Cathedral. I like these meetings because there’s not nearly as much pressure to share here. If everyone said something we’d be here all night.

I’m looking for a killer and have two significant problems. First, I have no clue what my killer looks like. I’m not beating myself up over that. You don’t kill fifty people like our Cutter Shark has unless you blend in. Second, the guy speaking has me mesmerized. It’s Big Tony. I didn’t know he was working the AA meetings. He tells a much better story than I do. With the way he checked off his years, months, and hours, he might have been Walter’s sponsor. I’m supposed to keep one eye on my surroundings to look for anything out of the ordinary. But all I can hear right now is Scalia.

“I know those times to be a fact because I looked it up this morning,” he continues. “I look it up every day. That way I never take for granted the gift of sobriety. It also reminds me to say a prayer for the soul of the man who helped me get my life back, get my wife back, get my kids back, get my job back.

“I hated the son of a . . . the son of a gun. He was constantly in my face. You’d have hated him, too. But man, did I need him. I don’t know why he stuck with me, but he did. Even after I took a wild swing at him one night and broke his jaw.”

I freeze in my seat. That might be a true story. Dad had his jaw broken at work. I was probably only eleven or twelve when it happened. The docs wired his mouth closed for almost three months. All he could do was drink liquids and pureed food through a straw. He was never that talkative anyway, unless the Bears were on TV, but we didn’t hear a word out of him the whole time. First thing he said to us when they pulled the wires out was, “I needed to lose twenty pounds anyway.” That was it and then life went back to normal, the event forgotten.

Did Big Tony throw a punch at Dad?

“I hated him for making me own up to my problems. And I loved him. Like a brother. Even if he did have a little Irish in him. I grew up in a big family with eight kids. But no brothers; seven sisters if you can believe that. He was my brother and I thank him for what he did for me. I light a candle for him every Sunday morning. I miss him. I pray you have a friend like him. So, my name is Tony, and I’m an alcoholic. God bless you.”

He makes the sign of the cross and takes a seat. The meeting goes another hour. I forget to look for my killer. I don’t hear anything else anybody says.

I don’t even know what to pray after hearing that.

44

“DINNER TONIGHT? MY treat.”

I look up from the conference room table where I’ve been reading the Factor Four notebook again—the city of Jacksonville for us mere mortals. It’s Major Reynolds. It’s been three weeks since our maybe date. We had an okay time. He did a lot of the talking, which was fine with me. He’s an impressive guy. Graduated from Dartmouth with a BA in Political Science and English Literature, and then he got his law degree at Princeton. Quite the Ivy Leaguer. He never said it directly, but it sounded like there’s a boatload of money in the family, so I get the feeling a public servant’s salary really isn’t going to hamper his lifestyle. Reynolds was polite and interesting. After that long work week, I’m not sure I reciprocated on being equally interesting.

“If it’s your treat, does that make it a date?”

“Based on the lead up to last time we went out, it would help me if you could give me a hint if there’s a right answer,” he says with arched eyebrows. “If you’d like it to be a date, it’s a date. If you don’t want it to be a date, then it’s just two work colleagues winding down after another long week.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I say. “Give me a couple hours to finish paperwork and we’ll figure out what it is later.”

“I’m very comfortable with that,” Reynolds says, smiling. “Now, just tell me what a couple hours means. It’s five now. If I picked you up at seven, is that a couple of hours?”

“I’m heading downstairs to do some punching. Eight o’clock is probably a couple of hours.”

“I’ll be at your place at eight sharp.”

Van Guten walks into the makeshift office as he says that. She looks at me appraisingly with just the hint of a smirk.

“You two come up with anything like a hot new lead?” she asks.

“Well if we did,” Reynolds answers quickly, “you’d already have heard about it.”

I nod to Van Guten and exit in my typical graceful fashion, bumping into the corner of the table hard enough to knock over an almost full cup of coffee someone left sitting in here and spilling it on papers all over the shared conference table.
Crud.

Van Guten takes charge and orders the junior FBI officer who just entered the room to go get something to clean up the mess. I hoof it back to my cubicle.

• • •

“Hit it! Hit it! Hit it! I don’t feel nothing. Nothing. Give me something. Hit it!”

I’m trying to remember why I thought Barry Soto was a nice guy. Just because he was friends with Dad? He is killing me. He wanted me to break a sweat, so he put me on a steep-grade climb at seven miles an hour on the treadmill. I think he forgot about me so I kept running. I did three and a half miles straight up Pike’s Peak for thirty minutes. Then it was twenty minutes of core training, fifteen minutes of grappling, and then on to punches and kicks, which is where I’m at right now.

We’ve done the kicks. Now we’re working on cross-body punches. He’s holding up two pads and screaming at me to hit. Let me say, this part of the workout is a great workout all by itself. When you’re already at the point of total muscle fatigue, it’s torture.

“Don’t stop. Hit! Don’t you quit on me, Kristen. This guy is after you. He ain’t quitting. Who’s got the last punch? Hit! Don’t you quit on me. Hit!”

When he shouts, “Okay, finished!” I lean over. I want to vomit. I think I taste acid in the back of my throat.

“Great job, honey. Great job. Great workout. Hey, straighten up. Get your lungs open. Breathe. Great job, Kristen. You still got some fight in you.”

I’m gasping for air. My heart is racing. My legs and arms feel like pudding. I contemplate fainting. I would, but then I’d have to get up again. Soto brings a towel and wipes sweat off my face. My hands are on my knees again.

“Stand up straight,” he says crossly. “Get your arms over your head. Breathe.”

It’s working. I think I’m going to live. I look up at the wall clock. Six-thirty. I’m going to have to get moving if I’m going to be ready to go out to dinner by eight. I was going to shower here, but I’m thinking I may throw a towel on my seat so I can hustle home and get cleaned up there.

“You really are doing great, Kristen.”

“Mr. Barry, I think you are trying to kill me,” I say.

“No, I’m the guy who’s going to keep you alive,” he says with a laugh. “Hope you don’t have big plans because you are going to be really tired tonight.”

I consider asking him to write a note that I can hand to Reynolds to establish that there’s a reason I am the absolute worst date in the universe on a Friday night. I probably should have suggested tomorrow night anyway. I’m tired most Friday nights, whether or not I’ve worked out with Richard Simmons’ evil cousin—the one with a bald head but plenty of hair poking out his ears and nostrils.

“Just my luck,” I answer him. “I’ve got a date.”

“Then you better get out of here,” he chortles. “You ain’t going to be awake past eleven.”

We laugh and I head for the door.

“Kristen!” he calls right before I let the door shut behind me.

I turn back to him as he hustles up to me.

“No, I’m not doing another set of lunges,” I say to him.

He squeezes my upper arm and says, “You could probably use it. But I had a quick question. Did Timmy ever hassle you?”

“Timmy? No, not really,” I answer a little uncertainly.

“What’s ‘not really’ mean?” he asks.

I’m wondering why he’s asking. Did Timmy push another detective for a date too? “Well, this is kind of embarrassing to say, but he did ask me out. I thought he was a little forward, but no big biggie. Why?”

“I don’t know how to break this to you, kiddo, but you aren’t the only one he was a little forward with. I think he asked every female in the building with two legs to her credit to go out with him.”

“So I really didn’t mean as much to him as I thought?” I say with a laugh.

“Like I said, kid, I didn’t know how to break it to you easy. But here’s the thing: I had to let him go.”

“Tough break for him, but it sounds like he asked for it.”

“No doubt, he did,” Soto says. “But bad for me, too. He was rough around the edges but the kid could fight. He’s been the best assistant I’ve ever had.”

“He take it okay?”

“What do you think?”

“Dumb question,” I say with a laugh. “But why are you telling me all this?”

“I guess I wanted to hear that he was as bad as the boss said he was. That’s why I don’t feel so bad about canning him. But he worries me just a little, too. Not sure he’s 100 percent right upstairs.”

“Are any of us?”

“Not me, that’s for sure. I’m an old man still trying to mix it up with young pups. But on Timmy, I think anyone who has had a bad experience with him needs to pay a little extra attention. There’s a reason he’s a great fight trainer . . . he likes to fight.”

• • •

I turn the ignition on my Mazda and enjoy the sound of an engine that starts right up, strong and true. I think about Timmy on the way home. That guy was a force of nature. Fast. Strong. Great anticipation. And I think I know what Mr. Barry was really getting at . . . Timmy is dangerous. Not someone you want to make your enemy.

45

“SO YOU’VE NEVER been married, never lived with a guy, and you have no steady boyfriend in your life. How does that happen with a drop-dead gorgeous, professional, young woman? Are the men in Chicago prone to blindness or is it more a matter of low IQ?”

We’re back on the Magnificent Mile. This time it’s Lawry’s, an old-fashioned restaurant—I really can’t imagine that the waitresses’ mustard-yellow uniforms looked good in the ’40s either—that features prime rib. They wheel a huge silver contraption that looks like a fancy outdoor grill to your table and carve your slab of cow right there in front of you. Reynolds looked a little surprised that I ordered the captain’s cut. He shouldn’t have told me he graduated from Dartmouth, one of those places where blue noses go to college. Knowing he’s from high society makes me suspect that (a) he can afford whatever I want to order and (b) that I’m just a curiosity to him and that he’s more comfortable with sophisticated women from his social strata, ones who order the petite cut.

I’m absolutely starving. I had a cup of coffee and half a bagel for breakfast, which wasn’t a bad start to the day. But Don and I met with Blackshear and Martinez from 9:00 a.m. to 1 p.m. to review notes and assignments. Someone put an apple on my desk—a peace offering from Shelly, I suspect, the department administrative assistant who knows I am closing in on her for writing those notes for everyone to read—and that was all I had for lunch. I had a granola bar late afternoon, but that was six hours ago and I’m pretty sure all 220 calories got burned off in that excruciating workout.

“They’re both blind and have low IQs . . . and maybe Washington, DC political-types will say anything to flatter,” I respond.

He gives me an admiring smile. “Not bad, Detective Conner.”

“Even if I’m not an Ivy League girl?”

“Actually, that would be young lady or woman—never a ‘girl.’ That would not be a politically correct form of expression at an Ivy League institution of higher learning.”

“It’s taken you this long to figure out that I’m not PC?” I ask with an exaggerated roll of my eyes. “What was your GPA anyway?”

“I did well enough.”

“That probably means real high. So did Princeton scholarship you to law school or did your daddy pick up the bill?”

“You know it’s not politically correct to talk about money at the table,” he says with a laugh. “But I will confess, I didn’t pay a dime for law school. I had an uncle pay my way.”

“So you have a rich uncle?”

“Nah—I think my Uncle Sam’s completely broke now.”

I pause and raise my glass of water in salute. “So you’re not from a fabulously wealthy family?” I’m starting to regret my captain’s cut.

“Not quite. But I didn’t take you for a gold digger. Maybe I was wrong.” He leans forward, mock serious. “Does this mean you won’t go out with me on another date?”

“I didn’t know that we had defined this as a date.”

“Oh, you’re right,” he says. “Since it’s your call, you still need to give me the verdict. And just so you know, there’s no pressure. I’m a big boy and can take any answer you give me as long as it is yes.”