Dead Center (The Rookie Club Book 1) (14 page)

Next, she called over to Homicide and asked for Hailey Wyatt. All morning she realized she owed Hailey an apology. It wasn't Hailey's fault that Jamie was in the position to be considered a suspect in Natasha's death. It wasn't anyone's fault but Jamie's. Well, Tim's. Tim. His bail hearing was set for an hour from now.

"I'm confident we'll get bail," Goldman had told her when they spoke after he'd met Tim. But in his voice, Jamie heard a tiny catch she'd never noticed before. Insecurity? She didn't ask. She'd know soon enough.

"Hailey's over at building 606," the secretary told Jamie after she identified herself.

"On Devlin?"

"Nope. Dennig," she said with the cheery voice of someone talking about today's lunch specials.

"Dennig? Who's that?"

"New one. She'll be there awhile. You want to leave a message?"

Jamie declined. She preferred to see Hailey in person, owed her that much. She and Hailey
had
been something like friends when the Rookie Club began. Female bonding, someone termed it when the group grew to a count of ten women. The word sounded weird: "bonding." Jamie had never bonded. Until that night, she'd never been outside a locker room or restroom with a group of only women. It had been a year and a half since she'd gone. Somehow female bonding had lost its appeal after she'd found Devlin in bed with Tim.

Halfway to Hunters Point, Jamie's phone rang. She recognized Chip Washington's extension.

"Hey, Chip. What's going on?"

"I heard about Worley."

Jamie frowned. She didn't want to be consoled about her ex-husband's arrest. "Are you handling the case?"

"No. Anderson's got it. I hear he came to your house from the scene, covered in blood. After their fight at the banquet, Christ—"

"I don't want to talk about it, Chip."

There was momentary silence. "I'm sorry, Jamie. I just wanted to make sure you were doing all right. Between Osbourne and Marchek that night and then this—well, I was just checking."

"I'm fine. I'll be fine," she said. "I'll talk to you later."

"Yeah, okay. Bye."

Jamie dropped the phone on the seat. She would be fine. This was about Tim, not about her. Her job was to catch Marchek. Devlin was someone else's problem. Somehow, though, it felt like she was about to get sucked into the cyclone.

It was almost one when Jamie arrived at the lab. Outside, they were having a rare cloudless November day and she was sweating under her blazer.

"You seen Hailey?" she asked at the lab.

"Down in the bay."

Jamie walked down the corridor that led into an open warehouse the building's occupants called the bay. Mostly, the bay housed patrol cars and the tank that the Special Ops team used for heavy mob situations.

Voices echoed from behind a partition wall. The Special Ops task force often performed drills in the bay. Ran obstacle courses while carrying heavy packs like ruck courses. Other times they rolled tractor tires up and down ramps, laying the tire down every fifteen or twenty yards to do jumps and squats and pushups around it. Other times, they simply did shuttle runs from one end of the bay to the other. Just watching them was enough for Jamie to feel like she'd pulled something. No sign of Specials Ops now. Instead, a metallic green minivan sat on a sheet of clear plastic half the size of a basketball court.

Hailey Wyatt backed out of the van. Her hair was pinned under a nurse's hairnet. Over her suit, she wore a clear plastic raincoat and yellow galoshes. As Jamie walked toward her, she saw that the soles of the yellow galoshes were wet. They slurped as Hailey tracked dark prints across the clear plastic tarp. The stench confirmed the dark stuff was blood.

Even in the getup, Hailey exuded sexuality. The curves of her tiny waist and large breasts were visible under the coat. Her wavy hair was tucked under the pale green hairnet. Rosy cheeks and a sprinkling of freckles seemed to only enhance her appeal.

Hailey had been one of those women Jamie avoided at first. Truth be told, she'd avoided all of them but some more than others. The sexy ones, in particular, made her feel uncomfortable, awkward. Like Devlin, Hailey looked too perfect to be real and certainly too attractive to be someone Jamie would want to be around. Women shaped like Hailey Wyatt used their assets to gain favors, tossed their hips and winked to make things happen. Certainly Devlin was that way. The exacting method she used to toss her dark hair over one shoulder. The little pout of her lips. And yet, Hailey wasn't that way. Unlike Devlin, Hailey seemed unaware of her allure. She was neither coy nor a flirt.

When a case finally brought them together, Jamie learned Hailey was grounded and confident and fair. And she was kind. But whether she noticed it or not, Jamie had seen the effect Hailey had on men. They paid careful attention. Jamie had her share of attention but never like Hailey's. She wondered how Hailey could possibly ignore it.

Jamie approached the minivan, nodded to a tech who was working at a folding table covered in the same plastic as the ground. He wore a lab coat stained red. He gently rocked a sand sifter, searching for evidence the way pioneers had for nuggets of gold. Beside him sat the small vacuum he'd used to collect evidence from the car. It was a red Dirt Devil.

Hailey turned to Jamie, gave a little wave. "Hey." She seemed to hold no grudge.

Jamie apologized anyway. "I'm sorry about the other day. I was an ass."

Hailey shrugged. "Come take a look at my latest."

Jamie stepped to the edge of the plastic, careful to avoid the bloody footprints. The van was a new model with sliding doors on either side. Both were open, but there was no breeze to move the air and dissipate the smell. It sat pungent, ripe, and completely unmistakable. Death.

"Who was it?" Jamie asked.

"Abby and Hank Dennig. It's her car."

Jamie shook her head. The names meant nothing.

"She's a mother of three. Drops the kids at their private school at eight thirty this morning, goes home, and parks in the basement of her building off of Broadway. Never makes it out of the garage."

"Leads?" Jamie asked.

"Oh, I didn't mention? He was dead in the car, too."

Jamie raised an eyebrow. "The husband?"

"One and the same," Hailey continued. "From what I've found so far, I'm guessing they killed each other. She was beat pretty badly but most of the blood is his. She had a letter opener."

Jamie imagined a fight between a large man bearing fists and a small woman with a letter opener. The odds never seemed in the women's favor, but she didn't know the Dennigs. "Letter opener is kind of a strange thing to carry in the car, isn't it?"

"I thought so, too," Hailey agreed. "But it seems it wasn't strange for her. It was engraved from Daddy, and she carried it so she could open mail when she was waiting for the kids at school or soccer practice."

"And to think I've been using my finger to open mail."

Hailey grinned, a spray of little lines around her eyes crinkling. "Hard on the manicure, though."

"She had the letter opener. Why not just stab him after the first blow? He know she had it?"

"There's a lot we don't know," Hailey admitted.

Jamie looked back at the bloody minivan, happy for the distraction from her own thoughts of Tim and Devlin. "They meet in the garage?"

"Took the kids to school together," Hailey responded.

"Together?"

Hailey followed Jamie's gaze. "They used to get coffee together some days."

"So if both are dead, it's a closed case. Why all the bother?"

"You heard of GGUNRA?"

Jamie paused. "Well, any acronym that ends in NRA is familiar."

"San Francisco's chapter. Abby is the president's daughter."

Jamie shook her head. "Too bad Daddy didn't give her a nice little .22 instead of the letter opener. She might still be alive."

Another tech cut cloth off the center seat with a pair of heavy scissors. He dropped the fabric square into a brown paper bag, crumpled the top of the bag closed, and wrote on it with a black Sharpie marker.

"Looking for signs of a third party," Jamie said, thinking out loud.

Hailey nodded. "Abby's father doesn't believe they would have done this."

"Be easier to blame a random homicidal maniac."

"Right," Hailey agreed. "One we can send up to the gas chamber."

"So searching for a third party," Jamie continued for her.

"And you can imagine how many hair samples there are—we got kids, kids' friends, and all the junk they pick up," Hailey went on. "Plus, I think they had a couple of dogs."

Just then, a tech walked toward them. He held up a clear plastic Ziploc bag.

Jamie watched the way he stared at Hailey while he spoke—another man infatuated. "Found this wedged down in the kid's car seat."

Hailey focused on what looked like a small button pin, never even glancing at the tech.

Jamie moved forward, read it over her shoulder. The pin was white with blue lettering. Around the outside it read, "Wage peace, not war." In the middle, inside a circle, were the letters "NRA" with a fat blue line through them.

"Probably not a gift from Grandpa," Jamie commented, stepping back.

Hailey's phone went off and she looked down at her bloody attire. "Dang it." She snapped off her gloves, removed her raincoat and galoshes, and left them on a rubber mat. Last, she removed the hairnet and pushed a dark strand of hair off her face with the back of her hand. The tech watched her as if it were a striptease though she performed with utilitarian efficiency.

By then, her phone had stopped ringing. She dug it out of her pocket, put her finger up to Jamie, and touched the screen. "This is Hailey Wyatt. I just got a call—"

There was a moment of silence as Hailey's gaze met Jamie's. "Perfect. I'm on my way now." With that, she ended the call and turned to the tech. "Bag that. We'll need to run it for prints."

He nodded.

"I'm going to the lab. Be back in ten." To Jamie she said, "Come with."

She started walking and Jamie caught up.

"Tim make bail?" Hailey asked.

"Hearing's probably over now. I haven't heard." She looked at the inspector. "What's at the lab?"

"Bunch of results came in earlier," she answered. "I'm still waiting on Natasha's toxicology, but I thought you might want to hear about the others."

Jamie didn't register her surprise that Hailey was sharing the case details with her. Instead, she asked the obvious next question. "Any indications she was drugged?"

"None."

Jamie stopped. "Tim didn't kill her."

Hailey nodded, waved her on. "I'm not convinced he did. I sent a CSU tech to the jail earlier so they could take some shots and a mold of his head wound. We also took a swab of the wound to search for foreign material. CSU's trying to work out what he was hit with, and we're looking for other suspects. The evidence isn't good for him though." She paused to look at Jamie. "I just want to be honest. Covered in blood. His prints on her. Going home to shower."

Jamie nodded as Hailey listed off the reasons to suspect Tim.

"And we all saw the fight."

Jamie thought about how angry Tim had looked at the awards banquet, how pleased Devlin had seemed when she'd blown him off.

"You know anyone who stutters?" Hailey asked.

Jamie remembered Tim's comment about the words he'd heard just before he was struck sounding like a stutter. "I don't, but I've read that it's not particularly uncommon among criminals."

Hailey nodded. "Yeah. Violent offenders. I've read the same stats."

"You have a time of death?" Jamie asked.

"It happened between eleven and one. The coroner is trying to narrow it down more. It helps that she kept the temperature in her office at exactly sixty-six degrees. Means the medical examiner can work with body temperature. Tim claims he arrived about twelve forty. She was on the ground. He was leaning over her when someone struck him."

"I know."

Hailey glanced at her.

"He came to my house afterwards. He was freaked out."

Hailey frowned.

"He swore he'd come forward immediately. I didn't want to tell you yesterday morning because I knew it would look better if he did it himself." She paused. "And I knew he would."

"And if he hadn't?"

"I'd have told you before the end of the day."

Hailey didn't respond.

"Also, I can provide an alibi for the whole night if you need it. I didn't help Tim. I just told him to turn his ass in."

Hailey opened the hall door and let Jamie pass in front of her. "You were with someone?"

"I was online for most of it."

The door clicked shut behind them. Their shoes ticked against the linoleum floor.

"Doing what?" Hailey asked.

"I belong to a group."

"Like a chat group?"

She nodded. "For cases—other cops."