Cuff Me(40)

“How’s Jill?” Marc asked before Vincent could press the issue. “Rumor has it she’s getting married.”

Well played, Big Brother. Well played.

“Yup.” Vincent’s voice was curt.

Marc didn’t take the hint. “And how do we feel about that?”

“We, being the Moretti collective, or…?”

“Good point,” Marc said. “I already know how the rest of the Morettis feel about it. How are you handling the news?”

Vincent slouched back on the couch. “Not much to handle. My colleague is getting married. Not exactly earth-shattering.”

Marc snorted. “Really? That’s where you’re going with this? Jill’s a colleague now?”

“She’s my partner.”

“I know who and what she is,” Marc said quietly. “I also know who and what she is to you.”

Do you? Because I sure as f*ck don’t know.

“Can we not talk about this?” Vincent grumbled.

“Sure,” Marc said easily. “How about you tell me about this case you and your colleague are working on.”

That, Vincent could do.

Hell, he needed to do it. He’d been staring at his boards for hours now and couldn’t shake the sense that something was just out of reach…

He filled Marc in on the Lenora Birch case.

Told him of finding the body but without a single sense of what might have gone down. Told him that they’d interviewed all of the usual suspects—ex-lovers, ex-husbands, jealous ex-lovers of Lenora’s ex-lovers…

And nothing.

He and Jill had been following Vincent’s suggestion of “starting over.” They’d interviewed everyone again with fresh eyes and ears, and they weren’t any further along than they were before.

Vincent stood to stare at his board, his eyes locking on the wide-eyed stare of a deceased Lenora Birch, silently begging her to tell him her secrets.

He rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know, man,” he told his brother with a shake of his head. “The method—shoving someone over a railing—screams crime of passion. But the complete lack of evidence, the lack of fingerprints, or so much as a hair could mean premeditation…”

“Or someone who’s remarkably cool under pressure,” Marc said. “A crime of passion followed immediately by levelheaded damage control.”

“Could be,” Vin mused. “But that’s the part that’s tripping me up. Crimes of passion generally stem from, well, passion. And Lenora Birch’s love life, while not uncomplicated, hasn’t turned up anything worth killing over. Best as we can tell, she held herself apart from other people. She was… removed.”

“Huh. Someone scared to connect, to get too close to another person,” Marc said. “Sounds… familiar.”

“I don’t think she was scared,” Vincent mused, ignoring Marc’s not-so-subtle jab about Vincent’s lack of relationships. “It’s like she focused her energy somewhere else.”

“Well, we can get that right?” Marc said. “Sure, we Morettis are all husbands or boyfriends or brothers or sons, but aren’t there times when we’re a cop first? When that takes up all of us. Those days when we’re married to the job, you know?”

Vincent froze in the middle of his pacing, a familiar prickle of knowing rippling along his spine.

“Say that last part again,” he commanded his brother.

“Um,” Marc said. “I said we were cops first… that some of us were boyfriends, although of course not you, because you just have a colleague—”

“That’s it,” Vincent said, interrupting yet another jab.

“What’s what?”

“What if it was a crime of passion,” Vincent said excitedly. “But not passion in the sense that we usually think of it. Love and sex and all that.”

“Um—”

Vincent tucked the phone under his ear, moved toward the board, and began plucking down pictures of ex-lovers.

“You said we were married to our job,” Vincent said hurriedly. “What if Lenora Birch was the same. What if the reason she held herself apart from people all those years was because her focus—her heart—was her career.”

“Not following. Remember, of the two of us, you’re the detective who solves crimes. I’m the sergeant who chases bank robbers. Spell it out for me.”

Vincent didn’t respond. His brain was humming with the hunch that had been eluding him this entire case.

“Marc, you’re a f*cking genius,” he muttered.

“Thanks?”

“I gotta go,” Vincent said, hanging up before even giving his brother a chance to say good-bye.

Two seconds later, he was making another phone call, this time to his partner.

“Henley,” he said the second she picked up the phone. “Get your butt over here. Now.”





CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


Jill’s place was a ten-minute walk from Vincent’s apartment, which was handy when he had what she thought of as his “fits.” Those abrupt, semifrantic phone calls that meant he was onto something.

Hadn’t happened in a while though.