“Oh dear,” Chuck murmurs again. “Yes. Of course. Right away. And just an FYI, Roberts’s home security system was turned off with his power. Patrol is trying to find a neighbor who might have a camera angled toward his house.”
“It seems no one has a working camera these days,” I say dryly. “Thanks, Chuck.”
Lang hulks his shoulders forward and growls. “Hulk Smash. The Chuck Smash.”
Chuck looks at him as if he’s crazy. He’s not wrong.
A few minutes later, Lang and I are in his Ford Mustang, part of a pilot program that allows a few detectives to use their own vehicle, fully outfitted with police equipment. All part of an undercover job he did two years back that almost got him killed. He revs the engine and glances over at me. “My gut’s roaring louder than my car, and I don’t like what it’s saying.” He backs us out of the parking space with a squeal of tires.
Lang has never been small on dramatics, but in this case, it feels rather appropriate.
Chapter 5
Roberts lives, or lived, about ten hot August minutes from the precinct—well, ten minutes without traffic, which is something that happens in dreams, not reality. Hellish traffic is the way of the world in Austin these days, and I adjust my air vent, willing the coolness to follow. While I wait for that world wonder, I reach for the file in my bag, only to find an extra chocolate bar. In an effort to save it from melting, I open it and hand half to Lang.
He gives it a side-eye. “You and your chocolate,” he murmurs, but he doesn’t hesitate to grab his hunk of sugar.
“It was melting,” I say. “We must save the chocolate. It saves the world, or at least my sanity. It might cause me to run about ten more miles a week than I would otherwise, but it’s a small price to pay.” I open the case file and start tabbing through the documents. “We have no camera footage at the crime scene, which is a three-story retail building with a bookstore at street level and a small theater on a basement level. There was a poetry reading in that theater the night of the murder.”
“That explains the poem,” Lang concludes.
“Maybe,” I mutter. “I’m not sure it’s that simple.” I leave that thought dangling in the air, for now, ready to be plucked and examined later. “The victim’s apartment, where he lived and died, was on the top level.”
“Back to the topic of camera footage. This man lived and worked in a retail building and had no camera footage? In downtown Austin? He was smart enough to run a business. Surely he was smart enough to have had cameras.”
I thumb through a few more documents, the air finally blowing blissfully cold. “Looks like he did have cameras installed, but they were conveniently offline the night he died.”
“Compliments of the same person who gave him a permanent sleeping pill, I bet.”
“Agreed,” I say, continuing through the file, and when the car idles at a stoplight behind an eternally long row of cars, I angle in Lang’s direction. “Roberts is a good detective. He covered a lot of material quickly. And he already pinpointed a person of interest.”
“Well, hell. That works. Who?”
“He wrote ‘the professor’ with no other name referenced, but the interesting thing is that he interviewed everyone who attended that poetry reading with one exception.”
“The professor,” he assumes.
“Right. He really wanted to interview whoever this person is.”
Lang shifts us into gear behind the now moving traffic. “Is there a description?”
“The lights were dim in the theater and directed toward the stage, so all we have is a vague description of a man who sat in the back row. Everyone said he ‘seemed’ to be tall, though no one saw him standing, so take that with a grain of salt.”
“And?”
“Average weight with dark hair. That’s all. No one seems to have seen him when the lights were up.”
“Or standing,” he grumbles. “Figures. So we have no DNA, a vague description that could be anyone, and a nickname of a man that no one really saw. Jesus. I thought you said Roberts did a good job.”
“He did cover a lot of ground in a short few days. And we just got the file. There could be more here that I haven’t uncovered.” I tab through the evidence list. “We bagged mixed drink glasses used during the reading that are presently in line for DNA testing. I’m going to check the status.” I dial the crime lab in a short, useless contact that has me disconnecting with a groan. “We’re in line, but there’s a backlog. Note to self: go to the forensics lab and do not leave until my testing gets priority.”
Lang just grunts. That’s his way. He saves the explosions for less opportune times, like crime scenes that require decorum that he forgets exists.
I scan the file and find a big gap in our investigation that needs to be fixed. I make a few more calls and arrange to have patrol collect the one thing that Roberts seems to have missed early on: a request for voluntary DNA from everyone at the poetry reading.
“Roberts didn’t collect that DNA, huh?” Lang asks when I finally put my phone away. “Seems like a first step to me.”
“Yes, it is,” I confirm. “And no, he didn’t. I’m not sure how he bypassed such an important step.”
“Maybe he didn’t do that great of a job, after all. Maybe something had him distracted, like dirty detective work.”
He’s back to connecting him to my father, and I’m not going to go there right now. “I don’t know what’s going on with Roberts, but it doesn’t add up.”
“Are you suggesting he’s our killer? Because he’s a damn cop, Jazz.”
“Who you just suggested was dirty.”
“Dirty is one thing. A monster is another. We’re looking for a professor anyway. You said so yourself.”
“Actually, Roberts said so.”
“It’s not Roberts,” he snaps.
“We’ll let the evidence lead us to our killer. Which means we need those samples to match them to the DNA on the glasses. And once we find this professor, which we will, we need to be able to prove he was at the event, which means isolating his DNA.”
“Now, it’s handled. And he’s still missing.” On that note, Lang pulls us into the driveway of a small, brown, brick house that I assume to be Roberts’s home. I shove the file next to the seat. “Why am I nervous?” I ask without reaching for the door.
“Because you’re a girl,” he says, a joke he tells just because I hate it. Yes, partners are a bit like siblings, or so I hear. I’ve never had a sibling. Just a man I call Lang because he hates it. “And,” he adds, “because Roberts is in trouble. It’s in the air.” He pops his door open and gets out of the car.