Damn, the cats!
She grabbed a can and started opening it.
‘Two minutes and I’ll be ready.’
Her cats, Sabrina and Shelby, came running at the sound, winding around Jake’s legs as she prepared their breakfast. He pulled up a chair while he waited, and Sabrina promptly jumped onto his lap and settled herself down. She loved Jake. Most animals did. Make that animals and women. Sullivan had a way about him.
‘So what time did you leave the bar?’ he asked, rubbing the cat’s ears, making her purr loudly.
‘Around one… I think.’
If she was honest, Rebecca wasn’t exactly sure what time she’d arrived home. After the fight with Alan, she’d knocked back a lot of bourbon.
One of the detectives in the department was retiring and they had been out for a few leaving drinks. Everything had been going well until Alan had shown up.
They didn’t have plans and he knew she was going for drinks with some of the guys. That he had chosen to show up uninvited pissed her off. It was as if he didn’t trust her. She knew he was jealous of Jake. Not that he had any reason to be; Jake Sullivan was like the brother she’d never had. There was no denying he was a good-looking guy, and yes, it was true he wasn’t short of female attention, but it had never been that way between them. Unfortunately, Alan didn’t buy it and had been insecure since the moment the two of them had been partnered together.
It didn’t help that he wanted to move things faster than Rebecca. They had been dating for six months, introduced by mutual friends; her mother loved him, and he was a good man, safe, reliable and loving. He had been dropping hints they move in together for the past month and was desperate to take her to Florida on vacation with his mother.
Still Rebecca held back.
She had been growing irritated with him over the past couple of weeks. Last night was the final straw and when he had shown up uninvited, believing he could persuade her to leave her friends at the bar and go to dinner with him, she had snapped.
Alan didn’t do fighting, which annoyed Rebecca even more, as he had stood in the bar and taken her anger, making her look like the bad guy she knew she was being. Eventually she had told him to go.
He had, calmly, because everything Alan did was calm and methodical, and she had drowned her anger, frustration and guilt in a bottle of bourbon.
Jake had left before her. He had offered her a ride home, but at the time Rebecca was hell-bent on staying. He had left one of the other homicide detectives, his friend and racquet ball partner, Brad Kramer, in charge of getting her home.
It was the getting home bit that was still mostly a blur.
Alan hadn’t called since the fight. No doubt he was waiting for her to make the first move.
He could be waiting a while.
‘So what do we know about the vic?’ she asked, plucking Sabrina from Jake’s lap and setting both cats in front of their food bowls. She was done thinking about last night and Alan, and wanted to focus the few operating brain cells she had on the case at hand.
‘Young male, multiple stab wounds. Body was dumped in an open grave. So, have you made things up with Alan?’
‘No. Do we know who found the body?’
‘Not yet. Caretaker I guess.’
Rebecca grabbed her sunglasses and keys. ‘Best we go find out.’
Vic was sitting in the back of a squad car, wrapped in a blanket and feeling sorry for himself, when Angell and Sullivan showed up. Mrs Michaels had been fussing around him since she’d arrived with the pastor half an hour before, helping him to get cleaned up, and he was munching his way through the tub of chocolate chip cookies she had made in an attempt to shake off the shock of what had happened.
Angell clocked him as soon as they pulled up at the church in Sullivan’s silver Audi and he could see her lips curve as she made her way over to the car.
‘Vic? What the hell are you doing here?’
The two of them had been in Mahoney’s last night, but only because they were out for drinks at the same leaving party. They didn’t frequent each other’s company much these days; Angell was too busy hanging out with her detective friends.
While Vic didn’t begrudge his former partner’s promotion, he knew it was only because of the high-profile Alphabet Killings and the fact she’d happened to be in the right place at the right time that her career had fast tracked so quickly. Had he been the one to unmask the killer, Rebecca Angell would still be in uniform patrolling the streets.
‘I was the one who found the body,’ he told her through a mouthful of cookie.
‘You found the body?’
Vic didn’t appreciate the slightly amused, almost disbelieving tone in her voice.
‘Is there something wrong with that?’ he demanded, immediately on the defensive. Six years had passed but Rebecca Angell still had the ability to rub him up the wrong way.
Mrs Michaels, who had been standing close by, chose that moment to pipe up.
‘Officer Boaz fell into the grave on top of the body. Poor man, it must have been such a terrible shock.’
‘You fell in the grave?’ This was from Angell’s partner, Jake Sullivan, who had joined them and was looking all smug and GQ behind his shades. ‘Seriously?’
Beside him, Angell tried to disguise her snigger with a cough.
Vic hated Sullivan, Dixie asshole. He’d transferred up from Atlanta a few years back with his cocky, laid-back attitude and stupid cowboy accent and seemed to think he could slot right in.
Vic was a firm believer that outsiders had to earn their place; it had galled him to see Sullivan settling in with that easy way of his and making himself at home on Vic’s turf.
After the hellish last few hours all he needed was to have these two idiots laughing at him and questioning every word he was telling them.
The shock of landing in the grave had been bad enough, but when he realised there was a body in there with him he had panicked, and what with scrambling around in the dark and trying to get out of the muddy and slippery hole, it had taken an eternity to get back to the car. It wasn’t until he was back there and reaching for his keys that he realised they were missing. Cold dread had crept up his spine as it dawned on him they must have fallen from his pocket when he landed in the grave. He had looked longingly at his cell phone sitting on the dashboard inside the locked car. His clothes were uncomfortably damp and heavy with dirt and God knew what else, and he couldn’t go home until he’d reported the body.
Making a spur of the moment decision, he had used his elbow to break the driver’s window and retrieve his phone. Only to find out he didn’t have a signal. Cursing loudly he had wandered up and down the road holding his cell at all different angles, praying for a couple of bars. Just one would have done.
But nothing.
Grim realisation set in. He had two choices: walk back to town or go retrieve his keys.
Had he known the second option would result in a half-an-hour mud wrestle with a corpse and still not produce any keys, he would have started the walk back to town straightaway.
But he hadn’t.
It had been nearing five, with the sun already rising, when a mud-caked Victor Boaz had finally managed to wave down a car on the road leading back into the city and raise the alarm.
When he finally got back to his apartment he promised himself a well-deserved beer and the longest, hottest shower ever.