Back in Black E-Book

Rhys Ford

• Herausgeber: Dreamspinner Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 399

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

McGinnis Investigations: Book One There are eight million stories in the City of Angels but only one man can stumble upon the body of a former client while being chased by a pair of Dobermans and a deranged psycho dressed as a sheep. That man is Cole McGinnis. Since his last life-threatening case years ago, McGinnis has married the love of his life, Jae-Min Kim, consulted for the LAPD, and investigated cases as a private detective for hire. Yet nothing could have prepared him for the shocking discovery of a dead, grandmotherly woman at his feet and the cascade of murders that follows, even if he should have been used to it by now. Now he's back in the dark world of murder and intrigue where every bullet appears to have his name on it and every answer he digs up seems to only create more questions. Hired by the dead woman's husband, McGinnis has to figure out who is behind the crime spree. As if the twisted case of a murdered grandmother isn't complicated enough, Death is knocking on his door, and each time it opens, Death is wearing a new face, leaving McGinnis to wonder who he can actually trust.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Blurb

Dedication

Acknowledgments

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Epilogue

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Copyright

Back in Black

By Rhys Ford

McGinnis Investigations: Book One

There are eight million stories in the City of Angels but only one man can stumble upon the body of a former client while being chased by a pair of Dobermans and a deranged psycho dressed as a sheep.

That man is Cole McGinnis.

Since his last life-threatening case years ago, McGinnis has married the love of his life, Jae-Min Kim, consulted for the LAPD, and investigated cases as a private detective for hire. Yet nothing could have prepared him for the shocking discovery of a dead, grandmotherly woman at his feet and the cascade of murders that follows, even if he should have been used to it by now.

Now he’s back in the dark world of murder and intrigue where every bullet appears to have his name on it and every answer he digs up seems to only create more questions. Hired by the dead woman’s husband, McGinnis has to figure out who is behind the crime spree. As if the twisted case of a murdered grandmother isn’t complicated enough, Death is knocking on his door, and each time it opens, Death is wearing a new face, leaving McGinnis to wonder who he can actually trust.

This is for the Five. Because it always starts with all of you.

For Lisa, sorry about the mess, and to Mary, sorry but you’ve got to give them back now.

Also to Greg, because once more into the breach, baby.

And to Elizabeth, thank you for taking a chance on the first one and letting me take Cole back out again.

Acknowledgments

TO MY wonderous Five—Penn, Tamm, Lea, and Jenn. I love you all.

And to my other sisters—Lisa, Ree, Ren, and Mary—much love.

Thanks will always go to Dreamspinner—Elizabeth, Lynn, Liz and her team, Naomi (who I bribe with cookies and tea), and everyone there who polishes what I send them. Thank you for being there.

And to all of the readers who have wondered what happened to Cole and Jae. Here you go. Saranghae.

One

I SPENT most of my formative years in Chicago, faithfully cheering on the Cubs and looking down at people who put ketchup on their hot dogs. My older brother, Mike, was—and still is—a hard-core White Sox fan. This doesn’t explain anything about us as brothers other than he’s always on the wrong side of the fence when picking teams.

Always.

For example, at some far-off point in our childhood, back when he was actually taller than me, we played an imaginary game we called Cows and Sheep. I’m not sure where we got the idea, probably from some old movie, because it was pretty much an excuse for all-out warfare with dirt clods and water balloons under the guise of me as a cattle rancher and Mike as a sheep wrangler battling it out for control of the land’s only water source for our herds.

Namely, the garden hose attached to the faucet on the side of the house.

Now, while we didn’t actually have any cattle or sheep, I knew enough about the woolly ungulates to know they weren’t bipedal, six feet tall, with a flap in the front of their bodies for easy access to their dangly bits.

Nor did they have a loaded Desert Eagle and a pair of Dobermans intent on running me to ground.

“I’m supposed to be here!” Shouting over my shoulder didn’t seem to help. Maybe the costume’s head was too thick for him to hear me screaming at him, or perhaps he couldn’t make anything out except the dogs’ vicious, frenzied barking. I dodged a thick bush, but its branches slapped at my face with a withering sting as I went by. “I’m doing a security—”

The sheep answered me with a bullet, blowing away the overgrown trellis I’d ducked through to get some distance between us. Its wood frame shattered, showering me with a tidal wave of leaves and splinters, probably adding to the welts already on my face and hands.

This was supposed to be a quick recon—me testing the perimeter of a Brentwood estate not far from the Craftsman I shared with my husband, Jae, and where I ran my investigation business out of what used to be the massive sprawl’s front rooms. I’d taken the job as a favor for Dante Montoya, a detective my best friend, Bobby, used to work with. His boyfriend owned an elite security firm and needed someone who knew the area to scope out the grounds of an overgrown château. He’d been hired by the guy who recently bought it and discovered it was not only missing a perimeter wall but also was in Mother Nature’s firm, hard grip. But since he was being paid to break into the place on another night to test its defenses, he wanted someone who had no dog in the fight to give him a sketch of what the jungle around the battered château looked like but keep him clueless of the interior to better assess the situation.

If I survived the culling, I was going to find Montoya’s boyfriend and punch him right in his pretty, funky-ass-eyed face.

“I’m going to fucking kill you!” the sheep screamed from somewhere behind me.

I couldn’t hear the dogs anymore, but I did kind of hope the man in the full-body costume took the time to Velcro the front flap closed. From what I had seen, it wasn’t much protection against the thorny hedges around us, but at least it would save some of his skin.

I hadn’t gotten a good look at the man wearing it, but as costumes went, it was spectacular. Probably custom-made, it was a hair too cute for my tastes, but then I also couldn’t imagine myself dressed up as an ungulate complete with a pink bow and enormous round tinkling bell tied around my neck or somehow shoving my feet and hands into what looked like hard hooves.

The place should have been empty. I’d been told no one lived there yet and it would be a month or two before renovations began to restore the old, creaking mansion. But when I discovered a light on in the small guesthouse a few yards from the garage I’d parked in front of, I went to investigate.

I expected maybe a few teenagers drinking beer and smoking pot they’d taken from their mom’s stash, or even a transient who’d found a way into the fairly large single-room structure, planning on keeping safe and warm inside its thick walls.

Instead I’d found Psycho Lamb Chop playing blanket mambo with an elegant socialite in pearls and ruffled bloomers, a slit worked into the pantaloons’ seams to allow Brave Sir Baa Baa easy access to her worldly treasures.

I probably could have sneaked off without either one of them being the wiser except for one thing—well, two actually. The damned dogs.

I’d seen this movie before. Hell, I’d been a recurring guest star in that particular strain of disasters through most of my career as a private investigator. But the sheep was new, and the dogs were really damned determined to take a chunk out of my ass.

Seeing as I liked my ass where it was—and I had a husband who seemed pretty fond of it—I bolted.

Shocked the hell out of me that Lamb Chop not only had the presence of mind to grab a weapon but also had the dexterity and stamina to run in those damned hooves.

The lawn’s overgrowth made it easier to avoid the dogs, but they weren’t too far behind me. I knew the left side of the property shared a fairly solid wall with the next estate, but the original twelve-foot-tall wrought iron fence surrounding the enormous plot had fallen into such disrepair that there were gaping stretches along the back and right boundaries. It was a contentious point with the property owners, or so I’d been told. Rather than erect their own fencing, they battled and sniped about the château’s falling metal spires and left the rusting iron segments to molder instead of securing their own homes.

It was kind of ironic being chased by a man in a sheep costume after catching him in a nefarious act with a woman who had a few years on him and obviously was way out of his league, but honestly, I wasn’t all that surprised. Shit like this always seemed to happen to me. This wasn’t the first time I’d come across a couple of people having sex—make that kind of weird sex—only to have them spot me, nor the first time I had to run for my life while someone tried to blow my head off. It was kind of an occupational hazard. Private investigators usually didn’t get to pick and choose the cases that came through their front door, and since most of society’s problems revolved around sex or money, it made sense that most of our business at McGinnis Investigations dealt with spouses wanting to catch their significant others doing the nasty with someone other than themselves.

This job wasn’t supposed to be like that. I was just to go in, take a recon of the buildings, and leave. I shouldn’t be on the run, although I had some serious questions about why the woman and Lamb Chop had two Dobermans with them in the guesthouse.

“Where the fuck am I going?” It was difficult to make heads or tails of where I was. The paths through the greenery were vague at best, and the thickets were practically opaque, making it difficult to see beyond what was right in front of my face. “I don’t even know which way I’m facing.”

There was a myth about moss growing only on the north side of a tree. Since I could barely remember if the Hollywood sign was north of me at any given moment, that wasn’t going to get me out of the jungle I’d stumbled into. The hard stone paths were littered with leaves, and every once in a while, I caught the hard clop of the sheep’s hooves striking rock, but the dogs were now oddly silent.

“Where the hell are you guys?” I slowed my run down and crouched behind a stand of bushes and an oddly posed statue that could have been a woman with six arms or an aroused cuttlefish looking for a good time. Cloaked in shadows and a thick layer of tangled vines, it was difficult to tell what the carving was, but it gave me enough cover to catch my breath. “Shit, I’ve got to work on my conditioning.”

The cuttlefish exploded in front of my face, its massive weave disintegrated by whatever high-powered piece of lead Mr. Flappy Sheep had loaded in his Eagle. Needless to say, it was enough of an incentive to get me moving again.

Not knowing the grounds, I was at a severe disadvantage, and apparently I was being chased by an ex-Olympian or something. I couldn’t shake the sheep. He kept up with me pace for pace. Maybe he knew how the damned bushes and trees were laid out around the complicated multilevel stone terraces and hills that some idiot decided would be great to put down as landscaping for the château. It was an Escher vomit of leaves, rocks, and the occasional naked statue missing an arm or a head but still sporting raging cock-stands or pert breasts. Perhaps both. I wasn’t stopping long enough to admire the art when I could still hear the random movement of a Doberman somewhere behind me.

While I couldn’t see the garage anymore, I was hoping it was behind me. Then I found out one of the dogs wasn’t.

It came at me from the right, a slavering beast with a mouthful of shark teeth and glowing eyes. I love dogs. I have a dog—a small, slightly rotund mop of a dog named Honey who’d come back into my life after she was taken by my boyfriend Rick’s family when he was murdered. Honey was now a spoiled princess who spent her day toddling after Jae while he cooked or lounging in one of several dog beds in our house. Her biggest aggressive act to date had been a particularly virulent gaseous attack following the ingestion of a bag of frozen brussels sprouts she liberated from a shopping bag while we were putting away groceries.

This Doberman was definitely not Honey.

I couldn’t comment on its gas issues, but it sure as hell didn’t resemble the furry lump that slept at the end of our bed every night.

It launched itself from a thin-leafed row of bushes I’d been about to run through and grabbed at my forearm. Up close, the dog looked even more massive than I remembered, but then the brain does funny things when it’s running on pure fear.

Teeth longer than a scorned woman’s memory sank through the arm of my leather jacket, raking over the skin beneath. My heart stopped, picking up an erratic beat on my next panicked breath, but by then physics took over where my panic abandoned any logic and my jacket sleeve tore away, split apart by the dog’s sharp teeth, leaving leather shreds filling its mouth. Enraged, the Doberman shook its head, and I pulled hard, yanking my scraped-up arm out of the remains of my sleeve and leaving the dog to its impotent kill.

I broke back into a hard run, leaving the Doberman to play with its best toy ever and hopefully distracted enough not to notice I’d left it behind.

“Okay, McGinnis.” I started to give myself a pep talk because it didn’t seem like Lamb Chop had any intention of letting me get away without looking like a colander. “Just find a wall. That’ll either lead to the back or the front, but either way, you’ll at least be off the property.”

My arm stung where the dog bit, but it wasn’t like I had a first aid kit in my back pocket. Jae was used to me coming home with all kinds of scrapes and bruises, but a dog bite, even one as shallow as this one, meant I was probably going to face his raised eyebrows and a skeptical snort. He never seemed to believe me when I said I never intended to get into any trouble. It was almost as if he hadn’t known me for several years and picked various bits of glass, metal, and the occasional thorn out of my skin. But I wanted to avoid having someone from the LAPD knock on our front door to tell him I’d been gunned down by a six-foot-tall sheep. There’s only so much humiliation a man can take, and that’s sure as hell not what I want written on my headstone.

“Died having sex with his husband at the age of ninety-five” was more my style. But if I didn’t get my ass moving, Sir Flappy Bits would have my head mounted to his wall above a roaring fireplace and spend his cold wintry evenings regaling his animal-costumed friends of his hunt through the jungle on his own personal Wild Human Safari.

Calming my breathing down, I listened for signs of the other dog and the rat-tat-tat of hooves on the uneven paths. The sounds of the Doberman working its way through my jacket sleeve were faint but distinct. It seemed happy, almost gleeful. So long as it was entertained and not coming after me, I was okay with it. I was less concerned about the other dog and deeply worried about the Desert Eagle.

I didn’t know a lot about gardening, but I knew enough to recognize the bramble of rosebushes in front of me were about one foot shy of having a giant purple-and-black dragon fighting off a prince so he didn’t take away her kidnapped victim. There were a few faded, withered blooms clinging valiantly to the nest of neglected, spindly branches, but even in the sparse light from Los Angeles’s ever-present gloam, the thorns were abundant.

There was a comment about life there. In the most horrific neglect, beauty fought to survive while violence thrived.

It could’ve been just that the rosebushes had a lot of thorns. Bacon and Hobbes definitely weren’t threatened by my entry into philosophy. I would rather while away the evening with a hot pastrami sandwich and a cold beer than spend a couple of hours discussing whether or not we were made out of paper.

The tinkle of Lamb Chop’s bell told me he was nearby. I had to get moving. I needed to find a way out, and I needed to find it fast.

An aggressive bark growing louder spurred me on. The bushes suddenly didn’t appear so daunting, and if Prince Charming could hack through them to rescue a comatose woman he’d never met but intended to marry, I sure as hell could at least give it a try.

Fuck. The rosebushes hurt like hell.

They tore at my bare arm, digging into my already split-open skin. It seemed like every thorn grew an additional six inches simply to rip me open. My jeans protected my legs, and I pulled up the arm still encased in a sleeve to protect my face. I couldn’t see an end to the thicket, and searching for a way around didn’t seem like the smartest use of time. I didn’t know how long the Doberman would be enthralled with my jacket arm, and there was no telling how close the sheep was.

To be fair, he didn’t need to get very close. He just needed a clear line of sight to blow my head off. I didn’t understand his rage, but then I didn’t know the story behind him in the sheep costume or anything about the woman he was with. Something back there was important enough for him to kill someone over, and I would rather that someone not be me.

It seemed to take me forever before I was through the rosebushes, and when I stumbled free of the spindly branches, I found myself facing the fallen remains of a wrought iron fence. I almost kissed its rusty corpse with glee, but I wasn’t quite out of the woods yet. Literally.

The château’s rear neighbor seemed to be resigned to the overgrowth, allowing at least a few yards of thick bushes and untrimmed trees to encroach the property line. They probably let it run rampant solely to hide the eyesore going stagnant behind them. A five-foot-tall decorative wall of stucco and tile jutted up from a strip of well-manicured lawn, offering me the promise of an oasis on the other side.

I broke into a run as soon as I heard the bell chiming behind me.

It felt like I was suffering from a thousand paper cuts, minute slashes from leaves and thorns with an ooze of blood turning my skin sticky. A warm trickle ran down my forehead, getting into my eyes, turning my vision blurry, but I was focused on the wall. I was tall enough to get my hands over the top of it and had enough faith in my abdominal muscles to pull myself over it, but I knew from unfortunate experience that the same could be said about a motivated Doberman.

I was worried less about the dog now. Still kind of worried about the guy with the gun, but I had an intense hope that the neighbors kept their lawn clipped and I would be able to sprint up to the back of their house while screaming my head off for help.

It wasn’t much of a plan.

But it was a plan.

I took the wall with ease, but the scar tissue along my ribs and chest chose that moment to seize up. Healed-over bullet wounds are the worst. They leave a guy with a tangle of keloids wrapped around nerves and muscles that sometimes fire off conflicting messages. In my case it was like being struck with a handful of charley horses knitted through my ribs and down toward my spine.

Getting up onto the wall was easy. Going over the wall was less than ideal. Seized up by spasms and pain, I went down hard, rolled up like an armadillo trying to avoid being roadkill stew. I landed with a grunt loud enough to wake the dead.

Or at least I thought I was loud enough to wake the dead.

Unfortunately, the dead woman I landed on didn’t seem to share that opinion.

I was having a hard time breathing. Some of it was from my twisting scar tissue, but a lot of it was from shock. I knew this woman. Surprised breathless, I scrambled from her lifeless body and planted my ass in the middle of a stretch of wet lawn.

The irony of finding her dead on this job didn’t escape me.

Lying on her back, her arms and legs flung brokenly away from her torso, Mrs. Adele Brinkerhoff was dressed much like she’d been when I was first hired to catch her cheating on her husband. When I’d taken that job, I couldn’t imagine the grandmotherly woman whose photo I’d been given was into leather corsets, braided whips, and a lesbian love affair with a woman much younger than herself. But as I found out then, looks can be deceiving.

She chased me that night, much like Lamb Chop did just a few moments ago, but she’d been armed with a shotgun and had a hell of a lot better aim than the guy in the sheep costume. I dodged her through a topiary sprinkled with bushes shaped like animals. She nearly took my head off with a powerful blast but took out a leafy elephant instead.

Judging by the hole in her chest and her bloodless, sagging face, Mrs. Brinkerhoff wasn’t going to be cheating on her husband any longer.

She was a doughy-soft woman, but she’d tucked those curves and fleshy thighs into a black leather jumpsuit. Her feet were bare, and the expression on her face was one of deep surprise. I tried fumbling for my phone, my fingers cold and unresponsive as I reached into my back pocket. The gore of her chest wound was immense, and even in the faint light, I could nearly see through her to the lawn… or at least my imagination could.

That’s when I spotted the handful of sparkling gems in her partially closed right hand.

It wasn’t like I’d kept up with her and her husband. They’d reconciled or at least come to some sort of agreement after I caught her, because both of them showed up in my office, paid the bill, and thanked me for my time. In a lot of ways, she had actually been the beginning point of my new life. I came home to find my older brother, Mike, sitting in my living room with a job that would eventually lead me to cross paths with Jae-Min Kim, the love of my life and the man who was stupid enough to agree to marry me.

In a lot of ways, Adele Brinkerhoff was the leather-wearing BDSM godmother who’d made our lives possible. Sort of. And now she lay dead at my feet, holding a handful of diamonds that looked expensive even to my uneducated eye.

“Oh, Adele,” I whispered, finally getting my phone out of my pocket. “What the fuck have you gotten yourself into?”

I had just hit the last number for LAPD’s emergency dispatch when the second damned Doberman came over the wall and took me down.

Two

ODDLY ENOUGH, the Doberman who tackled me kept me company. His attack consisted of a fierce bathing with a damp tongue and then trying to climb up the front of my body to be held when the man in the sheep costume flung himself over the wall. I’m not sure if the costume’s hooves did him in or if he just wasn’t that athletic, but even from ten feet away, I heard both of his legs snap as he landed. He dropped down into the lawn face-first, and the Eagle went flying, discharging a bullet when it bounced on the ground. The shot hit the wall, and the Doberman probably decided it had located the spider monkey part of its genetic thread and scrambled up my body to quiver on my shoulder.

He weighed a lot less than Jae and smelled a hell of a lot worse, but I would take the claw marks over his teeth into my jugular any day.

I coaxed the Doberman down and left Lamb Chop where he landed after I kicked the gun as far away from him as possible. I ignored his screaming while I limped up toward the house, dialing 9-1-1 as I went. No one was home at the estate, but the cops assured me they would be there in a few seconds, drawn by the barrage of calls from outraged residents at the sounds of shots being fired in their safe, elite neighborhood. The dog fell into step behind me, and I trudged out to discover Central Dispatch hadn’t been wrong. A few minutes later, two cop cars screeched to a halt after I’d made it out the side gate.

The enormous black-and-tan Doberman promptly pissed on the sidewalk, then rolled over on his back when the cops began shouting for me to put my hands up. All in all, it was the shitty beginning of what was probably going to be a long night, and I still hadn’t done any recon on the estate I’d been sent to scope out.

An aurora borealis of red-and-blue swirls churned above the formerly dim street, courtesy of the phalanx of cop cars crowding the tree-lined sidewalk. Their bright, saturated lights pushed away the milky orange-yellow coming from the streetlamps that sparsely dotted the side of the road. This part of Brentwood was very much old-school Los Angeles, clinging to the outdated opinion that their intimate, cloistered neighborhood was kept safer by darkened streets and heightened security. Because of the area’s proximity to the observatory, the local lighting was subdued to prevent the ambient glow from bleeding into the already not-so-dark night sky that hugged the city. But I could have used a little bit of light. Until the cops arrived, I could barely see my hand while standing in front of the estate where I’d found Mrs. Brinkerhoff’s body.

“Now, let me get this straight, you were hired to check out a property for a security firm owned by Montoya’s boyfriend, when you were pursued and shot at by Ralph Branigan.” Lieutenant Dell O’Byrne stood silhouetted against the floodlights, her pen furiously dancing across the page in the notebook she was using to document the scene.

“Is Ralph Branigan the guy in the sheep costume?” I asked. “I’ve just been calling him Lamb Chop and other names in my head. He had a gun. And was shooting at me. I didn’t stop and ask him his name.”

“Yes, the man you’re calling Lamb Chop is Mister Branigan.” O’Byrne’s dark eyes flicked up the page, their depths filled with an annoyance that I could see through the shadows clinging to her strong face. “Help me out, McGinnis. Just give me the facts first. Then you can give me all the commentary you like. What were you doing that prompted Branigan to come after you with a gun?”

“I don’t know. Could have been me looking through the window and getting a good look at him schtupping that blond lady.” I shrugged as nonchalantly as I could, but my brain was still having a hard time wrapping around the details of what happened. “You know, the former nun. Mother Mary Stigmata or whatever her name is.”

“I’m trying to be serious here, McGinnis.” Another glance up, but this time there was a hint of a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.

“O’Byrne, I just spent the last half hour of my life running away from a gun-toting crazy man in a sheep costume with his dick waggling around through a flap in the front because I caught him having kinky sex with a former nun who is now a powerful California lobbyist for faith-based charities. He was trying to kill me. Sicced the ex-nun’s dogs on me, who thankfully thought it was all just a game of tag, apparently, but the damned bullets were real.” I held my hand up, pinching at the air with my thumb and index finger. “He missed me by this much. And just when I thought I’d gotten away from him, I stumble across a former client’s dead wife. If I can’t laugh at any of this, I’m going to lose my mind.”

O’Byrne was a whipcord-lean Latinx with a beautiful face, a serious demeanor, and a scowl fierce enough to stop a herd of rampaging toddlers dead in their tracks. We hadn’t seen eye to eye when she first rolled into her position with the LAPD as a senior detective, but over the years, I must’ve done something right, because she eventually retained me as a consultant with the department. I’d been a detective with the LAPD when I was shot by my partner and best friend, Ben, who’d somehow gotten into his head he was in love with my boyfriend, Rick. Rick didn’t survive the shooting, and I wasn’t so sure I had.

I did. And I’d grown a lot since then. Fell in love. Got married. And now stood over the corpse of a case I’d left behind me a long time ago.

O’Byrne took shots of her own a few years ago while working on a case with me, and she’d pulled out of the wreckage of her body a lot better than I had. She went back to wearing a badge, while I was rolled out, too devastated and scarred up to be any good. I didn’t know a lot about Dell or her personal life. We weren’t the kind of “get together on a Sunday and have a beer while watching a football game” friends, but it was safe to say we respected each other. Or at least I was willing to admit I respected the hell out of her.

I just hadn’t planned on having one of the craziest evenings of my life when I kissed Jae goodbye that afternoon and walked out our front door.

“Tell me what you know about Adele Brinkerhoff,” O’Byrne said, nodding to a passing uniform who’d wrangled the Dobermans into the back of his police car to wait for the ex-nun’s husband to arrive and take them home. “You say her husband hired you a few years back to catch her cheating?”

“They came to an understanding, paid off my bill, and thanked me for my time,” I replied. “I haven’t really had much contact with either one of them since then. It seemed like they were going through a rough patch and worked it out. Or he just decided he could live with a bisexual, leather-wearing dominatrix who had torrid love affairs on the side. I didn’t really ask, because it was none of my business. The check cleared. That was the only thing that counted.”

“She was wearing leather when she was killed. Was it like what you saw her in the last time?” She cast a quick glance around the neighborhood, probably scanning the high walls and tall hedges blocking any commoners from peering at the sprawling estates tucked in above Koreatown. “If we start knocking on a few of these doors, do you think we’ll find she had a thing going with someone around here?”

I hadn’t spent a lot of time staring at Adele. There’d been other concerns, like the dog and then the guy with the gun, not to mention dealing with the shock of seeing her grandmotherly face slack with death. Thinking back on what I could remember of that moment, I shook my head.

“This is going to sound crazy, but it seemed to me like what she was wearing wasn’t sexual in nature. I mean, the first time I saw her, there wasn’t any question that she was dressed for a good time and to deliver a firm spanking. She looked more like… I don’t know, like she was going to a party?” I realized at the bite of a breeze against my arm that I was still wearing my tattered jacket. I shrugged it off and left it on the hood of the police car, assuming someone would come gather it as evidence for the dog attack at some point. “The woman kind of led two lives. When she and her husband showed up at my office, she was bordering on frumpy. I really can’t tell you much about her.”

“What about the diamonds she had in her hand? Know anything about those?”

That question rocked me back. My brain had decided they were gems the first time I spotted them, but the idea didn’t fit into the narrative I’d conjured up to have the evening make some kind of sense. It was already crazy enough without discovering Adele Brinkerhoff dead, and tossing a handful of diamonds into the mix only tipped things over into the land of grinning cats and talking playing cards.

“So they’re real? I wasn’t sure.”

“I’m going to assume they’re real, because I don’t have any explanation for why I have a little old lady shoehorned into a black leather jumpsuit and found dead in the middle of a neighborhood where it costs five dollars just to take a whiff of fresh air,” O’Byrne drawled, a faint sneer on her face.

“I’m feeling attacked,” I shot back. “I live in this neighborhood. Okay, not on the huge-mansion side of things but still in this neighborhood.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen where you live. So it only costs four bucks.” The sneer grew, but the humor in her face did as well. Jollity looked good on her. I didn’t see it very often. Usually my presence brought annoyance or slight ridicule to her expressions. “I’d like to see your case notes from back then if you still got them.”

“It’s been five or six years, but all of my case notes are kept digitally, so I’ll be able to send over everything I’ve got. I’ve got a contact number for her husband, but it’s been a while, and he seemed a lot older than she was. I don’t even know if he’s still alive.” I was beginning to regret taking off my jacket, because the wind began to carry a bit of ice in it. “Did you consider that Branigan might have killed her? I mean, it would be kind of cold-blooded of him to blow a hole through her and then go back to the ex-nun for a bit more fun, but that Desert Eagle of his would sure as hell explain the crater in her chest.”

“I’d considered it, but from the looks of things, it seems like Adele Brinkerhoff’s been lying there for more than a couple of days. Branigan and his associate were in Sacramento until early this afternoon. She lives down the street and knew the place was empty and on the market.” O’Byrne closed her notebook, tucking her pen away into her jacket pocket. “She told her husband she was going to take the dogs for a walk, then scooted down here to hook up with Branigan.”

“Well that explains the dogs but not the sheep.” Whenever I closed my eyes, I still could see Branigan’s pale fleshy bits swinging back and forth as he ran, framed by tufts of woolly white fur. “I mean, I guess when she was a nun, her old job was pretty much tending to her flock, but that’s just going way too far.”

There wasn’t enough bleach in the universe for me to get that out of my memory. With any luck I would get bashed on the head on the way home somehow, giving me a bit of amnesia. At the very worst, I would totally lose every memory of my past, but I had a lot of faith that I would fall back in love with Jae as soon as I saw him. He would understand. He’d understood much worse.

“He connected to the lobbying she does in Sacramento?” I was curious, because somehow coming after me with a gun powerful enough to take down a giraffe seemed like a bit of an overreaction to being discovered having sex as a sheep. “Because I’ve got to tell you, he seems like the kind of guy who would gun down an old lady.”

“See, that’s where this gets very sticky,” O’Byrne said, making a sour face. “She’s been punching at the government to get more religious programs into California’s prisons, and two days ago, Branigan became the deputy director for one of the Corrections and Rehabilitation departments. So, once news of all of this spreads around, something tells me he’s going to be losing that corner office and she’s going to be out a connection to the state’s purse strings.”

I contemplated what O’Byrne laid out. Then I turned to her, crossed my arms over my chest, and said, “I get all that, but it still doesn’t explain the fucking sheep suit.”

IT WAS three in the morning by the time I fit my key into the front-door lock. I’d sent Jae a text telling him I was okay but some shit had hit the fan so he might as well go to bed without me. I was surprised to find the living room lights were on and my husband curled up in the middle of one of our couches, our black cat, Neko, stretched out alongside his thigh, her tiny body extended as far as she could and taking up as much of the cushion as she could, mostly to prevent Honey, our poof of a dog, from taking up residence.

I’d bought the Craftsman following Rick’s death. Without him and Ben in my life, I’d been left adrift, riddled with scars and brain groggy from a coma. Back then, I didn’t know which keloids hurt more, the ones on my body or the ones in my heart. Weak, exhausted, and soul sick, I attacked the decrepit sprawling two-story house with an intense fervor, working to resurrect it as if somehow bringing it back to its former glory would also fix me.

A couple of years later, the house was restored to its showcase prime, and I’d opened up my private investigation business after converting the formal dining room and front parlor into an office and conference room. Along the way I picked up Claudia, a sharp-tongued, Southern-born black woman who’d retired from driving a school bus and decided to not only manage my office but also my life. She’d become my mother of sorts and was the first person who realized I’d fallen in love.

Way before I did.

Kim Jae-Min was everything I wasn’t looking for in a man but really needed. A photographer by trade and a former dancer at a gay Korean gentlemen’s club called Dorthi Ki Seu, he’d been at the center of a murder case I stumbled into, then wormed his way into the center of my heart. We’d been through a lot—fights, broken hearts, hurt feelings, and cultural conflicts—but those were in our past, and now I wore his ring on my finger.

Or at least I thought it was on my finger. There were some days I was pretty sure it was actually threaded through my nose. On those days, I just kept my mouth shut and answered yes to anything I was asked.

Who said I didn’t know how to be married?

“You didn’t have to wait up,” I said, padding barefoot into our living room. Carefully I moved the six pounds of fury and black chinchilla fur we laughingly called our cat and sat down next to him, sighing contentedly when Jae leaned against me. “Not that I’m complaining, because you are exactly who I need to see at the end of this day.”

I didn’t need to see the bowl of orange-dusted fruit strips sitting on the table next to the couch to know he’d been eating li hing mui mango. Jae’s kiss tasted of it. Its sweet licorice-sugar stung my tongue, reminiscent of tamarind with a punch of Jae behind it. I was dead tired, scraped up to hell, but my body responded as it always did, flaring to life whenever he was near. My desire for him became incendiary whenever we touched, and there were moments when I was convinced I would one day be found as a pile of ash at the side of our bed. I would be the happiest pile of ash ever.

He was almost my height, skimming six feet, but we were built so very differently. For all of my being half Japanese, very little of it settled in my bones and musculature. My face wore ghosts of my mother’s Asian blood, but my personality and body were purely descended from the McGinnis side of the family—a long line of Irish brawlers with a nose for trouble and a thirst for adventure. I kept fit by boxing and running, usually accompanied by Bobby Dawson, my best friend and a former LAPD detective, and lately I’d tried to keep up with Jae doing yoga, hoping it would help ease the scar tissue knotting up my body.

Jae was a sleek, beautiful Korean man with a pretty face it almost hurt to look at and a flexibility that almost guaranteed my destiny as that pile of ash. His black hair framed his sculpted face, falling almost down to his shoulders and long enough to pull back into a ponytail, something he did when he went all mad scientist in the kitchen. As much as I loved his mouth, I loved his eyes even more. They were a smoky honey-rye silken brown mixed with burnt gold, and I loved seeing the world through them when he told me about his day. He was graceful in a way I could never compete with and seemed to possess a fondness for spicy things that even amazed other Koreans. He’d come to me guarded and hating his attraction to other men, but to be fair, I’d come to him broken and hating myself.

Along the way, we kept each other company as we patched up our wounds even as life injured us further. But we’d still found each other, still climbed over rigid walls to admit our love, to embrace our connection and eventually exchange rings.

I regretted nothing of the pain we’d gone through to reach this point in our lives, but I would have to say I wished I had brought more smiles to Jae’s full lips. Since we were both in our thirties, we had a lot more years ahead of us, and I looked forward to teasing those smiles out of him for a long time.

“I’m glad you’re home, Cole-ah.” Even his voice held a hint of the chilis he loved, scorching a fusion of lust and desire down my spine and across my belly. The kiss ended way too soon, and I went in for seconds, but Jae pinched the end of my nose, stopping me in midswoop. “Hold on to that thought, because I planned on waking up when you came home, but something dragged me out of bed.”

“I’m guessing that something has to do with me,” I mumbled as if suffering a tremendous cold, unable to speak clearly with my nose held firmly between his fingers. “Could you let go? I sound as if I’m going to go take a job as a nanny for a man named Sheffield with three kids and a butler.”

He let go, leaving me with a kiss on my injured nose tip. Reaching across of me, he dislodged Neko, who’d settled against me on the other side, and snagged a piece of paper I’d not seen tucked in under the bowl of mango.

“I wasn’t asleep, because I was worried about you, even though you told me you were fine. I was still worried,” Jae admitted in a soft whisper. Neko, however, voiced her opinion at being ruffled with a loud strident meow at odds with her tiny body. Honey, probably sensing the cat’s impending rampage across the room, wisely picked herself up off of the floor and shuffled over to one of the dog beds where she would be safe.

“I was fine.” I could see he didn’t believe me, and since I’d left out the part about being shot at, Jae probably suspected I was lying. Actually it was probably more than suspicion, because he could always tell when I was lying. “It was a little hairy at times—and remind me to tell you about the sheep—but I was okay. What woke you up?”

“The phone.” Jae held up the piece of paper so I could see the numbers he’d written down. “A man named Arthur Brinkerhoff called about an hour ago. He’d like you to find out who killed his wife and why the cops are accusing her of stealing two million dollars in diamonds.”

Three

“WAIT. BRINKERHOFF.” Claudia hovered at the edge of my desk, holding my coffee cup hostage, just out of my reach. “We know that name, right? Wasn’t that the name of the spanking dominatrix grandma who nearly popped your head off with a shotgun a few years back?”

“I don’t know about dominatrix,” I grumbled, grabbing at my cup as it wove closer. “Okay, maybe.”

“She sure as hell beat your ass,” my alleged surrogate mother shot back as she set my coffee down with a firm thump. “And now she’s dead, and somehow it’s your problem?”

“Well, I did kind of find her.” The coffee was strong. At some point in Claudia’s past, someone taught her how to make paint thinner out of coffee beans, and she’s been perfecting her toxic brew ever since. I was surprised I still had nostril hairs, but I was grateful for the punch to my heart, since I’d gotten so little sleep the night before. “I feel like I owe this guy. I haven’t thought about them in years, but it’s the case I was working on when Mike dropped Hyun-Shik’s case into my lap.”