Nickel City Crossfire by Gary Ross (popular romance novels .txt) 📗

overdose but I thought it deserved a second look, so here I am.”

“Is that what you do? Give things a second look?”

“More or less.” I blew a stream of air across my cup and took a sip to find it good and strong. “The woman with your son that night, Keisha Simpkins. What can you tell me about her?”

Holding his cup with both hands, as if absorbing needed warmth, he looked down a moment. “A nice girl,” he said. “Her father turned out to be a prick, but Rhonda and me, we liked Keisha a lot, and her mother.” He sighed. “That girl was a doctor. Definite daughter-in-law material.”

“I’ve spoken to her parents and they say the same things about your son.”

“They thought Odell was great until some assholes said he dealt heroin. Then her daddy blamed my son for the whole thing.”

“Did you ever think Keisha was responsible? That she was the dealer?”

“Not really. Maybe I said something like that when I was mad but I couldn’t see that girl messing with drugs.” He studied me a moment. “You from narcotics or homicide?”

“Second looks,” I said. “That’s my specialty.”

“Like cold cases?”

“Close enough.”

“I ask because I’d like the names of those informants so I can beat the panties off their sorry asses for lying on Odell.” He took a swallow of coffee and chuckled. “See how much street cred they got left after a retired mailman beats ‘em shitless.”

“What they claimed would piss me off too,” I said. “But even if I had them, I couldn’t give up names of another detective’s confidential informants. That’s against the rules. But I can tell you this much. Something about their statements bothers me.”

He nodded to show he understood. “That’s why you’re giving it a second look.”

“One reason.”

“I bet another is the autopsy.”

“What do you mean?”

“No needle marks—except the one that killed him.”

Nodding, I made a mental note to call Mira the instant I left.

“Odell wasn’t nobody’s junkie or dealer,” Carl said through clenched teeth. His back stiffened again and he set down his cup. “We cleaned out his place the week after his funeral. Jeans, khakis, button-down shirts—real dealers’ clothes. Books and DVDs everywhere but no weed, no pills, and not one gun, except his paintball rifle. All those stacks of drug money you see in movies? The only cash we found was a hundred-dollar bill folded inside his passport and twenty bucks in change in a damn cookie jar. The manager at our bank did some kind of search for a safe deposit box in his name. Know what he found?”

“I’m guessing no box in his name. Anywhere.”

“Bingo.” Carl’s eyes began to fill. “What kind of dealer shops at Target and drives a ten-year-old Mazda?”

I gave him a moment to breathe. “You have the autopsy report?”

He wiped his eyes and shook his head. “Leon Starks, the undertaker, is a friend of mine. I asked him to look for needle marks.” Carl swallowed audibly. “I saw my boy before Leon put on his suit. His arms and legs were clean and smooth as a baby’s ass.”

For a heartbeat or two I said nothing. “Did you know that Keisha’s missing?”

His brow furrowed. “Missing? Like disappeared?”

“Yes, about two weeks ago.”

“Jesus!” He narrowed his eyes at me. “That’s why you’re looking into this. You’re missing persons and trying to connect the dots. I didn’t hear anything about this on the news.”

“Sometimes publicity is wrong for a case like this. We’d appreciate it if you and your wife didn’t tell anyone till you hear about it from the media. Keisha’s life may depend on it.”

He nodded and raised his cup to his lips as if the coffee would fortify his assent. Before he drank, he asked, “Did she disappear on her own or did somebody snatch her?”

“Too early to know. That’s why we’re keeping things quiet. We need to determine if somebody is after her or if somebody caught her.”

“Poor Keisha.” He bit his lip before he sipped. “But this kinda makes sense. Say somebody tried to kill them both—why, I have no fucking idea. But she survived. Then she ran. Had to. If they took her, her body woulda turned up somewhere by now.”

“Still could,” I said and waited a breath or two before adding, “You said you cleaned out your son’s apartment. It might help me find whoever was behind the overdose if I could look at his phone or computer or maybe his car.”

Carl had started shaking his head before I finished. “Sorry. Like I said, my wife was really torn up about this. My next-door neighbor is a retired shrink from UB. He said the faster I got rid of Odell’s stuff, the better it would be for Rhonda.”

“So you sold it.”

“Yeah. The police never showed much interest in it—till now.” He glared at me, but only for a moment. “Couldn’t stand the sight of that car so I sold it for a few hundred cash.”

“Do you have his name, the buyer?”

“Her. Ellen something. Something with a T. Rented a room down the street. Finished grad school this semester. She’s probably back in New York City by now.”

And probably a dead end, I thought but said, “I’d still like her name.”

“Terrio,” he said, index finger pointing toward the ceiling. “Ellen Terrio, Brooklyn.”

I wrote down the name. “What about your son’s computer and phone?”

“Odell had this big machine that did everything. We don’t have much use for a computer that fancy—Rhonda’s Kindle is just fine—so I donated it to the community center around the corner. Last I saw it, they were loading math games for kids in their after school program.”

For a few seconds, I said nothing, calculating the odds of getting a computer tower away from the community center and getting something useful out of a hard drive that may or may not have been reconfigured. At best a longshot. “What about his phone?”

“I put it in one of those electronic recycling bins at the mall,” Carl said. “I never even tried