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

to turn it on.” He sighed. “Sorry, I’m not much help. You got a card?”

“Fresh out but I’ll write down my cell number. Call me if you think of something.”

“Take my number too,” Carl said. “Call me when you catch the motherfuckers.”

Someone else had told me the same thing a few weeks ago, just before I got shot.

11

Glad you called,” Mira said, lowering the volume of what sounded like her favorite group, U2. “We have to talk about Christmas. What to get for Bobby, who’s coming to my house. So far it’s me and Shakti, Bobby and Kayla, you and Phoenix, Julie and her boyfriend. Do you think the Dorans will come this year or will they have family from out of town again?”

“I’ll ask them,” I said, turning right onto Main from University Avenue. “I’m on my way there now.” I did a quick count in my head. “Are you sure you’ll have room for eleven?” Last year I hadn’t met Phoenix, and Julie Yang, the live-in math grad student who looked after Shakti while Mira worked, didn’t have a boyfriend. The year before last there had been nine of us in Mira’s small dining room, including Jimmy Doran’s wheelchair, at a table designed to seat eight.

“We can make it work,” she said. “So let me know.”

“I will.” I hesitated. “You’re not in the middle of something, are you?”

“Like a post?” She laughed. “Just paperwork. There’s more to my job than autopsies, you know. If I were at the dissection table, I’d be talking to the voice recorder, not you. What’s up? Wait, let me guess. You’re working a case and want me to risk my job because you need a copy of an autopsy report.”

“That you would say that means you’re at home, not in the office.”

She laughed again. “My brother the detective. Nothing gets by him.”

“I don’t want a copy of the report. I just need to know one thing.”

“What?”

I told her about Odell and Keisha’s overdose and her disappearance, that her parents had hired me to find her. I told her no one I had interviewed believed Odell was a user. “I just left his father. He thinks somebody forced heroin into his son. He said there were no tracks on the body, no punctures but the overdose injection site. I just want to verify that.”

After a moment she said, “I’ll get back to you. You get back to me about the Dorans.”

“Will do,” I said. “Give my nephew a hug for me.”

A few minutes later I reached Admiral Road and parked two doors away from a brick house with a center entrance and a steel wheelchair ramp. The house belonged to my former campus police partner, Jimmy Doran, and his wife Peggy Ann. Jimmy had been paralyzed from the waist down a few years earlier in a shootout we had with two spree killers passing through the Buffalo State campus. His silver wheelchair van sat in the driveway, and Peggy Ann’s blue Impala was parked in front of the house. For a moment I just sat in my Escape, looking at their home and collecting my thoughts.

The side of the van bore modest black letters that said Doran Security Consulting. A former state police officer forced into his second retirement by the shooting, Jimmy had developed the firm with his son Little Jimmy—LJ—who would soon graduate summa cum laude in computer science. They offered high tech security solutions for a diverse clientele, including Driftglass Investigations. LJ was especially adept at cracking codes, hacking into databases, and covering his tracks on the way out. I had no doubt he had gotten into both Keisha’s Dell laptop and her iPhone by now. But as I climbed out of my car and moved toward the steps, I realized that discussing the case with his parents might be useful too. Jimmy had been a smart cop whose instincts sometimes made me look at things differently, and Peggy Ann was a nurse practitioner herself who had retired early to care for her husband.

Pulling off my watch cap and pocketing it, I rang the bell.

After a moment LJ opened the door and said softly, “Hey, G.” Honey-skinned and thin, he was under six feet tall and had the sandy curls typical of many biracial children. He wore a loose blue sweater, slim gray chinos, and sneakers.

I stepped into the paneled living room, and he shut the door. His father’s motorized wheelchair sat near the lift track along the stairs. The lift chair itself was out of sight, which meant it—and Jimmy—were upstairs, where he kept a manual wheelchair. “It’s quiet.”

“Dad’s taking his nap. Mom’s at the gym with her friend Leslie.”

I nodded. As active as Jimmy forced himself to be—working irregular hours for his business, driving with manual controllers, swimming in his all-weather enclosed lap pool out back, curling dumbbells—he needed regular naps. It wasn’t urgent that I wake him right this moment, so I resigned myself to discussing things with him and Peggy Ann another time. “Well, how’d you make out?”

“I got in,” LJ said. “But next time you bring me something, wear latex gloves so I don’t have to spend time isolating your fingerprints from the owner’s.”

“She used fingerprint access, and you lifted her prints to unlock her stuff?”

Grinning, he shrugged. “Too late to use that to get into the phone, so I figured out her passwords. But I wanted to practice making fake fingers anyway.” He walked past me and started toward the office in a converted breakfast room at the back of the house.

“Superglue and Gummi bears,” I said.

LJ shrugged. “Actually, surgical glue. Close to super glue, and Mom’s got plenty.”

It was late afternoon, but the office was still bright because three of the four walls were exteriors full of windows. We sat at one of the tech-cluttered worktables, and LJ pulled over Keisha’s phone and laptop, as well as a large zip-lock plastic bag with printouts, a yellow DSC invoice, and three gelatine blobs—fake fingers.

“Okay,