Chapter 36
He answered and said, “Make it quick.”
“Do you prefer the Apostles Creed or the Nicene Creed? The Nicene Creed is too long but more liturgically robust.”
“Make it quicker,” he said. In the background, it sounded like heavy machinery was grinding.
“Do you know Duane Chambers’s brother-in-law? Brother of his wife Emile?”
“Duane Chambers, man I killed in Italy?”
I nodded, though he couldn’t see me. “Him.”
“Don’t know nothing about his family. Haven’t thought about Chambers since the day I shot him.”
“That’s cold,” I said.
“Are we done? I got a thing.”
“If his family carried on his mafia enterprise, would you know?”
“Course I’d know.” He said it like a scoff, like I’d asked him which way was down. “But after Duane died, Remi went up the river, and that was that. Business collapsed.”
“I met Remi Boscolo. In prison. We got jumped by his fellow inmates.”
“You did what? When?” he said.
“I thought you had a thing.”
“You right, I don’t care.”
“Can you ask one of your cool cyber criminal masterminds if they know the name MuscleMama12?”
“No cyber crooks are cool. Too geeky and arrogant about it to be cool. But I’ll ask.”
He hung up without another word.
I thought I’d cracked the case. The case of, What’s Bothering Mackenzie About Theo And Piper Cardot. Coming home last night and seeing Kix had acted as the key opening a lock. It had adjusted my point of view just enough that facts sharpened their focus.
I dug around online in vital records for a while, making a phone call to an informant when I got stuck on a firewall. I found what I anticipated I’d find.
Marcus texted me twenty minutes after we hung up.
>> No one knows a MuscleMama12.
It was the message I expected.
I stood and paced the office. GPA, curled into the corner inside a brilliant rectangle of sunlight, didn’t lift her head but her brown eyes swiveled to follow me back and forth.
I thought I had it. I had the crime and the culprits. I had the motive. I had much of the evidence. It’d be enough to convince Ronnie but not a jury. What I needed for complete victory was a confession.
GPA and the Tesla rejected each other at first. The seats were synthetic vegan leather that scuffed and showed moisture too easily, and she kinda slid around on them, and her short hairs showed up too easily on the gray surface.
But when I rolled down the window for her, and she stuck her head out, all was forgiven in the avalanche of bliss.
Ronnie’s office was off Salem Avenue, in a row of renovated brick buildings near the new Amtrak station.
She had the top floor, behind a heavy reinforced door with redundant locks that her late father forced her to get.
Inside, the office was charming and khaki and polished and smelled like a luxury hotel.
Her receptionist and paralegal Katie loved dogs and adopted GPA as her own while I knocked on Ronnie’s inner door.
The attorney herself stood from her desk and exhaled with pleasure.
“I love seeing you in my office, Mackenzie. It makes a masculine mockery of all these pompous legal briefs and niceties.”
“I’m wearing sneakers. Feels like I’m desecrating the tribunal chambers of a formally admitted officer of the court of justice,” I said.
“If you call me that, I can call you gorgeous.”
“No deal.”
She stuck her tongue out. “What brings you?”
“I’d like to make a final report, about the case you hired me to investigate concerning Emile Chambers, and I’ll conclude by suggesting a course of action that could bring closure for both of you,” I said.
“Mackenzie.” She picked up a pad and pen, and she pranced around her desk on bare feet to sit in a client chair, which cost four times what my client chair cost. She crossed her legs and clicked the pen. “I’m all ears.”