16. I need you to zing me, Quinn. #3
“When you don’t think anyone is watching or you forget you’re with others, you absolutely are a giggler. I like it best when you giggle while you’re reading a book. I’d get a lot more reading done if I kept reading instead of admiring you while you’re lost in your book and giggling.”
I paused working to regard him with a thoughtful frown. “I giggle?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“Well, yes. I have been rightfully accused of being a dour and depressive excuse of a human being.”
“That was before you had a good reason to be happy, Bailey. You’re happy now, and there’s no reason for you to hide when you’re happy. If other people want to be miserable, that’s on them. You hurt nobody by being happy, so be happy. When you’re happy, I’m happy.”
“Well, you are a gorgon-incubus doohickey, and may the heavens forbid if you were to become unhappy.”
“I suspect my wicked grandfather is behind all of this. Obviously, he made some form of arrangement for me to meet Audrey—”
“No.”
My husband chuckled. “No?”
“That’s on my wishlist of crimes Morrison has committed.
He recruited Audrey to seduce and marry you specifically so he could collect dirt on you and defame you as a police chief.
However, he did not anticipate your inflexibility in your ethics, resulting in Audrey being unable to gather the evidence or catch you in the act of cheating or whatever it is other police chiefs might use to discredit one another.
As it is on my wishlist of crimes Morrison has committed, your grandfather cannot take credit for your decision to marry her. ”
“Huh. Do you have a list of plausible crimes?”
“I do.”
“Move that wishlist item to your list of plausible crimes and motivations. Motive matters in cases like this, and if that motive is presented, the judge may request additional information from Morrison’s cops—and also demand angelic verification.
The innocent cops will be critical in the proceedings, as his character is on trial as much as his actions are.
It absolutely is a factor if the court determines Morrison was attempting to corrupt or discredit a fellow police chief.
That’s a direct violation of our oath to our communities and those we serve and protect.
That alone would lose him his job, as we’re supposed to be the highest ethical standard among uniformed officers.
We need to have sufficient circumstantial evidence to warrant additional investigation into Audrey’s relationship to Morrison before my marriage to her.
If we can prove a relationship, that becomes very good fuel for the flame game. ”
Huh. I copy-pasted the entire section involving my guesses regarding Audrey and Morrison into the more realistic list. “Done.”
“As your first wishlist item is worth pursuing, give me your next wishlist item.”
“That his son is the product of rape from a woman he forcibly turned into a gorgon, stripping her of her rights as a human so she would not be able to press charges against him.”
“Move it to the other list. Both of those are crimes. Angelic verification should be requested on this one, so we need to confirm with her. We’ll have to lean fairly heavily on Saven for that, but he probably has an angel or two who owes him a favor and can verify everything before the official verification.
Angels can’t lie, but that doesn’t prevent them from instructing humans on how best to manipulate the truth through omission and careful selection of words. Cases like this trip angelic triggers.”
No kidding. “Your grandfather is probably more pissed he has to be questioned as a witness than anything else, because it means he can’t play that game this time.”
“You’re probably right. Next item on your wishlist?”
“He’s rabid.”
“Bring that up for questioning, because an angel can verify if he was, at any point in the past, infected with the virus or treated for it. That’s something specific enough they might be able to search through the past without him being present.”
“I really meant that he’d just fall over dead in a month or two after the disease progresses because he wouldn’t be able to get the right grade of neutralizer to cure it.”
“Unless he was behind the warehouse raid and had the neutralizer available,” my husband replied.
“Which would make him complicit in a major felony theft and manipulating law enforcement through the 120 Wall Street incident.” I copy-pasted that from my wishlist, too.
“Next item?”
“Noodles topped with sea bugs with some form of cream sauce for dinner. I really like sea bugs and believe we should find another restaurant tonight that will serve me sea bugs.”
“If you want noodles topped with sea bugs, we shall look for noodles topped with sea bugs. Just don’t forget to eat your other sea bug sandwiches before we quest for more sea bugs.”
“You should eat your share of the sea bug sandwiches. And have some fries.”
“I’m not feeding three, and it seems fair for the twins to get a sea bug roll each.”
“Do I get to use that claim when I feel like overeating like some glutton?”
“Considering how infrequently you allow yourself to overeat like some glutton? Yes. Please. You have a horribly difficult time gaining weight, and you need to be packing on some extra healthy pounds right now. You know that pregnancy weight a lot of women complain about after the delivery?”
“I’m concerned for my back and feet,” I admitted.
“With your metabolism, if I feed you salads for a week and ask you to keep up with me, you’ll have lost all of that weight plus ten extra pounds.”
“I’m a freak.”
“You’re a cindercorn, and I’ve been feeding you like you’re a human woman. All shapeshifters have heightened metabolisms.”
“Except you!”
“I do have a heightened metabolism, Bailey. I’m just feeding really well just about every night several times over.”
Right. Gorgon-incubus doohickeys had specialized diets of delicious tasty woman, and I was on the menu most nights. Whee! “I’ll have to exercise you extra to make sure you don’t gain excess weight.”
“I’m sure I’ll be fine. So, after your noodles with sea bugs, what else is on your list?”
“All of my co-workers abandoned me the day Magnus McGee delivered that cell phone bomb filled with gorgon dust. We should check if Morrison was involved, as we do know his sister was the one who gave him the bomb and ultimately murdered him because he refused to participate in her games.”
“Add it to the other list.”
“These are supposed to be pipe dream additions, Sam!”
“I’m going to have to make sure you give me both of your lists on all future investigations, because these ideas are the exact kind we need when we’re working on identifying a culprit or a motive.
Thinking inside of the box is important at times, but creativity is also needed to go along with the understanding that we can’t use sane logic on the insane. ”
“Oh. I was using insane logic on this list.”
“And one of the main culprits? Insane. Keep going. Your ideas are good.”
“My co-workers, though?”
“If the goal was to infect you with gorgon dust, and Morrison was somehow linked to their inability to show up to work, then he is an accomplice in the gorgon dust bombing of your apartment. That is considered to be a terrorism event, as it was targeting someone who lived in an apartment complex and is a highly certified government contractor. Well, it could be flagged as terrorism, attempted murder, disruption of the peace, destruction of personal property, and a slew of other misdemeanors with a few felonies added in for good measure. As the dust found in your apartment matched 120 Wall Street, that would link Morrison to 120 Wall Street—and potentially make your former co-workers important witnesses. If anyone was hurt preventing them from going to work, then they’re owed restitution from Morrison, too. ”
“This is excessively complicated.”
“The cases I’m brought into usually are—otherwise, the detectives would have already handled everything.
This would have been bumped to my desk if I hadn’t become involved in other fashions.
As it is, we’re going to be severely scolded by the commissioner for using our vacation time to creatively put ourselves where we might find clues.
He’s going to see right through my ploy, but because we have receipts for these locations, he won’t call me out on it—and even if he does, I’d just honestly claim I had wanted to close the book on that part of my life.
Closure is important to him. He became a cop because his family never got closure on the murder of his uncle. ”
“That’s sad.”
“It is. That case is still open, and it’s in our jurisdiction, so I’ll leave the file out on your desk during a slow week so you can start poking your nose into it. He can’t afford a wayfinder, and his uncle’s body was never found.”
“How does he know he was murdered, then?”
My husband smiled. “That is an assumption—one founded on his knowledge of his uncle, how much he cared for his family, and other factors. Nobody in the family believes that his uncle would have just left them.”
“But amnesia could have happened.”
“And that’s exactly why that’s some serious lack of closure for them.
What if his uncle is still alive? Why did he leave?
It’s a nagging mystery that hurts his family every time the holidays roll around.
So, I’ll leave the file on your desk along with everything we have on the Dowry case, and we’ll go from there. ”
“And if we don’t like what we find?”
“That’s sometimes one of the hardest parts of our job, Bailey.
We often don’t like what we find. But we’ll decide then.
Even the stories with an unhappy ending end that way for a reason…
and sometimes, we give the families just enough for them to get some closure without the full story ever coming to light. It depends.”
“But what if he was murdered?”
“Then we bring the killer to justice and give him closure that way.”
“And if he ran away?”