Veil of Night: A Novel Read online

  Swiftly he looked around. Yeah, there it was, parked to his right: a beater with the engine still running, exhaust pouring from the tailpipe. No driver, so that meant this stupid shit was on his own.

  The google-eyed girl handed the coffee out to him. He gave her a brief nod, pretended to take a sip of the coffee, then said loudly, “This coffee is old. Could you make a fresh pot, please?”

  She gave him an agonized look. He said, “Look, if you think it’s too much trouble to make some fresh coffee, then let me speak to the manager.” As he was talking he flipped open his wallet, let her get a quick flash of his badge. She took a deep breath, gave a nod as brief as his, then said, “Yes, sir. It’ll take a minute, though.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Shit. Now what? His car was too close to the building for him to squeeze out through the driver’s-side door. Moving as fast as possible, he put the transmission in park, put the cup in the cup holder, released his seat belt, and jacked himself over the passenger seat and out the door, grabbing the coffee cup from the holder as he went out. He didn’t have a second to waste. Shit could go down fast, and people could get hurt. The last thing he wanted was to start a shooting spree in a crowded fast-food restaurant.

  He jerked the plastic top off the coffee cup, rounded the front of the car, and was pulling his weapon from his holster when he all but collided with a thick-necked bozo who came barreling out of the door with a money bag in one hand and a pistol in the other. The bozo roared, “Move, fucker!” and jabbed the pistol in Eric’s direction.

  With his left hand Eric threw the hot coffee in the bozo’s face, cup and all. Bozo bellowed, automatically raising both hands to his face; he was so close, less than half a step away, that his pistol almost hit Eric in the nose as he swung it up. Eric shot out his left hand and caught the guy’s wrist, giving it a savage twist. The bozo squealed like a little schoolgirl, his voice rising high with panic, and dropped the pistol, which went skidding across the pavement with a speed and sound that made Eric stop and stare at the weapon in disbelief. A heavy pistol wouldn’t skid like that, wouldn’t make that sound. Only something lightweight, and made of plastic—

  A fucking water pistol?

  “That does it!” he snapped as he whirled Bozo around and slammed him facedown on the hood on the car, dragging out his cuffs and snapping them on before the guy could stop whining about being burned. He felt as if steam were boiling from the top of his head, he was so angry. “I’m not stopping for fucking coffee ever again!”

  Behind him, the crowd that had spilled out of the McDonald’s began applauding.

  “Hey, Wilder, are you paying these dickheads to rob places so you can play hero?”

  The jibe was lobbed at him as soon as he showed his face in the bullpen. He growled under his breath as he wove his way to his battered desk. Garvey walked over, grinning. Hell, everyone around him was grinning. “That kid they interviewed did a great job,” he said. “Of course, they had to bleep the part about what kind of coffee you’re never stopping for again, but if you’re any kind of lip-reader you can tell what the kid was saying. By the way, the lieutenant wants to see you.”

  “Now?”

  “Wouldn’t hurt.”

  “Fucking great,” Eric muttered, but took himself upstairs. How was he supposed to have stopped one of the local TV stations from interviewing the restaurant’s customers? He supposed he could have slapped a hand over the kid’s mouth and told him to keep quiet, but at the same time he hadn’t realized how many of the customers had heard him ranting about his coffee. Wouldn’t you know it, the reporter had picked one of the kids with bright eyes and big ears who was all but dancing with excitement at being on television. Why couldn’t they have gone for some shy kid who was scared to death, hiding his face against his mama’s arm?

  It had been all over the noon news. “Whoosh!” the kid had said, imitating the motion Eric had made in tossing the coffee in the bozo’s face. A big grin had lit the kid’s face like it was Christmas. “Then he took the gun away from the robber and threw him down on the car, wham, like this—” He imitated that motion, too. “And said he was never stopping for fucking coffee again!”

  They’d bleeped the “fucking,” but Garvey was right, there wasn’t any doubt about exactly what the kid had said.

  He knocked on Lieutenant Neille’s door and pushed it open at the muffled “come in.” “You wanted to see me?” He sounded grumpy to his own ears, but he didn’t care.

  “Sit down.” Neille leaned back in his black leather chair, a perplexed look on his face. “Wilder, do you have any objection to making an apprehension using normal methods?”

  Eric dropped into one of the visitors’ chairs. “There was a restaurant full of people. I didn’t want any bullets flying around.” That should have been self-explanatory.

  “I don’t know if you could get any luckier, considering the guy didn’t have a real gun. If you’d shot him, the media would be raising hell.”

  “If I were lucky, I wouldn’t keep walking into situations like this,” he said irritably.

  “As it is, the mayor’s office has called, I’ve already had five requests for interviews with you, and a charity group wants to know if you’ll be one of the bachelors auctioned off—”

  “Hell, no!” Eric barked, then caught himself. “Sorry, sir.”

  Neille grinned. “I didn’t think so. I refused on your behalf.” Still grinning, he looped his arms behind his head. “I don’t know if I can get you out of the interviews, though. This is two days in a row you’ve brought the bad guy down in an unconventional way, and the mayor thinks this will be great publicity.”

  “Except I don’t have time for publicity.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’m investigating a murder, I have suspects practically falling out of the trees but none of them look all that good for the job, and this circus has already taken up most of the morning.”

  “Understood. I’ll do what I can to stall, and maybe something else will happen to take the spotlight off your smiling face and turn it on someone else. But if the mayor says you do the interviews, then you do the interviews.”

  “Yes, sir.” Frustrated, Eric got to his feet and returned downstairs to his desk, and the mountain of paperwork that was waiting for him. It didn’t help that grins followed him every step of the way. Of all the days for a huge time-suck to happen, when he had more to wade through than he could handle.

  He glared at the thick stack of reports and paperwork on his desk. That was something about television cop shows that really griped him: they never showed the mountain of paperwork real cops had to wade through on every case, every day. Reports had to be written and filed, requests written and filed, every shred of evidence accounted for every step of the way.

  He dropped into his chair, and began flipping through the reports to see what he wanted to read first. He knew the report on Jaclyn’s clothes wouldn’t be back yet; he’d just logged them in last night, so the lab techs probably hadn’t even started yet. The clothes had been wet, and they’d have to air dry before they could be tested.

  There was a preliminary report on the trace evidence the crime techs had turned up. No analysis yet; that took time. But just knowing what was there would usually point him in the right direction. It might take him awhile to weed out what was important from what wasn’t, but this was a start.

  He pulled the report out of the manila envelope and began to read. The first thing he noticed was that there was hair—a lot of it, in just about every color he thought human hair came in, though there were a couple of hot pink ones that threw him.

  Garvey dropped into the chair beside Eric’s desk. He glanced up at the sergeant. “Have you seen this?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Gray hair.”

  “No telling where it came from, though. It’s a public place.”

  Which enormously compounded their problem, but then again, maybe not. Sometimes when you started digging into something t