21 Weeks: Week 1 Read online

wasn’t gonna…” For the first time, Williams sounded sincerely uncomfortable. “I wasn’t going to ask your age.”

  “Why not?” Beck returned.

  “Women don’t… you know. I just… I wasn’t.”

  As he fell into silence, Beck wondered how in the hell he thought he could survive in SWAT. He was lucky criminals didn’t just pull out spoons and eat him alive.

  “You’re what? Thirty-nine?” Sitting right next to him, she could tell Williams was older than mid-thirties, but was certain he was still shy of forty.

  “Nice guess.” He looked almost disturbed at her accuracy.

  “And you’ve been on the force twelve years. What did you do before that?”

  “I spent six years in Aviation Operations for the Army, and three years in the Coast Guard. Oh, did I forget to mention that?”

  Glancing toward her, Williams kept his face straight, and Beck realized she’d spent the past five minutes being played - thoroughly, perfectly played.

  “Yeah. You did.”

  “Sorry.” Williams didn’t sound very sorry. “So, how does your face feel?”

  “Like I got punched,” Beck admitted. “Why? Does it look bad?”

  “Depends what you’re trying to do,” he said. “If you’re planning to audition for a makeup commercial this afternoon, it looks pretty bad. If you want to scare a few witnesses, it’s really working for you.”

  Huffing a laugh, Beck realized she actually liked the man. Damn if she didn’t. After her morning, it felt as if she’d been handed the one gem in a cave full of coal.

  “Sorry about the guys.” Williams seemed to tune into her thoughts.

  “Why? You weren’t even there, were you?” Fairly competent at noting every person in a room at first glance, Beck didn’t recall seeing Williams until the moment he tried to give Bishop a shoulder to lean on.

  “Not when it started,” he said. “I was dropping my kids at school. I caught the end. Those guys, they can be real pricks. Racist, sexist, whatever it takes if they think they can get a rise out of you.”

  “Is that all Bishop was doing?” Beck asked, and Williams’ lips formed a thin line as he glanced her way.

  “Bishop’s set in his ways, thinks he knows how things should run.”

  “He’s not wrong, you know.” Beck wasn’t sure why she was trying to alienate the one ally she had. “It wasn’t my case. I was told several times to keep my hands out of it, and I didn’t. I’m well aware that putting away someone else’s perp doesn’t make you look good. It just makes them look bad. I know why I have no friends here. The real question is, how did you end up stuck with me?”

  “I didn’t. I requested you.”

  Beck found that hard to believe. “Are you some kind of masochist?”

  “I’m a realist,” Williams stated. “I’ve got two kids closing in on college. I need one of those fancy desks with its fancy paycheck. Martinez says you’re half vigilante. I figure, I prove I can keep you in line, I’ll make sergeant in a year. I really hope you won’t make it too painful for me.”

  Glancing his way, Beck watched the smile cross Williams’ lips.

  “Plus, someone was going to have to take you, and I didn’t want to get my ass kicked.”

  Against her better judgment, almost against her will, Beck laughed.

  4 - Wooley’s Grocery - Monday, 9:30 a.m.

  “Officer Godfrey, meet Detective Beck Nash, my new partner.”

  “Hey.” Godfrey nodded.

  “Hey,” Beck returned.

  “So, what do we got?”

  “Owner of the store.” Godfrey waved them to the counter’s end. “Ranj Basu. He was found like this at 8:58 a.m.”

  About the time she was getting into a fight with her new colleague, Beck noted.

  Flopped onto his side, Mr. Basu didn’t appear to have been expecting the fall. From their vantage point, it looked like a single gunshot, straight through his side, the pool of blood on the floor beneath him making the cause of death clear.

  “Who found him?” Beck’s eyes moved to the rifle on the edge of the shelf beneath the counter. The way it was situated, barrel angled out, it looked as if the victim reached for it, but didn’t get the chance to pull it. By all appearances, a robbery gone bad.

  “Customer.” Officer Godfrey pointed out the distraught woman across the store. “Linda Cain.”

  “Has anyone pulled the video?”

  “Working on it. The feed shows on that screen.” Officer Godfrey indicated the small TV behind the counter. “But it doesn’t record here. Must be going to an external server.”

  “No computer on site?” Beck asked.

  “We haven’t found one.”

  Accepting the minor complication with a nod, she looked again to the dead man on the floor, not entirely sure how she was supposed to feel. She didn’t know him, had never seen him before in her life, and she wasn’t exactly prone to mourning strangers. There was something sad, though, about the scene, the way the man lay there alone. For how long, they would have to wait for the M.E.’s report to know.

  “Anything missing?” Williams questioned.

  “There are a few holes in the merch. Doesn’t look like the killer took much, though.”

  Beck glanced to the empty silver hooks, the vacant spots on the shelves, the empty place down the front of the counter where a candy bar box was missing in full. “And certainly nothing worth killing anyone over,” she uttered.

  “Try to hurry along that video, will you?”

  “Sure thing.” Godfrey went off to heed Williams’ request.

  “Do you want to talk to the witness?” Williams looked to Beck.

  Gaze moving over the counter, Beck took in the scratches, inch-long grooves etched into the surface in front of the cash register, as if someone tried to pull the piece across it, but didn’t get far. Trailing to the mess below, where one metal rack had been dislodged, snack bags scattered, one burst wide, its contents crunched into the floor, it looked as if someone had made a fast getaway. Strange, since there was nothing to indicate anyone had interrupted the crime in progress.

  “Do you mind doing it?” Beck asked. “I’d like to look at the body.”

  “Yeah. No problem.” Williams seemed to get it, or at least not to mind, which came as little surprise given what Beck had collected about the man’s nature thus far. “That’s our M.E.” He motioned to the back of the store. “She’s amazing, but don’t ask her what happened. She won’t tell you.”

  Grin pressing the corners of her mouth, despite the grimness of their surroundings, Beck knew there was only one person it could be. Glancing over her shoulder, she spotted the woman down an aisle of canned goods, scribbling notes against a clipboard, and knew, too, why Dr. Shannon Baxton was standing at such a distance.

  With a nod to Williams, Beck watched him head over to the witness, before detouring down the aisle on her way to Mr. Basu. Completely engaged in her preliminary assessment - though, everyone knew, she would never speak it aloud - Baxton didn’t even glance up.

  “Hear you’re a real pain in the ass to work with.”

  Startling, Baxton’s pen skidded across the paper. Looking up with slight surprise, a broad smile came to her face.

  “Hey, Nash. What are you doing here?”

  “I got transferred to Metro. Homicide.”

  Smile fading, Baxton’s brown eyes narrowed, reminding Beck that, just because the woman didn’t say everything she was thinking, didn’t mean her brain wasn’t constantly at work. “You’re still doing that?”

  “Doing what?”

  “It’s a promotion, right? Metro Homicide? That’s a promotion. You got promoted. So, say you got promoted.”

  Baxton. Always exacting.

  “I got promoted to Homicide,” Beck said. Though, door propped open for the Crime Scene Unit to pass in and out, 115-degree heat wafting into the tiny store, it didn’t feel like much of a move up in the world.

  “I guess we’re going to
be working together again,” Baxton said.

  “Guess so.”

  It was hard to believe it had been as long as it had since they last did. Baxton started right around the time Beck did, as a reserve investigator with the Coroner’s Office before she even graduated med school. She was good then, on the way to being one of the best, but the same. Her specimen-collection and lab work were beyond reproach, the kind of detailed excellence district attorneys had wet dreams about at night. Which was why Metro had bogarted her since the day she got her license. Baxton’s on-the-scene work, however, was nonexistent. No theories. No speculation. Just observe, collect, document, and then get as far away from the body as the location allowed. It hadn’t taken long watching Baxton work for Beck to realize she was dealing with a medical examiner who was skittish at the sight of dead bodies in the wild.

  “What happened to your face?” Baxton asked.

  “I got into a fistfight with my acting sergeant.”

  Mouth hanging open for a second, Baxton didn’t even bother to question it. “Well, it doesn’t look like too much damage.” Fingers sliding onto Beck’s chin, they turned her face to the side instead.

  “It’s not impeding,” Beck uttered.

  “But it hurts like hell?”

  “Yeah.” Pulling out of Baxton’s grasp, Beck glanced back at Mr. Basu’s body, realizing she had more important things to be doing than catching up with a woman she hadn’t seen in a decade. “So, what can you tell me?”

  “He was shot with a large-gauge weapon. Bled out. There are some inconsistencies, though.”

  “Inconsistencies?” Beck was duly impressed. The last time she worked with her, Baxton wouldn’t even make that kind of