Paper Bullets (18 page)

“I need to talk to you,” he said. His voice had lost its cold edge and instead had an urgency that hadn’t been there before. “You’re making a mistake. I don’t want it to cost you.”

“Cost me what?”

“What you’re trying to protect.”

I didn’t trust Richards as far as I could throw him. Considering I probably couldn’t even pick him up, that wasn’t very far.

I still didn’t know if he’d followed me here or if he’d decided to start following Sewell. I didn’t know why he’d been arguing with Melody yesterday, although given the intensity of his first conversation with me, I was starting to think that what I’d seen had been a normal conversation where Richards was concerned. And I definitely had no clue how he could know anything about me other than what was public information.

On the other hand, I had nothing concrete on Sewell or Richards or anything to do with Melody’s murder that I could take to the police that would make them turn their search for her killer away from Ryan. I didn’t even know if he was still just a person of interest or whether he’d been upgraded to a suspect. I hoped that Norton would call me if Ryan had been arrested, even if it was just to give me a heads-up so that I could prepare Samantha before she heard it on the news, or worse yet, from one of her friends.

I certainly hadn’t figured out how to get the kind of information I needed on Richards, the kind of information that Kyle wouldn’t be able to get from his chatty friends on the force. Stacy had only given me background, and from what she’d told me, Richards had seemed like the possessive type.

Might as well plow ahead and see what I could get. The best way I knew how to do that was to knock him as off balance as he’d meant to knock me by waiting for me where I least expected to see him.

“Did you kill her?” I asked.

He rocked back a little, his body rigid. I don’t think he took a breath for nearly half a minute. The only thing that looked alive about him were his eyes. I had a hard time looking at the pain reflected there.

“Is that what you think?” he finally asked, the question almost inaudible over the sound of traffic on the street and a car horn echoing off the walls of the garage.

“I think you’re dangerous when you want to be. I think you were following her yesterday, and you were in the middle of an argument when I saw the both of you at the gym. I think you might have been obsessed with her, and you didn’t like the fact that she had lunch with another man.”

He lifted an eyebrow and opened his mouth, but I wasn’t done yet.

“I think you took my picture with your cell phone yesterday and maybe you’ve been following me, although I didn’t spot your car until about ten minutes ago. I think the police took the convenient, easy way out when they interviewed me trying to dig up dirt on Ryan’s relationship with her when they could have had at least two easier suspects if they’d only widened the investigation a little further, but you’d know what kind of conclusions cops would jump to, wouldn’t you? But you know what I think most of all? I think maybe someone set up Ryan to be a convenient patsy.”

I hadn’t consciously considered that last part, but it had flowed out of me in a logical chain and I went with it.

What if someone
had
been setting Ryan up? With the flowers and the pictures and the phone calls, knowing what conclusions a lawyer might draw from the evidence at hand?

“I didn’t kill her.” Richards took a deep breath and glanced around the garage as if to check to see if anyone was listening. Apparently satisfied no one was close enough to hear, he looked back at me. “She was my informant,” he said.

Now it was my turn to be shocked. That was the last thing I’d expected to hear.

“You’re suspended,” I said. “How could she...”

He was staring over my shoulder. I turned my head to see the security guard watching us from inside the glassed-in walkway. Several other people were waiting for the elevator. They couldn’t hear us, but they sure could see us.

“We can’t talk here,” Richards said. “Let’s go for a ride.”

“If you think I’m getting—”

“Look, I’m still a cop,” he said, interrupting me. “I was never suspended. That was just a cover story. Make you feel any better?”

Not really, but I agreed that we couldn’t keep talking here. We were attracting too much attention as it was. If Sewell left on a break, or even left to go get something out of his car, I didn’t want him to see me talking to Richards. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to be the kind of conversation either of us wanted overheard, so that ruled out a bar or a restaurant. At least I knew my car was safe.

I dug my car keys out of my pocket and thumbed the fob, unlocking the doors. “Are you armed?” I asked him.

He shook his head. “I’m not supposed to be a cop anymore, remember?”

“Well, I’ve got a can of pepper spray in my purse, which I’m going to put on the seat right next to me.” I pointed at the passenger side of my car. “The door’s unlocked.”

I dug the pepper spray out of my purse while he walked around the front of my car. I got in the driver’s seat, tempted for a moment to lock the doors and just leave. Only the possibility of Ryan’s arrest for murder made me stay.

Richards opened the passenger door and leaned in. “You don’t trust me one bit, do you?” he asked.

I lifted the pepper spray in response. It hadn’t escaped me that Melody had been killed in her own car.

“I don’t blame you,” he said as slid in the passenger seat and buckled himself in. “I don’t blame you at all.”

CHAPTER 23

I’VE PUT A LOT OF MILES on my car. Reno isn’t the biggest place in the world, and I’m sure other people have longer commutes, but Nevada is a big state with a whole lot of nothing in between the towns that dot the dessert.

I’ve served subpoenas in Silver Springs and Stagecoach and Gerlach, and once I tracked a witness down on the Pyramid Lake Paiute reservation. When Samantha was in elementary school, she played soccer three afternoons a week after school, and I went to every game I could. So far we’d made seven trips to Nevada City and back just so Samantha could spent time with Jonathan.

I never minded driving. I enjoyed Samantha’s company when she was with me, and when I was alone, I enjoyed listening to audiobooks. The stories made the time in the car fly by, but I never got so involved in the plot that I lost track of where I was driving and why.

Driving around town with no destination in mind with a potentially dangerous man in my passenger seat was not an enjoyable experience. It didn’t matter that he was a cop. Cops could be killers just like anyone else.

I left the bank building and headed west on California. My plan was to get on McCarran and just keep driving so that I wouldn’t get distracted by downtown traffic.

McCarran ran in a continuous loop through Reno and Sparks. The original intent of the road was to ring around the outside of both cities, providing residents with an alternative to the two freeways through town—I-80 ran east and west and 395 north and south—that were becoming increasingly clogged with traffic. By the time all the sections of McCarran were completed, both cities had grown beyond the outer edge of the McCarran loop.

These days McCarran was just another major thoroughfare dotted with traffic lights in the congested areas but boasting a higher speed limit than most city streets. On the plus side for me, the road had an almost continual flow of traffic, not to mention a good percentage of patrol cars on the lookout for speeders.

Even though Richards had said we needed to talk, he didn’t say anything until we’d passed the cafe on California where Melody had had lunch the day before. I almost expected to see the same older guy sitting at a table out front, reading something on his tablet, but lunch time was long over and the outside tables were empty.

“I didn’t set your ex up,” Richards said. “Archulette and Squires are good detectives, but they don’t think outside the box, and the box says look to the spouse or significant other whenever someone gets killed after a domestic disturbance.”

Domestic disturbance. He must be referring to the scene Melody threw at Ryan’s office after I left the gym.

“How much do you know about the investigation?” I asked. “Is Ryan going to be charged?”

“Not much. Everybody in the department except my captain thinks I’ve been suspended, so I’m the black sheep.” He looked down at his hands. “It wasn’t much of a stretch. I can be a pain in the ass. So no, I don’t know if they’re going to recommend that your ex be charged, or if they’re investigating any other leads.”

Kyle had described Richards as a little prick, but now that I’d had a chance to observe him up close and listen to him talk, he struck me more as a punk kid grown up.

He wasn’t that much taller than I was, although he was bulkier and more solid than he first appeared. He was wearing a plain white tank top that showed off the definition of the muscles in his shoulders and chest, but his olive skin bore faint scars from adolescent skin problems and other, less innocent, damage.

With his dirty blond hair and dark eyes, put him in a watch cap or a hoodie, and he’d be the guy other people would be frightened of in a dark alley. I could see why he’d been chosen for undercover drug work. Thirty pounds skinnier, hair a little longer and unkempt, and he’d have no trouble passing for a drug-using gang banger.

“You said I was making a mistake that would cost me,” I said as we passed the turn off to Keystone Avenue. “What mistake?”

“Pushing Justin Sewell.”

“What makes you think I’m pushing him?”

Richards considered me for a moment. “How much do you know about Sewell?”

So we were going to play “you show me yours and I’ll show you mine.” Okay, I’d bite. After all, I’d let him in my car.

“He was born in Boca Raton,” I said. “He did work for a charity in Boca called the Widows and Orphans of Southern Florida. It’s on his LinkedIn profile, buried among all the local charities he volunteers for because his bank requires it. The Widows and Orphans of Southern Florida owns a Florida LLC that, several times removed, owns a piece of a resort called the Boca Beach Club, which is owned by a guy named Antonio Gordino. A few years back, Gordino managed to get out from under federal racketeering and money laundering charges. Sewell lives above his means for a personal banker, but not so much above his means that he’d attract the wrong kind of attention. I can’t prove it, but I think he’s getting regular money from the charity—call him a consultant or a financial advisor or whatever—but what he’s really doing is laundering mo—”

“Jesus,” Richards said, interrupting me. “How the fuck did you find all that out?”

“Private investigator,” I said. “Seriously motivated private investigator.” I didn’t tell him that I’d stumbled on most of this by accident. I figured it couldn’t hurt if he thought I was just that good.

“I don’t think I want to know what you’ve found out about me.”

It hadn’t been nearly as much as I’d discovered about Sewell, so I kept my mouth shut. Instead I gave him a sideways glance.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess it’s my turn.”

“That would be nice.”

He rubbed a hand over his mouth. “I tumbled onto Sewell by accident, back when everybody thought I was just another burned-out undercover cop who got too deep into the lifestyle. Sewell was pushing prescription drugs—oxy, stuff like that—and I was trying to get a handle on his supplier.”

I’d been given a prescription for oxycontin in December when I’d dislocated my shoulder. I’d taken exactly one pill, and it had made me so sick that it was easier to just deal with the pain with over-the-counter pain meds. I’d taken the rest of the pills back to the pharmacy so they could dispose of them.

When I’d mentioned that to Kyle on our first date, he’d told me oxy was a high-demand drug on the streets, and it was also one of the kinds of pills kids stole from their parents’ medicine cabinets to get high. I remembered being both appalled at the idea and annoyed that anyone would think Samantha or her friends would do such a thing. Now I wasn’t so sure about Maddie.

“Getting in good with a guy like Sewell’s tricky,” Richards said. “I meant it when I said you were making a mistake going after him. I didn’t think you knew what you were stumbling into. Guys like Sewell eat nice, good-looking women for lunch. But you know a lot more than I thought, and you’re still going after him.”

“Does that mean you no longer think I’m nice?”

“I think you’re fucking nuts, but you’ve got balls. Either that or you’ve still got a thing for your ex. Mine would just as soon shoot me herself.”

“Gloria,” I said.

He shot me a sideways glance. “What the hell don’t you know?”

I slowed down for a red light on Hunter Lake Drive. The air conditioning in my car was doing its best against the late afternoon heat, but I still felt sweat trickle down my back between my shoulder blades. I considered turning up the fan to high, but the noise would discourage conversation, and I wanted Richards to keep talking.

A young woman on a bicycle pulled to a stop at the light, crowding close to the passenger side of the car in front of me. She was dressed in black bicycle shorts, a bright orange top with black and yellow highlights, and had a plain white helmet on her head. Her bare arms were deeply tanned, and her legs were lean and muscular, the tendons standing out in sharp relief.

I wondered how much of her life was spent on her bike, riding around town at a slow pace or racing up and down the hilly parts of McCarran just for the joy of experiencing the world rushing by without being enclosed in a car. Would she change anything about her life if she knew it might end today?

Melody hadn’t known that her life would end yesterday. She’d been just another young woman going about her day without a clue how precious every remaining second was.

Apparently Richards’ question hadn’t been rhetorical. He was waiting for an answer.

“I don’t know why Melody was murdered,” I said. “I don’t know who killed her and torched the car. I don’t know what message that was supposed to send. I don’t know who’s setting Ryan up and dragging me along for the ride. Is that enough for you? It’s more than enough for me.”