Kansas City Christmas (14 page)

He claimed he wasn’t a cop anymore, but his actions showed that he was, through and through.

Once he admitted that truth to himself and the world, then maybe it would be easier for him to admit that his heart was still in good working order. After the tragedies he’d endured, he was entitled to be cautious about caring again. He might have a limp, he could still walk. Even without his cane. He might be wounded inside, but he could still love.

She couldn’t be more certain of that conclusion than if she had the science to prove it.

Science. A thought blipped through her mind as she put away the blankets. Proof. She strolled back to the living room, shuffling through a record of vague impressions, searching for something that should have registered sooner. “Tests.”

“Temple has the tests under control at the lab.”

“Now what do you suppose he meant by that?”

“Uh-oh. Nancy Drew alert.” Jillian crossed her arms in front of her, grinning. “What did you think of?”

There was nothing vague running through her mind now. She was working three steps ahead, putting thought into action.

She brushed her hair behind her ears, carefully checking for signs of anything more than superficial discomfort from her stitched-up wound. “May I borrow your phone?”

Jillian glanced at the one sitting right beside her on the lamp table. “Um. Sure. Here.” She pulled her cell from the pocket of her jeans.

Holly clasped the phone between her hands, then headed for the closet to pull out her short pink coat. “I mean, is it okay if I take this with me? You said you’d be at home all day decorating the place—can you get by with using the land line?”

“Of course. But, wait, where are you going? Edward said you should take it easy today.”

“I’ll take it easy at work.” She carefully pulled her stocking cap down over her hair and wrapped her scarf around her neck. “I’ll ask the patrolman downstairs to give me a lift to the lab since my car’s there, anyway. And I’ll make sure he calls someone to come watch our building.”

“I’m not worried about me.” Jillian hustled around her to block the door. “I’m worried about you.”

“Don’t be.” Holly smiled and squeezed Jillian’s hand. “Everyone keeps telling me to take it easy. But I can’t really relax until I find the answers I need. And I think I know where to find them.”

She hugged her sister and hurried downstairs to the front door, pausing to punch in Rick’s number before heading out into the cold, sunny air. “Rick? Yeah, it’s Holly. I’m coming into the office—would you have time to do a consult with me?”

Her attacker hadn’t stolen
all
of her work last night.

Now she just had to make nice with Rick Temple until she could get the print-out she’d left for him out of his desk.

E
DWARD WATCHED HIS OLD FRIEND
Jamal down his third hot dog and wondered how a man who’d lived most of his adult life on the streets of No-Man’s-Land, KCPD’s nickname for one of the area’s most troubled neighborhoods, could still have such enthusiasm for life.

“Yes, I definitely think the chili cheese is the best.” He wiped sauce from the corner of his mouth with the end of his sleeve, yet spoke like he was reviewing a four-star restaurant. “Though the mustard and sauerkraut dog kicked up the flavor quite a bit.”

For the price of a three-course lunch from a hot dog stand, Jamal had agreed to meet Edward in Washington Park and share the latest news he’d gleaned. Edward stamped his feet on the brick walking path until Jamal had adjusted his cap and earmuffs atop his bald head and pulled down his sleeves-cum-napkin over his bare fingers. Gloves would be the next form of payment he’d offer the septuagenarian, whether today’s information panned out or not.

When Jamal moved out, Edward shortened his stride to match. “So, buddy, what do you have for me? On the phone this morning you said you had heard something about my brothers?”

“Not your brothers, my friend. You.”

“Somebody’s talking about Edward Kincaid on the streets?”

“You’re the man who killed André Butler, ain’t you?” Edward scanned back and forth across the park area, wondering where all these
somebodies
were who thought his hell and retribution made for an interesting topic of conversation. Except for the statue of George Washington himself, the place was deserted. Jamal continued with a world-weary shrug, “André was no good. Turned his back on everything his mama tried to teach him.”

No way was he going to take a trip down
that
memory lane today. “Is that all you’ve got for me? People reminiscing about getting Butler off the streets?”

“Nope. Nope.” Jamal climbed over a drift to the sidewalk that led down toward the barbershop where Edward had picked him up a half hour earlier. “What I’m hearin’ is that you are on a righteous path again.”

“Righteous?” Edward shook his head, carefully stepping over the same drift. “Who’s saying I’m gunning for them?”

“Not who. What. I’ve got sources talkin’ about what you want. That you’re gettin’ close, stirring up the order of things the way you did when you arrested André and his boys.”

Had he been off the streets so long that he couldn’t follow Jamal’s slang anymore? Or was the old man babbling just to get some food in his belly? “I said I wanted to find one of those Z rings.”

“Yes. Se-rill-ik.” Jamal sounded out the word phonetically and grinned. “I looked it up in the shelter library. It looks like a number three.”

“Yeah. We had this conversation before.” Edward was already late for the meeting with Kevin Grove and his brothers. He’d left Holly with a rookie guard watching over her. He couldn’t afford to be wasting his time here if Jamal didn’t start making sense. He swallowed hard to keep the bite out of his voice. “You didn’t find one of those rings for me, did you?”

“Nope.”

Jamal stopped. Edward caught himself a step later and turned. His old friend from the streets was grinning from ear to ear. “What?”

“I didn’t find no ring. But I found a Cyrillic
Z
.”

Edward didn’t want to burst his friend’s proud bubble. “In the encyclopedia where you looked it up?”

Jamal arched a scraggly brow and shook his head as though Edward was the fool. “On a woman’s wrist. Least I heard tell about it. A man I know works for the city. He’s a sanitation engineer—”

“Jamal!”

His friend pulled his stained sleeve back from his hand and pointed to the inside of his wrist. “Freddie said he met a woman with a tattoo right here. A teeny, tiny number three inside a circle. A Cyrillic
Z
.”

Edward nearly hugged his skinny friend. “Please tell me it wasn’t on a body inside his truck.”

“Freddie was doing dumpster pickup in the alleys last night. He caught a woman—nice-lookin’ older gal, he said, with long dark hair—though she wasn’t dressed nice—throwing somethin’ out in one of the dumpsters. She gave him a hundred dollars and said to forget he ever saw her.” Jamal sensed Edward’s next question. “When she reached up with the money, he saw the tattoo.” Jamal laughed. “He thought it was fake.”

“The tattoo?”

“The hundred.”

Edward could barely keep his feet planted. But he needed to make sure that this was the break he and his brothers had been waiting for. “Did Freddie happen to see what she dumped in the trash?”

Jamal nodded. “He showed it to me when he flashed me the hundred dollar bill. Broken glass and bottles and stuff. She was probably dumpin’ her drugs.”

Or evidence stolen from a crime lab.

Edward linked his hand beneath Jamal’s elbow and hurried toward the warmth of the barbershop. “Can you introduce me to Freddie?”

“Sure. You ain’t takin’ his hundred dollars, are you? I know you cops take things for a case and they don’t always come back. But Freddie’s earned—”

“I’ll trade with him, I promise.” He paused to open the door for Jamal. “And Freddie’s sure it was a Cyrillic Z?”

“You bet. Because I told him and all my friends that you was lookin’ for one.” That’s why his name was on the streets. “You got rid of André for us, and good folks are lookin’ to repay the favor. If Edward Kincaid wants a Cyrillic
Z
, we’ll find him one.”

Edward smiled. “Now that’s righteous.”

“T
HINK OF IT LIKE A MODERN
version of the Minié balls developed during the Civil War.” Rick Temple drew slashing lines exiting the crude rifle he’d already drawn on the white board in his office. “They expanded as they traveled through the grooves of the rifle, increasing their range and power, but also beginning their decomp.”

“Rick, I just need the print-out back. Not an entire history lesson. I still need to stop by Trace and DNA before I head out.” Holly held out her hand, but he ignored her request and kept on drawing. This was like some kind of tedious video game where she had to complete the entire task before she could move on to the next level. Conceding to the rules of Rick’s ego, Holly pulled her hand back to the strap of her purse. Apparently, she wasn’t getting that piece of paper or the lab reports from her attack until she’d heard the lecture through to its very end. “I thought that Minié balls were made of iron.”

“They were.” Now Rick was writing out a chemical formula. “Iron rusts and breaks down when exposed to the elements or during long-term exposure to the moisture inside the human body. There are records from the war about veterans who weren’t killed outright when they were shot. But the projectile lodged in their body where it began to decompose, and then years later they died of the toxins released by the foreign object in their system.” She didn’t dare interrupt him to say that she read history books, too. “Our disintegrators work in basically the same way, but at a greatly accelerated rate. Of course, the impact seems to kill people outright.”

“So your theory is that if any of the victims had survived their wounds—”

“—then most likely they’d die from the decomposing toxins in their systems.” Rick finally put the print-out back in its envelope. “Those bullets are deadly in more ways then one. Can you imagine the havoc it would wreak on a population where medical care is minimal?”

“Let’s hope we never have to find out.” Holly fixed a smile on her face as he turned around and handed her the information she’d asked for ten minutes ago. “Thanks, Rick. It’s good to know I have someone so smart and thorough working on my team.”

Pleased with himself and his report, she supposed, Rick held on to the envelope, blocking her exit and making sure he had her attention. “Don’t you want to know about the other tests?”

With a slight tug, the print-out was hers. She stuffed the envelope into her purse and slung it over her shoulder. “I’m on my way to Trace now.”

“Well, let me save you the trip.” He circled his desk and picked up a pair of file folders from his in-box. “Lieutenant Kincaid and his brother Atticus asked me to run some tests regarding your attack.”

“They asked
you?
”

There he was in front of her again. “Well, I’ve been running things since you got hurt.”

Holly didn’t have to tilt her chin to look him in the eye. “I’ve only been gone one day.”

Rick rested his hip against the corner of his desk and sat back. His arms brushed against hers, and Holly flinched. “You know, I enjoy working with you, side by side like this, rather than taking orders from you. Ever since you got your promotion to team leader, you hide yourself down in your lab. It’s almost as though you’re keeping secrets from us.” He winked and leaned closer to share a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s like you don’t trust us.”

Holly pushed him out of her personal space, annoyed and frankly a little uncomfortable with this side of Rick’s personality. “I prefer to work alone. That’s nothing new. I concentrate better in the lab that way.”

“It just feels unfriendly to me. And I think we could be good friends, Holly, if you gave us a chance. We could, you know, look out for each other—so that maybe something like what happened to you in the lab doesn’t happen again.”

Was that why he took such delight in playing his practical jokes on her? Through some adolescent sense of logic, was that how Rick was trying to draw her out of her reserved shell to become more like one of the gang? “I didn’t know you felt that way. I’ll try to do better and be more…social.”

“Asking me for help with your chemical composite print-out was a good start.”

Ugh. They weren’t in junior high and Holly didn’t need the figurative pat on the head. She snatched the files from Rick’s hand. “Could I just see the results from Trace and DNA now?”

She turned her back on him and opened up the first report, detailing the scrapings taken from beneath her fingernails. “Epithelial,” she read aloud. Skin. From her attacker, she hoped. Holly quickly opened the second file for the DNA results.

“Female.” Her attacker
had
been a woman. Like the Kincaid brothers had suggested. Female like the woman who’d murdered their father. And yet: “No hits in CODIS.” No direct match. Whoever had attacked her hadn’t ever been arrested for any kind of felony.

Rick tapped the folder she’d been reading from. “Did you notice this?”

Holly scanned the paragraph at the end of the page. “A familial connection?”

“We found two links in the system, in fact,” Rick pointed out, seeming pleased to do so. “Though the DNA strands didn’t positively identify the woman donor, we did find a relative in the police staff records. The other is in the deceased databank. Brooke Hansford and Tony Fierro.” Holly knew Brooke as Atticus Kincaid’s fiancée, and administrative assistant to Major Mitch Taylor, who ran the Fourth Precinct. She knew Anthony Fierro as a dead body in her autopsy room. Tattooed from head to toe—including one tiny Cyrillic
Z
like the mark she’d found on all of Z Group’s former operatives—Fierro had been found murdered in his jail cell shortly after attacking Brooke. And now it looked like Brooke was his sister? “Eeuw.”

“Ah. I see you got to the part about Brooke Hansford and Tony Fierro sharing a biological mother.” Rick seemed so happy with himself to have figured out more than Holly had, that she simply let him tell her the answers. “The DNA sample taken from your fingertips also matches the nail chip recovered from just outside your lab. They’re from the same woman.”