Unplugged (4 page)

3

Excuses are like butt holes. Everyone has ’em and they all stink.

—Connie McMullen,
challenging yet another of her daughter’s well-rehearsed lies

T
HE PRECINCT HOUSE
was about the same as I remembered it.

I hadn’t been there since I’d tried to convince Lieutenant Jack Rivera to allow me to help him unravel the mystery of Andrew Bomstad’s death. He’d been a star tight end for the L.A. Lions.

It hadn’t been an entirely altruistic offer on my part, as Bomstad had died on the floor of my office and the LAPD had thought I was somehow responsible. As I saw it, I had something of a vested interest in the case, but Rivera had turned me down flat.

And not just about the investigation, either.

But I didn’t think about the time we’d spent sprawled together on the floor of my vestibule anymore, except during a few embarrassingly vivid nightmares.

Maybe I was a fool to trespass on his turf again, but I’d called NeoTech and learned that Solberg hadn’t returned to work. In fact, no one had seen him since the end of October, when his associates had boarded the plane back to L.A. and bid him adieu. NeoTech hadn’t been forthcoming with much more info, except to say they were certain he would return before the end of the month.

Much hair pulling and several calls netted the information that Solberg had been scheduled to depart Las Vegas on flight 357 with America West Airlines. But they had no way of knowing if he’d actually boarded the plane.

My crack about our little geek friend being dead didn’t seem quite so amusing anymore. Maybe it was guilt that had driven me to Rivera’s lair. Maybe it was something else. I was pretty sure it wasn’t hormones.

“Can I help you?” The woman who stood behind the front desk was broad and dark-skinned, with earlobes that looked as if she might have, at one point, hung paint cans from them. They reached nearly to the point of her jaw and were currently sporting three-inch peacock feathers adorned with multicolored beads. The name plaque on her desk said
SADIE
.

“I’d like to file a missing persons report,” I said.

“Aw right,” she agreed, and slid a yellow legal pad across the counter so that it lay directly in front of her. She had boobs big enough to make a mountaineer swoon and her expression was absolutely deadpan. There was no, “Oh my God, who’s missing?” or even an “I’m so sorry for your [quite literal] loss.” She looked bored and a little peeved. She might as well have asked if I wanted fries with my report. Apparently, Solberg wasn’t the first person to disappear from sight in L.A. In fact, maybe that’s why this town called to the huddled masses. Maybe that’s why it had called to me. “What’s his or her name?”

“J. D. Solberg.”

“J.D.?” She lifted her murky gaze toward mine with accusatory slowness.

“Jeen, I guess.”

She shifted her weight. It took a while. “You guess?”

“It’s Jeen,” I said, challenging her to challenge me. It was Saturday morning, for God’s sake, and I was doing my civic duty.

She scribbled on her notepad. “When did she disappear?”

“He’s a man.” Sort of. I shuffled my feet a little. “And he hasn’t disappeared . . . exactly. He just hasn’t
reappeared
.”

She scowled up from under her brows. The woman had attitude to spare. At that precise moment, I would have traded a minor body part for a teaspoon of that juice. My stomach felt queasy.

“What?” She almost made it sound like two syllables. Intimidation was her stock-in-trade. They should have given her a badge and put her out on the street with nothing more than a scowl and a head bobble. She would have been fine.

I cleared my throat, straightened my back, and resisted glancing behind me. I had every right to be there, and the chances of Rivera appearing to remind me I’d acted like an overzealous porn star in the past were astronomical. I had nothing to be nervous about. “He went to a convention and hasn’t returned,” I explained.

“How long ago he leave?”

“Eighteen days.”

Her expression hadn’t brightened any. “How you related to him?”

“I beg your pardon?” I said, firing up my licensed therapist tone.

Her mouth quirked and her eyes narrowed. Her brows had been plucked to near extinction, but her hair made up for the loss. It was stacked like a braided beehive atop her head. “You his sister? His mother? What?”

His
mother
! Yeah, she had attitude and she probably swatted down gangsters like houseflies, but I’m Irish, and I was pretty sure I could take her if I had to. “I am an acquaintance,” I said.

“An acquaintance!”

“That is correct.” I stiffened my spine. “I am a friend, and he—”

“I can’t file no report from no friend,” she said, and waggled her head for emphasis.

“What are you talking about?”

“You gotta be a relative or somethin’. Where’d he go anyways?”

“What?”

Judging by her expression and the cock of her hip, I had to guess that her patience was running low, and I’m a trained professional. “Where was this convention he never come back from?”

“Oh. The convention. I believe it took place in Las Vegas.”

She raised a brow and propped an open fist on one meaty side. “Las Vegas?”

“Yes.”

“Girl, you know anything ’bout Las Vegas?”

“Listen—” I might have been losing a little of my professional edge.

“They got things shakin’ there that ain’t even legal in most the country.”

“I’m well aware—”

“Your J.D., he like the ladies?”

My mouth opened.

“ ’Cuz they got ’em in feathered flocks over there. More dancing girls than I got bills. And stacked!” She shook her head, in admiration or disbelief. It was hard to say. “They got a Russian gal at the Czar that can spin hula hoops on her—”

“Just file the damned report,” I snapped.

She looked patently offended and snorted through her nostrils. “Aw right, but you ask me, your man is gone permanent.”

I might have sputtered a little. “He is not my man.”

She shrugged, gave me a lazy glance, and waggled her head again. “Hey. You’re probably better off without ’im.”

“He is
not
my man,” I repeated.

“Well, then your”—she smirked and etched quotations in the air—“
acquaintance
is gone. Them dancing girls has butts tight as apricots and—”

I thumped the counter with my fist. “I don’t give a damn how tight their butts are or—”

“Is there a problem here?”

I recognized the voice immediately. It permeated my consciousness like a double shot of Absolut. I froze, hoping I was wrong and wishing I could ooze into the gray, industrial carpet beneath my feet. I waited a moment, but no oozing occurred, so I turned slowly.

“Lieutenant,” I said, and there he was. Jack Rivera, in all his officious glory, his dark eyes deadly and his expression as hard as his ass.

“Ms. McMullen,” he said.

We stared at each other. It hadn’t been too many weeks ago that we had done more.

I cleared my throat. He scowled.

“What are you doing here?”

I pursed my lips and refused to fidget, but it was hard looking at him without remembering the sound of tearing clothing. His, not mine. They don’t make men’s shirts like they used to. “I’m filing a missing persons report,” I said.

“Yeah?” His gaze never shifted from mine. “Who you missing?”

I gave him a tight smile, letting him know that everything was going peachy and that I neither appreciated nor needed his help. “I was just giving that information to your secretary here.”

“Oh?” He slowly shifted his midnight gaze to the aforementioned secretary. Maybe he thought that if he turned away I was going to pull out my Taser and zap him between the eyes. Maybe it wasn’t a bad idea.

“One Jeen Solberg,” Sadie said, and gave a breathy hmmfing noise and a head bobble. “She ain’t even a relative.”

His scowl deepened. Rivera doesn’t have a wide range of expressions. “J. D. Solberg?” he said, still not looking at me.

“That’s what she says.”

“She say where he went?”

“She says—”

“She’s right here,” I said, just managing to unlock my gritted teeth.

He turned toward me as if less than thrilled to remember my existence, then seemed to sigh internally. “I’ll take care of this, Sadie,” he said.

“Fine by me,” she snorted, and shuffled off.

The station room was cluttered with desks and dividers, but staff members were few and far between. Apparently, they didn’t let little things like murder and mayhem interfere with their weekends.

Rivera stared at me. His brows lowered a little. His lips twitched. A nick of a scar sliced the right corner of his mouth. I’d noticed it the first time I met him. Even before I noticed that he had the behind of an underwear model and the attitude of a Neanderthal.

“Come into my office,” he said, and turned away.

I considered refusing. But Elaine’s forlorn expression popped into my head and I followed him dutifully.

A moment later he was closing the door behind me and seating himself on the far side of his desk. He motioned toward the opposite chair. His sleeves were folded back from his hands. His wrists were wide-boned, his skin the color of hazelnut coffee.

I sat down on the edge of my chair and tried not to remember the last time we’d been together. He’d been wearing old blue jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt stretched tight over his nonexistent belly. He’d smelled almost as good as the egg foo young he’d brought in those sexy little Chinese take-out boxes. “So you can’t find your techno friend?” he asked.

I considered telling him for the umpteenth time that Solberg was
not
my friend. In fact, I considered telling him a lot of things, like I didn’t care how good he smelled, he was still a knob-headed cretin from the depths of hell.

“I wouldn’t be here,” I said instead, “but Elaine is worried about him.”

“Elaine?” he asked as if he didn’t remember her.

I scowled. Everyone with a teaspoon of testosterone and a single functioning brain cell remembers Elaine. “My secretary,” I explained. I was nothing if not patient.

“Oh, yes,” he said, and leaning back slightly, folded his hands over his belt buckle. He was wearing dark dress pants and a navy blue button-up shirt with no tie. His face was lean, his neck dark, with no chest hair showing beneath the scooped hollow of his throat. I swallowed. “Your loyal employee.”

I refused to drop my gaze, even though I knew exactly what he was referring to. Elaine had lied for me once or twice. He had found it neither believable nor amusing.

“She’s been . . .” I drew a deep breath and jumped in. The water was icy. “She’s been dating him.”

“Elaine,” he said, then paused, “and Solberg.” His lips twitched a little.

“Yes.”

He gave the slightest shrug as if to say it wasn’t his place to question the mystical ways of the cosmos. “And he’s gone missing?”

“Yes.”

Seconds stretched and frayed. “You didn’t kill him, did you?”

For just a moment I let myself fantasize about dropping an anvil on his head. But I wouldn’t really do it. That would be wrong. And I didn’t know anyone with an anvil. “You’re just as funny as I remember,” I said.

“Some things never change.”

His grin, for instance. It couldn’t really be called a smile, since it barely quirked the corners of his mouth. Instead, it just shone with satanic mischief in his eyes.

“Where does he live?” he asked.

“What?” Despite everything, the anvil scenario was distracting.

“Solberg,” he said, and slid a notebook across his nearly empty desk as he straightened. “What’s his address?”

I gave it to him.

He paused in the middle of writing. “That’s not our district.”

“What?”

“La Crescenta would have jurisdiction there.”

“What are you talking about? His house isn’t thirty minutes from here.”

He shrugged. The movement was slow and barely discernible. “Cops are territorial. I thought you’d learned that by now.”

Something sparked in his eyes. I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t care. I’d learned my lesson last go-round. Jack Rivera, with his dark chocolate eyes and wood-smoke voice, was strictly off-limits, like cigarettes, and desserts with fat grams that ran into the triple digits.

“Very well . . .” I rose to my feet and swept my purse dramatically onto my shoulder. Glenn Close should have looked so good. “Where is La Crescenta?”

“Sit down,” he said.

“I would love to converse, Lieutenant,” I said, “but I’m afraid I don’t have a great deal of time to—”

“Sit down,” he repeated.

I did so, though I don’t know why. Maybe it was because he was a cop, but God knows, I haven’t been exactly meek with authority figures in the past. I believe Father Pat, the patriarch of Holy Name Catholic School, had once called me the spawn of Satan, but that whole episode is a little blurry, as I was in a lust-induced haze with a boy named Jimmy at the time. He could spew Jell-O out of his nose on command. It’s hard to resist a guy with that kind of nasal capacity.

“I’ll take the information,” he said.

I wished I were still standing so I could look down at him. “Don’t do me any favors.”

A muscle jumped in his jaw, then he dropped the pen on the notepad and spread his hands. “Listen, about the other night.”

I raised a superior brow. “The other night?”

“When we . . .” He drew a deep breath. His eyes narrowed a little. They were sharp and lethal, softened only by the lush fringe of his lashes, which could make him look mischievous one moment and sexy as hell the next. It was a wonder he didn’t chop them off just to hone his hard-ass look. “The other night,” he repeated. “At your house.”