Hewitt raised a hand in a placating motion. “Bowie, I understand you’re upset. You have every right to be. But if you had anything to do with this, you need to tell us now. We have three victims. We can’t help you if you don’t tell us what you did.”
Bowie frowned, trying to follow their train of thought, but then Odette’s eyes went comically wide and she started laughing hysterically. “Wait. You think Bowie did this? What? How does that work, exactly? Between drinks he just casually whipped out an Uzi or something and went to town in the middle of a parking lot? Then came back in, finished the night. They pay you guys for this?”
Detective Parsons gave a huge sigh, looking Odette up and down. “Of course not. Who are you again?”
“Odette Coldwell. I’m his best friend,” she said, eyebrows raised like she dared him to fight her.
Parsons put both hands on the table like he was attempting to make himself seem larger. It was a clear intimidation move. “Well, if you’d like to remain present, we’re going to need you to be silent.”
It didn’t work. Odette leaned forward. “And if you want to continue to question my friend here, then you’re going to do it with me beside him, or it all stops now and I call my uncle.”
Judging by the way Parson’s face contorted, he didn’t like having a five-foot-nothing girl tell him what to do. “Young lady, I don’t know who your uncle is, but he can’t help you in here.”
She smirked at him. “Oh, you definitely know who he is. He’s the District Attorney for LA County.”
“Christ,” Hewitt muttered under his breath.
He was? That was news to Bowie. He knew Odette came from money, knew everybody in her family was insanely successful—doctors, lawyers, an actor, and her, an almost prima ballerina. But Odette didn’t talk about them much. She tried not to take money from them and preferred to live her own experiences, as she put it.
Odette sat back with a huge smile on her face, crossing her arms as she bounced one leg over the other, pleased with herself.
Parsons, it seemed, wasn’t sold. “Bowie, in about four hours, this is going to be out of our hands. The man who was murdered was the son of an Italian diplomat.”
“Oh, I’m well aware of that,” Bowie said with a sneer. “I’m just not sure what you think I had to do with this.”
Hewitt leaned in, his face bleeding with sincerity. “Did you hire somebody to kill him? If so, we might still have some wiggle room if you confess now. A good attorney can argue diminished capacity. You’ve been through a lot over the last few weeks. It has to have taken a toll on your mental health.”
Once more, Odette cackled madly. “We live over a laundromat. We barely make enough money to pay our water bill every month. Do you know how expensive it is to live in LA as four struggling dancers? Where would Bowie get the money to hire a hitman?”
“Family?” Parsons said. “Friends?” He looked pointedly at Odette.
Odette rolled her eyes. “We didn’t have anything to do with this. We’re not sorry he’s dead. He was a monster. One you let roam loose around LA. It was only a matter of time before he bit the wrong person. But it wasn’t us. I wish it was.”
Bowie gaped at her. It was the most she’d spoken about his attack since it had happened. They’d both been dancing around it for weeks, talking about everything surrounding it without actually talking about the thing itself. He’d thought she was upset with him, but now, he wondered if she was somehow upset with herself.
“Also, not for nothing, but I saw those windows,” she added. “That was bulletproof glass. No LA gangbanger is gonna have bullets that would pierce through that.”Maybe one, Bowie thought. “You’re obviously looking for professionals.”
“Who are you?” Hewitt said, looking at Odette like she was an alien.
“A girl with a lot of family in the government. Government-issued vehicles have bulletproof glass.”
“Is she right? Was that bulletproof glass?” Bowie asked.
“We can’t release information in an ongoing homicide investigation,” Parsons muttered, looking like he wanted to strangle Odette with his lanyard.
“That’s code for yes,” Odette said with a snicker.
Parsons ignored her. “If we check your bank statements, we’re not going to find any large sums of money missing, are we?”
Bowie snorted. “You’re not going to find any large sums of money at all. I’m broke. I’m a dancer.”
“We’re also going to look into your family.”
Bowie’s hands flailed helplessly. “I don’t even talk to my family. They don’t even know about the…” All of a sudden, it felt like he couldn’t breathe. This was all too much. “About what happened to me. My parents cut me out of their lives when I chose dance over college.”
Parsons wasn’t done. “We’re going to check. Phone records, too. We’re not the only ones.”
Bowie shook his head, stomach sloshing. He pulled his phone from his pocket, using his fingerprint to unlock it before he slid it across the table. “Check my phone. There’s nothing on it. Because I didn’t do anything.”
