Captain Roman-Wyatt was at the station when I arrived. He asked Wen and me to give him an update on what happened that evening.
“I’m sorry that you got called in, Captain.”
“It’s part of the job description, Detective. Luckily, it doesn’t happen very often. Nothing says ‘Welcome to Blissville’ like a homicide. I worked here a few years before I had to investigate one, so you must be special,” he teased.
“Adrian will be pissed he missed all the excitement,” Wen told our captain.
“Oh, no he won’t,” Adrian said, entering the captain’s office. “I go out of town for a few days and all hell breaks loose. Can’t y’all protect and serve the people without me?”
“Oh good, Adrian’s back,” Wen said. “The rest of us can go on home. He’ll take it from here.”
“Was there really a severed head dumped in the alley behind the coffee shop?”
“It was a bloody marble bust,” I told my new partner. Even though I hadn’t worked in the field with him yet, we had clicked right away when I met him the day I interviewed with the captain.
“Bust? Like a breast?” Adrian asked
“Bust, as in a marble statue of someone’s head and shoulders,” our captain answered. “Of course, your mind went there.”
“Who was the bust of and what the hell was it doing in Maegan’s alley?”
“I have a pretty good idea of who the bust was created to honor, but I need to confirm it. I’m hoping the newspaper will provide a clue, but if not, the guy from the historical society should be able to help us.”
“Who do you think it is?” the captain asked me.
“I think it’s Blissville’s founder, Anthony Bliss.”
“Who’s he?” the captain asked.
I told him everything that Maegan had shared with me that morning. I had called Homer Stillwater to make an appointment with him, but he was out of town for the day. “I’d much rather help you solve a homicide than go antiquing with my wife, but I’m already in the doghouse,” he had told me. “Can this wait until tomorrow? I can meet you at the historical society after church.”
I had agreed to meet him, but I would have to revise our meeting location since I couldn’t take a key piece of evidence out of the station. In the meantime, I planned to use everyone’s favorite research tool: Google.
“Let’s suit up and see what we have before we send it off to the state lab,” the captain said. “I hope they can get the results back to us fairly quickly so we can for sure say the bust was used to kill Renzo.”
“I have a contact in the state lab. I don’t mind making a phone call or two,” I offered.
“Is she pretty?” Adrian teased, implying that I knew her outside the job. I did, but not in the way he thought.
“Kelsey is very pretty, but better yet, she’s a brilliant scientist. Her wife wouldn’t approve of me trying to charm her to get my evidence moved up the priority list though. I’ve seen Valeria swing a bat for our co-ed softball team, so I won’t be crossing any lines.”
“Fair enough,” Adrian replied.
In our small lab, Officer Jayna Murkowsky was a step ahead of us. She was scanning the bust with a handheld device that looked like something they used at a store for items too big to put on the conveyor belt. Instead of reading a barcode, it recorded the angles of the face and compiled the data into her computer to form a photo. On another computer, she had a split screen showing Anthony Bliss’s image from two different angles.
“Left was definitely his strongest side,” Adrian said.
“That’s the side most people choose for selfies,” Wen added.
“It’s true that most people photograph best from the left side,” Murkowsky agreed.
“How do you know that about selfies, Wen?” Adrian asked incredulously.“Do you take a lot?”
“Teen sister.”
“Ahhh,” we all said.
“Does that same logic apply to dick pics?” Adrian pondered out loud.
