“And?”
“And went to see if I could help.”
“Mother Teresa, right here in Jefferson Park,” he said. Only he said it like she was some broad who worked a spaghetti house down in Little Italy.
Was there someone else I could talk to? I glanced at Alex, but he was stoic, as usual. “It was freezing out,” I said, “and there are places the unhomed can go to get warm—”
“You really shouldn’t be approaching the vagrants, miss.”
He made it sound like I was poking a stick through the cage at animals in the zoo. “I thought I could help. I guess it’s good I did.”
Aycock eyed me an extra second. “When did you realize you were acquainted with the victim, then?”
Joey’s gray face. I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes and recounted how I had pulled back the blue fabric.
“So you’re telling me you messed with a crime scene?” He wasscribbling in his notepad. “Do you not watch even the worst version of theCSIs?”
I sat up, confused. “The… TV shows?”
“Not a Nancy Drew, then?” he said. “Just the do-gooder not already freezing her own chicklets off, with all the time in the world to check in on the poor and downtrodden?”
I had really lost track of things here. What were chicklets? Why was he being mean to me? Was he being mean, or was I just in some kind of fog, where all the words coming at me seemed like a fire hose of nonsense? “I don’t know what you want me to say,” I said, finally.
“And this is your boyfriend, your da says.”
“He’s not my…” I stopped. That was too many layers of incorrect to unpack at once. “Joey is myex-boyfriend—or maybe… maybe not. Oh, God.”
“Explain,” the cop said.
“He disappeared,” I said. “He was gone, and the rent money, too. So I thought… He got us evicted, and he wouldn’t answer his phone.” With Alex standing there, and Quin probably just behind him, I didn’t want to admit how many times I had tried calling.
“When was this? No contact with deceased since when?”
Deceased. I swallowed hard and counted back the days.
“You got evicted that fast?” he said. “You might have a case against your landlord.”
“Joey never had a lease,” I said. “And we had a… fraught relationship. With the landlord.”
He looked me up and down. “I bet,” he said. “But not with each other? You and the deceased were on the outs. You fight a lot?”
“Hang on,” I said.
“He seeing other girls?” Aycock said. “Couldn’t commit?”
“The opposite, actually,” I said. “Look, I wouldn’thurthim.”
But I had joked about killing him, oh God. He’s a dead man.
“He… he just wanted,” I said. “He wanted something we weren’t going to have. I thought he was at his sister’s. Was he not?”
“I’ll need that information, for the sister,” Aycock said. “Now,can you think of any reason someone might want to harm Mr. Hartnett?”
“Tokillhim? There were a couple of guys at work he didn’t get along with,” I said. “But it wasn’t what you’d call a high-stakes career. Joey was… he was…”
I couldn’t think of what Joey was. When I thought he’d ditched me and taken the cash, I had let all the good stuff go, just shrugged it off like it had never happened. In the last week, I had built armor out of the memories that made me grateful he was gone. Now that I couldn’t be mad at him anymore, I didn’t have much else to offer.
“Well, that’s quite a eulogy,” the cop said, sitting back and taking in the surroundings. His eyes caught on the poster at his shoulder, my screaming face, mouth wide. “And he stole money from you.”
