Paxton sighed as he holstered his weapon.
I winced. Yeah, I should’ve probably stayed quiet, but I hated stupidity.
Paxton took a step closer to the perp. “Tell me who this Wennie is, right now, before we get to the station, and I’ll let the detectives know you were cooperative. Where is he?”
The perp wiped his face on his arm, smearing blood everywhere. “Wengrow is his real name. I don’t know his first name. He buys shit from me, usually I drop it off.”
“What kind of shit?”
I rolled my eyes. “So, you were his dope dealer. What, like meth?”
The guy nodded, timid as a bunny.
An ambulance pulled up nearby with its sirens screaming, and there were already uniformed police directing the EMTs to the victims they’d attempted to help stabilize. There were definitely a few corpses, from how some of the guys were just standing idly near bodies. One lady had landed way out in the street, and the vics didn’t look very old, maybe midtwenties or early thirties.
“Help!” someone started to scream from inside the shoe shop where the car was still in the middle of what used to be a sales floor, and a cry went up from the crowd that had gathered.
“Ruptured gas lines,” someone shouted, and seconds later the stench of rotting eggs and sulfur smacked my nose. This would be an all-night mess for someone. Part of me rejoiced in the adrenaline flying through my veins at the chaos—it was maybe the best feeling in the world, except for scuffling with Ari and telling him to murder people.
“Where is the dead man you say you didn’t kill?” Paxton demanded.
The perp rattled off an address I already knew by heart, but I pretended it was new information by nodding and making eye contact with Paxton when he glanced at me. I tapped my head, and he smiled—my partner would ask me that address later. He relied on me, and I liked that he trusted me so much he wouldn’t even ask why I didn’t write it down.
Everything was such a shitshow we ended up running Judah Abernathy, our perpetrator, to the Lakeside Station. After all the paperwork and a debriefing with Monahan, we were sent back into the field without a detective to see if Abernathy was telling the truth about the dead body, since he had sixty-five-thousand dollars stuffed into the ratty backpack we’d dragged into the station with him.
“Too bad he can’t keep that money.” I smacked Paxton’s shoulder as we walked toward the rundown house that belonged to Wengrow. White paint had flaked off the wooden siding and the lawn was more like a lightly maintained field. “He’s going to fucking need it. How many people did they say were dead?”
“Twelve. Patrons died inside the shoe store, too.” Paxton sounded nearly sick, and I did the right things, making sure my face looked sad as I squeezed his shoulder.
“The union will have our backs on this. We were following orders when we joined that chase.”
He sighed—as one of the actual good cops in New Gothenburg, I knew he’d wear the weight of responsibility for this day for the next few months. It made me glad I didn’t internalize things the same way he did because it must be awful to feel bad all the time.
“Well, it’s open,” Paxton muttered as we got to the front stoop. “New Gothenburg Police Department! We’re here for a wellness check!” He nudged the door inward with his foot and we both groaned as a nasty smell smacked our faces. The summer heat hadn’t done the corpse inside any favors, but the odor that wafted out was compounded by other funk I doubted was the stiff, and the stench created a nightmare a thousand times worse than dead-body rot alone.
“Do we really need to check?” I asked, raising my eyebrows.
Paxton nodded. “Hell, I’m regretting coming to work today. My warm bed had a naked River in it. You’ve no idea how close I was to calling out.”
I snorted.
We made our way through the living room and traded looks. It was inevitable that we would stumble across a body with the putrid smell in the air. Excitement had me wanting to smile, but that would be weird, so I held it in. I couldn’t wait to see what Ari had done. We searched the living room, which appeared to have survived a natural disaster, and the moldy kitchen. There weren’t many other spaces we could check, so we went toward the bedroom. The state of the house supported my idea that Wengrow wasn’t leading a useful life, and that info, coupled with the murder of the little girl, made me exceptionally happy with what we were about to find.
“If this asshole is naked, I’m blaming you for the image that will be burned in my brain,” I said, nudging Paxton.
He tried to smile, but it was barely a wisp of his usual expression. “Fair enough. I’ll buy beers sometime.”
“Sure, I’ll take that deal.”
He nodded, and we came to a silent agreement where we both peeked through the doorway together. I bit the inside of my cheek—this wasn’t Ari’s best work. I critically assessed what was clearly a knife wound as a killing blow, and I would have to tell him not to do that again for a while, but I was amused he’d used the murder weapon to leave some sort of note on the body. Paxton shuffled closer and leaned down.
“Bloody hell.” He stood up again, shaking his head, and gave me a pained look.
“Yeah, this is vile. Do you think our perp at the station did it?”
Paxton shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows? We better get the crew out here. We’re spreading everyone thin today.” He muttered a few curse words under his breath.
“Eh, we don’t want the city to question our budget.”
