Head Games by Thomas B Cavanagh

Author:Thomas B Cavanagh [Cavanagh, Thomas B]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466829688
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

“So why you? It your birthday or somethin’?”

Detective Salvador Diaz grinned at me with a crooked yellow smile. He had a solid, stocky frame, and the shoulders of his thin dress shirt pulled tightly when he leaned forward onto his knees. His eyes were inky black and hard.

“I honestly don’t know,” I said. We were in my living room, me on the couch and Diaz on my recliner. The crime-scene techs were wrapping up, the cardboard box and its grisly contents having been removed about twenty minutes earlier. There wasn’t much for the techs to do, since this wasn’t much of a crime scene. But, there was no denying I’d found a human head on my dinette table, and everyone had to go through their motions.

“Aw, c’mon, Mike,” Diaz said, sitting back and affecting a sardonic smile. “You were on the job all those years. A detective. A couple tours with MBI. You tell me you don’t have a guess why somebody picks you to get the boy’s head?”

“I didn’t say that. I just don’t know anything for sure.”

“Now we gettin’ somewheres.”

“What about my daughter?” I said, looking at the closed door of Jennifer’s room.

“She’s fine. Detective Crowley is with her.”

Both Diaz and Crowley were from the Orange County Sheriff’s Office, not the Orlando Police Department. Although my address says Orlando, my apartment sits just outside the city’s jurisdiction in unincorporated Orange County, giving the sheriff’s department control over the homicide. If the headless corpse that Igor showed me this morning turns out to be, as I suspect, the rest of Eddie Sommerset, an epic turf battle is on its way. With the body found in the city limits and the head found in the general county, the case was bound to be a political football.

Since Diaz and Crowley were Orange County, I didn’t know them and I couldn’t leverage much of my local law enforcement reputation to get a break. I knew a couple of the county guys from MBI assignments, but none were currently in my apartment. I had informed the partners of my own background.

When they arrived, Crowley and Diaz had split up to get independent statements from both me and Jennifer. Standard procedure.

But Jennifer was pretty upset. Upon realizing that she had been carrying around a human head—the head of TJ Sommerset’s cousin, no less—she kind of freaked. I got her mostly calm by the time the uniforms showed up. But when Crowley pulled her aside, Jennifer gave me a look of such abject terror that I was momentarily paralyzed. I told her to relax. Everything would be fine. She didn’t do anything wrong. Just tell the truth.

Crowley appeared to have a gentle touch. As a woman, she was probably better equipped to handle a distraught fifteen-year-old girl than Diaz or some other male detective. Even me. This wasn’t a sexist observation. This was a fact. Most guys I knew in this line of work were a little jaded and unfazed by a few teenaged tears.

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