Free Ghost Flower by Michele Jaffe Page A

wouldn’t stop filming me, before anything happened. Even then it was only because they summoned one of Coralee’s mother’s bodyguards, and after bruising my knuckles on his chin, I kicked him in the nuts.
    The police arrived almost immediately—someone must have called them as soon as I started the fight.
    The officer who brought me in was surprisingly young. He wasn’t good-looking, not in the traditional sense anyway, but he had the kind of face you wanted to keep looking at. His mouth was too big, his nose looked like it had been sculpted in a bar fight, and he was scowling. His face was made for it.
    He was the kind of guy you’d never see at a country club, but who would have no trouble getting past the velvet rope at a night club. The name tag pinned perfectly straight on his blue patrolman’s uniform said “N. Martinez.”
    He approached me cautiously, but I could have told him he didn’t have to worry. I only fight when it’s unavoidable, and I’d already called all the attention to myself that I needed.
    He cuffed me, then steered me into the backseat of a waiting cruiser. Neither of us spoke during the twenty-two-minute drive to the police station, and the scowl didn’t change. When we got there, he scraped a chair out from next to a desk and pushed me into it. “Where’s Ainslie?” he said to the only other person in the place, a white man with graying hair in a tweed coat and a tie, a detective. “This one’s for her.”
    “What is it?” the detective asked, wincing a little as he looked at me. Clearly somewhere between the fight and getting thrown into the pool, my looks had lost a bit of their luster.
    “She was that domestic disturbance at the Gold residence,” N. Martinez said. I could tell he didn’t like the detective and that he was not the kind of person who was good at hiding that. “Crashed Coralee Gold’s graduation party. Looks a lot like Aurora Silverton, doesn’t she? That case was Ainslie’s.”
    I felt, rather than saw, the other man’s eyes get huge as I sucked on the cut on my lip that I’d gotten from the Golds’ security guard’s right hook.
    The detective came around to take a look at me. He had an urban road system of veins on his nose, and there were teddy bears on his tie. I gave him a smile, apparently a bloody one because he pulled back. He turned to N. Martinez and said, “You had better get her tidied up. This gets out, we’re going to have flashbulbs lurking outside.”
    “That’s not standard procedure,” N. Martinez objected. The scowl hadn’t wavered, but it might have deepened. “The evidence—”
    “Get her cleaned up before Ainslie sees her if you want your job.”
    N. Martinez grabbed my arm with no pretense of trying to be gentle and led me out into the hall. He stopped to pick up a first aid kit, then dragged me to the men’s room. “I’m a girl,” I pointed out to him. You’d think someone with an interest in standard procedures would care about that.
    “But I’m not, and I’m coming in with you.” I knew from experience that police get very testy and overprotective when they hear you’ve kneed someone in the balls. He followed me in, put the first aid kit on one of the white porcelain sinks, and unlocked the handcuffs. “Wash yourself.”
    You reek of the fetid stench of death. Madam Cruz’s voice echoed in my ears as I watched him watch me.
    There were two sinks beneath a mirror. Behind me were two dingy green painted stalls, and alongside them was a urinal. There was a sign on the door with a time stamp that indicated the cleaning crew had been through that morning, but I didn’t believe it. The place could have used a full five hours of scrubbing.
    “Could you turn your back?” I said. “I’d like some privacy.”
    He ignored me and took up a position leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, still scowling. There was something familiar about him, I thought, but then realized it was probably