Free Fall by Candice Fox

they’re going to remember me and I’m not going to remember them. I know. It’s weird. My mother had it. The stuff I’ve done. I’ve chased guys with guns into dark warehouses. I took a crowbar to the head in an airport loading dock and then nearly got shot in the face. A German shepherd took a chunk out of my calf the size of a lemon on the way into a drug dealer’s house. But none of that is as uncomfortable as when you’re on the phone, particularly if it’s to someone in authority, and you can’t hear them clearly. And you have to say so, and then the person on the other end speaks louder and you still can’t hear properly.
    I found that the best way to deal with my phone phobia is to make sure I’m doing something else at the same time. So I invested in a hands-free set. I hooked the phone up while I worked on my house that evening. I cleared the kitchen of dust and hair and fluff with a broom and then started chipping out the burned bricks from where the oven had caught fire. The roofing guys had been in during the day and closed up the hole above me, but the ceiling was still incomplete, exposing wires and lightly charred beams. I put the bricks in a pile and sat looking at the hole I’d left with a tired satisfaction, fielding calls from the younger detectives and sucking a non-alcoholic beer.
    In the first few hours, the minion detectives didn’t know much more about Ivana Lyon that could help the case. The autopsy was being done overnight and I could view her in the morning. Apparently there were no leads in the family – no one was acting weird, they were all horrified and the mother wasin a Valium-induced coma. Ivana had been a mild-mannered, hard-working girl who was popular. She liked to party but wasn’t a tweaker. We had plenty of friends and ex-boyfriends to sort through for potential suspects. Everything was fine at her job. Her colleagues were all your garden-variety flight attendant types – clean, neatly dressed people with lots of Tupperware.
    I wasn’t too enthusiastic about there being leads among Ivana’s friends. If the attacker knew her, it seemed a strangely risky move to grab her off the side of the Centennial Park jogging track in front of dozens of potential witnesses. He’d have had a much easier time grabbing her in her apartment, or at her car, or a million other less populated places she probably frequented. My guess was that the murderer didn’t know her, that she’d been a random pick. But then again, that didn’t fit with the brutality, the obvious fury of the attack. Who gets that angry at a perfect stranger? I sat on the floor and looked at the black bricks and felt confused.
    Imogen walked in at nine carrying takeaway boxes. The smell of curry preceded her. I tried to shake away the cerebral impulses that started zapping at the sight of her, those mental flashes that put my girlfriend and the murdered girl I’d spent all afternoon staring at together and transposed the images before my eyes, my police brain trying to terrify me.
    â€˜It’s my baby!’
    â€˜Hi, baby.’ She looked around, looked at me, looked at the three empty beers by my hand. Her pretty upper lip curled. ‘You know you’re filthy, right?’
    â€˜Give me a kiss.’
    â€˜No.’ She stepped awkwardly around the pile of dust and stuff I’d swept from the floor, pulled a plastic step ladderfrom the wall and brushed it off before sitting on it. ‘You’re drinking again?’
    â€˜They’re virgins.’
    â€˜Still.’
    â€˜I know,’ I sighed. ‘I’ll start again tomorrow.’
    â€˜We should really go to my place. Get you a shower.’
    â€˜I thought women liked men who worked,’ I said. I flexed my biceps. She missed it.
    â€˜Women like men who can afford other men to work for them.’
    I pointed at the ceiling. She looked up at the newly