Free Deadly Interest by Julie Hyzy Page A

askew.
    He motioned for me to follow him, and I did,
walking past the round reception wall toward a pair of elevators.
The building had only a basement and two floors. I eyed the
wide-open adjacent staircase, but the detective pressed the “up”
button before I could suggest we take the stairs.
    “ Have you ever been here
before?” he asked as the elevator opened. I caught a whiff of
just-finished cigarette as I walked past him into the boxy
room.
    I touched my nose in a dainty motion, as if
that would help keep the smell at bay. “Not this station. I’ve been
in a couple of others. I have a friend who’s on the force on the
north side.”
    He didn’t ask me her name, where she’d been
assigned, or anything. This guy wasn’t going to win any Mr.
Congeniality awards. When the doors slid open at the second floor
he allowed me out first and gestured toward a long hall. Not
knowing where I was headed, I stepped to the side. “Why don’t you
go first?”
    “ No, go ahead. Up there,
on the right,” he said.
    I found it disconcerting to have him
follow.
    We wound up in a sizeable office, with more
than a dozen desks. A busy place, more than half of them were
occupied by detectives, with civilian guests seated next to each
desk, apparently giving statements.
    Detective Lulinski led me through the room
and opened a far door. “We can do the fingerprinting in here,” he
said, by way of explanation.
    When he set my first finger up for scanning
on a glass plate, I turned to him, “I heard all kinds of horror
stories about black ink that’s so hard to wash off.”
    “ Nope. We’ve moved to the
twenty-first century here. We scan your prints
nowadays.”
    He accomplished the fingerprinting task in a
matter of moments, navigating my digits around with a smoothness
that had to be borne of practice.
    When complete, and once they’d been
uploaded, he guided me back into the big room of busy desks and
indicated where I should sit. We were nearly dead-center in the
room, and I was amazed at the buzz of sound, with each detective
busy on the phone or with the individuals seated at their desks.
There were a handful of fellows Lulinski’s age, but most of the
detectives were hard-body young men, dressed in varying shades of
black and dark blue.
    One woman worked a desk in the far corner. I
wondered about that.
    Detective Lulinski’s desk was a model of
Spartan efficiency. Except for his computer monitor and a Rolodex,
his workspace was empty. No pictures, no cutesy mugs, nothing that
gave me any indication of his personality. All business, this
fellow. But, to his defense, I imagined that he often interviewed
less than ideal citizens at this desk, and the last thing he’d want
to do is provide information they could possibly use against
him.
    The one out-of-place thing on his desk was
his blotter. Evidently, Detective Lulinski was a scribbler and the
entire white face of the calendar that covered the center of the
blotter was awash in drawings and notes. He seemed particularly
interested in drawing eyes—there must have been fifteen of them
staring back at him, female eyes, male eyes, most of which had been
rendered in black ink, a few in blue. I had to admit, he was pretty
good.
    No emotion in any of the eyes, however, and
I wondered what that said about the man.
    As soon as he sat, he pulled up a file from
his computer, and concentrated on it, leaving me to my
lonesome.
    “ Why . . .” I cleared my
throat. “Why did a funeral home van come to take Mrs. Vicks away? I
thought that this would be something for the coroner to
do.”
    His eyebrows, dark with bits of gray hairs
that went their springy different ways, raised up—not pleased. But
he didn’t make eye contact. He simply kept clicking at the form on
the screen, even as he answered me.
    “ First of all, here in
Cook County, we say ‘medical examiner’—not ‘coroner.’ The
difference is mainly semantics, but due to the overwhelming number
of incidents every