Free Do You Want To Play: A Detroit Police Procedural Romance by Charlotte Raine Page A

realized what it was: she had a cross around her neck, earrings shaped like crosses, and a Bible in her purse, but it was Sunday morning and she had died around 9 a.m. She hadn’t died anywhere near a church, so why was she in that alley?”
    “Why was she?” I ask him. He takes another sip of his beer, thoroughly enjoying divulging this story.
    “I went to her church to ask why she wasn’t there that morning. It had to be something important for her to miss church. Almost nobody knew why she wasn’t there that morning…except when I mentioned what road was close to where she died, this one woman told me that the murdered woman volunteered for an abused women’s shelter, and one of the women she helped lived on that street. We went to see the abused woman…we found out her husband had the same gun that killed the murdered woman…we matched the gun to the bullets and he was arrested.”
    “You solved your first case,” I say, smiling. “That’s awesome.”
    He nods. “Her name was Cheryl Burke.”
    “Cheryl Burke,” I echo. I raise my beer and we clink our bottles. We talk through the rest of the night. I forget about eating dinner, I forget about the PVP killer, I forget that I’m in an apartment that is the exact opposite of mine. We talk about past cases, about teenage embarrassments, about Detroit. We talk until we’re both fighting to keep our eyes open and we’re both weaving toward being drunk. We talk until Tobias is lying on his back on the couch and I lean forward until I’m lying beside him.
    I can only imagine that it feels as good as solving your first case.
     
    ~~~~~
     
    When I wake up, my head feels full and the space beside me feels cold. I open my eyes to realize Tobias is gone. I stand up, thinking that the PVP killer has gotten to him, before I see him standing in the entrance between the kitchen and the living room, watching me.
    “Sorry that you had to fall asleep like that,” he says. “I guess we were just worn out.”
    “I guess,” I say.
    “You can take the bed next time,” he says. “I’ll be on the couch, so I’ll know first if someone tries to break in. The window in the bedroom is sealed shut, so there’s no way he’s getting in there, but I’ll get curtains, so he can’t look inside here.”
    “Thanks,” I say. I rub my face. “What time is it?”
    “Six,” he says. “You should get ready for work.”
    I sit back down on the couch. “Should we go to work in separate cars, so nobody knows we’re staying in the same apartment or should we just not care what the other policemen think?”
    “We’re not going back to the station,” he says. “I can’t think with the FBI up my ass. I was thinking about the last box that the killer gave you.”
    “You mean the lucky cat?” I ask.
    “No, I mean the box,” he says. “Timothy Wood had an envelope, which nobody would think much about if they it saw left somewhere in a train station. But if you saw a box in the train station, what would you think?”
    “…I would think, Wow, someone is going to steal that,” I say.
    “Exactly,” he says. “I don’t think Jasmine was telling the truth. Plus, we got the box after we talked to her, and I think that comment about luck that the killer made was commenting about how we never found the photographer of the blackmail.”
    “Well, he has been watching us the whole time,” I say. “Clearly, from the drawing he made of me. It doesn’t mean that Jasmine was the one who told him about our conversation.”
    “You’re the one who said the killer didn’t have to be a man,” he says. “I mean, I kind of doubt it’s her since she’s tiny, but she could have lured all of those victims to the places that they were murdered, by her innocent act. Even you have a soft spot for her.”
    “The video that was sent of the killer and me…the killer was a man,” I say.
    “It was a silhouette of a person that looked like a man,” he says. “It could have been a