Free Four O'Clock Sizzle: An Inspector Rebecca Mayfield Mystery (The Rebecca Mayfield Mysteries Book 4) by Joanne Pence

“There really is nothing between us. And if there ever was, it’s over.”
    Angie’s mouth dropped open. “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”
    “Although there are some who might be relieved,” Serefina said, sotto voce, to Angie before turning to Rebecca again. “I’m sorry, too, but that’s between you and Richie. We know it won’t affect how you handle this case, and how you make sure he stays safe.”
    Their words, the way they looked at her, made Rebecca wish things had worked out differently with Richie. But all she said was, “I’ll do my best. I assure you.”
    “ Bene. ” With that, they said their good-byes and left.
    Rebecca plopped herself back down in the seat. She wondered how many seconds would pass by before Serefina put in a call that would make Carmela Amalfi’s day. Carmela, Richie’s mother, had pretty much disliked Rebecca from the moment they first met. In Carmela’s eyes, it was bad enough that she wasn’t Italian or Catholic, worse that she was a cop, but then she became a complete persona non grata in Carmela’s eyes after Richie was grazed in the arm by a gunshot while on a case with her.
    The worst part of it was that Carmela had been right that he could have been killed. And Rebecca had played over and over in her mind what went wrong that had caused him to be in that kind of danger.
    In a sense, she couldn’t blame Carmela for hoping the two of them would break up. Now, the woman got her wish.
    Rebecca decided to forget about all the Amalfis and went to the desk of Jamie Mills, a technical whizbang who worked in the Crime Scene Unit. She asked him to attempt to locate Diego Bosque via his phone, the GPS on his car, or his credit card use, but despite his “mad skillz” Jamie had no luck. It was as if Bosque, or someone, had gone to great lengths to see that he couldn’t be found. Rebecca suspected Richie’s friend, Shay, would have much better luck, but she was pretty sure that resource was as closed to her as Richie’s friendship.
    Sutter marched up to her as soon as she returned to her desk. “I’m on TV,” he announced smugly.
    “You are?”
    “The beheading. Eastwood told me to talk to the reporters. I think I did pretty good, too.”
    Rebecca nodded. Eastwood liked using Sutter with the media because he could use more words to say absolutely nothing of any importance than anyone else in the department.
    She told him she’d learned Tanaka and Bosque might have some business dealings with each other. When she heard Tanaka left the restaurant with Bosque the night before he died, she had reviewed security and traffic camera videos, but all it showed was both men driving away from Kyoto Dreams in their own vehicles, one a black Lexus, the other a black BMW. The cars soon disappeared from view, and while she picked them up a couple of times, both eventually disappeared from subsequent cameras.
    She and Sutter had been doing extensive research on the backgrounds of the two men, looking for any kind of connection, any former trouble with the law, talking to people who knew them, searching for anything at all that could lead to someone wanting to brutally kill Tanaka and potentially to have kidnapped Bosque—or worse.
    But so far, nothing had turned up.
    She was again puzzling over Tanaka and Bosque’s phone records when the autopsy, if you could call it that, on Tanaka’s head hit her desk. She was stunned to find it showed a considerable amount of cocaine and alcohol in the bloodstream at the time of death. So much, in fact, that Tanaka was likely passed out or close to it when he was killed.
    The report also showed that whatever caused death had only happened to the torso, very likely a gunshot or stabbing. Given Tanaka’s state, it could have been inflicted by either a man or—and here she thought of Tanaka’s odd love life—a woman.
    Rebecca was pondering that when a call came in from Officer Lottie Hernandez in the city’s Central Station.

 
    CHAPTER