God.
Diane.
Why did you make me not surprised you were dead?
Worse.
Why did you make me not surprised you’d been killed?
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you okay to drive? Or would you like an officer to take you?” he asked.
“I-I . . .” I stammered. “I just need to breathe.”
He gave me a smile. It was also tight. It didn’t reach his eyes. It was still attractive but that wasn’t the reason it soothed me.
His eyes were kind.
It was his job to be here.
But somehow I knew, even if he saw this every night, he knew precisely what I was feeling and he didn’t like it.
Not at all.
And he wished I wasn’t feeling it.
Not feeling it at all.
“Breathing would be good,” he said on what sounded somewhat like a brotherly tease. “Do that. Coupla big ones for me, yeah?”
I nodded again and did as told.
It was really hard. There seemed to be something obstructing my lungs.
“It’s not easy,” I whispered.
Oh shit.
Something was happening to my eyes.
With a practiced hand, a dark-blue handkerchief was out of his pocket and he was offering it to me.
I shook my head.
“I’m not gonna cry,” I told him.
“Then breathe, Rebel. You with me? Breathe.”
I breathed. In. Out. Shallow. In. Out. All shallow. Try again. In. Out.
There it was.
I drew a long one in.
Then let it out.
“Good,” he murmured, stuffing the handkerchief back in his pocket. “Again.”
I did it again.
Okay.
I had it together.
“I’m all right to drive,” I told him.
“Right. I’m Lieutenant Hank Nightingale. You go in,” he was pulling his wallet out of his back pocket, “you tell them I asked you to come talk to me. I’ll call it in. They’ll be waiting for you. They’ll take care of you. But I won’t make you wait long. Okay?”
I nodded and took the business card he offered me.
“Hank Nightingale,” he repeated.
“Hank Nightingale,” I parroted.
“See you soon, Rebel.”
More nodding and, “Yeah.”
He was waiting for me to make a move, either his cop-handling-a-shocked-and-newly-grieving-friend schtick or he was a gentleman.
Or both.
I turned to my car. Got in. Switched on the ignition. Looked up at him through the window and did more nodding.
He nodded back and I saw him mouth, Breathe.
In. Out. In. Out.
Big ones. Deep ones.
I was good.
I put the car in gear.
He turned and moved back to Diane’s house.
“Rebel?”
I looked up from the black coffee mug that said Denver in white on the side with some white stripes under it, through which there was a gold badge, to see Lieutenant Hank Nightingale striding toward me.
I grabbed my bag, shoved the strap on my shoulder and popped up out of my seat. “Hi. Uh, hi. Hi.”
Goddamn it.
I waved.
Goddamn it.
He gave me another smile, this one partially amused, partially pained, partially forced. It appeared he wasn’t a big fan of women made nervous due to the fact they were sitting in a police station at four in the morning due to another fact, that one being their friend had been killed.
He still thought I was funny.
Shit.
“Would you come with me?”
I nodded.
I forced myself to stop doing that and said, “Yes. Sure. Yeah.”
He swung his arm out and I moved toward him, but he didn’t lead. He fell in step beside me.
He also didn’t take me to an interrogation room, which was what my mind, for the last fifteen minutes I’d been sitting in the waiting area being brought coffee by a nice Hispanic cop in a uniform and assured “Hank” wouldn’t make me wait too long, had conjured was the next step.
But of course I didn’t have anything to be interrogated about.
He took me to a large room with a lot of desks, some offices that had walls of glass on one end and rounding this out there were a bunch of file cabinets and whiteboards and one couch.
It wasn’t teeming with people, but it was bustling more than I would think it should be at four on a Thursday morning.
Then again, Denver was a city, not a Podunk town. Crime happened in cities.
It just never involved me.
And then there was Diane.
He took me to a desk another Hispanic man was sitting on. This Hispanic man was in civvies, and if I was in another frame of mind, I’d happily turn that mind over to trying to decide which of them looked better in their jeans: linebacker sweetheart who carried handkerchiefs or edgy Latin hottie who some might say needed a shave, but I would not.
“Have a seat.” Nightingale gestured to the chair sitting next to the desk.
I sat, tucking my purse in my lap and setting my mug of coffee on his desk.
“This is my partner, Lieutenant Eddie Chavez,” he introduced.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” Lieutenant Chavez replied.
Nightingale sat in the desk’s swivel chair, not close to me, but turned to me.
“We’re not gonna take a lot of your time. We’re gonna ask some questions. I’m gonna take notes,” Nightingale stated, reaching a long arm out for a worn leather-bound pad and the pen sitting beside it on the desk. “And we’ll get you home as soon as we can.”
“Who’s gonna tell Diane’s folks?” I asked.
Both Chavez and Nightingale focused on me.
Whoa.
I had a hot flash I didn’t quite understand, outside the fact these two men could focus in such a way half the energy in a room was sucked into their effort.
“Do you know Diane’s folks?” Chavez asked.
I nodded to him. “And I should . . . we’re . . . I know them. We’re close. We worked to try to get Diane . . .”
I trailed off.
“To try to get Diane . . . what?” Chavez queried.
“To uh, stop what she was doing.”
“What was she doing?” Nightingale asked.
I drew in breath.
Then I looked him in the eyes. “Drugs. Porn. And I mean starring in porn movies. Not watching them. Chantilly. Chantilly and porn. Google those words. You’ll see a different picture of Diane than whatever you saw tonight.”
Nightingale’s jaw got tight, and when I looked to Chavez, I saw his stubbled one ticking.
“So I should . . . I feel like I should be there when they’re told. Diane’s folks, I mean,” I finished my earlier statement.
“We’re locating next of kin. That was next on our list. To do the notification,” Nightingale shared. “If you’d come, and you think it would be of comfort to them, we’d appreciate you being there.”
“I’ll do that.”
Nightingale nodded.
Chavez cleared his throat and spoke.
“You were at her house tonight. Can you explain why?”
“I got a call,” I told him.
“From who?” he asked. “And what did they say?”
“I don’t know. It was a female. Her voice sounded familiar, but I don’t remember how. She also sounded really scared. She called on my landline.”
“Your landline?” Nightingale asked, having an uncanny gift of being able to write in his notepad even as he was looking at me.
Cop skills.
I nodded to him. “Yeah. No one uses that. I only have it because I got it in a bundle with cable and Internet, and then I told my brother about the bundle and he said I lived alone, do I keep my cell by my bed when I’m sleeping? And I said no. And he said he wanted me to keep my cell by my bed. And I said I didn’t want ugly cords around my bed and I charge my cell at night. So he said to get a regular phone and have it by my bed. And I said why? And he said because I live alone and he’d feel a lot freaking better if I had a phone close in case anything happened in the night, I could—”
I cut myself off.
Both men watched me patiently, and I made the decision to stop babbling about Diesel, my protective brother, and definitely stop talking about things happening to women alone in the middle of the night.