The Highway sergeant stepped between them. “I’ll get all of Sergeant Payne’s necessary information and make sure the detective has it, Sergeant. Besides, we helped him to make the pinch back there, and I want to make sure Highway gets in on the paperwork. You know how it is.”
The Eighth District sergeant looked at him for a moment, then walked away.
The Highway sergeant turned to Matt.
“Let me have your badge and payroll numbers. And I better have hers, too. Tell me what happened and how you hurt yourself so the Northeast Detective can document it if you need to go out IOD, ^2 and make sure you touch base with the assigned detective so you agree with the statement before he puts it on the ’49.”
“Thanks a lot,” Matt said. “I owe you two now.”
“You better let me drive,” Olivia said.
“Why?”
“It looks like you scratched your hand, too. You’ll get blood all over your pretty leather gear shifter.”
He walked around the rear and got in the passenger seat of the Porsche.
Detective Lassiter opened the door of her second-floor apartment, reached inside, flicked on the lights, and then motioned Sergeant Payne inside ahead of her.
“The first aid stuff’s in the bathroom,” she said. “The bedroom’s just the other side of the living room.”
He walked across the living room to the bedroom, noticing as he passed through it to the bathroom that it was not messy, and that a white comforter covered her bed.
Intimate feminine apparel was hanging from the shower curtain rod. When she came into the bathroom, she snatched it off and threw it behind the shower curtain.
She took bandages, swabs, Mercurochrome, and bottles of hydrogen peroxide and alcohol from a cabinet and then turned to him and started cleaning his face.
“That’s pretty nasty,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to go to the emergency room?”
“I’m sure,” he said.
Three minutes later, his scraped face had been cleaned with both hydrogen peroxide and alcohol. He had manfully tried, and failed, not to wince when the alcohol stung painfully.
“Let’s look at the leg,” she said.
“What’s wrong with the leg?”
“The fence got that, too, I guess. In the car, I saw it. It’s all bloody.”
Three minutes after that, his leg had been treated with alcohol and hydrogen peroxide and painted with Mercurochrome, but not bandaged.
“Your trousers are ruined,” Olivia said.
“I noticed.”
“And let me see what you did to your hand.”
“I guess I scratched it the same place I tore my pants, going over the fence.”
She took his left hand in both of hers.
“That’s a puncture wound,” she said.
He didn’t reply.
“You just can’t leave it like that,” she said.
He didn’t reply.