Afraid to Die (Alvarez & Pescoli)

“And now?”

“Now I just want to find him.” Her dark eyes were troubled and she twisted the stem of the glass between her fingers.

“What about your son’s father?”

“Out of the picture. Actually, never in it,” she said darkly. “Didn’t even know I was pregnant.”

“High school boyfriend? Something like that?”

Alvarez hesitated, then said, “Something. Not part of the equation, okay?”

Obviously a subject that was off-limits. “Okay. So what about O’Keefe? He’s tracking the kid, too.”

“Yeah.”

Pescoli took a long swallow from her beer as the pool balls clicked from the table around the corner. “I did check on him, y’know. With that Helena detective, Trey Williams. He said the guy was legit, kind of a deputy, but not official.”

“O’Keefe doesn’t always play by the rules.”

“So I gathered.”

“But he’s effective.”

“That’s what Williams said. So far I haven’t seen much evidence of that. The kid’s his cousin?”

“Gabe’s adoptive mother, Aggie Reeve, is O’Keefe’s cousin.”

“Okay, ... like a second cousin, or something. This just keeps getting more and more fun.”

Alvarez’s head snapped up and she shot a look at her partner that was hard as steel. “Definitely not fun.”

“Bad choice of words. But you were involved with O’Keefe, right?” Before Alvarez could answer, Pescoli held up a palm. “Don’t go into the whole denial thing, okay? I’m not an ace detective for nothing. I get paid to figure out this crap.”

“Fine.” Alvarez’s jaw tightened a little. “We were involved.”

Pescoli raised an eyebrow.

“Not like that. Well, not really.” Alvarez looked down and swore under her breath. “We were close. I mean, the act is just a technicality, I guess. I thought ... fleetingly that I was in love with him, that he might be ‘the one,’ ”—her mouth twisted with remembered bitterness—“if you believe in all that garbage, which, by the way, I don’t. But before things got too complicated, I backed out. Well, at least I thought I did. Turns out I was wrong.” She twisted the stem more violently, watching, as if in fascination, as the bloodlike liquid sloshed against the bowl of the glass.

“And that’s when everything went down in San Bernardino.”

“Yeah. The upshot is that I left the department and so did O’Keefe. His actions were under review, and though technically he was cleared of any criminal charges when Alberto De Maestro was shot, De Maestro, who survived, sued everyone associated with the shooting.”

“Including the department?”

“Oh, yeah. Especially the department. Got a lot of press out of that.”

“So O’Keefe quit.”

“You read about it?”

“What I could. The facts. What I didn’t get was the emotional story.”

“So now you’ve got that.”

“And you’re still in love with him, aren’t you?”

“With O’Keefe?” Alvarez shook her head but didn’t meet Pescoli’s eyes. “Nah. It was a fling, make that almost a fling.”