Private #1 Suspect (Private 2)

“What’s this?”

“Candidates for my job. I’m setting up appointments for you to meet the best three. Best three in my humble opinion.”

I nodded. “Let’s get started.” I introduced Christian Scott, said that Scotty had been with the Joffrey Ballet, suffered a knee injury, joined the California Highway Patrol as a motorcycle cop.

“Scotty was one of three guys who brought down a major doper, four hundred pounds of weed in the trunk. It was Scotty who pulled him over on a hunch—”

“A hunch and the rear of the car was sending up sparks on the freeway,” Scotty said.

“He’s got good hunches and, I’ve been told, a pretty decent pirouette,” I said into the laughter. “Scotty has just finished his six thousand hours as an investigator at California Casualty, so his license is in the mail.

“Stand up and show us your face.”

There was applause. Scotty stood and said he was glad to be here. Then investigator Lauri Green raised her hand and said, “Jack, I gotta go in a minute. Just to let you know Mara Tracey is out on bail.”

Lauri was talking about our shoplifting movie star, made ten million a picture and still lifted a hundred-dollar sweatshirt from a boutique, attracting tabloid headlines, paparazzi popping up out of the shrubbery, and a publicized date next week in front of a judge.

Mara’s husband had hired us to keep eyes on her. We discussed tailing Ms. Tracey, then Cruz got up and filled the group in on the dead businessman at the Beverly Hills Sun. He sketched in the backstory: the string of four other dead men in other hotels, and the dead-end lead to an escort service. He talked about research he was doing now, interviews with hotel staff, and so on. He was keeping himself in the background, he said, now that the cops were on the case.

He didn’t mention the Noccias’ stolen van full of boosted pharmaceuticals—I was keeping that one off-limits to the group.

When Cruz sat down, I tapped keys on my laptop and Colleen’s photo filled the center flat screen on the wall.

My ears hummed and my heart rate shot up when I saw that picture. Only two days ago, Colleen had been alive and

well.

I dropped my eyes to the keyboard, trying to get a grip on my emotions. When I spoke, my voice cracked.

“Most of you knew Colleen. She was most likely killed to torment me and to implicate me in her death.”

Del Rio said quietly, “Dude.”

I swallowed hard and kept going.

“As you’ve probably heard, I’m not only the prime suspect, I’m the only suspect. Meanwhile, Colleen’s killer is out there somewhere—laughing his ass off.”

CHAPTER 37

I LEANED BACK in my seat at the conference table. I was aware of my colleagues looking at me as I stared at Colleen’s face on the screen. Her expression was sunny, luminous, and it wasn’t a portrait, just a snapshot for her ID card taken on her first day of work at Private.

I remembered how an hour after that photo was taken, Colleen was sitting outside my office, going through my mail. She had looked up when my shadow crossed her desk and said, “Is someone wanting to harm ye, Mr. Morgan?”

“A dozen people I can think of. Why?”

She showed me a padded envelope marked up with red grease pencil, block letters reading, “Time Dated Material. Open Upon Receipt.”

An arrow pointed to the pull tab. It wasn’t ticking, but the envelope had no return address and the lettering looked insane.

We had evacuated the building, eighty of us standing out in the glaring sun on Figueroa while the bomb squad took the envelope out with a robot and x-rayed it in the bomb-mobile. The contents were shredded newspaper and a note, same red letters with a lot of rays coming out from the words “BANGETY-BANG-BANG-BANG.”

Fingerprints were traced back to a repeat offender, Penn Runyon, a psycho who’d been incarcerated for the illegal sale of weapons and had been released a few months before.

Runyon was interrogated, said he’d read about me in the paper, how I’d tracked down and brought in an escaped con who was a friend of his.

Actually, it was Tommy had who brought down Runyon’s friend, not me.

Common mistake: Jack Morgan, Private Investigations. Tom Morgan Jr., Private Security.