Page 19 of Manner of Death
“Is, um… I know you’re not going to have a lot of spare time for a while, but…” Bashir swallowed, and he admittedly sounded a bit resigned as he asked, “Is that offer for dinner still open?”
Fuck. That smile. The way this man lit up the goddamned morgue. Bashir was doomed.
“Offer’s still open.” Villeray inclined his head. “Text me?”
He shouldn’t. He absolutely fucking shouldn’t. But…
“Yeah.” Bashir smiled even as his brain rattled off all the reasons he shouldn’t do this. “I’ll text you.”
Chapter 6
“What is that expression on your face?”
Sawyer didn’t bother looking over at Kurt, keeping his focus on his phone. “What expression?”
“The one you’re expressing right now. The one that’s weird.”
“What’s weird?”
“It makes you look…happy.”
Sawyer bit back a smile. “Should I not look happy?”
“You generally don’t,” Kurt replied. “Especially not when we’re in the middle of two murder cases. Kind of doesn’t fit the mood.”
“It’s not like the victim’s family is sitting across from me right now.” No, that had already happened, and it had sucked. It turned out that the person who’d found Christopher White was a friend of his parents, and had called them even before she called the cops. They’d gotten to the scene way too quickly and had, despite everyone’s best efforts to stop them, seen their son in a state which…well, no parent should have to see that.
Sawyer had tried his damnedest to comfort them afterward, but for all he could read body language like a pro, for all he could pull his most empathetic self to the forefront at will, there was nothing anyone could do that would make a mother feel better about losing her son.
Especially to something like murder.
“Enemies?” Mrs. Calloway had whispered—she was divorced from the victim’s father and had taken her new husband’s name, but it was clear that the three of them had been close. “What do you mean?”
“Anyone who might want to harm Christopher,” Kurt had explained.
“But…I thought he drowned.”
“The preliminary autopsy suggests that he may have been poisoned.”
“Oh God…”
“And even if he had died of drowning,” Kurt went on with all the dogged persistence of a cop who’d been doing these interviews for too long, “someone had to drop his body off on the side of the road.”
“His body, my baby’s body, oh my God, oh my God…” Mrs. Calloway had just about collapsed, and her husband seemed about five seconds away from throwing a punch.
Sawyer had stepped in at that point—sent Kurt for bottles of water, which was code for “get the fuck out and don’t come back,” and taken over the interview.
“I know it’s hard to think about,” he said, careful to keep his voice gentle. Soft eyes will get you more callbacks than hard looks ever could, he remembered his mother saying. She was right, too…up to a point. “I know that this is probably the last place you want to be right now, and I’m sorry we have to ask you these questions. But we do have to, especially if we want to get justice for Christopher.”
Mrs. Calloway had buried her face in her husband’s shoulder, but she looked over at Sawyer then. Her eyes were blood-red—she’d burst capillaries from how hard she’d been crying. “Chris worked nights as a bartender,” she whispered. “He was a good one, good at making conversation, good at putting people at ease. Like you.”
Sawyer forced an encouraging smile. After a moment, she went on. “I don’t know of anyone who would have wanted to hurt him, but you should talk to his girlfriend, Larissa. Honey, can you…”
“I’ll give the detective her number,” her husband promised.
“Does she know yet?” Mrs. Calloway asked. “Does Larissa know? Oh my God, we have to call her! We have to tell her! She’s going to be broken—oh my God!”
The interview ended there. Sawyer had escorted them out, then headed back inside and called up the girlfriend, Larissa Smith. Five terrible minutes later, he’d been on the verge of calling in sick for the rest of the day when all of a sudden he got a text from Bashir.