Company Man by Joseph Finder Page A

and shootings. A dead body there could mean any of a number of things, including drugs or gangs, but the odds were that it meant very little. Was this hard-hearted of her? She preferred not to think so. At first she’d been shocked at the reactions of the survivors, even the mothers, who seemed to be almost resigned to losing a son. They’d already lost their sons. Few of them pleaded their sons’ innocence. They knew better.
    When Audrey learned who’d be picking her up this morning, who she’d been partnered with on this case—the loathsome Roy Bugbee—she felt her body go rigid with annoyance. More than annoyance, she had to admit to herself. Something stronger. This was not a worthy feeling, not a generous impulse.
    Silently, as she dressed—she kept a clean outfit in the parlor closet—she recited one of her favorite verses of scripture, from Romans 15: “Now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be likeminded one toward another, according to Christ Jesus.” She loved this line, even as she realized she didn’t yet fully understand it. But she knew it meant that the Lord first teaches us what is true consolation and true patience, and then He instills this in our hearts. Reciting this to herself got her through Leon’s recent sulking fits, his drinking problem, lent her a much-needed serenity. Her goal had been to re-read the entire Bible by year’s end, but the irregularity of her schedule made that impossible.
    Roy Bugbee was a fellow detective in Major Cases who had an unaccountable loathing toward her. He didn’t know her. He knew only her outward appearance, her sex, and the color of her skin. His words cut her, though never as deeply as Leon’s.
    She gathered her equipment, her Sig-Sauer and her handcuffs, rights cards and IBO request forms and her PT, her handheld radio. While she waited, she sat in Leon’s favorite chair, the worn rust BarcaLounger, and opened her old leather-bound King James Bible, her mother’s, but there wasbarely time to find her place before Detective Bugbee pulled up in his city car.
    He was slovenly. The car, which he was lucky enough to have at his disposal—she hadn’t been given one—was littered with pop cans and Styrofoam Quarter Pounder boxes. It smelled of old French fries and cigarette smoke.
    He didn’t say hello or good morning. Audrey said good morning to him, however, determined to rise above his pettiness. She sat in uncomfortable silence, amid the squalor, observing the scattering of ketchup packets on the floor around her feet and hoping that none of them was on the seat beneath her plum business suit. The stain would never come out.
    After a few minutes he spoke as he flicked the turn signal at a red light. “You got lucky, huh?” Bugbee’s blond hair was slicked back in a pompadour. His eyebrows were so pale they were almost invisible.
    â€œPardon me?”
    His laugh was raucous. “I don’t mean with your husband. If Owens wasn’t drunk on his ass when Dispatch called, you’da been assigned to him. But lucky you, you get me.”
    â€œMm hm,” she said, her tone pleasant. When she first arrived at Major Cases, only two of the men would talk to her, Owens being one of them. The others acted as if she wasn’t even there. She’d say, “Good morning,” and they wouldn’t answer. There was no women’s bathroom, of course—not for one woman—so she had to share the men’s. One of the guys kept urinating right on the toilet seat just to make it unpleasant for her. Her fellow detectives thought it was hilarious. She’d heard it was Bugbee, and she believed it. He’d done “practical jokes” on her she didn’t like to think about. Finally she’d had to resort to using the bathroom downstairs in the warrant unit.
    â€œBody found in a Dumpster on Hastings,” Bugbee continued.