Quintic by V. P. Trick

hour, and they had already
gone over it all less than twelve hours ago. She really should have
stayed in bed. That was what she got for falling for a workaholic
who never let it go, whatever the it was. She sat back
down.
    Couldn’t he say, just once,
‘Let’s you forget about it, ma chérie .’ She should be dating
a Frenchman. Or an Italian uomo . Anything but a cop. She
sighed.
    “ Let’s start
by the guy’s name,” Hamilton began. “Rick
Lemieux.” It was such a shame hearing wasn’t like smelling or
seeing. She could stop herself from smelling or seeing (when she
really, really put her mind to it), but couldn’t stop herself
from hearing, not in a damn meeting at least. She should have
brought her phone’s earplugs.
    “ Fred and I
went through two dozen insurance companies.” For sure the guys’
patience impressed Christopher. “We found the one making payments
to a Rick Lemieux−” Lemieux had enough to live on for the rest of
his life if he had had a life left “−According to the insurance
company’s records, Lemieux has no next of kin. And check this. The
Insurance’s address for the guy is a postal box. Domicile unknown.
Fred is still checking through the databases, but so far, we
haven’t found anything on him.”
    Lemieux has
no police records ; he was too good to get
caught! She kept her thoughts to herself.
    The team
wasted o ver an hour in a meeting to learn
a name but not much else. Hamilton traced their next steps very
succinctly.
    “ We’ll
contact phone companies to see if, by chance, Lemieux had a
registered phone somewhere. We’ll go to the post office to see if
anyone might have seen the guy when he went to get his checks. And,
of course, we’ll try to find some of the hooker’s co-workers. We
might get lucky. Some of her girly friends might remember
Lemieux.”
    Christopher’s boys were going to
be busy. Hamilton concluded by giving the guys homework. Meeting
over.
    She
desperately needed a coffee. Too bad she had a hangover and didn’t
like scotch, Christopher kept a bottle in his desk bottom drawer.
Perhaps if she had some in her coffee?
    No coffee,
no scotch, Christopher grabbed her arm before she reached the door. His touch felt nice. He
stopped Hamilton with a nod.
    “ Ham, I
think Patricia should give a background report. Write down
everything she remembers about the guy. His tastes, his habits,
where he took her out and such. Guys our age, we have our habits;
might be the places he hung around then, he still went to these
days. What’d you think?”
    Rhetorical
question. Hamilton agreed, “Anything can
be useful at this stage.”
    Infuriating. Christopher gently
rubbed her inner arm with his thumb. She really should learn to
like scotch, straight, no ice. She needed something damn potent at
this instant. She intended to consume a large amount of alcohol to
survive writing Lemieux’s damn background report. Why hadn’t she
stayed in bed this morning?

The One Before
Him
    C hris reluctantly let go of her
arm and stomped to his office. He busied himself by pacing in front
of his window and returning phone calls. He observed as she
sauntered from desk to desk, talking to Bridget, and then Des,
Reid. She stepped out of the room for five minutes, toilet break
probably, before settling at her desk and shuffling papers around,
open and close her drawers randomly (or so it seemed from his
vantage point).
    She clicked the mouse a couple of times, but was up
again, back to talking to Bridget. She left again, longer this
time, to Fredrick’s basement most likely. She breezed in twenty
minutes later and headed to her desk again . She was clearly not
working.
    It didn’t
take a genius to see she was upset, no fucking genius to know she
di dn’t want to write the report on
Lemieux. The fuck if he desired to read it, and he sure didn’t want
to have the others read it either. But they had no clue on the guy,
and she had known him. If the amount of energy she was wasting
by