The First Cut by Dianne Emley

coordinate your activities. Answer your questions. Listen to your concerns. Any bitching, take it to him, not to me.”
    That brought a chuckle.
    “With that, Jim, it’s your show.”
    “Let me first say welcome to Doug, Louis, and Alex. Thanks for pitching in. Say good-bye to your wives or girlfriends. Cancel your plans for recreational activity. Don’t plan on seeing your kids while they’re still awake. Your asses belong to me until we find the dirtbag who murdered Frank Lynde’s daughter.”
    Caspers gave him a thumbs-up.
    “Lieutenant Beltran is going to handle all contact with the press.”
    Beltran gave a smile and a jerk of his head that conveyed, “Bring it on.”
    Kissick continued. “Any reporters stop you on the street, show up in front of your house, get through on your private line, just say you can’t talk about an ongoing investigation, and refer them to the L.T.”
    Beltran added, “They will stake out your house and worse. The press gobbles up a case like this with a spoon. Frankie Lynde had those all-American looks, beautiful smile, and a tragic, mysterious death that the public won’t be able to get enough of.”
    “Laci Peterson,” Doug Sproul said. “And that college girl who disappeared in Aruba.”
    Louis Jones pulled out the name. “Natalee Holloway.”
    Vining was grateful that no one mentioned her name, but she wasn’t an official member of that club, only having flat-lined for two minutes.
    Early pointed at herself. “Suffice it to say that if Frankie looked like me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
    They enjoyed the joke at Early’s expense, then Kissick took over. “Best we can hope for is a bigger news story to blow us to the back pages. Let me introduce Detective Steve Schuyler from LAPD’s Hollywood Division. He was in charge of Frankie’s M.P. investigation and was nice enough to save us a bunch of time by coming out to Pasadena.
    “Let me fill in a piece of the story for those of you who weren’t at our earlier meeting. Frankie had a romantic relationship with a Lieutenant Kendall Moore of LAPD Robbery Homicide. Lieutenant Moore showed up here earlier on his own, ostensibly to help us with the investigation. He was waiting in the lobby when Detective Schuyler arrived.”
    “He didn’t come with you?” Ruiz asked Schuyler.
    Schuyler raised his hands. “I walked in and he was sitting on the bench. He outranks me.”
    “Did he approach you after Frankie went missing?” Early asked.
    “No. Frankie’s phone records led me to him. He copped to the relationship right away. They were together over a year. He said they’d been doing a long good-bye, fizzling out, starting about two months ago. He said he hadn’t spoken with her for about a month before she disappeared. Her phone records substantiate that.”
    “Did you get his?” Beltran asked.
    “He gave them to me,” Schuyler responded.
    “Isn’t he the helpful guy?” Early said.
    “It’s possible he had a face-to-face with Frankie,” Schuyler said. “Followed her from her strip club outing. Waited for her at her home. Let me be clear. I didn’t eliminate him as a suspect. I had him under surveillance. Other than his job and a little adultery, he leads an ordinary life.”
    Kissick took notes. “Who ended their relationship?”
    “He says they just drifted apart. That the split was amicable.”
    “Baloney,” Vining said. “Someone always ends it.”
    Kissick raised his eyes from his notepad to look at her, then quickly resumed writing.
    Schuyler explained. “I found nothing to corroborate Moore’s story because he and Frankie kept the relationship close to their chest. Moore didn’t talk about it with his buddies. Her friends knew she was seeing someone, but she wouldn’t name names. The only one Frankie talked to about Moore was her best friend, Sharon Hernandez, an officer out of Van Nuys. They went through the Academy together. But after Hernandez was critical of the