The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) by Mike Markel Page A

meeting.”
    “Do you know the name of the prostitute you
hired?”
    “No.”
    “How did you contact her?”
    “All I had was a phone number.”
    “Where did you get the phone number?”
    He looked at me, his eyes shining. Then he lowered
his gaze and spoke slowly. “My wife was sick for a long time. Someone gave me
her number. I’m not proud of what I did. I never knew her name.”
    “Mr. Williams, did you kill Virginia Rinaldi?”
    His face was red and shaking, like he had some
kind of tremor. “I did not.”
    “Can you tell us where you were last night? Ten to
midnight?”
    “I was home. I live alone. I was watching
television.”
    Cletis Williams was wrung out—hunched over,
breathing heavily, his face blotchy. Ryan and I thanked him for his time and
told him we’d get back to him if we needed any more information.
    Back in the Charger, I put down the visor to block
the late afternoon sun coming in at eye level. “That bit about how Virginia
Rinaldi was attacking religious freedom. That’s bullshit, right?”
    “Yeah, that’s bullshit.”
    “Let me see if I understand his story. His wife’s
dying, so he starts nailing this hooker. Then he hires her so he canblackmail the professor to leave him alone. Is that
what you got?”
    “That’s what I got.”
    “You buy it?”
    “I think I do.” Ryan tapped a finger on the
dashboard. “Stress and grief can make you do strange things.”
    “There’s no evidence Virginia told him his life
was gonna explode.”
    “True, but it doesn’t sound like a phrase he would
make up,” Ryan said. “At any rate, there wouldn’t be any evidence. She was too
smart to put anything in writing.”
    “He’s got no alibi,” I said.
    “That’s right.”
    “So what do we do about him?”
    “One thing: He said we need to look a little
closer at the porn course.”
    The phone in my big leather bag rang. I pulled it
out and checked the screen. “Let me take this,” I said to Ryan. “Yeah, Helen.”
It was Helen Paddington in Vice.
    “I got a possible ID on your prost Krista. Can we
get together?”
    “We’ll be there in five.”

 
    Chapter 10
    “You IDed our prost?”
    Ryan and I were at headquarters in a medium-sized
room that said “Vice” on the door. Vice and Anti-Gang got their own little
playhouses. They say it’s about unit cohesiveness. They say things like that.
    Last time I’d been in Vice’s room, it was an
all-guy pit, and it looked it and smelled it. There was a tattered, stained
couch, a full-size refrigerator, and all kinds of takeout wrappers. But since
Helen Paddington came on board six or eight months ago, the place had been
cleaned up. The couch went, along with the refrigerator and the garbage. I
don’t know whether she kicked their asses or shamed them into it.
    “Hey, Karen. Ryan.” She nodded in our direction
and gestured for us to sit at the Formica-covered table in the middle of the
room.
    She was about thirty-five or forty, medium height
but thick in the middle. She had platinum hair, short on top and buzzed along
the sides. In her left earlobe was a rainbow-colored plug; in her right ear, a
half-dozen small stones of different colors ran up the cartilage. No makeup.
She wore cowboy boots, blue jeans, and a man’s old white dress shirt with the
top three buttons open to show a thick black crucifix surfing some significant
cleavage. If I had to guess, the statement she was making was that you’d never
be able to figure out the statement she was making. I’m fine with that. The
word was the guys in Vice thought she pulled her weight.  
    She took the seat at the head of the steel table.
Ryan and I flanked her. As she opened a folder on the table, she looked out at
me and then Ryan over a pair of half-glasses. “This is Krista.”
    She passed the booking photo to me. It showed a
pale-skinned young woman with a broad, Russian-looking face. Strands of
shoulder-length hair, an unconvincing shade of red, had escaped the