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

ponytail.
Her brown eyes were wide-set underneath thin, penciled dark eyebrows. The nose
was thin, the lips full. Her expression was blank.
    “Krista is Elena Moranu. Twenty-seven. We think
she comes from Romania.”
    “She got an AKA as Krista in our system?” I didn’t
think so, since Ryan hadn’t found her when he did a search.
    “No, one of our guys said he remembered booking a
prost goes by Krista. He pieced it together and we pulled her out of the
system.”
    “She here legally?”
    “I doubt it, but we don’t follow up on that unless
it’s a felony.”
    “We got a good address?”
    Helen tapped the folder. “This is for you to
take.”
    “What can you tell us about her?”
    “We arrested her three times, going back four
years. She works regularly in town. Fairly high-level.”
    “As in?”
    “By-the-night. Five-hundred bucks and up. She
doesn’t blow truckers.”
    “She do time for anything?”
    “No, not in Rawlings. She could have a bunch of
other identities in her past we don’t know about. Since simple prostitution is
a misdemeanor, not a felony, if the girl isn’t robbing the john or selling him
drugs or doing something else nasty, she’s not going inside. Krista’s never
given us any problems.” Helen Paddington shrugged her shoulders. “She does like
to pretend she’s not a hooker.”
    “How’s she do that?”
    Helen put her hand into a loose fist and waved it
up and down, the gesture every eleven-year-old boy uses to mean jerking off. “Not
sure the extent of her legal training, but she appears to know that if she
didn’t take a dick in her cunt, her ass, or her mouth, it wasn’t sexual
intercourse.”
    Ryan shifted in his seat. He’s not fully
comfortable with women using plain language.
    I said, “She wants us to believe a guy’s giving
her five-hundred bucks for a handjob ?”
    Helen smiled, showing a gold crown on the side.
“Like I said, unless we’re booking her for something in addition to the
hooking, we don’t really give a shit. And I’m pretty sure she doesn’t give a
shit what we believe. She doesn’t give us any backtalk. She makes her phone
call, the lawyer comes. She cops to the misdemeanor, pays the five-hundred
dollar fine, and walks away. Nobody gets hurt. Everybody’s happy.” She smiled
sadly. “What are you looking at her for?”
    “The professor went down the stairs last night? We
think Krista was living there.”
    “Living there?” Helen Paddington’s eyebrows shot
up, like she hadn’t seen that coming.
    “The professor’s students tell us there was a
local sex worker name of Krista got in an argument with the professor upstairs
during halftime in the class last night at her house. Krista storms out,
carrying a backpack. We get there this morning, the professor’s lying at the
bottom of her stairs, wearinga couple of
injuries that don’t look like they came from the trip down the stairs. We go
through the house. There’s definitely a young woman living there. She’s got all
kinds of hooker outfits.”
    “The professor a les , or
she just giving Krista a place to live for some reason?”
    “We haven’t gotten that far. We think maybe she
was les or bi. The professor apparently had Krista come to her class about a
month ago to talk about being a hooker or whatever. Whether that means the two
of them were a couple …?” I put my palms up.
    “Something’s off here.” Helen Paddington frowned,
trying to put the pieces together. “A prost as good as Krista can afford her
own place. No reason for her to be renting a room. Unless she’s got a thing for
the professor. I’ve known a lot of working girls do guys for a living but
they’re really gay.”
    The three of us were silent for a minute.
    Then Helen said, “You see Krista killing the
professor upstairs, pushing her down?”
    Ryan said, “No. We think there was a struggle
downstairs, in the kitchen.”
    Helen was shaking her head. “This woman weighs one
ten, tops. If she