Santini. Maybe a seventy-six-year-old would have found her hot, but no, she wasn’t hot.”
Santini shook his head. “First woman you trip over—” he slanted a glance at his partner of three years “—literally—in I don’t know how long and she has to turn out to be a senior citizen.” The dark, weathered face gathered around a pout. “Couldn’t you have run into a hot babe?”
James thought of the cameo he’d left locked up in his desk drawer at home. He still had to place the ad and he was dreading the deluge of response he anticipated. “I wasn’t trying to run into anyone and if your wife catches you talking like that, you’ll be sleeping on the screened porch again.” The light turned green and he was off.
Santini jolted, then settled back. After three years, he still wasn’t accustomed to the fits and starts of his partner’s driving.
“Yeah, I know. But a guy can dream, can’t he? I can’t step out on her—won’t step out on her,” Santini amended, probably because the former sounded as if he were henpecked, which he had admitted in a moment laced with weakness and whiskey, but it wasn’t something he liked dwelling on, “but I can live through you—if you had a life, that is.” He frowned deeply, forming ruts around the corners of his mouth. “You owe it to me, Munro.”
He took another corner, sharply. Santini moaned beside him. “Watching your back is all I owe you, Santini.”
Santini shifted in his seat, his hand braced against the glove compartment. Another turn was coming up. “So, you putting in the ad?”
It wasn’t something he wanted to do, but Harriet Stewart was right. Someone was undoubtedly upset over losing a piece like this. The more he looked at it, the prettier it became. He could almost see it sitting against someone’s throat, moving with every breath she took.
He blinked, wondering if the heat was getting to him. Even the air-conditioning in the car was struggling with the air. “At lunchtime.”
Patience had never been Santini’s long suit. “Why don’t you do it now?”
James snorted. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got a crime scene to cover.”
Responsibilities had shifted when it came to locking up crime scenes. These days, the scientists seemed to be all over it before the detectives had a chance even to survey the scene. “Why don’t you let the CSU guys do our walking for us? Most of the time they get all huffy if we’re in their ‘way.’”
It was a constant battle for supremacy. Each department felt they had dibs on solving crimes. It hadn’t been this way in his uncle’s day, when detectives were gods—or so his uncle liked to tell. “And what, hold on to this job with my looks?”
Santini considered for a long moment, then shook his head. “Naw, couldn’t happen. You’d be let go in five minutes.”
“Not before you, Santini,” he said, taking a quick turn and then pulling the car up short. Santini nearly bounced in his seat. “Not before you.”
Just as he’d predicted. One look at his answering machine and he saw he was drowning in phone calls.
He glanced at the glaring red number. Fifteen. Fifteen callers since the ad had appeared this morning, each probably purporting to own the cameo. He sat down and played them all.
Only one was a hang-up, signifying a telemarketer. The rest of the calls were from people who claimed that the cameo belonged to them. Didn’t take a Solomon to know that at least thirteen if not all fourteen were lying.
He frowned as the last message ended and a metallic voice came on to say, “End of final message.”
“Might as well get this over with.” The words were addressed to the dog who had come to greet him when he’d opened the front door.
James opened up a can of dog food for Stanley, took out a bottle of beer from the refrigerator for himself and settled into his recliner with a pad and pencil to return the calls.
The claims were all bogus, down to the last number on the answering machine. A great many of the stories had been creative as to how the cameo had been lost, but no one could tell him about the faint inscription etched on the back of the cameo.
A couple of the people he called back had figured out that it wasn’t an inscription but initials, but as to what those initials were, they claimed to draw a blank, saying it had been so long since they’d looked at the back, they couldn’t remember. He told them to call back when they regained their memory.
“Incredible city we live in,” he murmured to the dog as he hung up on the last caller. “Give them a crisis and they all pull together. Dangle a piece of jewelry in front of them and it’s every man or woman for themselves.”
James sighed and shook his head. He’d never been a great believer in the nobility of man to begin with, but he hated being proven right. Getting up, he took his empty bottle to the garbage.
As he dropped it in, he saw the dog eyeing him. “Yeah, yeah, I know, I should be recycling, but I don’t have the time. If you’re so hot on the issue, you go and recycle them.”
Stanley just continued looking at him with his big, soulful brown eyes.
James blew out a breath, dug the bottle out of the garbage and put it on the side. “C’mon, I need a jog. Maybe it’ll clear my head.” And then he grinned. “Maybe we’ll trip over a diamond this time. Or a ‘hot babe.’” He used Santini’s words for the experience. “If we do, we’ll put her on Santini’s doorstep, see what his wife has to say about it. You with me?”
Stanley barked in response.
“Good dog.”
He went to change out of his clothes and into his jogging shorts and shirt.
Forty-five minutes later, he was back, dripping. The humidity that held the city hostage seemed to have gone up a notch as the sun went down instead of relinquishing its grip. It was like trying to run through minestrone soup.
Throwing his keys on the table, he saw the blinking light.
Another call.
“Well, it can keep,” he told his dog, pouring fresh cold water for him into a bowl. Stanley began to lap as if he hadn’t had a drink in seven drought-filled days. “I need a shower.”
The light was still blinking seductively at him after he came out of the shower.
And while he ate a dinner comprised of a ham sandwich. He eyed the hypnotic light as he chewed, toying with the idea of just deleting it without listening, or at least putting it off until morning.
Greed always left a bad taste in his mouth and the slew of people he’d encountered this evening, all wanting something for nothing, had put him off. Bad enough he encountered it every day on the job, people stealing the sweat of someone else’s brow, absconding with someone’s dream when they had no right to it. But he damn well didn’t have to welcome it with open arms right here on his own turf.
But he knew that wasn’t strictly the case.
“Wrong, Munro. You put the ad in, you opened the floodgates. Now take your
