Two to Worry About

Chapter 3

"Okay, tell me what you got."

The three of them stood in the lieutenant’s eight-by-ten office staring at each other. The lieutenant’s desk was littered with case files and stacks of papers. A small fan in one corner was almost strong enough to generate some kind of a wind current. The squad room the lieutenant’s office sat in, bashed against two other offices on either side of his, was devoid of any life now.

"We got a dead body," Turner said succinctly.

Lieutenant Dimitri Yankovich turned and looked at them both, his face as expressionless as any human cadaver could be. Tall, thin, slightly stooped, almost anemic-looking, Yank was known throughout the Metro for looking like a walking dead man. Pale complexioned, yet with vivid dark brown eyes, he was also the supervisor of South Side Precinct"s second shift. But everyone knew Yankovich. The man was approaching legendary standing as an arrow-straight shift commander. He could be hard as nails to any recalcitrant fellow officer or criminal. Or he could be as soft as a priest in a confessional booth. It depended on the situation. And his mood at the moment.

"Care to take that just a little bit further? You know, maybe fill in the blanks some."

"I wish we could, Yank. But there"s nothing to fill in yet. A call came in we would find a dead cowboy lying in an intersection. That"s what we found. A dead cowboy. Right now, we"re waiting for Joe down in forensics to give us something to work on. Until then we"re just circling in a holding pattern."

"Any witnesses?"

"None," Turner"s red-headed partner chipped in, shaking his head. "No one heard gunshots. No one saw the body being dumped in the streets. A couple of "em thought they saw a black pickup truck slip around a corner about the time the body showed up. But that"s about it."

"A dead cowboy," Yank muttered, shaking his head. "This friggin’ city is going to hell in a hand basket. A friggin’ hand basket."

He circled around Turner and Frank, walked around his big desk, and sat down. Yank"s glass cubicle for an office was one of three, the middle one, sitting at one end of the second floor reserved for the precinct"s detectives’ squad room. Motioning for the two to sit down in the battered-looking office chairs on the other side of his desk, he sighed, ran a hand through his thinning hair, and looked at both men.

Turner Hahn and Frank Morales. And liked what he saw. A perfect match. One tall. Red-haired. Looking like some madman"s nightmare for an experiment gone bad. The other tall. Athletic looking. With thick wavy black hair and a wiry smear for a mustache underneath a razor straight nose. The guy had dimples, deep dimples, in each of his cheeks which would make most women become all dreamy-like. Add that boyish permanent sneer on his lips … that half grin of someone just barely within the limits of proper decorum … and women would take their clothes off any time Turner would bat his eyes at them. Without being asked. Not that he knew for sure. But that was the scuttlebutt around the precinct.

By themselves they were damn good cops. Two of the best detectives he had ever met. Together as a team they were unbeatable. Frank, the ugly one, had an IQ that was off the charts. He was also equipped with an eidetic memory that pulled up raw data faster than a computer. Turner, the handsome one, was pretty damn smart himself. But his talents were his gut instincts and his unshakable confidence in himself and his partner. He was also Metro"s best shot with either pistol or rifle.

Frank was sheer force and intellect. Honest as the day was long. Impervious, apparently, from pain. Completely devoted.

Turner was the bulldog who, when he accepted a case, wouldn"t give up once he latched onto a problem. He friggin’ liked the hard cases. The unsolvable ones. The ones no one else would touch with a fifty-foot pole.

likedWhat made the two even more interesting to him was the fact many in the city"s department hated them with a deep passion. With Turner catching the brunt of the intense dislike. There were reasons for this festering malice. Turner was rich. No. Not just rich. But rich. An unexpected inheritance a few years back plopped almost thirty million dollars into his bank account. The inheritance gave him not only the money, but a grandfather as well. A grandfather who was, as the rumors went, possibly as rich as a Scrooge McDuck rich. The old man was, in a nutshell, colorful. He had a past that read like an Ian Fleming spy novel. Still was a spy as the story went. Except this time, he was running a super-secret agency no one talked about.

rich.But the thing was this. Once the old man died, Turner would inherit. Everything. God only knew how much the old man was worth.

A rich cop is a hard man to beat. You can"t bribe him. You can"t scare him with lawsuits. You can"t frame him. But a rich and honest cop is even worse. Both were. Honest to the bone. In a city filled with corruption, what the hell could you do with two honest cops?

richhonestThat"s why a large number in the department didn"t like the two. Money and honesty. A terrible combination for anyone who honestly wanted to be a crook.

But that"s why he liked them. Trusted them. Gave them the tough cases.

"Go home," he said, looking at the two. "Go home and get some rest. The two of you deserve it. Can"t do anything until forensics comes up with something. Come back tomorrow, and let"s see where we stand."

"But …” Frank began, throwing a shrug at Yank worriedly.

"Forget it," Yank growled, waving a hand of dismissal. “I"ll get the H & B to cover if another body pops up. Go home and get some sleep. That"s an order, dammit. Get outta here."

The H & B.

Detectives Marissa Hamm and Mike Bean.

Oil and water. The Ying and Yang of human contact. If Marissa Hamm said UP, Mike Bean would find three reasons to claim it was DOWN. It was in their genetic makeup to rub each other the wrong way. And they preferred it that way. Actually, enjoyed it. Quietly relished the idea of finding something to one-up on the other. But professionally, as a team, when it came to solving cases, they were very good at their jobs.

one-up The H & B worked the second shift Theft/Larceny desk. Busy, yes. But the work was slow going most of the time. Tedious yes, but not that they were so overworked they could not momentarily cover another desk occasionally when the need popped up. Besides, Turner suspected the two would enjoy working a homicide if a body dropped on them in the next twelve hours. It would be a break in the tedium of their normal workload.

The two nodded silently and left the lieutenant"s office in silence. As they lumbered down the rickety stairs leading to the ground floor below, Frank was thinking it would be nice to see the kids and the missus for a few hours uninterrupted. Turner, for his part, was thinking of a cold German pilsner or two before hitting the sack for some sleep. Eight hours of solid, uninterrupted sleep.

At least one of them got their wish.