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"Mind if I ask you a question, Ms Hardy?"
"Go ahead."
"You just glanced at those pictures."
"So."
"You can barely see her face in most of them. How did you know it was LaShawn?"
"LaShawn always wears her hair like that."
"So does Pamela."
"No, she doesn’t."
"In one of those pictures. The one with two of them."
Felicia picked up the pictures and fanned through them until she found it. "This one?"
"That’s the one. See, same ponytail. And the picture I got of the two of you out of Pamela’s room. By the way, your picture doesn’t do you justice, but she’s wearing a ponytail."
"That doesn’t mean that’s how she always wore it. Both of those pictures were taken on the same day. I remember that day. She was going to Jake’s birthday party and she didn’t have time to get her hair fixed. I told her with her hair pulled back like that she looked like LaShawn."
"Why didn’t you go to the party?"
"I knew the type of people that would be at any party Gee was throwin’. Pamela would always ask me if I wanted to go, but I was a cop. I wouldn’t be caught dead up in there."
"Mind if I ask you another question?"
"I’ll save you the trouble. No, to my knowledge Pamela wasn’t laundering money. That is what you and the police want to know, isn’t it? What is your name, again?"
"Nick Simmons. I’m pleased to meet you. And yes, that is what I was going to ask you."
"Cops think so?"
"I got that impression."
"That’s why I don’t want to talk to them. Once they figured out she was murdered and it was drug related, they’d start thinking money laundering and then they’d start looking at me. I’m sure someone has gone through my file and my arrest records looking to link me to this shit. And if they really want to, they’ll find something, whether its there or not."
"Do you think that your leaving the way you did helped?" But Felicia didn’t answer me.
"I used to tell her all the time that it didn’t look good for her to be in her position at the bank and be associating with a known drug dealers wife, and goin’ to their parties. But she would always say that for that to be a problem, she’d have to be doing something wrong, and her record at the bank would speak for itself."
"You mind if I ask you another question?"
"You don’t have to ask me that every time you want to ask me something. Go ahead."
"Have you had breakfast yet?"
"No." Felicia let out a little laugh.
"I haven’t either. And I’m hungry, so can we finish this conversation over breakfast? I promise I’ll behave myself even without handcuffs."
Felicia looked at me as if I had lost my mind. She picked up her gun and walked toward me again. She stood in front of me, not speaking. As if she was deciding right then how it was goin’ to be between us. She looked into my eyes. I locked my eyes in hers. She exhaled and left the room.
"Shit," I said quietly.
For a second there, I thought we were having a moment. You know, the kind that James Bond always has when the girl kisses and then releases him. I felt the pain in my wrists. "Live in reality, Nick. This ain’t no fuckin’ movie." I didn’t think she was going to kill me, so I didn’t try to leave. I couldn’t, not after coming all this way. She knows