Page 5

Special Agent Michael Prince, Faith’s best friend and partner of eleven years and counting, waited for her in a much larger, much newer vehicle than her old Crown Vic. Faith understood the appeal of the luxurious boats that manufacturers called SUVs these days. They were comfortable, and they allowed people the option to stream music on their phones instead of listening to the same bullshit news they saw on TV or the same twelve songs that played on every radio station.

Still, she preferred the feel of an older car. They had personality. They were driver’s cars, not the semi-self-driving hotel rooms that were all the rage these days.

She didn’t bother asking Michael if he wanted her to drive, though. Michael was a much better driver than he was a passenger, and she didn’t want to spoil her good mood any further by dealing with his complaints on their way to the restaurant.

She opened the door for Turk, then climbed into the passenger seat. Turk immediately leapt into Michael’s arms and exuberantly licked his face. Michael laughed and hugged the big dog. “Hey, boy. Good to see you, too. I missed you." He turned to Faith and teased, "No kiss from Mommy?"

“Well, I’d like to have a boyfriend when this is over, and I’m sure you want to stay married. So no.”

“Fine. Turk’s a better kisser than you anyway.” He put the car in gear and asked, “How’s David?”

“Didn’t you guys see each other last week?”

“Jeez, I’m just making conversation.”

She laughed. “He’s fine. He’s trying to get me to move in with him before the lease is up.”

“Do it. You have him wrapped around your finger. Take advantage of that now before he figures out how annoying you are.”

“I’ll take that under advisement. I mean, I probably will. I’m going to move in with him eventually, so there’s no real point in dragging it out.”

“Exactly. Besides, he’s a good guy. I like him.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said drily.

“Oh, whatever.”

"So, how's Ellie doing?"

He grinned. “Perfect as always. She made me a chocolate cake in the shape of a badge for our anniversary.”

“Does she know that FBI agents don’t wear badges?”

“You see, that’s the difference between you and me. I thought the cake was adorable, and I appreciated the thought. You have to go right to picking everything apart.”

“Picking things apart is what I get paid to do. For the record, before you get all pissy, I think it’s adorable how cute you two are.”

“It is adorable. We’re like the… the… who’s the couple who lives next door to Lucy and Desi Arnaz?”

She looked at him for a moment. “Do I look like I watch I Love Lucy?”

“No, I guess not. You probably wouldn’t like it. No blood.”

“Oh yeah, that’s why I became an agent,” she quipped. “I just love blood.”

“Well, I know it’s not the vacation days. Did you know the Bureau’s trying to reduce paid time off from three weeks to sixteen days annually?”

“The horror.”

“One more reason to retire, I guess.”

She rolled her eyes. "You keep saying you're going to retire, but I think you just like to pretend you have options other than the Bureau. You're like the boyfriend who keeps threatening to leave, but he never does because he knows he can't do better."

“The point of retiring is to do nothing, not to do better. But yeah, I guess you’re right. In any case, with West locked up, Ellie’s sleeping at night, so she’s not pressuring me to move us somewhere far away anymore.”

Michael's wife, Ellie, happened to also be Franklin West's ex-wife. Needless to say, she hadn't taken it well when her abusive ex-husband was revealed to also be among the most prolific and most brutal serial killers in American history. She was more relieved than anyone when he was finally brought to justice.

“That’s good,” Faith replied. “I’m glad she’s healing.”

“Yeah, me too. I won’t lie, though; I was kind of hoping I'd get ten minutes alone with West."

“Isn’t the phrase five minutes alone?”

“I’m an old man now. I’d need a couple of breaks to catch my breath.”

She rolled her eyes and slapped his shoulder playfully. “Don’t talk like that.”

“Why not? I love being old. I’m pretty sure I was born to be an old man.”

“You might be right there.”

“So how are you holding up?” he asked. “Are you following the case?”

She sighed. “Trying not to.”

“I get it. The last thing you need after years trying to shake that monkey off your back is for some dumbass academic to act like he’s the same as the Night Stalker.”

“Right? How do you even make that comparison?”

"You get told by a bunch of stuffed shirts that your shit smells like roses, so you start thinking that every thought that pops into your head is Gospel. From there, you just cherry-pick your facts so it fits whatever preconceived bullshit you've decided to pronounce today."

She smiled wryly. “I take it you saw the Crime talk broadcast this morning.”

“Yep. My mistake. I had the TV on for the weather, and I left it on when I saw West's face. I thought it was going to be an update on the jury selection, but nope, it was Tyler Hudson entertaining some dumb shit professor who thinks that every murderer is a sexual deviant."

“Yeah, what’s with that? Do people not realize there are other motives for murder?”

“I’m sure they do, but sex sells.”

She scoffed. “It would be nice if they thought that maybe they shouldn’t sell this kind of sex.”

“Well, fuck ‘em. They want to look all smug and pat themselves on the back for being smart, that’s fine with me. At least they only get to talk about things after the fact instead of being involved in the hunt for these criminals.”

“Thank God for small blessings.”

She sighed, but this time with relief. She was grateful to have Michael to talk to. She couldn’t really talk about work with David. Aside from the fact that most of the time, she really couldn’t talk about work with him since it involved an ongoing case or sealed court records, he couldn’t understand what it was like to hunt serial killers. He was supportive, of course, but law enforcement was one of those jobs you didn’t understand unless you worked it.

Either way, it was a load off of her chest to talk with someone who shared her views on the bullshit the media always peddled in these cases. With that off of her mind, she could focus on the case at hand.

“So what are we walking into?” she asked Michael.

“Victim is Harold Grimes, food columnist and author. He was doing a blind review of Sushi Amaterasu when he jumped up like he was choking, ran around the restaurant like crazy for about thirty seconds, then fell down dead.”

“Jesus.”

"Yeah, we never get the cut-and-dry ones, do we?"

“If we did, we’d be local police. But hey, at least we’d actually have badges.”

“You stop it. That cake was delicious.”

She smiled. “I’m glad you liked it. Do we have a cause of death for Grimes?”

“We’re waiting on a tox report, but the preliminary guess is a severe allergic reaction.”

She lifted her eye. “It can’t be an allergic reaction, or we wouldn’t have been called.”

“Well, the hypothesis is that someone introduced a foreign substance into his meal that caused the reaction. Or they just straight up poisoned him.”

“And this is like another case you said?”

“Yeah, Eleanor Crestwood. Also a food columnist, but in her case an online blog. She died at Cucina Toscana last week. You didn’t see it on the news?”

Faith vaguely remembered hearing about a woman who had died at a restaurant, but it was sandwiched between two lengthy reports on the West case, so she didn’t pay attention to it. “I don’t remember what they said. I can see the connection, though. Two high-profile food critics died the same way at two different restaurants within a week. Sounds like what we do.”

“I feel a need to point out that what we do is find people who do stuff like that. We don’t actually do it ourselves.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Obvious.”

He looked at her quizzically. “Lieutenant Obvious. Why was I demoted?”

“David’s Captain Obvious.”

“What? Why? I’ve known you longer than him.”

“Well, he’s cuter than you.”

“Speak for yourself. Ellie says I’m adorable.”

She laughed. “Good for you. Do we have a confirmed COD for Crestwood?”

“Definitely poison. They’re still waiting for the tox report to know exactly what killed her, but they think it’s something called a sodium channel blocker.”

“A what?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said. I guess it interferes with nerve signal transmission or something. Basically, it kills you.”

“Ah. That clears it up.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

He pulled into the parking lot of an upscale shopping center in Rittenhouse Square. The shopping center was nestled in between several hotels ranging in price from expensive to exorbitant and clearly hoped to extort money from well-heeled travelers by offering a tasteful selection of the latest in designer fashion and trendy eateries.

Not that it was making much money now. Sushi Amaterasu was near the center of the strip mall, meaning the yellow police tape surrounding the entrance was clearly visible from the street, as were the two police cruisers parked in front of it.

“Nice place,” Michael said.

“I’m sure it was.”

The two of them got out of the car and Faith felt her good mood fading. It wasn’t that she didn’t enjoy her job, but it felt wrong to be cheerful when she was investigating a violent murder.

Michael seemed to feel the same way. “I hate to wish myself out of a job, but it would be nice if there wasn’t a psycho out killing people every few weeks.”

“Yes. It would.”

Faith’s mood darkened further. That was another downside to this job. It was never done. You never truly “won.” You would catch some killers, but there were always more. You would save some lives, but you couldn’t do anything about the lives already lost.

She had put Franklin West behind bars, but at the end of the day, West was only a colorful symptom of a disease that raged despite society’s best efforts to cure it. Still, she had chosen this job because she could handle the struggle. Where others gave up, she fought on.

Turk barked, and Faith smiled grimly. “Exactly what I was about to say boy. Let’s go catch a bad guy.”