Riptide (Sam McRae Mystery #3)

Chapter 4

By the time the cruiser arrived, Billy Ray and his zombie brigade were gone. The cop who responded looked to be about sixteen. He and Billy Ray could have attended high school together. Maybe sat in the same homeroom. Compared notes on the same girls.

The kid—the cop, that is—walked up to us, a quizzical look in his baby blues.

"Did one of you call about a disturbance?"

I raised a hand. "I did. The disturbers have hit the frickin' bricks."

Jamila counted her barrettes and combs, shaking her head. "One's missing." She squatted to peer beneath the cars again.

The cop's brow furrowed. He scratched it with his pen. "I can file a report, if you'd like." His tone suggested, "Why bother?"

"I think we should," I told Jamila.

"Why?" She squat-stepped sideways, ducking her head and doing another visual sweep. Finally, she straightened and added, sounding annoyed, "What good will it do? We don't even know his full name?"

"Ah, but I got his tag number."

Jamila did a double-take and smiled. "Quick thinking, Sam. Way to go."

I hoped that my quick thinking would help make up for the inadvertent damage to her music box. I didn't realize it would just lead to more trouble.

Who knew that Billy Ray, aka William Raymond Wesley, would end up knifed in the gut while passed out on the downstairs porch that night? Or that someone would plant Jamila's comb near his body?

Filing the report provided more evidence of animosity between Jamila and the deceased. Surely, not enough for her to commit murder, I argued to the cops. My words fell on deaf ears. Before I knew it, they'd arranged a lineup. A witness fingered Jamila as the one he'd seen at the scene of the crime hours earlier. As they led my friend away to be fingerprinted, I realized we needed local counsel. We were both outsiders and city slickers. Neither of us knew the local ropes or had the proper connections to handle this.

*****

A couple of hours after they'd taken her, I was allowed to see Jamila. In the visiting room, it felt more than a bit peculiar to see her in an orange jumpsuit seated on the wrong side of the table.

"I've called Rudy and my parents." Jamila sounded tired.

"I can only imagine how they must feel."

Jamila blew out a breath. Her shoulders sagged, her body deflated. "Not good. Rudy hasn't told the kids."

"Hopefully, he won't have to. You realize, of course, we've got to hire a local attorney."

Jamila raised her index finger. "I used one of my calls to reach my father. He recommended someone he worked with here years ago."

Sounded hopeful. Jamila's father was an attorney at one of D.C.'s biggest firms. "Who?"

"His name is Edward G. Mulrooney."

"If he's as impressive as his name, he should be good."

*****

I called Mulrooney. Jamila's father had already hired him to cover her bail hearing later that morning. With that out of the way, I arranged in the wee hours to move into temporary quarters since our condo was still off-limits and crawling with crime techs. I scrounged up a motel on Coastal Highway near the Delaware line. It was late (or early) and vacancies were few and far between, so I took the room without close inspection. I stumbled through the door, threw myself on one of two double beds, and drifted off for a few hours. I woke up in a musty, oversized closet passing itself off as a room.