“How’s the kid doing?” Tippen asked, helping himself to the other desk chair in the cubicle.
The kid, Michael Taylor, fledgling homicide detective, was Kovac’s third trainee in as many months. Of the other two, one had gone back to his old job in Sex Crimes, and the other had transferred to a sudden opportunity in the Business and Technology unit. Neither had been cut out for Homicide as far as Kovac was concerned—an opinion he had made abundantly clear.
Bottom line: He didn’t want a new partner. He was too old and cranky to break one in. He and Liska had been partners for so long that they were comfortable together, their styles meshed; they had learned to tolerate each other’s annoying habits. They were like an old married couple that never had sex. He wanted that back. Instead, he had to take this kid and try to make him into something he could live with.
Taylor showed some promise, Kovac admitted grudgingly. He had been an MP in the army. After two tours in Iraq he had opted out of the service and come home to Minneapolis. He joined the force and set his sights on making detective, rising quickly through the ranks. He had come to Homicide from Special Crimes, to bulk up his résumé before he was fast-tracked to further stardom. At least, that was what Kovac believed. The kid was too handsome and too sharp to loiter in the trenches with the rest of the grunts. He had Big Things written all over him. His sheer perfection rubbed Kovac the wrong way.
He shrugged at Tippen’s question. “We’ll see.”
He turned up the volume on the computer speakers. Taylor was sitting looking relaxed, looking like he could sit there for the next two or three days. He had his shirtsleeves rolled perfectly halfway up his forearms. Even this late in the day his shirt still looked freshly starched, perfectly tailored to showcase his broad shoulders and trim waist.
“Good thing Liska transferred out,” Tippen said. “She’d be all over Taylor like stink on a billy goat.”
Tippen resembled a billy goat, Kovac thought, with his long homely face, sporting a goatee and mustache these past few months. His vintage beatnik look. He claimed it played well with the coffeehouse chicks.
“The guy is hot,” Tippen went on. “If I was a woman, I’d fuck him.”
Kovac made a pained face. “Oh Jesus, don’t put that in my head!”
“Taylor’s too young for Tinks,” Elwood Knutson announced, joining them in the cramped gray cubicle, and taking up all remaining available space. He was built like a Disney cartoon bear, and had a similar pelt of hair.
“Don’t tell Tinks that,” Kovac advised. “She’ll pluck your eyeballs out and feed them to you.”
“Merely an observation,” Elwood murmured, hunkering down closer to the screen. “She’s not the cougar type.”
“He’s not that young anyway,” Kovac muttered. The kid made him feel like a dinosaur. “He’s thirty-four.”
“And how old are you now, Sam?”
“Old enough to remember rotary telephones. I’ve got shoes older than this kid,” he confessed. “And a couple of neckties, too.”
He turned his focus back to the computer screen.
“You know,” Taylor was saying to Stack, “we’re just not making the progress here I thought we would, Ronnie. You seemed so eager to cooperate, but you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know.”
“Maybe I don’t know anything more than you know,” Stack said, pushing his limp blond hair back from his face.
Taylor shook his head. “I don’t think I’ve overestimated you. I think you want to help us out here,” Taylor said. “BB was your friend, after all.”
Stack’s eyes darted from side to side. “He wasn’t really my friend. I mean, I knew him, but . . .”
Taylor leaned forward a bit. Stack leaned back.
“Now, there you go, trying to distance yourself when we have witnesses who put you with BB shortly before his death,” Taylor said. “Now you’re suddenly telling me maybe you and BB weren’t such good friends after all when I know you’d been staying at his house. You have to know what this makes me think, Ronnie.”
Stack nibbled at a hangnail as he curled in on himself, turning into a human comma on the other side of the table, trying to make himself smaller and smaller, as if he thought he might eventually become so small Taylor would find him physically insignificant and let him disappear.
“It makes me think maybe we should be looking at you as a suspect instead of a possible witness.” Taylor’s voice was quiet and even, matter-of-fact. “Should we be looking at you that way, Ronnie?”
“N-no.” The twitch wiped his arm across his forehead. “It seems really hot in here. Aren’t you hot?”
“Me? No. I spent two years in Iraq fighting for your freedom in the ninth circle of hell. I know what hot is. It’s not hot in here. I mean, we’ve got the fan going and everything.”
Without another interview room available, they had had a janitor come in and clean Stack’s vomit off the floor, and then had brought in a little desk fan to blow on the wet carpet and dissipate the smell of puke and cleaning agents.
“Did you have some kind of beef with BB, Ronnie?”