Page 37 of Falling For You

ANDY

It took me three weeks to send the email. Three weeks of drafting it in my head on patrol, rewriting it at my desk after shift, deleting entire paragraphs because they sounded too eager or too angry or too much like a woman asking permission for something she'd already earned. In the end, I kept it to four sentences. A formal request to schedule ride-along hours with Patrol Investigations, citing the requirements I'd already completed, CC'd to Human Resources.

Elliot replied within twenty-four hours. He approved the scheduling request and copied Lieutenant Burns on the response.

The paper trail did exactly what I designed it to do.

"Swing shift picked up a domestic on Decatur Boulevard last night. Suspect's still outstanding. White male, mid-twenties, red truck. Keep your eyes open."

Elliot stood at the front of the briefing room with a clipboard.

He ran through the rest. A BOLO on a stolen vehicle, a construction closure on Charleston that was rerouting traffic, a noise complaint pattern near the university.

"Last thing. Quarterly firearms qualifications are due by end of month. If you haven't scheduled your range time, get it done. I don't want to pull anyone off the street for a lapsed cert."

Elliot closed the clipboard and dismissed the room. Two months ago, he was the man who lied to me and made me cry on my apartment floor. Now he was just my sergeant running a briefing.

The shift had been so gradual I almost missed it. His voice used to play in my head every night. Now the space where it lived had been filled by someone else's laugh and a smile I'd started looking for on every shared scene.

"Ready?" Doug tapped the edge of my desk on his way past.

Dispatch sent us to an apartment building off Lamb Boulevard just before two. Dead body. Responding officers requested.

The victim was a man named Cyril Puno. Mid-thirties, found at the bottom of a stairwell. He was face down on the concrete landing, one arm pinned beneath him, the other stretched toward the bottom step. Blood pooled beneath his head.

Doug crouched beside the body and started writing. I started on the neighbor.

"I noticed the smell when I got home." The neighbor was a woman in her forties, still in her work clothes, keeping her distance from the landing. "It was coming from the stairwell door. I opened it and he was just lying there."

"Does Mr. Puno usually take the stairs?"

She shook her head. "Nobody does. The elevator works fine."

I looked at the body from where I stood. The wound was on the back of Puno's skull. If he fell forward down the stairs, the impact would be frontal or lateral. Forehead, temple, or the side of his face. A wound to the back of the head meant he was moving in the wrong direction.

I asked the building manager about cameras. Lobby and parking garage, yes. Stairwells, no. I asked if the elevator had gone out of service recently. No.

A man who never took the stairs was found dead in the only part of the building without cameras, and the wound was in the wrong place.

Nothing about this was an accident.

I walked back toward Doug. "I don't think this was an accident. The wound is⁠—"

"What do we have, Andy?"

Elliot was in the stairwell doorway.

"I don't think he fell down the stairs. The wound is in the wrong place. Someone struck him from behind."

Elliot crouched beside the body. He tilted Puno's head, looked at the wound, looked up at the stairs. Took his time. Then he stood up.

"Looks like he fell down the stairs to me. Let's not turn an accident into a homicide."

The stairwell door opened behind him. A detective stepped through. Elliot turned away from me without another word and walked straight to him.

Doug was quiet for a second. "He's wrong. I've been looking at this wound for twenty minutes. You called it."

Then we heard it. Elliot's voice carrying across the landing.