“Oh,” he looked down, “Lost the time.” He quickly cleaned his brushes and started to jog out of the room, stopping at the open partition to the kitchen. “Um. See you tonight?” His fingers toyed with a beaded necklace around his neck. Had that been there before?
“I’ll be here at ten,” Riley nodded.
“Great!” Cai grinned and tossed a wave before vanishing down the hall.
“He’s a sweet kid,” Riley said once the door to the back bedroom shut. The emphasis on ‘kid’ was a relief.
“Sometimes easy to forget he’s a kid.” I poured a cup of coffee and hesitated in the kitchen, eyeing the makeshift tarp over my coffee table. The laptop was still there from Tuesday.
“If you say so.” He held out his hand, his smile creasing the corners of his eyes. The lines spoke more to the frequency of his laughter than his age. “Agent Riley Cordova.”
I shook the outstretched hand. “Austin Glass.” It stung to have to drop the detective prefix. Had I already decided not to return to duty? No. “I’d love to shoot the shit, but I have some neglected work to look into.” After holding the coffee cup up in a gesture of thanks, I retrieved the laptop from under the tarp and sat on the sofa, feet propped up on the coffee table.
Cordova sat next to me, ankle crossed over his knee and an electronic reader in his lap. I spoke without looking at him. “The FBI afraid of the big bad homo molesting their straight agents?” The words were light but my fingers tapped my password with unnecessary force.
“It would be unprofessional and inappropriate to call you defensive and reactionary, Detective Glass.”
“So you’ll just imply it?” A rueful grin wiped the hostility from my face. I could get to like Riley Cordova.
“I’m implying,” he paused considering his words, “that you’re taking the defensive against perceived offense, not an actual one.”
“No coincidence you’re gay and assigned to this case?” I asked with an accusing tone, waiting for the laptop to boot up.
“No coincidence,” he agreed. “Mrs. Strakosha made some demands about the men on her personal security detail.”
Oh.
I was an idiot. Not that I was going to apologize. The sting of rejection from my colleagues was still sharp. The memory of dildos and lube rattling to the front of my desk drawer was a vivid reminder of where they stood. “Well, welcome to homo-land.”
He laughed and went back to reading. “Welcome yourself, Detective.”
I chuckled, opened my web browser and forgot about agent Cordova. After navigating to the search engine, I typed in ‘barn lager’.
Schizophrenic News
My first impression of the search results was that ‘barn lager’ was not proper Swedish, or Danish or any other language. The first entries were a mishmash of sites with one word or the other. Nothing sensible combined both words except a china pattern from Pottery Barn. My search led nowhere.
I navigated to an online translator service. The Danish translation of “child store” made sense. In Swedish and Norwegian it meant “child bearing”. None of it got me any closer to an answer. Maybe I was wrong about the whole thing. A small laugh escaped as I breathed out.
“Good news?” Agent Cordova asked.
“Very. I’m the king of wild accusations it seems.” I tapped the plastic trying to think of where to search from there. Maybe there was a beer place locally. I typed ‘barn lager Denver’, hit enter, and began to read down the page.
The ninth entry demolished my smile.
I almost missed it as I scrolled through the same results from the last search. The second-to-last link was in Swedish, and I was offered a button to translate the text. I clicked it.
Barnlager.com—We carry baby clothes, children’s clothes and toys made in Sweden—16th Street and Wynkoop, Denver
16th and Wynkoop. Smack dab in the middle of the 16th Street Mall. I opened up the site’s front page and skimmed over the pictures of toddlers in play clothes before delving deeper in. It took ten minutes, but I found what I was looking for on a list of importers. Asa’s Playground was midway down the page.
It didn’t take much of a leap to figure the name of Marta’s shop.
Half-Wit’s End
“Fuck.” I dragged a hand through my hair and went on a hunt for the spreadsheet files from Luis and the restaurant. Was Asa’s Playground among the companies listed? Wouldn’t I have noticed that before? But that day I’d been distracted. Darryl and his wandering fucking hand.
“Bad news so soon? Things change on a dime around here.”