Witch Hunt(32)

The house was mostly dark when he let me in. It was well after midnight, but that shouldn’t have mattered in my brother’s house. He was a night owl.
I leaned around the end of his stairs to check the second floor. All the doors were open and the rooms were dark.
“Sofia already in bed?” I asked.
“She isn’t here.” A sigh. “We’re taking a little time apart. And before you say it—”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“—she’s in love with someone else.”
She wasn’t my wife, but the announcement still felt like a punch to the face. I sucked in a hard breath. “You know who?”
“I don’t, and I don’t want to think about it.” He scrubbed his hands through his hair. He’d always been the spitting image of our dad, except without the mustache. Now, with heartache etched on his face, he was practically Dad’s twin. “Either she’ll break it off with him or me, and I’ll deal with either when it happens. You’ve got bigger problems. Sit down, I’ll get you a beer.”
“Shouldn’t I clean up first?” I gestured at my dusty jacket and jeans.
“I’m not the one in the house who cares about the upholstery, dude.”
There wasn’t anyone in the house who cared about upholstery anymore. And his home felt a hell of a lot emptier for it.
I was the one on the run from murder charges, but I’d take my week over Domingo’s. He was nuts for Sofia—she was his moon and stars and all that romantic crap. She was the reason he’d stopped knocking over 7-Elevens for petty cash and gotten a real job. She was the reason Domingo had a nice life in the first place.
I took the couch in the living room. It was a lot softer than the den couch.
“Anyone come looking for me?” I asked, eyeing Sofia’s footstool and trying to decide if I wanted to risk putting my dirty shoes on it.
“You busted out of jail. What do you think?” Domingo called over his shoulder as he went for the kitchen. “Agent Takeuchi hit up Pops first, so I got the courtesy of a warning phone call before she appeared at my doorstep.”
I whistled. “Suzy? Really?” I knew I’d probably been given a file like Isobel’s and assigned to an agent, but I never would have thought that the OPA would assign me to my desk mate. Weird that it was the OPA visiting my family instead of the LAPD, though. “Did Pops have fun with her?”
“He says she’s a gorgeous woman and you should let her catch you.”
Of course he did. “Tell me he didn’t hit on her.”
“What do you think? Seventy-two years old and the man’s still got it.”
“He thinks he’s got it, anyway,” I muttered.
Domingo emerged from the kitchen and with two bottles of beer. I took mine gratefully and drank deep. The cold felt amazing going down my throat. And in my hand. I placed the bottle to my forehead and winced when it hit a bruise.
“Tell me what happened,” Domingo said.
“What hasn’t happened? I don’t even know where to start.”
“The beginning works.”
The beginning. Right. “I had drinks. A lot of drinks. My coworkers and I were celebrating, and I tried to chat up a waitress—”#p#分页标题#e#
“Erin Karwell.”
He knew her name. I grimaced. “Has it been on the news?”
“Oh yeah.” He pushed a piece of paper across the coffee table to me. It was a printout from a news website. There was a picture of Erin on the top—gorgeous, innocent, living Erin, with her hair wild and a huge smile. The words in the headline, “Waitress Murdered,” made me feel like I was falling down a deep, dark hole.
I skimmed the article. My name wasn’t mentioned. One of the few advantages of being a spook, I guess.
“How’d you know that I was connected?” I asked, folding up the article, sticking it in my pocket. I wanted to keep Erin’s face with me. A reminder of why I was doing what I was doing.
“The FBI agent,” Domingo said. “She told us.” He sank into the chair across from me, took a swig of beer. “She was acting real weird. I’ve never seen anyone that pissed in my life.”
That didn’t sound weird—that sounded like Suzy. I leaned back against the couch cushions, shut my eyes, rolled the sweating bottle over my face. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“You can’t even see me right now.”
“I don’t have to see you.” I opened my eyes. Domingo had schooled his face into something so innocent, it looped around about five times and landed right back on guilty. “I know what you’re thinking. I always know what you’re thinking. And Suzy didn’t frame me for the murder.”