Touch Of The White Tiger. Julie Beard

at the white sheet.

      “My name is Lieutenant William Townsend, director of Q.E.D.”

      I tore my gaze from Roy’s body and focused on a man who towered above me a good six inches. Gray-haired and quietly arrogant, he regarded me assessingly.

      “How did you know who I am?” I asked, refusing to be cowed.

      “Detective Marco briefed me when I arrived,” he answered in an upper-crust British accent. He was apparently a UK immigrant who’d tenaciously clung to his distinguished way of speaking.

      “Marco?” The word was like a bad dream suddenly remembered in the light of day. I glanced over and saw Marco talking to a bevy of crime scene techs and investigators.

      “What time is it?” I hissed.

      Arching one brow in surprise, Lieutenant Townsend replied, “Four-fifty.”

      The proverbial clock had struck midnight. In Marco’s eyes, I was now officially a pumpkin. I’d failed our agreement. I rubbed my eyes with both hands and sighed.

      “I need to see your license,” Townsend said in a clipped manner.

      Without enthusiasm, I handed over my certification card and studied him as he held it by the edges with his uncallused, manicured fingers, as if I had cooties. I’d always been curious about Q.E.D., which was short for the Latin term quad erat demonstrandum, “that which is to be demonstrated.” I’d never met a Q.E.D. officer before but I’d heard the group jokingly referred to as the Quad Squad.

      An elite group, it consisted of about ten cops who had elected to undergo psychosurgery to limit their capacity to feel emotions. After surgery, the officers took the latest bio-meds to spur connections in the logical, left side of the brain, which would then take over functions that had been surgically freed up in the right, or emotional, side of the brain. The idea being that a more logical cop could better solve crimes and would be less inclined to abuse criminals in a fit of anger.

      “Are you carrying a weapon, Ms. Baker?” Townsend inquired, handing me back my ID.

      “A knife and a whip. No gun.”

      He fixed me with cold, gray eyes that fronted a brain working apparently with computer-like precision. In fact, he stared down his aquiline nose at me for so long with so little emotion that I began to wonder if he considered me a suspect.

      “I didn’t do it, Lieutenant. But perhaps I can help you find out who did.”

      “That won’t be necessary.” He gave me a perfunctory smile, perhaps one remembered from presurgery days. He motioned above my head and soon another detective joined us. My skin began to tingle ominously in this new presence and I turned to see who it was.

      Marco. His jaded eyes that so recently glittered at me with desire now shone with reproof.

      “Detective Marco,” Townsend said, “I’m arresting Angel Baker in connection with this double homicide. Would you be so kind as to read her her Miranda rights?”

      Townsend walked away without waiting for a reply. Marco put his hands on his hips and sighed heavily. Our gazes met again. “You just couldn’t wait, could you?” he said accusingly. “What? Another hour was it?”

      “Marco, I—”

      “You have the right to remain silent,” he said in a monotone voice, cutting me off. “You have the right to an attorney….”

      Chapter 3

      Nothing but the Truth

      To say I was stunned by the turn of events would be a gross understatement. I was nearly in shock. I rode calmly in the police aerocar, as if out for a Sunday drive. This is all a mistake, I kept thinking. They have to let me go. When you step in serious doo-doo, you usually don’t realize what a mess you’re in until the action settles and your olfactory senses kick into high gear.

      I got a powerful whiff of it when I walked into Police Substation #1. Fondly known as the Crypt, P.S. #1 was a highly secure concrete fortress built underground so that mobs couldn’t blow it up whenever one of their leaders went there for a pit stop in crime’s never-ending rat race. It was hard to get into and out of without a police escort. Not that I planned on trying to escape. I was innocent, after all. I simply had to prove it, right? It was amazing how someone as hard-bitten as I am could be so naive.

      Still handcuffed, I rode down a concrete corridor lined with twenty glass prison cells on either side. My chauffeur was a beat cop who transported me in the back of an aerocart-type vehicle you see at O’Hare Airport that carry disabled passengers and beep obnoxiously at able-bodied passengers in the way.

      Slowly accepting the fact that I was a criminal suspect and not a tourist, I hunkered down in the back seat and watched the parade of prisoners with growing dismay and increasing alarm over my predicament. My eyes popped when I saw a tall, shirtless body builder in one of the clear cells. His skin was covered with so many body piercings that he looked like a human pin cushion. He glanced at me sullenly as I passed.

      The next cell contained a Skinny—a prostitute who wore no clothes. Ever. Except for the facsimile of clothing permanently tattooed on her body—in this case red short-shorts and a white short-sleeve top. Since it was too painful to tattoo nipples, they remained intact, pink and perpetually protruding from her white “blouse.” Skinnies didn’t like to waste time undressing. Time was money, after all.

      And just when I thought I’d seen it all, we drove past a person I’d hoped I’d never see again as long as I lived.

      “Cyclops!” I exclaimed without thinking.

      The pudgy, red-haired cop in the front looked back and sneered. “He a friend of yours?”

      “Not exactly.” More like enemies. Cy ran his own underground prison in Emerald City, the homeless community that dwelled in the abandoned underground subway system.

      Unlike the previous jailbirds I’d just seen, Cy wore a green city-issued jumpsuit with a hood, which he’d pulled over his hairless head. He’d been badly burned in an underground gas fire when he was young. Blinded in one eye, enraged and twisted by the incident, both physically and mentally, he’d been nicknamed Cyclops after the one-eyed monster in Greek mythology.

      “How did you guys catch him?” I asked. Cops as a rule stayed clear of Emerald City.

      “From what I hear, it wasn’t hard,” the officer replied. “He’s blind.”

      “Blind?” I sat up for a closer look as we drove out of sight, so to speak. Hunched over and scowling, he looked not unlike Shakespeare’s Richard III, whom he was fond of quoting. “I thought he had one good eye.”

      “Yeah,” the cop said, “some chicks wandered down in Emerald City and poked his eye out. Ain’t that a bite?”

      “Yeah,” I replied without enthusiasm. The chicks just so happened to be me and my mother. Lola had stabbed Cy in the face with a stick during our fight. It was the coup de grâce that enabled us to escape from his prison. It must have left him totally sightless. Somehow I felt bad about it. Roy always told me I was a sucker for the underdogs of the world.

      With a tug of guilt and the loss of Roy squeezing my heart, my numbness began to fade and I felt shaky by the time we arrived at the interrogation wing of the station. My chauffeur deposited me, still handcuffed, into a windowless rectangle and locked the door. If this tactic was meant to make me brood over the evening’s events, it worked.

      I would miss Roy terribly. And Victor had been cheated out of his future. I felt for his father’s loss all the more because Mayor Alvarez was a friend of Henry Bassett, my foster father. Both men would grieve, and it killed me that I had to be associated with Victor’s death in any way.

      And, as always, I felt abandoned. It was my natural reaction to everything. Marco could have come to my defense at the crime scene, but he hadn’t. I wasn’t even sure if he thought I