Page 10 of Lethal Bliss

That speculative look forms on her face again. She's not sure whether to share or not.

I decide not to prod and wait instead.

After a while, the look disappears. “He said he made a recording,” she says and pulls out the dental floss pack. “Can we use the computer here?”

“Yes.”

I lead the way over to the bank of monitors in the lounge area and fire up one. Flora inserts the card into a card reader and slots it in while the system boots. Once the booting is complete, I access the memory card and play the only video in it.

The images are shaky, but the figures in it are recognizable. The view is from a window up on a second floor. It’s showing a patio I recognize immediately.

“Raymond Carter’s house,” I tell Flora.

“Yes.”

Two men are hauling a body wrapped in blue sheets out of the house.

Flora’s jaw hangs. “Is that…?”

“Those are the men that attacked us tonight,” I tell her. “Officers Slattery and Brown.”

Brown’s perpetually clean-shaven pate is what gives him away while Slatter’s brown hair and generous paunch mark him out.

“Is that Carter?” Flora asks.

“Most likely. Check the time stamp.”

The time on the recording shows 6:15 p.m. That’s a good two hours before Carter was reported dead at the abandoned warehouse.

The men carry the shrouded body around the house to the trunk of a waiting car. It’s the Chevy from tonight. Milton comes into view then to raise the trunk. Slattery and Brown bundle the body into it, and he shuts the trunk. The three get into the car.

The camera pans away from the window to show a bedroom and then begins to move shakily as Richard Wells, or whoever made the recording, walks quickly out of the room. It floats down a hallway to another bedroom at the end. The window from this one shows the street.

Richard is just in time to catch the car going down the road.

“Great,” I say. “Great. This is all I need.”

Flora has a skeptical look on her face. “You don’t have proof that the body in the trunk is Raymond. Richard Wells’s testimony about the gunshot he heard would have helped, but he’s dead.”

I shake my head in disagreement. “By the time a CSI unit goes over that house and the trunk of that car, I’ll have all the evidence I need. All you need to do is put this out, and I’ll have them by the balls.”

My cellphone starts to buzz with an incoming call then. I pull it out to check the caller ID: It’s Lorenzo. Something has gone wrong. A freezing cold spreads rapidly all over me. It keeps my thumb hovering over the screen for a few minutes before I finally swipe to pick up: “Hello?”

“Enzo?” Lorenzo’s voice is level.

“Yes?”

“Franklin is dead.”

“How did he—”

“The official story is that he tried to escape from jail and got shot.”

“We both know that’s a lie.”

“I know.”

“They killed him.”