7
AARON
“Son of a bitch.”
Luca threw his cell phone onto the couch and stalked to the other end of the great room, spitting curses in his wake. I watched from behind the waist-high counter-s***h-breakfast bar that formed the boundary of my kitchen. There’d been plenty of similar outbursts in the month since we found his mom’s body, but today’s “son of a b***h” seemed particularly emphatic.
“Was that Detective Payne on the phone?”
“How’d you guess?”
If anyone deserved the insult, it was Aldrich Payne. I’d crossed paths with him at work, and he’d always struck me as a man who carried the badge for the wrong reasons. He liked the power it gave him, but not the work that came with it. His paperwork game was top notch, according to various acquaintances, but his investigative techniques n
