Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

staying here?” I realized before the words were out of my mouth that that was a question that didn’t need to be asked. If she could have stayed with her husband (and her dog), she would have. She had to get out of her home for some reason, and I guessed that if she felt that she had to get out, the reason must have been pretty darn good. Kevin shot me a look that instructed me to shut up. I did so by forking some more linguine into my mouth. Trixie settled at my feet hoping for more pasta to fly from my mouth directly into hers.
    Queen looked down, tracing the pattern on my everyday dishes with the point of her knife. “Things weren’t so good there.” She looked at Kevin. “But I talked to Father McManus and I decided that I need to go back.”
    I put my fork down. “ ‘Weren’t so good’ how?” When she didn’t answer, I looked at Kevin. “ ‘Weren’t so good’ how?”
    “That’s for Queen to discuss with you. I can’t say,” Kevin said. Sometimes it really sucks having a priest for a friend; his vow of confidentiality usually gets in the way of providing necessary information.
    Queen took a long drink from her wineglass. “Sometimes Jake wasn’t very nice to me …” she started.
    Kevin threw a glance toward Queen’s upper arm, and I noticed the blue-black marks of a handprint that stood out in bas relief against her cocoa-colored skin, which somehow I had missed before. Even if I had noticed, I probably would have attributed her bruises to her strenuous and dangerous work as a private investigator charged with kicking cheater ass. The long-sleeved sweatshirt she had worn on the hot August night earlier should have been a dead giveaway, but as we’ve established, sometimes I’m dense. Without saying a word, Kevin told me exactly what I needed to know: this young woman was a victim of abuse and needed a place to stay. Max could have been more descriptive in her explanation of why she was leaving Queen here, but had chosen to remain mute on the topic. I hadn’t needed to know everything, but just an idea of why she was homeless would have been helpful. Plus, how was I to know that the abuser wasn’t out there looking for her and following her nightly to my humble abode? Just another thing to talk to Max about once I got through wringing her neck.
    “Then you’re not going back there,” I interjected. “You’ll stay here until you can get on your feet.”
    “I can’t do that,” she said. “I’ve overstayed my welcome already. And Jake’s a really nice guy. He’s just under a lot of stress.”
    Kevin was nervously tapping his knife against his plate and I reached across the table to silence him. Queen hadn’t really revealed anything with her description of Jake but I had been around the block a few times; she didn’t have to. She was living with an abuser and couldn’t go back. That much was clear. “Listen, Queen,” I said. “If I’ve learned one thing in my life, it’s that men who don’t handle stress well act out in a bunch of different ways. And they don’t change. You need to move out until Jake gets some help.”
    “I have nowhere to go,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. Trixie whimpered in sympathy.
    It only took me a minute to arrive at the decision. “Then you’ll stay here.”
    She shook her head sadly. “You know I can’t. You live by yourself. You don’t need me here. It was already getting tight with just me, and now you have one more person,” she said and looked at Kevin. “Sorry, Father,” she whispered. “There’s no way we can make this work. Father needs the room more than I do.”
    She was right. I didn’t know how long Kevin was going to stay and my allegiance was to him. And I wasn’t in a position to put an addition on my house for displaced Hooters waitresses and AWOL priests. But I also knew that I wasn’t letting her go back to stressed-out Jake and whatever he was capable of. There was just no way that was going to happen. I stared at the white wine swirling around in my glass and contemplated the situation. It only took me a second to figure out what I was going to do.
    “I’ll be back,” I said, and pushed my chair away from the table. I stopped in the front hallway and pulled the big telephone book from the shelf in the closet, flipping until I found the number I was looking for. I recited the last four digits to myself as I climbed the stairs to my bedroom, the other digits being consistent for all local