Quartet

As Chief homicide detective, Chris had his hands full leading his men. The job was no picnic, but his team ran like a well-oiled machine. Well, except for those incompetents Central has just dumped on him. With years on the force, Chris hadn’t made friends with everyone, and someone at Central was making him pay times four. He was getting too old for the job. Thank God Patricia had abandoned her filing clerk stint. Although, knowing her, the damn woman would have had ideas on how to get rid of them. Now she spent her days at the library and her nights in his bed, at least when she did not run off to Italy or a desert yoga retreat. Just when he thought his life couldn’t become more complicated, a prostitute accused one of his officers of sexual assault.
With Christopher busy helping his man out of trouble, Patricia intended to stay away from his precinct and soon look for another, more normal occupation. For now, she focused on her writing. A psychiatric might say that her story about a female serial killer proved both testimony and outlet for how gruesomely real her job as part of the Big guy’s team had felt. Write, sleep, drink, hide were her therapy, as was her relationship with Christopher. They had made a deal. She stopped claiming their affair was only casual; he refrained from asking her to move in with him. What’s a woman to do when her cop lover gets arrested, though? Marry him–strictly as a get-out-of-jail card, Big guy–buy a house, and help the infuriating man clear his name.
For once, the extremes the damn woman took to support her friends were in Chris’s favour. Too bad he was too busy clearing the murder charges hanging over his head to enjoy her thoroughly.

“What’s in it for me, DesForges, sweetie?” Patricia asked.
That woman was a bitch. “What the fuck are you talking about, Babydoll?”
“You heard me. You all heard me. What’s in it for me? If I get Hamilton out and about, what are you all going to give me in exchange?”
He was stunned. Reid wasn’t. “I don’t care about Ham all that much, girlfriend. Quieter when he’s not around. I offer nothing.”
Patricia started to laugh. “Reid, ma chérie, you don’t have anything to offer. Anyone else?” DesForges knew she wasn’t asking for money. Or sex; it couldn’t be, she was a woman for Christ’s sake!
LeRoy, tacitly the team’s interim boss when Chris was out, no matter what the fuck Central had decided, took charge. “What is it you want, Babe?”
“You know what I want.” Teasing laugh. Foxy lady. Des didn’t have a clue what she wanted. The way her brain worked, the woman was a surprise box to him. From the look of the others, they didn’t know either. “Christopher’s whereabouts.”
“What the fuck, Babe?”
She looked at each in turn her laugh turning sarcastic. “You don’t know? Damn it, none of you know!”