Into the Night: Inspector Rykel Book 2 (Amsterdam Quartet) by Jake Woodhouse Page B

murder board as she slumped into her seat.
    Open and shut this wasn’t.
    Not by a long shot.
    This was the kind of case which would be very much open, possibly for a long time, and it had her name next to it on the murder board.
    As the most junior member on the homicide team she’d got the shitty desk. The one right by the door, so everyone who came into the room walked right by her back. And when they left the door open, which they invariably did, she got a direct scent line to the toilets just next door.
    The men’s toilets.
    And she didn’t know what it was about male homicide inspectors, but for the most part they didn’t appear to have the best digestive systems.
    Tanya dropped her eyes from the board and stared at her desk. She’d tried to argue with Smit earlier but he’d not been willing to listen, just told her to take leave another time. He’d told her not in so many words but the message had been clear, that he really didn’t care.
    A uniform walked into the room, looked around for a moment, lost.
    ‘You seen Kees?’ he finally asked Tanya when he couldn’t find anyone else important-looking enough.
    ‘Not recently. Actually I haven’t seen him all week,’ said Tanya, realizing how pleasant it had been.
    ‘Urgent package came for him, can you sign for it?’
    ‘What are you, a courier?’
    ‘I know, sucks, doesn’t it? Not what I signed up for.’
    Tanya signed for the parcel. ‘No, me neither,’ she said as she handed the pen back and took the parcel.
    She took it over to Kees’ desk, which was layered with rubbish. It looked to her the kind of place rats would breed. She balanced it on top of the smallest pile and walked back to her own desk, Zen in comparison. Or anal.
    It was bad enough that she’d been landed with the case, but the fact that she was now quite possibly going to have to start interviewing her colleagues made it even worse. She was the only woman in the department, and that made most of the men uncomfortable, not quite sure how to behave around her.
    This is going to make them even more uncomfortable
, she thought.
    An idea struck her; she could check the attendance logs for everyone in the building – that way she might be able to narrow down who was present when the calls were made. Meaning she could at least narrow down the number of people she was going to piss off.
    She went down to the desk sergeant and requested the logs.
    ‘Not sure I can give them out,’ said the young officer, looking uncomfortable.
    ‘It’s just that I’ve been doing so much overtime, and I didn’t keep track, you know? I’d really love to be able to put in a claim …’
    She leaned forward, propped on her elbows, feeling her breasts squeeze together, and watched the guy’s eyes slide down her chest. It only took a few moments for her to know he was going to give in.
    She felt a wave of contempt.
    Only she wasn’t sure if it was for him, or herself.
    ‘Yeah, I could do with some of that,’ he said, suddenly more animated than he had been. ‘We’ve only got the last two weeks; anything older’s been archived already.’
    ‘Two weeks is fine,’ said Tanya.
    As she got back to her desk with the logs she realized she needed to do this elsewhere; she didn’t want anyone seeing what she was up to. She stuffed them into a plastic bag she had in a desk drawer, proof of a hurried lunch from Albert Heijn, and headed for the door, thinking she’d go to the bagel joint she and Jaap sometimes met at for lunch. It was the kind of place cops didn’t go, so although it was close to the station they’d figured they’d be safe. And in any case, they were just colleagues, and colleagues sometimes had lunch together.
    Jaap had questioned her desire to keep their relationship secret, but she’d been adamant. She didn’t want the sleeping-to-the-top jokes, or any of the other shit that would get thrown at her.
Maybe one day
, she’d told him.
    She got a table towards the back, ordered a bagel