Kill the Messenger by Tami Hoag Page A

for forty-five years. Most of the cops he knew had been divorced at least once. He himself had never had a romantic relationship that hadn’t crashed and burned, primarily because of his job.
    Diane had her own reasons, none of which she had ever confided in him. He knew she had been married to a Crowne Enterprises executive who had died of a heart attack a few years past. But when she spoke of him, which was hardly ever, she talked about him without emotion, as if he were a mere acquaintance, or a shoe. Not the great love of her life.
    Whoever had put her off the idea of everlasting love had come after the marriage. Curious by nature and by vocation, Parker had nosed around for an answer to that question when they had first gotten involved, almost a year before. He hadn’t found out a thing. Absolutely no one knew who Diane had been seeing after her husband’s death, only they believed she had been seeing someone and that things had ended badly.
    Parker figured the guy was married or a muckety-muck in the coroner’s office or both. But he dropped the unsolved mystery, figuring that if Diane had been so careful, so discreet that not even her friends knew, then it was none of his business. She was entitled to her secrets.
    He liked having his secrets too. He had always figured the less anyone knew about him, the better. Knowledge was power, and could be used against him. He had learned that lesson the hard way. Now he kept his personal life personal. No one at LAPD needed to know who he saw or what he did with his time off the job.
    She scoffed at his milk-of-human-kindness line. “This guy deserves an acid bath.”
    They were watching CNN Headline News. Diane had televisions all over the house and sometimes had them all on at once so she could go from room to room without missing anything.
    It was late, but it always took a while to wind down after a murder. Uniforms had knocked on doors within viewing distance of Lowell’s office, but the shops were empty for the night and there wasn’t a soul to speak to. If there had been, Parker would’ve worked through the night. Instead, he had locked down the scene, gone to the station to start his paperwork, making Ruiz go with him instead of chasing after Bradley Kyle like a cat in heat. From there he had gone to Diane’s Craftsman bungalow on the Westside.
    “Fifty-five-gallon drum, and forty gallons of acid,” he said matter-of-factly. “Keep the drum in your basement, leave it for the next homeowner, who leaves it for the next one after that.”
    Most women would probably have been appalled that he had that kind of stuff in his head. Diane just nodded absently.
    The story running was about jury selection for Cole’s upcoming trial, and a recap of the whole sickening mess—from the discovery of Tricia Crowne-Cole’s body; the funeral with Norman Crowne sobbing on his daughter’s closed casket, his son leaning over his shoulder, trying to comfort him; all the way back to her wedding to Rob Cole. An incongruous photograph: Cole posing like an Armani tuxedo model, Tricia looking like maybe she was his older, dowdy sister who had been left at the altar. She would have been better off.
    “Look at this clown,” Diane said as they ran file footage of Cole starring in his short-lived TV drama, the aptly named B.S.: Bomb Squad. “Looking like he thinks he’s somebody.”
    “He used to be.”
    “In his own mind. That guy is all about one thing: himself.”
    There was never any gray area with Diane. Rob Cole was an instant ON button for her opinions. She had worked the murder scene more than a year ago now. She and Parker had had numerous variations of this conversation since. Every time some new phase of jurisprudence kicked Cole’s name into the headlines again, she resurrected her ire and outrage.
    “I met him at a party once, you know,” she said.
    “The memory is as vivid as if I had been there myself,” Parker remarked dryly. She must have told him a hundred