Chapter Seventeen
Chloe fought to keep the notes on the page from blurring into an illegible tangle of black ink. At some point, her handwriting had begun to resemble ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.
If Lucifer were awake, he could probably translate them for me, she thought with a humorless smile.
Her partner had been in and out for the last hour or so. She was glad, now, that he'd refused the cot. She liked being able to check on him with a quick glance, rather than having to get up. She liked feeling the shallow in and out of his breathing against her, a constant reassurance that she needed in order to keep working. A few times, his breathing had faltered. Those times, Chloe had frozen, not daring to breathe herself until Lucifer's lungs resumed their fragile rhythm.
There were just under four hours left on the clock, but she no longer worried about that. The oxygen tank was all that mattered now. She'd switched to the second canister roughly two hours ago, and it was already over half gone. At the rate Lucifer was using it up, it wouldn't last another two. And once it ran out, things would get bad. Fast.
Chloe's notes on the yellow legal pad were extensive, detailing the exact times both Keith and Chet appeared on camera at the bar and at the movie theatre. To Chloe's dismay, Chet popped up regularly on the footage taken at Brimstone, pouring drinks and participating in the trivia game. At just after nine, he handed his apron off to another bartender and left for the movie with Keith, just as their statements claimed.
Keith, however, was a little bit more of a slippery fish. According to his sworn statement, he'd worked at the bar until nine, then left to see The Weaponizer. Same as Chet. However, Chloe couldn't spot Keith on camera at all between seven-thirty and nine. Keith's explanation for this was that he'd been in a back room, doing inventory. There weren't any cameras or other employees back there, leaving no way to prove or disprove his presence. He could easily have left the bar and come back. The hour-and-a-half absence didn't match up with Rose's time of death, but it still might mean something.
Both Chet and Keith were provably at the theatre by nine-forty-five. Once they disappeared into the dark auditorium, Chet didn't show up on camera again until well after midnight, when the movie let out. He could, theoretically, have left sometime in there, killed Rose, and come back for the end of the show. Assuming he found a way to dodge every single one of the parking lot's numerous security cameras, and got Keith to cover for him.
Because unlike Chet, Keith had definitely never left the theatre. The man apparently had a bladder the size of a grape. He came out to use the restroom no fewer than four times during the course of the film.
That's what you get for ordering the Jumbo Mega-Slushee, Chloe thought, taking a deliberately small sip of her orange Power-Ade.
She squinted down at her notes, trying to put it all together. Rose's lover, Keith, could've left the bar between 7:30 and 9:00pm, but there was no way to prove it, and it didn't match the time of the murder. Chet, whose hair might or might not have been the one found in Martin's vehicle, could've left the theatre between 10:00 and 12:30, which did match the time of the murder. But again, Chloe couldn't prove it. Not to mention there was no known motive. Chet and Rose were coworkers, at best. And there were no on-camera interactions between Chet and Martin at all that night. Another bartender had served Martin his drinks before eventually cutting him off at a little after 8:00.
Chloe stared hard at the screen, her eyes boring into the last, shadowy image of Martin from the night he supposedly killed his girlfriend. He appeared in the background of a heavily tattooed woman's drunken selfie, heading down a dark hallway on obviously unsteady legs, aiming for either the restrooms or the bar's back exit. Probably the exit, because he never showed up on camera again.
Where did you go? Chloe asked him silently. What really happened that night?
Lucifer, who'd been slumped against her, dozing restlessly, suddenly jerked awake. He sat up straight, breathing fast, his whole body rigid with tension. Lucifer's fever-bright eyes fixed on the far wall of the warehouse, as if seeing something Chloe couldn't perceive. A hallucination. A waking nightmare.
She rubbed the trembling muscles of his thigh. "Lucifer, it's okay. You're just dreaming."
"Detective," he said, his voice laced with an urgency she'd never heard before.
"I'm right here," she assured him, giving his arm a gentle squeeze to try to distract him from the imaginary thing across the room.
Panting, Lucifer didn't tear his gaze from the shadow-splashed wall. His arm twitched under Chloe's hand.
"I think…something's coming," he said haltingly. His whole body was shaking now, as if whatever he saw terrified him to the core.
Chloe's own breaths came short and fast as she squinted at the spot where he was staring. Was something actually there? Could the Devil see things humans couldn't? Her breath caught as one of the shadows seemed to move. A cold sweat broke out on her forehead, sending chills through her body. The shadow shifted again, rising and falling, like a dark pair of wings.
Just another trick of her sleep-deprived mind. Had to be.
Still, she couldn't stop herself from asking.
"What is it, Lucifer? What do you see?"
"Azrael," he whispered.
His sister. The Angel of Death.
Chloe's blood turned to ice. No…
Beside her, Lucifer's body gave a violent jerk. His eyes rolled back in his skull as he pitched forward off the bench.