Naked Addiction Read Free Page B

had been napping in his backyard hammock and was still a little groggy.
    “Huh? What show?” Stone asked.
    But once the news perked him up, Stone told Goode to call the watch commander and report finding the body while Stone called the Homicide lieutenant, Doug Wilson, to see if Goode could work with the team that was up in the rotation, especially since he’d already gotten a leg up on the investigation. In the meantime, Stone told Goode not to let Jake leave without giving a full statement, and reminded him to tell dispatch to run a quick criminal check to make sure the kid didn’t have any outstanding warrants.
    “Yeah, I know. I’m on it,” Goode said. “This ain’t my first rodeo.”
    Once Jake came back clean on the warrant check, Goode tucked the cell phone into his pocket and watched the kid play with the rat-dog. Flooded with adrenaline, Goode sat for a moment, trying to get his thoughts straight, worried that he might forget to do something important. He took another deep breath and let it out slowly.
    Down, boy , he told himself. You have to show Stone and Wilson that you can do this .
    For months now he’d been thinking that he couldn’t take one more night as an undercover detective, buying crystal meth in Ocean Beach. So this was it. His big chance to get the hell out of Narcotics. But self-interest aside, he really did want to know what had driven someone to kill such a beautiful girl. Unless, of course, her beauty was reason enough.

Chapter 2
    Goode

    G oode told Jake he needed to wait a little longer, while he moved the van up the alley a ways. “Just stay out the way,” Goode said. “We don’t need you polluting the crime scene any further.”
    He wasn’t out of undercover work yet and didn’t want to be recognized or associated with his van by anyone else, so he parked it in an unobtrusive spot behind the adjacent apartment complex. He shook off his flip-flops and pulled on his Nike tennis shoes, without socks as usual.
    During his seven years with the LAPD and his eight with the San Diego PD, Goode had certainly seen his share of the dead. Drug dealers sprawled on their apartment floors near the beach, track marks up and down their bruised arms. Homeless junkies, their skin so dirty he wondered if it would ever come clean. He found it curious that people thought the longer you’re a cop, the easier it got to handle finding a dead body. Well, it didn’t. Especially when it was hot out, accelerating decomposition. Even so, finding this young woman felt different. He couldn’t figure out why it was hitting him so hard. And so deep.
    Goode was leaning against a garage door, running through the gamut of possible events that could have led to her being dumped in the alley, when the television news crews started pulling up in their vans topped with monster satellite dishes. The patrol cars rolled up as well, and officers began cordoning off the area with yellow tape.
    Soon the alley was also swarming with reporters, cameramen and tripods as tall as people. Goode tried to duck behind a stairwell, but one of the reporters spotted him and asked him to do an on-camera interview. The guy said he’d heard from one of the patrolmen that Goode was the one who’d found the body. That Goode was wearing shorts and a T-shirt that said, SURFERS DO IT IN WAVES , because he was off-duty.
    “Not exactly,” Goode said.
    Following protocol, he told the reporter to talk to the sergeant, who had just shown up. Stone nodded at Goode to join him down the alley, where he told Goode that he was officially on the case.
    “It’s showtime, indeed,” Stone said.
    The stars must be aligned, the sergeant said, because virtually all the homicide teams were already busy working active cases. On top of that, three members on the team that was up in the rotation had gone camping together and had come down with some nasty virus and/or poison ivy, leaving only one healthy detective, Ted Byron. His wife was