Interview and Excerpt

I have an interview up today on Reviews by Jessewave. I was very flattered to be featured there and you can check out another picture of my avatar/muse/walking eater-of-Scrabble-tiles.

Home Work is coming out in a week. You can sign up to try to win a copy at Stumbling Over Chaos. I thought I’d also share a brief excerpt from the beginning of the story:
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*** Home Work – Chapter 1 ***

Detective Jared MacLean kicked his partner’s ankle as hard as
he could without losing his footing on the icy pavement. “Jesus,
Oliver. Don’t eat that now.”

The older detective ignored him and bit into a greasy bacon-
filled breakfast sandwich. “What? I’m hungry, the food’s getting
cold, and it’s nothing we haven’t seen before. Grow a pair.”

There was a moment of discomfort between them. Oliver
shifted his weight subtly, away from Mac, and Mac decided it
wasn’t just his imagination. Since coming out of the closet
three months earlier, Mac had worked his tail off to keep his
relationship with his police partner unchanged. And yet, every
time the topic of sex came up, no matter how innocently, he felt
like Oliver was checking him to see if his reaction was weird.
As if knowing Mac was gay had made him suddenly different
from the guy Oliver had worked with for the last three years. It
was slowly getting better, but that sense of strangeness wasn’t
quite gone. Mac hadn’t realized how comfortable he’d been with
Oliver until suddenly they weren’t.

Nothing to do but keep ignoring the change and give the man
time. More time. Mac leaned his elbows on the bridge rail and
looked out across the Mississippi River. His eyes blurred from
the cold wind and he ducked his head lower in his hood. It was
barely five a.m. and still pitch dark. The shortest days of the year
were approaching. Most sane people were asleep, but the lights
of the city never went completely dark, even at this hour. The
colors glinted off the ice along the edges of the river. Closer,
below Mac’s feet, the dark water flowed and eddied around the
pilings in wind-whipped surges, more heard than seen. The
river would freeze, eventually, but despite the bitter bite of the
November night it would take a lot more time and cold to subdue
that wide water.

Mac glanced over at the dead body on the sidewalk. The man
was frozen in a heap, his arms folded under himself, his face
hidden under a mass of tangled hair. There was a small pool
of blood, now glazed to red ice, under the corpse’s head. MPD
Homicide had been called to the scene, in case the bleeding was
due to something more sinister than a slip and fall. After one
look Oliver had decided to keep the area secured and wait for the
medical examiner.

Oliver came to stand beside Mac, still munching on the
damned sandwich. “What do you think? Killed here or dumped?”

“It’s an odd place to dump a body.”

“Maybe they were planning to throw the guy into the river
and didn’t realize the railing was so high?”

“Or they got spooked before they could get him into the
water. Still it’s a damned public spot to try it.”

“It could be just a slip and fall.” But Oliver’s tone was doubtful.

Mac had his suspicions, which Oliver apparently shared.
The man’s ragged clothes, his dirty hair, and the thinness of his
poorly-clad body all suggested he was one of the poor suckers
who tried to make it through a Minnesota winter on the streets.
When the weather got this cold, some of them simply didn’t
survive. Too scared, too crazy, too messed up on drugs or alcohol
to find shelter, they froze in the sub-zero temperatures. But there
was no reason for this man to have been out on the pedestrian
sidewalk crossing the river in weather like this. He should have
been huddled up in a meager shelter somewhere, over an exhaust
vent or wrapped up inside a box, not wandering on icy wind-
swept concrete. And the man’s frozen pose didn’t look like a
natural fall. He might have been chased out here, lured here. He
might have been dumped. Either way, something was hinky. The
disarrangement of his clothes suggested he had been robbed,
although he couldn’t have had much. Maybe it had just been some
opportunist who came across the body, but if so that meant yet
another person had been wandering around on a frozen bridge in
the bone-chilling dark. Unlikely.

Still, Oliver was right, this was nothing Mac hadn’t seen
before. It was the man’s naked, frozen feet shoved into inadequate
sneakers that had got to him. Just a touch of the familiar,
something about the thin pale ankles had made him think of the
man he’d left at home in his bed. And thinking of Tony in the
context of death was never good for Mac’s stomach.

Oliver finished his Mickey-D’s and crumpled the wrapper
carefully into his pocket so neither paper nor grease would
contaminate the potential crime scene. “More likely he was killed
right here. If they brought the body to dump it, why not just
drive to a better spot and try again? Why leave the body out here
to be found?”

Mac shrugged. He’d about given up trying to figure out why
people did the dumb things they did. Maybe there would turn
out to be a logical or sinister reason why the body ended up here.
If this wasn’t the scene of the death, maybe the person who
dumped him just panicked, or gave up, said to hell with it, and
went off to have a drink. Lately, he’d had a few too many cases
where the perp’s IQ couldn’t measure up to their shoe size.

“I’m gonna sit in my car, out of the fucking wind,” Oliver
told him.

“I’ll wait here. The ME should be arriving any minute.”

“Come get me if she calls this one a homicide. This cold is
making my knees ache.”

Mac nodded. It was kind of stupid to stand there, freezing his
nuts off, when his own car was also parked in the array along the
curb. Between the blinking lights of three patrol cars, his rust-
bucket looked like the piece of crap it was, but he would be out
of the wind. But some streak of masochism in him made him
stand there, hunched in his parka, keeping a dead man company
until the meat wagon arrived.

The medical examiner who’d caught the short straw on this
frigid morning turned out to be Gretchen Peterson. She got out
of her van at the curb and climbed over the concrete barriers
that protected the pedestrian walkway from the traffic. She was
a short, middle-aged blonde, fashionably dressed in crisp slacks
and a tailored coat, despite the hour and her job. Her heeled
boots were her undoing as she stepped onto the icy sidewalk and
almost did a pratfall. The contortion she used to catch her balance
looked painful, and Mac mentally took note of the creative non-
cursing that went with it. Gretchen paused, exchanged nods with
Oliver, who was watching from the warmth of his car, then came
toward Mac with exaggerated care.

“Mother-flippin’ sidewalk is a dog-gummed skating rink,” she
grumbled.

“Guess our guy wasn’t good on skates.” Mac nodded at the
dead body.

“Poor bastard.” Gretchen stripped off her warm mittens and
pulled on a pair of latex gloves. She squatted down carefully and
touched the corpse’s neck, then slid a hand into the underarm
area. “Hm.”

“What?”

“He hasn’t been dead that long. Surface freezing but not
deep.” She slid her fingers under the dead man’s head with an
abstracted look on her face, then paused. “Shite.”

“What?”

Gretchen sighed. “I hope you’ve got your long-johns on,
because this guy has a dent in his head that’s not going to match
the flat bit of filthy concrete he’s lying on.”

“Shit.” Not a surprise, but still, you could always hope you
were wrong.

“Said that. More or less.” Gretchen straightened up. “Well,
there’s no problem certifying that he’s really dead. I’m going to
go sit in my nice warm van until you get whatever pictures you
need. Let me know when he’s mine.”

“Time of death? Can you give me an estimate?”

Gretchen shrugged. “I’ll know better once I get a core
temperature and crunch the numbers with the outside
temperature. First guess? Not less than one hour and not more
than six.”

“Did he die here?”

“Do you take me for a Magic 8-Ball? Ask me that after the
autopsy.” The ME hesitated, looking down. “I can’t even tell you
whether he died from the blow or the dad-blamed deep freeze we
have going. But he took a pretty hard hit.”

Mac nodded and followed the small, stocky woman back
toward her van. Oliver got out of his car as they approached.
“And?”

“Someone whacked him,” Mac told his partner. “We’re gonna
be here a while.”

Oliver’s gaze sharpened and he pulled out his cell phone,
fumbling it impatiently in gloved hands. “I’ll call the crime
scene guys and get the log started. You get the uniforms to set a
perimeter, and then go talk to the woman who found the body.”

“Got it.”

An hour later, Mac slid into the driver’s seat of his car. The
scene was already clearing out. The ME had taken the body
and the techs were finished searching for evidence. The MPD
wouldn’t skimp on working up this case just because the victim
was a street person. Well, not much. But the plain fact was that
the bridge was public and empty, the ground was covered in ice
and blown clear by the wind, and anyone working the scene was
courting a nice case of frostbite. Oliver’s habitual wide crime
scene was getting short shrift this time.

Mac sighed at the relief of being out of the wind, shoved
down the hood of his parka, and turned the key in the ignition, in
a probably futile search for heat. The engine whined anemically,
coughed a few times, and consented to start. Mac adjusted the
controls to blow the first rush of cold air on the rapidly fogging
windshield. He tried to decide if his fingers would thaw faster
inside his gloves or out of them. He was blowing on his hands
and cursing the tingle of returning circulation when the other
door opened. Oliver dropped into the passenger seat and
grunted. “Crap, I think I froze my…feet solid.”

“Me, too.” Mac held his hands to the slowly warming vent.

Oliver turned toward him. “So you talked to our witness? Any
help?”

“Nope. She works in a local bakery. She got taken across the
bridge when the bus driver missed her stop and had to walk back
over it. She found the guy and called 911, but she insists she saw
nothing, heard nothing. She was mostly pissed at the driver for
making her walk. And at us for making her late for work.”

“I guess we have to be glad she bothered to call.”

“True enough. So what’s your take?”

Oliver shrugged. “Fight over a bottle? Mugging for whatever
two cents the poor bastard had? Except then why would he
be out here above the river? Unless they chased him onto the
bridge. Weapon was something long and rounded, according to
Gretchen. A piece of pipe, branch, cane, tool-handle, something
like that. We didn’t find it, but something that size could have
been tossed away over the rail.”

“Maybe they hit him with the bottle?”

“I asked her. She thinks something narrower. She’ll let us
know eventually.”

“So the killer ditched it in the river or took it with him.”

“Looks like. I’ll have a couple of uniforms come back and
look at the understructure in the daylight, see if anything got
hung up down there.” Oliver pulled his gloves off with his teeth
and stuck his hands into his armpits. “Jesus, that stings. Remind
me why I haven’t taken retirement to Florida yet.”

“Can’t bear to be one of the wimps who bail out on
Minnesota?”

“From where I sit, that’s looking like sanity, not cowardice.”

“Must be the high pay and working conditions.”

“Hell, yeah. Knew there was a reason.” Oliver leaned his head
back on the headrest and closed his eyes. “So, Tonto, we’ll head
back to the station, file a quick report, and then you can find
us a place to start asking questions. Preferably somewhere with
central heating.”

“You got it, Kemo Sabe.”

Oliver reached toward the heating vent, then ostentatiously
put his gloves back on, pulled the drawstring on his hood tight
and got out. “By the way.” He leaned on the open door. “Your
car’s heater is fucking useless.”

“So shut the damned door and stop letting the cold in.”

Mac patted the dashboard of his car in apology as he pulled out
around the black-and-white. At least his car started. It always
started, always ran, in all the weather Minnesota could throw at
it. Which was all he asked of it.
They managed to get into the station, file a preliminary report,
and pick up an unmarked car without encountering Captain
Severs. Not that Mac could remember ever seeing the captain in
before seven a.m., but bypassing him sped things up. Severs liked
oral reports, to supplement the written ones that he then didn’t
have to read. Of course the death of a homeless man wouldn’t
garner much attention from the captain.

They spent the next two hours touring the shelters that
housed those homeless who were lucky enough to find a bed out
of the cold. As breakfast time rolled around, they added a couple
of soup kitchens that didn’t do overnights. They had a photo of
their corpse which Mac thought was probably a fair likeness. The
head injury hadn’t affected the man’s face. But neither the workers
nor the other men sheltering inside recognized the victim.

“Well, shit,” Oliver muttered, as they came up empty again.
“Guy was either new to the streets or really kept to himself. Any
other thoughts?”

“The ER?” A lot of the homeless ended up at the Hennepin
Country Medical Center emergency room, one way or another.
With no hope of other medical coverage, the ER stitched them
up, dried them out, treated their infections and frostbite, their
overdoses and mental disorders, and then had to turn them back
out onto the streets to do it again.

Mac and Oliver stepped through the automatic doors into
controlled chaos. The waiting room was full, and the desk staff
looked harried. Oliver led the way up to the counter and flashed
his badge. “Minneapolis Homicide. We’d like to talk to a few of
the staff.”

The receptionist frowned at him. “Is anyone bleeding or
dying?”

“Um, no.”

“Then you can wait your turn. Over there.”

“What happened?”

“Ice happened.” She gestured at the room. “Three major car
accidents in back, a lot of minor ones, slips and falls. Anything
that doesn’t have major trauma gets to wait.”

“Got it.”

As they turned away from the desk, Mac grabbed Oliver’s
sleeve. It seemed to Mac that Oliver stiffened at his touch, and
Mac let go at once. No touching, damn it. Apparently in Oliver’s
new rules, Mac didn’t get to touch him even casually in public. It
appeared to be an unconscious reflex, and what Mac really hated
was how a second later Oliver would make a visible effort to
be okay with it. To pretend like it hadn’t bothered him. Alone
together, they had almost regained their former ease, but Mac
was beginning to think Oliver’s fear of being tarred by the same
pink brush when people were watching was going to be hard to
shake.

“How about we get some food?” Mac kept his voice casual.

“They’re not going to work through this mess anytime soon and
I’d rather not hang out here.”

Really rather not. Mac glanced around the room. He thought
about that evening a year ago when he’d paced this floor, stared
out those windows, wondering if Tony would survive the night.
That was when he’d realized just how much it would hurt him to
lose Tony. The beginning of all the changes. Sometimes he still felt like
he was on a roller coaster he couldn’t get off. Don’t want to get off,
he told himself firmly.

“Sure,” Oliver said, oblivious to Mac’s distraction. “Where?”

“You choose.” Mac winced at the arctic air hitting his face as
he stepped through the doors back out into the wind. “Someplace
warm. And cheap.”

□▪□▪□

Tony Hart silently counted to ten and knelt in front of the
hall closet to look directly at Mac’s daughter Anna. The tiny five-
year-old stared back at him with no hint of yielding in her dark
eyes.

“Anna. If you don’t wear the snow pants, you won’t get to go
outside for recess. You’ll have to sit in the hallway while the other
children play.”

“Don’t care.” She held the offending pants out between
her thumb and forefinger, like a diva handling a dead mouse.
Theatrically, she opened her fingers and let the pants fall to the
floor.

“I know you like the blue ones but they’re in the hamper. You
got them all muddy.”

“You should wash them. Aunt Brenda always washed my
things right away.”

Aunt Brenda didn’t have another job. Tony took a breath. Not
Anna’s fault that she was still adjusting to the big changes in her
life. Whatever Brenda’s faults, she clearly hadn’t stinted in the care
she gave Anna. Sometimes Tony wasn’t even close to measuring
up. He gritted his teeth and reminded himself he was doing his
best. “I’ll get to them. But there’s no way to do that before school
starts this morning. You need to wear the black ones.”

“No.” Anna folded her arms and stuck out her chin.

Behind Tony, his foster son Ben grumbled, “We’re going to
be late for before-school snack time. Again.”

“We’re not going to be late. Shi…shoot. Okay, Anna, you’re
choosing to miss outdoor playtime if you won’t wear those pants.
So be it. Get your jacket on.”

Ben kicked the doorframe. “And my boots are too tight.”

“What?” Tony straightened and turned away from Anna,
who was docilely putting on her coat now that she had won her
argument. “Ben, those boots can’t be too tight. We just bought
them a month ago. Not even.”

The dark-haired six-year-old shrugged one shoulder, in a
move clearly copied from Mac. “They pinch my toes.”

Tony closed his mouth firmly on vocabulary not fit for tender
ears. “I’ll look at them later, okay? If you need new ones, we’ll get
them. Later. For now, everybody get dressed. Coats, hats, mittens,
not optional today. It’s really frigid out there.”

Both kids dug in the closet for hats and mitts. Tony helped
Anna thread the zipper on her jacket, and located Ben’s stray
mitten. He held the apartment door for them and did inventory.
Warm clothes—check; lunch boxes—check; book bags—check. He
grabbed his own backpack, gloves, keys. It wasn’t until they were
halfway down in the elevator that he realized he’d put on his own
sneakers instead of boots. To hell with it, we had ice, not snow.

The world outside was as beautiful as it was treacherous. A
thick layer of ice glistened on every surface, refracting the street
lamps in a thousand points of light. Every naked branch and
dark pine bough shone as though polished.

“Look, Anna!” Ben took two running steps and slid on the
glazed sidewalk. “It’s fun.”

Tony made a grab for Anna’s arm before she could imitate
him. “Those who don’t wear snow pants don’t get to slide on
the ice,” he told her. “And Ben, once was enough. You’re going
to fall.”

“No, I won’t. It’s like skating.” The boy shuffled faster and
spun in a little circle. His next slide stopped abruptly at a patch
of bare concrete, spilling him on the ground. The boy hit the
pavement hard on his hands and knees.

“Ben! Are you okay?”

“Sure.” Ben got up carefully, rubbing his hands painfully on
his thighs. “It’s not so bad. I fall down skating too.”

Don’t fuss. Even after four months, Tony was still working
on that part of the parenting thing. What was overprotective
and what was just keeping the kid safe? Kids fall. Ben’s fine. Tony
decided not to ask to see those hands. “How about if we walk
carefully to the car?”

Tony kept hold of Anna’s hand as they crossed the parking
lot to his Prius. When he hit the unlock button, Ben got in the
back and buckled his seatbelt but Anna frowned. “I want to sit
in the front.”

“You can’t. You know that. Not in my car.”

“I sit in front in Daddy’s car.”

“No you don’t.” Ben said. “We sit in the back, same as here.”

“When I’m alone with Daddy, I sit in the front.”

Tony sighed for what felt like the fiftieth time that morning.
And it’s only seven a.m. “Your dad’s car doesn’t have front airbags.
Mine does. It’s not safe.”

“Then maybe my Daddy can come home and drive me to
school.”

Ah, that was the real issue. Mac had gotten called out of their
warm bed before five that morning. Anna had not been pleased
to find her father already gone when she woke up. Tony rubbed
his eyes. He was tired himself, and his fuzzy brain wasn’t coming
up with any parental pearls of wisdom. He told her, “Your dad
won’t be home until tonight.”

“He’s never home. He never drives me to school. He never
picks me up.”

Tell me about it. Mac’s schedule varied, and it didn’t mesh with
the kids’ school well. Not that Tony’s was a great fit, with the high
school starting an hour before the elementary. But at least there
was pre-school care available, which the kids usually enjoyed.
Tony could drop them off and make it to his first class. At first,
he and Mac had tried to take turns whenever possible, but Mac
was prone to last-minute calls. It was just easier for Tony to do
the transportation. It seemed like it was just easier for Tony to do
a lot of things lately.

“He’s home as much as he can be. He doesn’t do the school
run but he does lots of other stuff with you. Now get in the car
or we’ll be late.”

Anna’s lower lip was close to tripping her, but she climbed
into the back of the car and snapped the belt across her booster
seat. Tony tossed his bag in, dropped into the chilly driver’s seat,
and turned the key. Bless the Prius, it started right up despite the
flesh-eating cold. Tony pulled out of the parking space slowly,
feeling the shaky traction on the glazed pavement. Traffic was
moving carefully, already heavy despite the early hour. He waited
for a comfortably large gap to pull out onto the road, and was
glad of his caution as he felt the rear end fish-tail. His hands
tightened on the wheel.

“If we drive this slow, we really will be late,” Ben complained.
“The only good part about before-school care is the Pop-Tarts.”

“You know what? This is as fast as we can safely go. In fact,
since the road is kind of icy and I really have to pay attention to
my driving, I’m going to put on some music and we’ll have silent
driving time.” Tony hit the CD button, and the light strains of
Owl City filled the car.

Ben muttered, “I hate this music.”

Tony decided the comment was quiet enough for him to
pretend he hadn’t heard it. He eased off the gas to increase the
distance from his car to the one in front, and then grimaced as a
more impatient driver slid over into the resulting space. Maniacs,
everyone drives like a maniac lately. Tony took a glance in his mirror
at the precious cargo in the backseat and slowed again to increase
his following distance. Having the kids in the car made him drive
like a little old lady. He couldn’t help it.

Traffic stopped for a light. Tony raised his eyes back to that
rear-seat mirror mounted below his rear-view for a longer look.
In the fish-eyed reflection, Anna was frowning, still turning over
some grievance in her mind. Ben was staring out the window,
singing along softly to the CD despite his complaint. Neither
child was his own flesh and blood, and yet they were inescapably
his. His with all the bone-shaking love and fear and pride and
frustration that entailed.

He and Mac and these two kids were a family. That was
something he’d wanted for as long as he could remember—a
partner and children and a life. Not that he’d expected it to
happen quite this way, with the lover dragged unwillingly from
the closet, and one child gifted to him by the tragic death of
the boy’s mother. But they were making it work. Tony couldn’t
imagine his life without any of them now. Especially that big cop,
out there chasing down murderers, who would come home to
Tony in the evening and wrap him up in strong arms and keep
them all safe. Mmm, yeah, Mac’s arms…

Tony dragged his attention back from daydreaming about
his boyfriend. And from wishing there was a better word for
Mac than boyfriend. He was driving. Not the time and place for
getting distracted. He took another glance at the backseat and
saw Ben nudge Anna with his elbow. Anna stuck her tongue out
at her brother. He kicked her ankle and she yelped. Tony sighed,
feeling the good thoughts of Mac slipping away. Yeah, he had a
family all right. And I can’t wait to drop them off at school for the day.
Ahead of them, the light finally turned green.

***