We hear she loved Krap

“This looks far more insane than I imagined from the description I was just given,” Baggett said when I came downstairs some fifteen minutes later, having struggled a bit with the unwieldiness of the large corkboard on which Curry had recreated Lamb’s city map. But his eyes had a spark of genuine interest, as he jammed his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and sat forward in his chair to see what we were showing him.

“Take these for me,” I said, leaning toward him so he could extract the stack of pub menus from where I had them wedged in my armpit to avoid dropping them while I grappled the board.

Baggett reached up and gently removed them from under my arm, then began flipping through them with a critical eye. “Are these in date order?” he asked almost immediately, after observing that Lamb had dated each menu.

I flushed. “Well, they were,” I hedged. “I dropped them while I was trying to get it all down the stairs.”

Baggett made a noise that meant, it didn’t matter, he was just asking to know the answer, and continued paging through them, looking up occasionally at the board where I’d propped it against the table, as if taking inventory of them against the map. “Lamb didn’t have them all mapped,” I said as Curry finished rinsing his paintbrush and slid down to the other end of the settee to join us, “and we didn’t know if that was significant or not, so all his original marks are the red pins, and then the ones we added are in white.”

Baggett made an approving sound, moving quick through the pub menus and then fanned them out, looking up at the board and plucking one out here and there to move it elsewhere in the stack. “Do we know what the different string colors mean?” he asked, when he’d finished shuffling the pub menus around to his satisfaction.

Curry and I shook our heads, glancing at each other. Lamb’s map had put Baggett in an uncharacteristic, downright jolly, mood.

“Have you been and had a look around any of these places?” Baggett asked.

“A couple,” Curry answered for us. “Nothing very in-depth. Just went and had a meal on our own and a look-see.”

“Well, that’s no good, is it?” Baggett said in apparent disappointment. “What kind of lousy predator bait does Bersk make, with you hanging around making people think they aren’t allowed to kill her?”’

“Oh, I’m fucking sorry!” I cuffed him on the shoulder. “Pardon me for not being eager to go off on a dumb half-cocked jaunt so I can get **** and murdered by some creep after being last seen in—” I pulled the top pub menu off the pile. “—Mrs. K’s Krap Shack. Beautiful. What a legacy. RIP, Detective-Sergeant Bersk! We hear she loved Krap!”

“She actually did enjoy the Krap,” Curry remarked. “I was surprised.”

I looked at him with vague irritation. “It was fine.”

“I’m not arguing,” Baggett said. “I’m surprised, that’s all. Half-cocked jaunts seem like exactly Bersk’s speed—breaking and entering a murdered detective’s flat—being fully ready to stab Markus Lydell in the foot in the middle of a guard bar. I figured posing as **** bait wouldn’t faze you at all.”

I studied the sixth ward section of the map, pretending Curry wasn’t trying to give me a look about that. Of course, Baggett caught it. “What?”

“Nothing,” Curry said. “We aren’t using her for bait simply because her age and appearance might align to the demographic of some of these missing women.”

Baggett’s eyes swept over us, but whatever conclusions he drew he kept those to himself. “You know that I wouldn’t ever genuinely ask Bersk to do anything she doesn’t want to. Yeah?” he said after a moment. “And regardless, I especially would not in any fucking circumstance permit anyone to kill the first person I ever genuinely loved working with in my whole career. You know this, right?”

“We know, Bag,” I said, with a sudden rush of affection for him.

Baggett nodded pragmatically. “Good. Well. Obviously I’ve hit a nerve, which both of you are conversant about but don’t want to discuss outside your creepy twin-language—fair enough. But I’m having a grand time and I’m not willing to let this evening get ruined when this absurd map of yours is the most interesting thing I’ve encountered in literal years, and it’s barely evening to begin with.” He delicately removed his cigarette from the corner of his mouth where it had gradually accumulated a distractingly astonishing length of intact ash, and tapped it into the ashtray on the table before replacing it and extending one hand to me and one to Curry. “Trust that I’m on both your sides, always, and it would take a fucking act of the gods to change that allegiance?”

“I think he’s lying when he pretends to be bad with people,” I told Curry as I took Baggett’s hand and gave it a hard squeeze. “Personally, I’m charmed.”

Curry seemed recovered from his moment of protective overreaction to the mention of Lydell. “You would be,” he said, making a face at me. “But yeah. We know, Bag.”

“What a nice moment we’re having just now,” I said. “Magnus, after you flinging yourself so enthusiastically on the Bersk-not-bait pyre I really owe it to you. I’ll pay better attention to your pub girls after this,” I promised, “so I can describe the elf who kills you in more detail than just whatever it was about her titties that made me so jealous at the time.”

“Thank you. Now, was that so fucking hard?” he asked me, taking back his spot on the garden settee and motioning me to join him there. “Bag, you should stick around for supper. Nan just got one of those new iceboxes and—no shit—we have a butchered prairiefowl from yesterday’s market, still fresh like it spent the night on a winter windowsill. We’ll do a proper fry-up and I promise Fuzzy will do none of the cooking. She’ll pour drinks and keep the stranger-**** talk going and she may be permitted to stir something, like potato salad. We’ll see where the night takes us. What say you?”

Baggett’s eyes met mine for a moment before flicking to Curry. “Can’t think of anything better.”