made the connection. Christ, but now that she was looking at it, the tragedy came back to
her and somehow put Brazil’s life in focus.
Drew Brazil was a thirty-six-year-old robbery detective when he made a traffic stop in an
unmarked car. He was shot close range in the chest, and died instantly. West took a long
time looking at articles, and staring at his picture. She headed upstairs to her division and
pulled the case, which no one had looked at in a decade, because it had been
exceptionally cleared, and the dirtbag was still on death row. Drew Brazil was
handsome. In one photograph, he wore a leather bomber jacket that West had seen
before.
The scene photographs clubbed her somewhere in her chest. He was dead in the street,
on his back, staring up at the sun on a spring Sunday morning. The . 45 caliber bullet had
almost ripped his heart in half, and in autopsy photographs, Odom had two thick fingers
through the hole to demonstrate. This was something young Andy Brazil need never see,
and West had no intention of talking to him ever again.
Chapter Five.
Brazil was looking up articles, too, in the Observer file room. It was amazing how little
had been written about Virginia West over the years. He scrolled through small stories,
and black and white photographs taken back in a day when her hair was long and pinned
up under her police hat. She had been the first female selected as rookie of the year, and
this impressed him quite a lot.
The librarian was impressed, too. She peeked at Andy Brazil about every other second,
her heart stumbling whenever he walked into her domain, which was fairly regularly.
She’d never seen anyone research stories quite the way this young man did. It didn’t
matter what he was writing about, Brazil had to look something up or ask questions. It
was especially gratifying when he spoke to her directly as she sat primly at her neat
maple desk. She had been a public-school librarian before taking this job after her
husband had retired and was underfoot all the time. Her name was Mrs. Booth. She was
well past sixty and believed that Brazil was the most beautiful human being she had ever
met. He was nice and gentle, and always thanked her.
It shocked Brazil to read that West had been shot. He could not believe it. He scrolled
faster, desperate for more details, but the lamebrain who had covered the incident had
completely missed an opportunity for a huge lA story. Damn. The most that Brazil could
pin down was that eleven years ago, when West was the first female homicide detective,
she had gotten a tip from a snitch.
A subject West had been looking for was at the Presto Grill. By the time West and other
police arrived, the subject was gone. Apparently, West answered another call in the same
neighborhood, and the same subject was involved, only now he was really fried and
irritable. He started firing the minute West rolled up. She killed him, but not before he
winged her. Brazil was dying to ask her about it, in detail, but forget it. All he knew was
that she took a bullet in the left shoulder, a flesh wound, a graze, really. Was the bullet as
hot as he had heard? Did it cook surrounding tissue? How much did it hurt? Did she
fall, or bravely finish the gunfight, not even realize until she held out a hand and it had
blood on it, like in the movies?
The next day Brazil drove to Shelby. Because of his tennis prowess, he had heard of this
small, genteel town in Cleveland County, where Buck Archer, friend of Bobby Riggs,
who had lost to Billie Jean King in the Battle of the Sexes, was from. Shelby High
School was a well-kept brick complex, and home of the Lions, where students with
money got ready for college in big cities like Chapel Hill and Raleigh. All around was
farmland and cow towns with names like Boiling Springs and Lattimore. Brazil’s BMW
rumbled around to the tennis courts, where the boys’ team was holding a summer camp.