by RJ Scott
By the time I got back, all I could see was the back of the mayor as he walked away, his posture rigid, and he was on the phone.
Maybe he’s ringing the local field office. Oh, to be a fly on that particular wall.
As soon as I was at Sawyer’s side, we headed out, and I fell into a jog with them, wishing I’d not bothered to cover up my vest or holster with the jacket or at least taken off my damn tie. I was melting in this heat, and it was scratchy and uncomfortable around my neck.
“I assume you didn’t expect to be dumped straight into a crime scene, Special Agent Beaumont?” Sawyer asked as we neared what looked like a parking area, with the requisite sign displaying a map of the reservoir that filled the dip of the flooded valley. I knew the topography of this town and the larger West Falls some twenty minutes away from studying Grandpa Toby’s notes, although the reservoir hadn’t been the focus of his research back in the eighties. Or sinkholes. His attention had been on police corruption and their reluctance to talk to him or entertain any of his suggestions that Carmen Kreuger could have been in Lancaster Falls. He’d called the PD an incompetent group of jackasses. I just hoped to hell that had changed since then, but meanwhile, I would keep my wits about me.
“Not really, but please call me Lucas,” I managed between breaths. I was a fit guy, but too many years behind a desk was challenging my ability to keep up with these guys.
“Call me Sawyer,” he replied. “This is Officer Logan Hennessy.”
“Logan,” the man said. My research before I’d come here told me he was a former Army Ranger.
I waited expectantly for the fourth man who seemed as determined and focused to say something. “Drew,” he barked and then strode ahead with us quickening our pace to catch up.
“Drew McGuire?” I murmured to Sawyer.
“Yes.” He side-eyed me as if he expected me to argue with him, and I should’ve been saying that whatever we were heading for was not the place for a civilian, but I saw a flash of something in Sawyer’s expression and backed off. I could only hope my reaction demonstrated that I wasn’t here to mess with Sawyer or his decision-making process. We jogged in silence a little while longer and came to Keep Out notices and more tape that had been torn to one side and coiled on the ground. One of the signs had been shot at, and the other had words crossed out. I heard Sawyer’s sharp intake of breath as he stopped by the first and traced the bullet holes with a finger. “Christ, it’s been used for fucking target practice.”
“Does anyone around here actually follow these no entry rules?” I asked and winced at what passed for passive aggression, which was number twenty-three on the list of things in my head that I needed to avoid. Say what you think. Comment. Don’t suggest. “Apologies. What I mean is, it has to be hard to cordon an area so wild.” Sawyer nodded and allowed Logan and Drew through, then me, before retying the cordon. I heard sirens behind us and assumed it was paramedics called to the scene, or maybe the coroner was faster than light up here?
“We can’t get a vehicle any closer than this parking lot, but the Gray place is about a quarter mile from here.” Sawyer broke into a jog and gave a running commentary about land ownership, and then he gestured at the ground. “This was one of the original trails out of town down to the rail tracks, but the creation of the reservoir, Iron Lake, truncated it, and the whole area fell into disrepair. Now the only person who would need to use it is Adam Gray himself.”
“The possible owner of the hand,” I murmured.
He nodded. We reached a gate, and I could see that there was a fence in the undergrowth, a lot of it obscured by tangled climbing weeds. It had the look of something out of The Walking Dead, makeshift barriers reinforced with lengths of sharp barbed wire, and behind that was a solid metal gate.
“What are we expecting?” Logan shifted his medical bag on his broad shoulders. He was a big man, capable, with a focus I admired. I imagined he was very much the action hero I expected an Army Ranger to be. And yes, I had dossiers on all the cops in the town, as well as the key characters from my grandpa's research and the extra I’d done myself. I knew all about Sawyer becoming captain after the former chief, Peter Sandoval, had retired, a cop who had been part of that group my grandpa called corrupt; Sandoval had been one of the newest of the team but had risen through the ranks quickly as people died or moved on.
I held a private theory that Sawyer Wiseman was the best thing to happen to Lancaster Falls PD, based on what I’d gleaned from research. Inevitably, I’d form more fact-based conclusions as the days wore on.
The gate was wide open, a yawning hole in the otherwise solid, barbed wire-tipped metal fence. Sawyer took a deep breath and glanced at me. I considered that maybe he was waiting for me to instruct him on what happened at the scene, but he would know it wasn’t me who was in charge. This wasn’t my case.
Yet.
After a pause, he spoke. “We take this slow. We assume the other dogs are in here somewhere, not all friendly. I want your body-cam on Logan. We take photos where we can, and we’re cautious. Got it?”
I nodded along with Logan.
Cautious was my middle name.
Two
Josh
The burner phone vibrated and danced across the desk, and I caught it one-handed as I continued to type with my right. I'd been expecting this call since I’d woken up, and I lodged the cell between my neck and ear, just like everyone tells me not to do, then answered.
“Yeah.”
“It’s a plausible deniability case,” the voice intoned.
Well, shit. They were the worse kinds of projects, the ones where if I was caught, then absolutely no one would come to my rescue and announce that I was one of the good guys.
“Why?”
“This is off-the-books but department-mandated.”
Fuck. Another thing on my shit list.
“How much is the client paying?” I wanted to get to the roots of this immediately because I wasn’t chancing my family for anything less than the amount I needed to fix the stove and the furnace. I looked at the quote pinned on the wall. A little less than twenty-thousand dollars would see the furnace fixed, and one cold-ass Pennsylvania winter would be covered. I’d had to close for three weeks last Christmas, and that included over some of the lucrative Festival days—a loss I couldn’t imagine for a second year in a row.
“I’m authorized to go to twenty.”
“Thirty, and it's a deal.”
“Twenty-two.”
“Twenty-eight.”
This dance would continue, the same as it always did, and finally, we would settle on twenty-five thousand, which was more than enough to cover the furnace, plus maybe get new fittings in some of the untouched rooms. I didn’t know why my contact always did this with the money dance, but I let him get away with it because it made me feel I’d come out with more money than I’d wanted in the first place.
“You’re killing me,” he muttered, then sighed. “Twenty-five,” he agreed.
“Usual rules, half now whatever happens, and half after,” I insisted.
More muttering. “On the understanding that—”
“If I don’t crack it, I get to keep the half, but—”
“You need to prove—”
“Just send me the freaking details.”
I shut down the conversation and ended the call. Then I logged into my encrypted space and scanned what was sent over, taking a mental note and already running scenarios through my head as to how I’d approach this issue. First off, I’d need a good six hours of uninterrupted work, which meant waiting until my son was in bed, but it wouldn’t be the first time I’d pulled an all-nighter. The times Harry had knocked on the door asking for his dad and waking me from a deep sleep at my desk weren’t worth listing, but so far, he'd just proclaimed that playing games on my PC was boring, and what did I expect. Also, locking my door made him think I was up to other things. Given he was nearly a teenager now, I didn’t have to imagine what he thought I
was doing.
Hacking into supposedly unbreakable security systems for money wasn’t on his list, for sure. In his eyes, I was his much older and mostly uncool dad, although given it wasn’t that many years that separated us, I hoped I wasn’t that uncool.
There was no way I was failing at cracking whatever the client gave me to do. I worked for SentryLine Security, SLS, off-the-books most of the time, hacking into systems that were deemed impenetrable, and I proved or disproved that someone with skills could get past even the tightest of systems. Sometimes I failed. Then I got to keep half the money, as SLS had proved to the people who mattered that their system was robust. I had years of practice now. The world had changed, but I needed one or two more jobs like this one, and perhaps I could stop doing it altogether. All I needed to do was get the hotel working well, and then that nebulous thought I had about selling it might come to fruition. It was a money pit, but it was stability for Harry.
And Harry was my everything.
I was good at code, I was a freaking genius at finding back doors into software, and I was ultimately self-taught. No one would look at the happy-go-lucky guy who owned the hotel as having a freaky hidden side that made untraceable money to keep open the hotel that was killing him. Anyone who checked on me would see a devoted dad, a town resident who'd been born here and had never left, who volunteered to organize town events, and who had a smile for everyone. They couldn’t know what else I did, because then Harry would know, and right now, despite the young-kid-old-dad bickering thing we had going on, he respected me.
“DAD!”
I winced and jumped out of my skin all at the same time. Harry hadn’t quite learned that he didn’t have to shout so loud that the door rattled. A knock would do, but then I smiled because this was just part of my son, and it was him and me together against the entire world. “Out in five!” I called back, meticulously shutting down applications, covering my tracks, I ran several backup protocols, and fastened the screens that hid the computers in place.
Within five minutes, I was out of my office, locking the door, and limping to reception. My knee hurt today; too much sitting at monitors and not enough exercise on a football injury that would haunt me forever. Fucking obligatory school sports. Why they couldn’t have had a math club, I’ll never know. I wouldn’t have hurt my knee solving theorems and enjoying algebra.
Harry was at the window, staring at his phone.
“What’s up, Hazmat?” I ruffled his hair, which he ducked away on instinct. He fussed with it and smoothed it back into place, even as he waved his phone with palpable excitement.
“Stop calling me Hazmat.”
“Sorry, Hubble.”
“And that.”
I ruffled his hair again, but this time I got a grin from him, so I called that a win.
“Something’s going down,” Harry announced, and I peered out the window at the car, a new-looking nondescript black SUV, and saw a man standing outside talking to Heather. He wasn’t parking anywhere he shouldn’t have been, but Heather appeared agitated and was pointing down the road. I attempted to lip-read, but that wasn’t in my skillset, so instead, I focused on the driver. Slim, blond hair, he shook his head at something Heather said, before reaching into his pocket and pulling out an ID. Whatever he showed her made her step back from him, and she looked surprised, but she was still telling him to move on. I could tell that was the issue when she waved toward the next block down.
“They found a hand,” Harry announced and held up his phone which had a picture zoomed in next to the nose of a scruffy terrier.
“Huh?”
“Marco was down there with Uncle Luca, and this dog brought a hand and dropped it right outside the library. It’s been chopped off. Look.” He thrust the phone closer, but that just made my eyes cross, so I gestured for the phone to check the image. He wrinkled his nose. “No swiping my photos,” he warned, and I rolled my eyes theatrically. I hated to think what a teenager would have on his phone, and carefully avoided swiping anything at all. I peered at the picture, pinching it in to see the whole of the scene, focusing in on what looked like a fake hand. I even began to form the words to explain that this was nothing, but then the tall blond dude, who was way this side of gorgeous, strode past the hotel, and he gave the impression that he had severe shit happening in his life.
“Wait, what? For real, they found a hand?” I mused out loud. “And not just bones, a real hand.”
“Marco said it looked really cool. Can I go and see it? Please, Dad.” He glanced back at the reception desk, his job right at this moment, where he would sit and study. My first instinct was to say no because I was a responsible dad, but my curiosity had me grabbing my cell and then opening the front door of the hotel and waiting for Harry to catch up. We had enough weird in this town without a disembodied hand, but if there was one thing I knew, knowledge was power. Why was there a hand, whose dog was it, and why was the tall, sexy blond in my town?
It was the blond whom I focused on first as we joined the back of the small group standing outside a cordon of police tape. I recognized at least one journalist whom I thought had left town two weeks ago, but had clearly come back here on speculation and hit the scattered-bloody-limb jackpot, because on the sidewalk, in the shade, was a hand. There wasn’t a lot of blood, apart from that on the dog’s fur, and the hand itself was anemic. The way it was lying I could see the nails as the fingers curved, but other than that, nothing. My fingers itched as my brain put two and two together, and I forced my own hands into my pockets in self-defense.
Harry had gone to stand with Marco, the two of them heads close, talking about what, I didn’t know. My son and my sister’s son, cousins, were joined at the hip, as close as brothers, and easily the best friends I’d ever seen.
“I have to go back,” Luca muttered close to me. “You got them?” He meant the terrible twosome, Harry and Marco, and I gave him a fake shocked glance.
“You’re leaving me with them and a hand?”
He elbowed me and ambled away toward Calabresi's, where he lived and worked, giving me the finger as I huffed.
The blond was chatting to Sawyer, Logan, and Heather, along with Drew, who hovered to one side as if his world had been shaken.
He and I had come a long way in the last few weeks from quiet animosity with too many awful memories on his side to a desperate need to make things right on mine, straight on through to finding our way back to friendship. I wasn’t sure everything was back to normal, but he glanced my way, and when I gestured at the body part and lifted an eyebrow, he met my gaze steadily and shrugged. It seemed he didn’t know any more than we did.
Then the whispers started.
“Fire.”
“There’s FIRE tattooed on his hand.”
“Fire? Isn’t that… I know someone has that tattoo… I’ve seen it.”
By the time they reached me, it seemed like every person standing there had a different theory from police to vagrants to that guy who used to work in the shoe store. I knew that tattoo, and I’d only seen it once, and when I met Sawyer’s glance, I could see he’d come to the same conclusion.
Adam Gray.
There was more discussion between the cops, and the blond standing with them.
“Who’s that cop standing with Uncle Sawyer?” Harry asked at my side, staring up at me as if I had all the answers. One day we’d be eye to eye, and the way he was growing, like a string bean, it wouldn’t be long at all.
“I have no idea,” I said, but it seemed Nicky did know because she turned in front of me, and I should have known she’d have been there, always the center of everything. She was the one person I never wanted to be stuck at the grocery store with because she had this way about her that frankly scared the shit out of me.
“He's Special Agent Lucas Beaumont, and he's here about everything,” she announced, just loud enough to cause a tidal wave of oohs and aahs in the group.
I couldn’t help but glance over at blond dud
e with a new optic. This sexy, gorgeous, uptight, suited man was a federal agent? Well, that was just shit. While the sexy, gorgeous bit was great, the fact he was a fed, with some of the questionable contacts I had online, meant he was dangerous to have around town. If he ever found out about my liaisons with less than wholesome dark web contacts, he’d arrest me on the spot.
Back to the sexy part, though. He held himself straight, confident, but there was something about him that made me think he wasn’t comfortable standing with Sawyer and the others. He kept checking over the people huddled with their morbid gawking, and at one point, our gazes locked, and he stared right at me before he went on to focusing elsewhere. He was distracted, and only Sawyer touching his arm brought him back to the present. More discussion and then Logan left before returning with a medical bag. After a hurried conversation, Sawyer, Drew, Logan, and Federal Agent Lucas Beaumont left in the direction of Iron Lake.
Probably down to Adam Gray’s place.
“Where do you think they're going?” Nicky asked everyone in general, but I wasn’t going to suggest Adam Gray as an option right now, not when there was a journalist in my peripheral vision, and the remaining official at the grisly hand scene was Heather, who stared down at it as if she expected it to move. She pulled out her cell, and a few moments later, Tate came out of the police department and headed her way. He was the PD admin genius who kept the town’s police in line, and he had some kind of tent folded in his hand. In a few shakes, it was up and protecting the evidence, also forming an effective barrier from the prying eyes of the crowd and to the ravages of Mother Nature, who was doing her best to burn everything before drenching it in rain.
The group of gawkers, and I included myself in that, began to disperse, but I stayed until it was me and the boys, Heather, and Tate. Until Sandoval sauntered over and I stiffened.