by RJ Scott
“Everything will be okay,” I muttered as I unlocked my office and then shut myself in to start work. I moved the chair slightly so I could see the front entrance through a small space in the blinds. If someone was out there chopping up bodies, then I wanted to watch the single unlocked ingress. Then I protected myself from the federal agent in my home, and I’d made sure to turn the key in the door so that I had no unexpected guests. I might have been able to pull the wool over my nearly teenage son’s eyes, but a trained federal agent up in my space, looking at screens, seeing what I was doing? He’d take one look at me accessing the dark web for information and lose his shit
However sexy-sweet he was, however cute he seemed? That could be a bad thing.
I was soon deep into code, nowhere near live systems but close enough and cloaked to have a plan of action, setting the time and date for tomorrow night when I could do this properly. I cataloged what I needed to do and sat back in my chair. I was this close to getting the money for the repairs that needed doing, as well as putting some away for Harry’s college fund.
Talk of the devil. He knocked on the door.
“Dad?”
I went to him immediately, closing the office behind me and leaning against the door.
“Hey.”
“I have something that… I don’t feel…” He wrinkled his nose, something he did when he was thinking hard.
“Are you feeling okay?” I pressed the back of my hand to his forehead. How many times had I checked his temperature since I’d held him in my arms as the tiniest of babies?
“Yeah, I was just…” Again he paused, and there was something in his expression that I couldn’t read. Damn the kid for growing up and having secrets in his eyes.
“Just?”
“Struggling with my math. Can you help?”
I got the feeling that this wasn’t the real thing he wanted to talk about, but Math was one thing I could help with, and maybe he’d chill and tell me more as we worked. I leaned on the counter, and I helped him work out how to calculate the volume of a cone. I got it wasn’t easy and that Harry wasn’t as fast at math as I was, so I was happy to help. One day he’d leave Lancaster Falls and would do something with his life, and he’d need math. He wasn’t resorting to hacking computers on the quiet and driving a hotel into the ground like his old man. He was a talented artist, fast on his feet, got himself into scrapes with Marco, but just as easily got himself out. When he graduated, I could see him attending art college, showing at galleries all over the world.
I was so damn proud of my boy.
“So, all I do is stick the numbers in that formula?” he asked, and I nodded.
“Simple, when you know how.”
“Cool.” We side-hugged, and he headed for bed. “Night, Dad.”
“Night, Harry.”
And then it was back to my office and more work, and before I knew it, the clock showed it was three a.m. I shut everything down and stretched tall, bones popping after I’d been hunched over the keyboard for way too long, and my knee aching like a bitch. Dinner had been a long time ago, so I headed for the kitchen, startled to see my new guest sitting there nursing a drink.
“Shit.” I couldn’t help the reaction.
“Fuck!” he yelped and slid back on his chair, the drink sloshing over the table.
I watched in slow motion as his chair tilted, and he tumbled backward into the darkness. I flicked the switch, flooding the kitchen with light, and got an eyeful of one special agent’s ass up in the air, not to mention a tantalizing glimpse of smooth skin and lightly furred strong legs, tangled around the chair. I helped him up—righting the chair and offering a hand, which he took and managed to scramble to stand.
“Sorry,” I apologized. “I didn’t realize—”
“I was in a world of my own—”
“The kitchen was—”
“—in the dark,” he finished and then made a show of grabbing paper towels and mopping the table. “Sorry if I’m not supposed to be in here. I was just thinking, and I couldn’t sleep so…” He waved at the mug, and a line of cold coffee droplets from the damp towels splashed onto my T-shirt. “Shit. My bad.”
“It’s fine. You want another coffee?”
He glanced down at his half-empty coffee and wrinkled his nose. “Maybe I shouldn’t.”
“Hot chocolate?”
“Please.”
I filled two mugs with water and put them into the microwave before going on the hunt for the chocolate mix. The last person to have used it was Harry, who was all about independence when it came to after-school refreshments, but it had to be somewhere. At Christmas, when we were at our busiest, we’d had hot chocolate made with milk and cream, with marshmallows, but in this heat, it wasn’t any guest’s first choice. The AC had kept the kitchen cool, the stone floors helping, and Lucas had made himself coffee, but that kind of thing was always available in my sleek industrial kitchen, which didn’t get much use these days. Hot chocolate was way back in the pantry and I guessed he wasn’t comfortable enough to be rooting around in the kitchen. Maybe after his two weeks, when he got used to the fact that the hotel’s kitchen wasn’t dishing up food to guests, if he was actually there that long, then he’d be more than happy to get whatever he wanted.
“I hope it was okay to help myself…?”
Had he read my mind?
“Of course. I said so, right?”
He smiled at me then, rueful and so self-deprecating that I just wanted to scoop him up and care for him.
What? This was a trained federal agent. An armed lawman who would arrest me at the drop of a hat. This wasn’t some good guy who would slip into my life and then go without leaving a trace of some sort. When the microwave pinged, I made the chocolate and then set his in front of him before taking a seat on the other side of the table.
“You couldn’t sleep either?” he asked.
I got the sense he was attempting to fill the silence that had fallen between us. That was what I usually did, so to hear it happen from someone else was unusual. “Accounts,” I explained.
“Hmm, it can’t be easy running a hotel, so much to think about.”
Yeah, like empty rooms, like money owed by various news outlets for stays by random journalists, like a furnace on the verge of self-destruction, like a stove that only had one working burner.
“Always something,” I murmured and then did what I did best—changed the subject. “How did it go at Adam Gray’s place?”
“I can’t really talk about that,” he began, then huffed.
He was uncomfortable, so I changed the subject again. “I heard you met our mayor.”
I only knew that because Nicky had told me, but it was enough to veer the subject away from serious matters and to share the fact that Mayor Stokes was an asshole.
“A deeply unpleasant man,” Lucas murmured and then seemed appalled that he’d said that at all. So yet again, I changed the subject.
“Tell me more about the kind of team coming here?”
“We now have an active crime scene…” He stopped and winced as if he’d told me something I couldn’t already have guessed. After all, a hand that had been chopped off at the wrist, plus the coroner’s team carrying something covered in a sheet added up to Adam Gray being dead. I knew it, but I wasn’t going to ask directly. Let Special Agent Beaumont have his secrets.
“Anyway,” he continued. “It’s just protocol, and we were here for the remains in the sinkhole, so others will join me to work this if the PD calls us in.”
“You’re not just coming in and taking it over?” I was confused. After all, I’d seen the shows when the feds showed up and the local PD had their hackles up.
“Not if it’s best the PD continue leading the investigation, but we’ll supply support. Not everyone from the agency will be here tomorrow. Some research is completed remotely. By this, I mean investigating the backstories of the… Look, I’m here to liaise between the town and the team, as and when they
arrive. I’ll be researching.”
“Next you’ll be telling me that they’re not all coming here on a private jet to find the serial killer?” I joked, but all he did was frown.
“Private jet?”
“Yeah, like the investigators on that program.”
“Oh. That. No, it’s a common misconception that we travel by private jet.”
“Bummer.”
“Hmm. I…” He stopped then, and it was as if he’d zipped his lips, and I got the impression that he wasn’t going to spill out what he knew in the middle of the night over chocolate with a total stranger. “I’ve visited the town before. My Grandpa Toby brought me to the Christmas festival.”
Great change of subject.
“The highlight of the town’s year,” I deadpanned.
“I was only ten or so. I just remember it was snowy and cold and there were Christmas trees everywhere.”
“So, I take it that you’re local to here, then?”
“Not really,” he said and then paid special attention to his mug, and I thought that was the end of it. “But it’s a big festival here at Christmas and Grandpa… yeah.”
“You’re right,” I offered because he was staring at me as if he needed that reply.
He stood, rinsed his mug, and placed it in the sink, and then backed out of the kitchen with a smile and a nod. I was left to my own devices, thinking about that slightly awkward transaction between us, with him justifying why he’d visited the town.
There was a big gap between my expectations of a brash, confident, focused federal agent and the hint of vulnerability and confusion I was seeing in Lucas Beaumont.
Huge.
Five
Lucas
Now was about the right time for me to have a few moments of panic. In my room, door locked, head buried in a pillow, I freaked out for all of ten-seconds, then rolled onto my back and stared at the ceiling. The scene we’d found today hadn’t been the worst thing I’d attended in my time, but this was more than old bones. It was corpse mutilation and modern-day murder.
As if he knew what I was feeling, my cell rang, and I answered without looking at the screen.
“And?” Grandpa Toby wasn’t one to start off with niceties, and since his Alzheimer’s had taken hold, he’d become even blunter.
“I only just got here today, Grandpa.” And found a body and freaked the fuck out in a kitchen with a man asking too many questions.
“In my day, we’d have solved the case in the first hour,” he grumped at me.
“Uh-huh.” Used to be that I’d know he was joking, but recently his focus on Lancaster Falls had become intense, and with his head the way it was, I knew his lucid moments were few and far between. “Tell me more,” I encouraged, hoping to take advantage of one of those moments.
“About what?”
“About how you solved cases.”
“I just… did.” He sounded confused, and I knew I’d lost him again, and my experience kicked in.
“Are you getting ready for bed now, Grandpa?” I glanced at the clock, four-fifteen a.m., and he was phoning me. I switched screens and fired off a quick text to Maggie.
“I’m in bed,” he said, and I heard the sound of a door opening plus some soft talking. Maggie was there, chatting about everything and nothing, as if it were perfectly fine that my grandpa was wide awake in the middle of the night. I didn’t hang up. I needed to know he’d be okay, and I waited until Maggie picked up the phone.
“Hello?” She used that tone where she was expecting I’d be gone and that she was talking to air. She’d been my grandpa’s live-in caregiver since he couldn’t live alone, and I didn’t know why she thought I’d hang up, because I had never done so before.
“I’m here. Is Grandpa okay?”
She went quiet for a moment, and then after shutting the door, she sighed. “He went for a walk today.”
That was such an innocent statement, and for any other person, it wouldn’t mean anything, but my chest tightened as anxiety hit me. “How far did he get?”
“The store, but I was right behind him. He bought cans of soup. He walked home. It was uneventful.”
My instinct was to remind her to be careful and that she needed to keep her eye on him all the time, but she knew what she was doing. I was painfully aware that this was part of his therapy to potentially fix some of the damage that Alzheimer’s was doing to his brain. She was the expert, and I’d searched long and hard to find her.
“Give him my love…” when he’s next able to understand.
“I will. Good-night.”
“Night.”
For a long time after she’d hung up, I gripped the phone, pressed it to my chest in case I fell asleep and missed a later call from Grandpa.
I must have fallen asleep like that, and I couldn’t have moved much in what remained of the night, because when I opened my eyes, it was six a.m. and I still held the phone tight. I relaxed my hold on it, flexing my fingers to rid them of the pins and needles, and then put the cell on charge, confused and tired and wishing I’d gotten more sleep. Dreams chased me into the shower, images in my head of Josh and chocolate and him attempting to make me drink coffee in the middle of the night. All I could recall from the dream was that I’d wanted to grab him and kiss him, which was the best kind of dream to wake from. I was hard, his face was in my head, and it wasn’t wrong to get myself off in the shower to images from my sleep, right?
Feeling a little guilty after the water washed away the evidence, I showered properly and dressed in my spare suit, then attempted to calm myself the hell down before I signed in to my laptop. I’d written up the report on finding the body and had sent it off last night. My first impressions of the cops in town were favorable. They were taking this case seriously, and they didn’t seem as if they were some backwoods hicks who didn’t know procedure. I knew Captain Wiseman had been a cop in Chicago and that Officer Hennessy was a former Ranger, and it was good that there was new blood in what had been a department run by a man who’d been on my grandpa’s radar forty years ago. Former Captain Sandoval had been an arrogant ass back then, according to Grandpa’s notes, and I was very pleased I didn’t have to deal with him right now. Only the man I’d met seemed less arrogant and more… scared.
I was the first to sign in to our chat system, SSA Dupuis was second, and one by one, the rest of our team appeared in tiny pixelated squares, the best that could be shown, given the slower Internet that was the norm in smaller towns.
Bryan didn’t waste any time leaping on the first thing I’d sent.
“The body is definitely Adam Gray?” He skipped the niceties, but then he was all business and my boss, so I just asked him how high whenever he asked me to jump. Bryan was in another stratosphere in terms of rank and a lifetime of experience. He was all big words and complicated pathways that none of us had a hope in hell of following, and he kept his questions and comments succinct.
“The coroner doesn’t have a definitive match, but local knowledge supports that it was Adam Gray. The scene was clean of blood, but we don’t have a time of death as yet. Each limb had been severed at a joint, fairly cleanly, but all parts have been found, albeit some of them having been chewed on by a group of feral dogs that I understand were once loosely considered his pets. All of the dogs are with animal control now, as far as we know.” Feral dogs, remains of dogs, who knew how many Adam Gray had actually taken in?
“Any obvious links to the case of the remains in the sinkhole?”
The bones, the names of women in stark black and white, alongside other bones that couldn’t be matched or were in the process of being analyzed. At least four women dead, possibly more, undeniably linked by various factors.
“Perimortem trauma injuries, sustained at or about the time of death, contributing to cause of death suggested that the carotid artery was cut deeply with a solid blade.”
This type of information would inform the team’s profiling, but that wasn’t my job. Not
yet at least. I was a junior member of this team, there to keep the peace, make things easy, liaise. I had experience, but listening to my gut was still something I was working on.
“And we have definite matches?”
“Maternal DNA and in the case of Jessica and Melissa, a forensic odontologist matched teeth. As to links locally, that is up in the air. Gray’s land extends down to the lake, where the bones were found. The sinkhole is also on the edge, so we have a proximity link.”
“And what about the notes in your grandfather’s file?”
“The only note on Adam Gray is a postscript on the more colorful characters in Lancaster Falls.”
“Adam Gray has moved up on our list as a primary concern,” Avery Kerridge interjected. She had two years’ team experience on me and was also probably the closest thing to what I’d call a friend on the team.
“I’ve taken over the hotel as our base for however long we need it, ten bedrooms, plus a space for desks if required. I’m thinking that if the case isn’t solved instantly and we become part of the furniture in Lancaster Falls for an indefinite period, then at least we’d have a base of operations, since the PD is tiny and couldn’t hold us all.”
Bryan nodded and then shuffled papers. “Good call, Lucas. Okay, Avery, I want you out there, keep me informed, and I’ll get to you in the next few days after we wrap up the Philly issue.”
I tried not to wince. Philadelphia had been a particularly grisly set of murders with links to a cult. The entire situation had left even us baffled to the point where the cops had nearly given up on us being of any use at all. Only a breakthrough when a young man turned on the cult had us joining dots that meant we made it out of that case with our reputation intact. Philly had been the introduction I’d never expected. In my first time in the field, albeit for a short while, the horrors I’d seen, the people I’d met, would live with me forever.