by RJ Scott
“Shows like CSI are ruining our criminal justice system, you know,” I began, but he didn’t open his eyes. Maybe he wasn’t a fan of crime shows, but the more I talked, the less he’d have the capacity to think about what he’d seen. I forged ahead. “Jurors watch those kinds of shows or read books where everything is solved by one lucky guess or finding a particular maggot or a stray hair. Their expectations of what we can present to them are evolving faster than the systems are. I can’t begin to tell you how much time is wasted at trial, explaining what forensic science really is and why it’s different from the shows.”
“Really?”
“God yeah. DNA profiling is all about probabilities, not fact, so we have the names of the women that have been suggested by the mitochondrial DNA, which follows a family’s unbroken female line, but there is always a degree of uncertainty. It’s interesting, you know, that—I’m rambling aren’t I?”
He squeezed my hand. “You’re filling the time I would spend worrying, it’s okay. I’m okay. I’m in the house, and my son is safe in our apartment. I can handle what I saw.”
He wriggled his hand free of my hold, then picked up our two glasses, rinsed them, and put them in the neatly stacked dishwasher rack.
“You should get sleep.” I stretched as I stood, but I didn’t get to yawn as Josh scooped me up, planted me onto the counter, which was the hottest thing to ever happen to me, and then he stood between my legs and kissed me.
Thoroughly, completely, endlessly, and when he pulled away, his lips glistening, his eyes half shut, I didn’t have any words in my head to use because it seemed as if he’d kissed my brains away.
“I just needed something… are you okay with that…? I’m sorry. I should have asked—”
I dragged him close and curled my legs around him as best I could, holding him still.
Then it was my turn to kiss him so that his brain turned to mush, and when I pulled back, he quirked a smile. I knew he’d have images in his sleep that he would never forget, but maybe the kiss would soften the blow? I wanted to think that his approach would work. He helped me down from the counter, and then holding hands, we went to the bottom of the stairs.
“There’s so much I want to tell you,” he began, but that was as far as it went. He pressed a kiss to the back of my hand. “One day,” he whispered, and then he headed for his apartment, and I went upstairs. Fuck. I really needed to kiss him some more and then take off his shirt and drag off his shorts, before peeling his underwear away from his cock with my teeth.
And then I wanted more.
Thirteen
Josh
I downloaded the last of the utility bills and made sure they’d all been covered, thankful for the second tranche of money that had now hit my account. It seemed like months ago that I’d cracked the security wall around the department, and the report back had been favorable. They were plugging the holes I’d identified, and with my work, I knew I’d saved them more than the twenty-five thousand that I’d charged them.
I went straight into game designer mode, opening the game I was working on, which was about six months away from being finished. I couldn’t afford to spend hours holed up in my office working on coding, and what little spare time I had was used up on making money. But if I could get this first spec worked up, I might be able to sell the game to someone bigger than me who could take it to market, and maybe I wouldn’t have to worry about money anymore.
But tonight, the coding wasn’t making any sense to me. It was a blur of words and math, and I knew that anything I did would be lost in a mess of errors. Which left me wondering what the hell to do next. I wasn’t ready to go to bed. I was too keyed up to sleep, and the images of what I’d seen would never leave me. It wasn’t just the body; it was the smell, Megan screaming behind me, the way she was trying to get me to be brave when all I wanted to do was throw up.
I’d seen the photos on the floor, of kids, of terrible, awful things that left me haunted in the semidarkness of my office. Restless, I went to the kitchen. The heat of a close, thundery night was enough to steal my breath, but when the guests were in their rooms, we turned off the AC in this area. Then, taking a spare key that I’d deliberately forgotten to give Avery, I let myself into the poker room, taking in the layout of the room as light flooded it. The board was big, full of photos and names, and apart from Casey and Adam, I didn’t recognize any of them. I wondered why these women had ended up in Hell’s Gate. What had made someone hate them to the point that they’d become victims? I stopped at the pictures of what was left of Adam Gray and then onto the mayor, his face, the remains, the note on the wall, along with some of the photos, and my stomach churned. Some of these boys were Harry’s age, and I was sure I’d never hated a man more than I hated Mayor Stokes.
“I don’t think you should be looking at all that,” Avery said.
I turned to face her guiltily. “Sorry, I couldn’t… after the mayor, I needed…” I cleared my throat and changed the subject. “Do you know who these women are?”
She pointed at each one in turn. “Student, student, addict, unknown, unknown, unknown, and extra bones.” She explained it in a matter-of-fact fashion, but I must have winced. “That’s why you shouldn’t be looking. Can I have the key?”
I handed it to her and backed out of the room. She locked up and then leaned back on the door. “Any more keys?”
I shook my head, and she stared at me. “What?” I asked her after a pause.
“Do you want to talk about what you saw in there?”
“No. I’m okay.” The last thing I wanted to do was discuss what I’d seen.
Somehow I slipped into a new kind of normal. It had been two weeks to the day since I’d found Mayor Stokes, and there was still no real break in the case. Lucas explained to me again that this wasn’t like the TV shows, and I knew that. I mean, I wasn’t expecting information the next day, but surely fourteen precious days was enough for them to have something. Anything. There was a dead end in the Adam Gray case, nothing on Mayor Stokes, and I could tell that Lucas was struggling with the fact that there was nothing tying the cases together and very little evidence in either.
We would eat dinner, and he would stay in the kitchen with me after Harry left for homework, and Avery made her excuses. Every night we talked about something new, and I was learning more about Lucas with every passing evening.
They’d added things to the board. I knew that because I glanced in every time I delivered coffee, and the team had grown. The tall gruff man in charge, Bryan Dupuis, had arrived, stayed for two days, and had left Avery and Lucas to deal with the case, which didn’t exactly fall into the realms of a serial murderer. The bones in the lake case were dead in the water, literally, and there was a persistent feeling of impatience in the hotel. There was new staff here, technicians who came and went, and I had to turn away journalists who had descended after the murder of Mayor Stokes, but soon left when nothing was coming of it. I had to hire in some temporary hotel workers, friends in town mostly, for cleaning the rooms and so it wasn’t just me and Harry manning reception. For myself, I couldn’t get what I’d seen out of my head, and tonight I couldn’t sleep, for so many reasons.
It had started when Harry had cut his finger with a knife as he was chopping carrots. I encouraged him to eat vegetables and fruit, but why he chose eight p.m. on a Friday to do it, I didn’t know. Doc was on hand, which was lucky. Here for poker, he’d tutted and fussed, as Harry refused to have it touched and then winced and moaned dramatically. Doc rolled his eyes at me, and when he was finished, he patted Harry on the head as I sent him to our apartment with what looked like the biggest bowl of carrots ever.
We played poker, hunched over the kitchen table after I’d cleared away stray carrot peelings. It was so different from normal. And then Chris did what he usually did, which was tell us about the latest scenes in his book, which inevitably involved ghosts or death. Sawyer was patient when Chris went on about this ghoul or that murder
plot, but even though I’d read all Chris’s books, I still shuddered when I’d seen death up close so recently. Apparently though, tonight was all about ghosts.
“This hotel is haunted, you know,” Doc had said, which fuck my life was the last thing I’d wanted to know. I’d rather he stuck to what he knew, which was the history of the town in dry facts, the nitty-gritty of who’d married whom, and so on, including details of all their kids. We humored him because we’d all been his patients at one time or another, and he was genuinely interesting. Well, at least the first time I heard a story.
“Oh, really?” Chris had been all bright-eyed, leaning forward in his seat, willing Doc to continue.
Doc puffed himself up, his pale eyes bright with enthusiasm. “Joe Dwyer swears he saw his sister Lily one night, not long after she died, wandering the hallway, crying for her baby.”
“Joe, as in is the bank owner, the one who used to own the hotel, right?”
“That’s right, young man, and he said she walked right through him and he was ice-cold.”
“Oh my god, that is awesome,” Chris had exclaimed, drawn in by the horror and backstory, but he was definitely the odd one out. Sawyer was quiet tonight, Drew subdued, and Logan had spent all evening glancing at Drew with worry in his expression, not surprising after finding the dog collar and the names on the wall. I didn’t know how Drew could bear all this, and all I wanted to do was hug him. I tried to keep things on the straight and narrow, but no one was concentrating on the game, not even me. This wasn’t the usual laughter-filled get-together, but maybe it was a lot down to the host. Me. Because my head was a mess, and it had shown in my weird silence.
“How did Joe’s sister die? Lily, you said her name was?” Chris asked, and I fully expected him to pull out his ever-present notebook and add it to his plot lists. Only he’d read the room, and he glanced over at Sawyer, who had been staring at a good hand. I could tell it was good because he’d relaxed his hold and the cards were visible to everyone. Maybe I should’ve told him?
“She tumbled into an open basement and died from smoke inhalation in a fire in the house, her son as well, which left Adam Gray alone. I remember he’d been building the cabin himself on his land, working through what we called Soldier's Heart but is more commonly known now as PTSD.” Doc shook his head. “Terrible thing, war. But, when the report showed that she’d fallen with their son, and then the fire was caused by a wiring fault, he never recovered. She was Adam’s whole life, and it was one horror too many for him.” Doc sighed. “Not to mention Joe was distraught, and he blamed Adam for the death of his sister.” He glanced up then as if something had occurred to him. “You know…”
“What?” I prompted because I would never discount a local’s knowledge of a past that went back longer than mine.
Doc shook his head. “It’s stupid.”
“You have to tell us now,” Chris encouraged, his eyes wide with fascination.
“I’m not saying Joe killed Adam, but I know Joe changed after losing his sister and never really recovered his equilibrium, which is why I make allowances, even when he’s being an ass.” That made me smile because that was the kinder way of explaining what an idiot Joe could be at times. The only time he’d ever seemed normal to me was when he was flirting with Beverly Kirkland, and look at how that had turned out.
Chris placed a card in front of him. “I wonder why Adam’s wife would haunt the hotel when she died at a cabin elsewhere. It’s canon that ghosts generally haunt the places they die in or objects, so I guess it could be that.”
“If you believe in ghosts,” Sawyer said.
Chris quirked a smile at his partner. “It’s not that I don’t not not believe that potentially there are real but maybe unreal ghosts,” he said.
I swore Sawyer went cross-eyed, trying to work that one out. He leaned over and kissed Chris on the tip of his nose, and then it was his turn to smile. I loved that Sawyer had someone who could help him in these dark, confusing times, and I couldn’t help but wish that Lucas was sitting in on the game. Preferably opposite me so I could stare at him.
“I remember…” Doc began, and I braced myself for another long, rambling story about Lancaster Falls. When he spoke, he made it sound as if he was one of the original settlers, and I swore he made most of it up. “Gosh, we’re talking fifty years ago now, when we were all in our twenties. Joe was the one who was born into money. Once, it seemed that the Dwyer family owned all the land around the mountain. The hunting parties he’d throw…” Doc smiled as he reminisced about what seemed like happier days. Maybe before Joe Dwyer had lost his sister in a fire.
“Is the ghost why Joe put the hotel up for sale, then?” Chris asked and wriggled his hands and made a woooooo kind of noise.
“I’ve never seen a ghost, so I doubt it,” I’d interrupted.
Doc could leave his ghost stories at the door unless of course he had actual proof there was a ghost. Then I could have marketed the place as the Lancaster Falls Ghost House. It didn’t take long for me to work through the scenarios of me not actually owning the place anymore or of having teams of people tracking through the space here looking for ether, or whatever it was that ghosts left.
It’s a no to The Ghost House, then.
Only the story didn’t leave me. I couldn’t shut my eyes without seeing Gerald Stokes’s body, and I was hyper vigilant about security in the hotel. Not just that, but there was a new storm front that had hit the town, locked in place it seemed, and Avery had informed me that the reservoir was now filling at a steady rate. Normally, I would have gone down there to see but couldn’t bring myself to visit. In fact, I was permanently glued to Harry’s side when he was awake and not at school, with Marco spending a lot of time here as well.
“Can’t sleep?” Lucas asked from behind me. I hadn’t even heard him come into the kitchen, but somehow he hadn’t startled me. Maybe I’d expected him? We’d been tiptoeing around each other, stealing a kiss here and there, but never taking it any further. Weirdly enough, for someone like me who had no issues getting off with someone at a club, the slower sensual pace of getting to know Lucas was fine. We spent the longest time talking about his world, mine, the weather, sports, my childhood, and a lot about the town. I knew he was learning more about the people who lived here from me, and I hoped that in a small way it was helping him process information as he received it. I was also fighting the instinct to tell him everything about me so that the slate was clear before we did all the things I wanted to do with him.
“The storm,” I lied as an excuse for not being asleep.
“It’s a bad one,” he mused and then sat on the chair right next to me—not across from me or with any space between us but on the chair next to mine.
“At least it’s breaking some of the heat. Maybe it will get cooler.”
“And then it will snow.” He glanced at me and smiled. I knew he was teasing me, and it felt good. Nice. Important. The conversation was something that any colleagues might have and I shouldn’t read anything into it.
He shifted and bumped my shoulder, and I tried to subtly move a little bit away from him because I was determined not to be the one to reach out first or make the first move. We’d shared kisses, but somehow in the space of the last week, it wasn’t enough anymore. I might have been alone in thinking that. I bet he had all these federal rules about not getting involved with people connected to a live case. Then again, I rationalized, my connection to the case was tenuous. Except that I lived in Lancaster Falls. Oh, and I’d found the body of the mayor and was even a suspect in his murder for all of ten-seconds.
And of course I was best friends with Casey's brother.
Okay, so I have connections, then.
The one person I didn’t have a connection with was Adam Gray, aside from that one time we’d met way back, when we were children with the whole poison-ivy-next-to-the-Dwyer-cabin thing.
I let out a sigh. I was so connected that this straight-as-a-die agent was proba
bly bound and determined to keep me at arm’s length.
“Are you okay?” I could hear the concern in his voice.
“It’s just been a hard day,” I murmured, but he didn’t have to know about the bank reminding me about a pre-agreed increase in monthly payments. I’d need to find an extra three hundred dollars every month, and even though that didn’t sound like much, it was enough to tip me over the edge. Maybe now was the time to try and sell, find that smaller place for me and Harry, give up on a failed dream? But that was something to think about another time. Right now, I didn't need his concern, because in my books, him talking to me all doe-eyed and understanding was just as bad as the random touching he kept doing. A press of his fingers on my arm when we talked or the way he knocked elbows when he came to check what I was cooking for dinner. Those moments might have all been innocent, but when all I wanted to do was to touch him back in a hundred inappropriate ways, it was getting harder.
I turned to him to tell him that he needed to stop touching me or sending me messages that I was interpreting as interest, but was actually just the nurturing way he had about him. I didn’t get a chance, because he cradled my cheek with his hand.
“Talk to me,” he instructed with determination. “It isn't easy to see death, and I’m here if you need to think things through with someone. Okay?”
“What are you expecting me to say?”
“Anything you want.”
“I don’t want to go over what I saw again. It’s no different from what you saw.”
“I thought it might help to get your thoughts out in the open.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe I needed to talk about not only the death I’d seen but also the feelings I had about him and the hotel and the jobs I’d done and how they were so close to that gray area between honest work and breaking the law.