“Whiskey never actually solves anybody’s problems.”
“And eating something does?”
“Honestly, yes.”
But he poured me an inch of Crown Royal over a few ice cubes from the refrigerator door and set the glass in front of me. Without lifting my head, I patted the cool marble of the countertop until I found the drink and then slid it toward me.
Tom opened the fridge and retrieved a cardboard carton of eggs and a block of cheddar. “Breakfast for dinner,” he said, looking at his watch, “for breakfast? Does that sound okay?”
It was after one o’clock at this point. I lifted my head and nodded and watched as he heated a skillet on the stovetop.
“Zervos was part of a joint task force a while back with the homicide unit,” Tom went on. “Six, seven years ago. When we had that sniper on 270. She and Frank used to drive each other crazy—Frank and his hunches, versus Mari and her dedication to legwork.” He drizzled oil into the skillet and tilted it back and forth to coat the surface. “Not that Frank didn’t do legwork. He did. But he didn’t need to prove that something was a dead end. Is this helping?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Do you want to talk?”
“I just can’t shake this feeling that everything is connected. Everything that has happened. I don’t mean actually connected. I just mean, a pattern. A bad pattern with me at the center. Rather than a string of unrelated events. Does that sound crazy?”
Tom set the skillet back on the burner and turned around to face me. “You’ve been through a lot.”
I shook my head. “No, that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about people getting hurt and me not being able to stop it.” But as I said it, I realized that made even less sense.
“People are always going to get hurt, and you’re never going to be able to stop it.”
“Well, fuck.”
He turned back to the stove and cracked two eggs neatly into the skillet. “You’re saying you feel like it’s your fault.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Roxane, you’ve chosen a profession that puts you into situations where bad things are going to happen sometimes. So have I. So did your dad. None of us can stop things from happening—all we can do is try our hardest to put the pieces together. And you do that. You have to know that.”
I finally picked up my drink and swallowed the entire thing. “But a man died tonight. Because of me. Because he was unlucky enough to have an office in the same building as me. I’ve got no business having an office. I should live and work in an underground bunker, a hundred miles from the nearest town. What if this particular nastygram had been sent to my apartment? What if something happened to Shelby—” I stopped there and put my head back down on the counter.
Tom turned away from the stove and leaned over the counter next to me. “You can’t play the what-if game.” His voice was a whisper. “You don’t want to.” He smoothed my hair against the back of my neck. “Now, I have an important question. Mayo or sriracha?”
It was in moments like this that I felt it in my bones, how good we were together.
CHAPTER 16
My own apartment felt long-abandoned in the morning. I bolted the dead bolt behind me and opened the door that led to my bricked-in porch, hoping that Catherine had left the bottle of Midleton for me.
She hadn’t.
I poured a shot of Crown Royal in my kitchen and drank it down and got in bed fully clothed. I needed to think, and it was a scientific fact that I did most of my best thinking while in my bed.
Morning sunlight shone around the edges of the mini blinds in sharp contrast to the dark purple walls of my bedroom. It wasn’t a wall color I would have chosen for myself, but a previous tenant had gone for bold hues in each room. When I moved in, the landlord was supposed to have repainted for me, but he didn’t, and eventually I got used to the colorful rooms. Now, after spending a few nights away, the purple walls were a bit jarring.
It was 7:41. I decided I would give myself until eight, and then get up and figure out what the hell was going on.
When I opened my eyes, the light in the room had changed. A lot. It was eleven o’clock already, and instead of doing my best thinking, I had only achieved a fitful, dream-riddled midmorning sleep.
I rolled over, my anorak twisting around me.
A dream fragment developed in my mind—I was back in my motel room, the first one, since the bathroom was on the left. I needed to write something down but I couldn’t find a pen.
“Oh shit,” I said in the waking world.
I flung the covers off and made a beeline for my computer bag and its pocketful of misprinted pens. Instead of listing the suite correctly as 4-L, the pens said “Suite A-1”—which didn’t exist in the building. But it occurred to me that Mariella Zervos hadn’t told me which office Benjamin Gaskell inhabited, only that it was on the first floor. I opened my laptop right there in the hallway and found Benjamin Gaskell’s website, which listed his office as “Ste 1-A.”
* * *
“A misprinted pen?”
Zervos didn’t seem impressed with my theory.
“But what’s your theory? That someone intended to call Benjamin Gaskell and got me instead?”
Zervos slid a sheet of paper across my desk—the phone list that had hung behind the desk in the lobby of my office building. All six floors’ worth of offices were crammed onto a single table, arranged by suite number. I squinted at the small print. Gaskell’s name was first on the list, while mine was in the second column and three rows below his. “What,” I said, “you think someone accidentally confused our phone numbers based on proximity?”
“I think that’s a bit easier to swallow than the pen thing.”
“Did anyone from the security staff attempt to call either me or Gaskell?”
“No.”
“Then?”
“I just don’t buy this.” She tapped the pen on the edge of my desk. “I mean, your office is listed correctly in your website. How does it come to pass that somebody only has this pen?”
I leaned back in my desk chair and thought about that. “It’s not like I give these pens out. They’re in exactly three places—my car, my apartment, and my computer bag.”
Zervos gave me a look like so what.
“I had my computer bag with me in Toledo. In my motel room. I know I mentioned this last night, but the other day, someone had been in my room.”
“Right, and they wrote you a secret threatening message in the shower steam. I remember.”
I sighed. “Well, whoever it was could have seen the pens and got the address from there?”
“Why, though? Your explanation requires more motive.”
I didn’t know the answer to that. I said, “Is the guy on the security cameras?”
“That was my next question for you.” She slid a printout from the back of her notebook and over to me. “Do you know this guy?”
I picked up the image, a grainy black-and-white camera still. It showed a man—dressed in shoes, pants, and a jacket, ball cap pulled low over his eyes—in the lobby of the building. Only a narrow segment of his face was visible. He could have been anybody.
“What was the explosive?”
She scrolled to a picture on her phone, this one of what appeared to be a twist of burned-up masking tape with plastic melted to it.
“What’s that?”
“The explosive. What’s left.”
I stared it at.
Zervos said, “My guess, it was some homemade Tannerite and a firecracker.”
“It looks like a piece of tape,” I said, and the detective nodded. “What’s Tannerite?”
“It’s used to make exploding rifle targets.”
“What, like clay pigeons? Skeet? Except illegal?”
“No, perfectly legal. Tannerite is a mix of aluminum powder and ammonium nitrate. It’s sold as two separate packs that you then mix together yourself—it’s called a binary explosive. Completel
y stable before it’s mixed, and pretty much stable even after. But shoot it with a rifle and you get a nice big boom.”
I looked at the picture again. It still didn’t make any sense to me.
Zervos said, “People will mix up some Tannerite and fold it up into a little packet with tape and use that as a target. It only takes forty or fifty grams. Of course, the more you use, the bigger the boom.”
“And the firecracker?”
“Tannerite needs some kind of ignition to set it off. A rifle shot is probably harder to pull off in an office building. But stick a firecracker in there and the whole setup is the size of your palm.”
“That’s it? That’s enough to—to kill someone?”
“If it was just on the floor when it went off, I wouldn’t think so. It would make a big noise and a lot of smoke, but it wouldn’t blow down a door or anything. In this case, the scene kind of tells me that Mr. Gaskell may have picked it up.”
“What do you mean?”
Zervos put the phone and the security-camera picture away. “It looks like the mystery man may have shoved it under the door, or Mr. Gaskell opened the door and picked it up. It exploded from the inside of the office, and Mr. Gaskell was holding it.”
I felt my teeth grinding together and said nothing.
“My point is, the device looks like something you might use to scare somebody. Not kill somebody. Good news for you, not so good for Mr. Gaskell.”
“So what does any of this mean?”
“A prank gone wrong, maybe. Someone trying to scare you. Or, if you believe in innocuous coincidences, maybe nothing to do with you at all.”
I was pissed at myself for not writing down the details of that call before I called Kez. “I’m surprised to hear that you do believe in innocuous coincidences.”
“I believe in evidence. That’s all.”
I could see what Tom had meant, about Zervos and my father driving each other nuts with their different approaches. I, personally, wanted to scream at her right now.
“There’s a chance that the phone number will help us figure out who called you. It can take a few days to get the data from the wireless provider, but we’re working on it.”
We rode down in the elevator together. Although she didn’t strike me as the warm and fuzzy type, she patted my arm when we reached the lobby and said, “We’ll find this guy.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Optimism. That never was Frank’s strong suit either. Or Andy’s, from what I can tell.”
“Do you mean my brother? God help you if he hears you call him Andy.”
Zervos frowned, something unnamable entering her face. “You have a brother named Andy too?”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“Your sister.”
I laughed. “I don’t have a sister.”
“Okay, my mistake.”
“What are you talking about?”
Zervos sighed. “There’s a girl, new to the force this year. Looks exactly like your dad. Like you. I assumed she was his daughter. But I was wrong. So it doesn’t matter. I gotta run.”
“And her name is Andy?”
But she practically ran back out through the revolving door, a hamster in a wheel.
CHAPTER 17
I’d wondered before if my dad ever got some woman pregnant. We knew about a few affairs—the whole family did—and I’d assumed that if there was more to it, we’d have heard about that too.
I immediately went back up to my office and hauled out my computer. A rookie cop named Andy should be easy enough to find, and she was; a class had graduated back in July, and I found a photo on the Dispatch website. Out of fifty-some cadets, there were six women, and one of them was petite, dark-haired, with a strong nose and eyes that looked icy blue.
I stared at this person. She looked exactly like my aunt, my father’s older sister, Cynthia, in pictures I’d seen of her when she was young. Cynthia was long dead—a car accident—but she had three kids of her own, all of whom would be old enough to have their own adult children. That branch of the family tree had lived in Erie and we rarely saw them.
I spent a while looking for a list of the academy grads’ names, didn’t find it.
I called my brother. “I talked to a cop this morning who said the weirdest thing, about Frank.”
“Oh?”
“She said there’s some rookie cop, a girl named Andy, who he thought was Frank’s daughter.”
“Andy?”
“I thought she was talking about you, I even said, god help her if you ever hear her call you that. But then she told me this girl looks exactly like Frank, and I found a picture, and she really, really does. I’m sending it to you now.”
Silence radiated through the connection while he waited for the text message to come in. “Holy crap, you know who this looks like?”
“Cynthia.”
“Exactly. Think she has a granddaughter who lives in town?”
“We would have heard about that. If we had a cousin here. A grandcousin? Second cousin?”
“First cousin once removed, technically. What are we supposed to do now?”
“About this? Um, I don’t think we’re supposed to do anything.”
“What if she is Frank’s kid?”
“That would be none of our business. You know?”
Intellectually, I did know that. But the qualities that made me a decent detective were, also, the same ones that made me an impossible person, and I knew it. I said, “We should ask Mom.”
“Mom and Cynthia hated each other.”
“No, that was Mom and Victoria.”
“I think it was both. Dad’s sisters were, well, like the female version of him, which is to say, drunk and mean and petty.”
“Sexism aside,” I said.
“You really don’t know her name? Just Andy?”
“That’s all she would tell me.”
“Not much to go on.”
“No.”
“So that means not much to do.”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
“I love you.”
“Yeah.”
I hung up and frowned at the picture leaning against the wall. Kez’s Cheer up, beach! Post-it was still stuck to the glass.
I wasn’t kidding—I didn’t know what to do, about anything. I knew deep down my brother was right—Zervos’s comment didn’t make this person any of my business, even if she was related to us. And regarding the rest of it, she’d told me to sit tight and wait a few days to see what their investigation turned up, but I didn’t feel like sitting tight, and I didn’t want to wait a few days either. But beyond doing a Google search for the phone number that had called me, there was little else I could do.
I tried Constance Archer-Nash’s media person; no answer. So I tried the cell phone that Aiden had been calling and to my surprise, she picked up this time.
“Bruce?” she barked.
“Sorry—no.”
“Fuck.” A deep breath. “Sorry.”
“Well, aren’t we just two ladies apologizing for nothing,” I said, and she laughed.
“Sorry, who’s this?”
“I’m a private detective and I think I have some info about the calls you’ve been getting on this number.”
Silence. Then, “Really. What kind of information? Actually, no, I’m not doing this. Give me your number and I’ll call you back after my security person says it’s okay.”
While I waited for that to happen, I emailed the records department to ask for reports filed by Constance Archer-Nash or the staff of Nora Health in the last month. Then I got into the shower and stood under the stream of hot water for a long, long time. It was almost relaxing, until my thoughts drifted back to the unknown person who’d been in my motel room.
Stop what?
Were showers going to be triggers for me now? Mirrors? Motels?
The light changed in my bathroom as someone passed by the window on the stairs at the back of the
building.
The water turned to ice on my skin.
I turned the shower off and listened; footsteps near my back door. I bolted from the shower and pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt from my laundry room, grabbed my gun, and squinted through the peephole to see who the fuck was out there.
Catherine Walsh, a box balanced on a slim hip.
I sighed and the peephole fogged up.
Catherine looked right at me, her expression going tense. “Hello?” she said.
I opened the door. “What on earth are you doing back here?”
We stared at each other. You always hope that the first time you see an ex after a breakup you’ll look amazing and they’ll look like shit, but that hope was only realized for Catherine today. She was radiant in a burnt-orange wool blazer and a houndstooth blouse and jeans, and I was dripping wet from the shower, dressed in dirty laundry, and holding a gun.
“I have some questions myself,” she said, nodding down at it.
I set the revolver on the kitchen counter behind me. “It’s a long story.”
“I have time for a story.”
“If this is your way of expressing concern, everything’s fine.”
“Oh I know. You’re always perfectly fine, is that it?”
“Something like that.”
“You’ve been happier to see me, that’s for sure.”
“Well, when I said porch, I figured you’d opt for the front.”
“Yeah, well, I tried that, but I’m not tall enough to reach the ledge even in these.” She waggled a dove-grey ankle boot and hefted the box. “I didn’t think you’d want me to just chuck this crap over the wall so I decided to come around the back. I figured you would be in Toledo, since that was your excuse for not seeing me.”
I took the box and could tell right away it was too light to contain anything other than clothes.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Something.”
“No.”
I set the box on the floor. “If it was just a bunch of clothes, why not chuck it over the wall?”
Her pale green eyes flashed a warning and I could tell she knew what I was thinking about. “It’s in the queer bill of rights that when your lover ditches you in the dead of winter, you get to drink her whiskey and not feel bad about it.”
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