Dark Secrets

by Savannah Kade

  It had been a sharp stab in the gut to realize that he was happy to dive for the guy holding the gun, that it was much easier to do that than look at that barrel aiming at Grace. He’d forced himself out of the car and had tried to be casual as he said, “I’ll be back.”

  Grace smiled at him and sucked in a breath. Whether that was because he was leaving her alone, or because they might get some of the test results back, he didn’t know.

  Fighting the urge to reach up and pull his baseball cap lower, Nate instead hunched his shoulders a bit. He needed to go unnoticed and tucking himself into a ball where no one could see his face was not the way to do it. Being invisible was an art form, he was discovering. Show his face enough so the people around him didn’t care, but don’t look at the cameras.

  Still, if anyone checked who owned the P.O. Box they’d likely trace it back to him. It didn’t go to the PD though they reimbursed him for the cost. But since the idea of a confidential informant was confidentiality, often no one else in the department knew who a CI was. It helped the CI stay safe. Now Nate was hoping that same P.O. box would keep him safe.

  He walked in through the glass door, for once not pleased at the entire wall of plexi that let everyone see everything as people checked mail and grabbed packages. The service center was closed at this time of night, but he’d picked this place because the boxes themselves had twenty-four-seven access.

  Sliding the key in, he opened the box and found three pieces of mail. It was normal to flip through them, so he did it even as he closed the box and turned the key. His heart skipped.

  There was a letter from Reena Johnson’s lab in Denver. He was out the door and standing on the curb as Grace pulled up.

  “Was there anything in there?” she asked before he even got the car door closed.

  “Yes.” He buckled in but didn’t take his hat off. If anyone was watching he wasn’t going to flash his face. It was bad enough they could see Grace. He’d had her tuck her hair into the back of her coat again so at least it looked shorter at first glance, not like the long dark mane that made her easier to spot.

  Grace pulled away, but he could see her hands shaking.

  “As soon as we get a chance on the freeway, you can pull over and I’ll drive. Then you can read it.” He wanted to reach out and hold her hand. Though he’d touched her back, and kissed her hard, the one time, there’d hardly been an opportunity to make up for the way the day had gone down.

  She shook her head. “I want to be in and settled somewhere before I read it. I don’t know what it says. I’ll want to put it together.” She was still breathing heavily though. The information in the envelope teased at them and they still had a good distance to travel.

  Grace made it halfway to Denver before they pulled over for a stretching break and food and a chance for Nate to take over driving. Their tent was gone, though they still had their suitcases, and that meant they were back to cash-only motels. Any ping on a credit card could mean death. He was beginning to get weary of being on the road and on the run. He was dreaming of his own bed. Only his own bed didn’t have Grace in it. He was torn.

  They ate Taco Bell because they wanted to be sure they didn’t have to leave the motel in the morning for food. They’d leave early, but the better fed they stayed the better off they’d be. Still, two a.m. drive thru tacos were hardly keeping them “better fed,” maybe just “fed.”

  Though they rolled into the motel lot around four a.m., the woman at the front desk couldn’t have cared less about Nate or his needing a room at such an odd hour. There was no second floor here. No front and back rows, only the one, squat line of rooms all facing the parking lot. At the far end, two women stood smoking. They started to beeline for Nate until Grace parked the car and stood up.

  She managed to look both tired and elegant as she handed him his bag and slung hers over her shoulder. She still had half her brother’s ashes tucked inside her jacket, he knew, and she was clutching the letter as though it were some kind of talisman. And maybe it was.

  Once inside the room, she ignored everything to open the letter. He checked the place out, found a brace for the window and decided “security” was not its middle name. Nor any of its names. He checked the bathroom and found a high frosted window to the back of the building. It was painted shut and it was a cheap glass. He wasn’t sure anyone would fit through it though. As soon as he had that secure, he texted in to Zaragosa’s burner phone to see how the raid was going.

  When he came out, Grace had the lab results spread out on the bed in front of her.

  “Nate, you have to see this.”

  * * *

  Grace felt her breathing grow shallow. “Look!”

  She pointed to the papers arranged neatly in an arc around her, only then realizing that was stupid. It was possible Nate didn’t know how to read electropherograms. And it was definite that she’d left no room on the bed for him. So she started over.

  “Reena Johnson is amazing. Brad had a guy in the Denver PD reach out to her and get results so he could run them through local banks and CODIS for DNA matching.” She was talking too fast, but she couldn’t slow down.

  “You’re really that well connected?”

  She smiled up at him. “Brad and I have traveled all over the US and even Viet Nam to bring back bodies and work cases. We know people in a lot of different departments and precincts. Luckily, we had a case just outside Denver two years ago and we were really helpful. The PD likes us.”

  “I’ll say.” He was grinning, but he held up a finger to hold her off for a moment while he checked his phone. Grace ignored it and turned back to the paperwork.

  “SWAT is finally moving on the compound. They were waiting for nightfall and a lack of activity. Apparently, the place has been a beehive all night with stuff coming in.” Nate looked at her again. “They were trying to wait to get the most people in the net.”

  “Slater X?” She asked. He was the one who’d come after her and Nate. They wouldn’t be safe until he was locked up.

  Nate shook his head. “He wasn’t there. No one has any doubt that this is his operation, but until we can tie him to it, we can’t hold him.”

  “Do they know where he is?” she asked, holding her breath. She had it. She had the answer. “Nate!”

  “Let me ask.” He punched the message into his phone, and Grace hoped that Mari Zaragosa would be able to get back to them soon.

  The moment he looked up, she started pointing things out. “Room eleven—where Jimmy died—was a goldmine. So, of the five blood samples, she matched three of them to DNA profiles in the system.” She pulled out one lab sheet printout and held it up. “This sample matched to an officer in the Dark Falls PD. Officer Derry Winfield.”

  “Our DNA is on file?” Nate looked at her, stunned.

  “Nope, but his is. He bled at a crime scene—cut himself—three years ago and had to donate a sample to have his DNA profile removed from the evidence.”

  “How do you know that?” He seemed startled.

  “There was a note on his profile saying that it wasn’t in for any suspected criminal activity.” She turned to him. “Unless the PD has record of him bleeding in this motel room, in conjunction with an investigation, then this is highly suspicious.”

  Nate was frowning. “Do you think it’s possible that his blood was at the earlier crime scene because of involvement and he cut himself on purpose to have a reason for it to be there? A cover up?”

  “It could have happened. Do you know this guy? Is he likely crooked?”

  “He’s in tech. Follows the trackers on the cars, checks out the equipment…” As he said it, Grace could hear the realization in his voice.

  “He’s perfectly positioned for it,” she added.

  “Let me get Masuka to check.”

  “You’re going to text him at four a.m.?”

  Nate just laughed. “We’re officers. We work around the clock.”

  She nodded and waited while he sent th
at message. “Ready for the next one? Because it’s better. So, three of the blood samples we sent in now have a DNA profile, but not a match—”

  “I though you said there were three matches.”

  Grace grinned. “There were. Two came from the same sample. Meaning both people bled in the room at the same time and dripped in the same spot!”

  “Does it have to be the same time?”

  She nodded at him. “It has to have occurred quickly enough that the first blood spatter didn’t clot before the second arrived. So within minutes. It’s possible that it could have occurred from two separate instances, but nearly impossible that the two people in the profiles weren’t there in the room together.”

  Nate nodded at her and she gave him a minute to absorb. She dealt in this stuff all the time, but he didn’t.

  “The two remaining matches come from that one sample. One is a DNA profile you had on file from a victim. An affluent kid who—get this—was brutally murdered in the same hotel room as Jimmy.”

  She watched as Nate’s eyebrows went up.

  Then she grinned even wider. “The other sample is Greg Slater.”

  Nate’s mouth fell open. Then he shut it. Then he started throwing questions rapid-fire. “Are you saying that you can link Slater X to Gary Glenbow’s death? Why wouldn’t we have caught it at the time? Does the mixed blood mean that?”

  She held up her hand. “If the techs took several samples, they did their job. It’s impossible to sample every drop in a room with blood spatter. But I found the one that also had Slater X’s blood in it. So yes, we can link him to the place and time of the Gary Glenbow murder.”

  “We can hold him!” Nate’s excitement filled the room and he leaned over and kissed her.

  She was on her back, with Nate on top of her, and papers flying everywhere before he jerked himself upright and said, “Shit! We have to get this to the right people. Right away.”

  Then he breathed heavily. “Do you need to sleep?”

  She shook her head. “Not anymore.” Grace was certain when she finally did crash, it would be long and heavy. But she was too wide awake to do it now. “Give me food and I can keep going.”

  “Can you organize this and be able to present it to your guy at the Denver PD in an hour?”

  Grace nodded and got to work. She gave Nate the name of the officer she knew and let him rouse the guy out of bed. She took pictures of all the lab results making sure she could read them, then emailed them to herself and Nate and as an afterthought, she CC’d Brad. Then she pulled a red pen from her bag and started circling the important numbers.

  When that was finished, she begged for a shower and Nate readily agreed.

  By the time she was ready, Nate was at the door with his hand out to her and the sun was just peeking through the cold, foggy mountain air. They hadn’t even unpacked anything.

  “Let’s go nail Slater X’s ass to the wall.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Nate stood in the hallway of Denver Precinct Twenty-Two and motioned for one of he officers to hand him paper and a pencil. He spoke into Grace’s phone, “Can you give me a minute?”

  The phone had rung while she sat inside the concrete meeting room with her papers and three of Denver PD’s finest. She’d told her contact he could bring only two people that he trusted absolutely. She’d handed Nate her phone and asked him to keep it. So he was out here, talking to the tech from Albuquerque about the results from Jimmy’s ashes.

  “I ran both the tox screen and the DNA tests simultaneously. If the DNA didn’t match, I would have wasted a tox screen, but I figured it was worth it,” she told him as he finally was handed a pen and a small notepad.

  “I’m ready. What do you have?”

  “The DNA profiles match. The cremains belong to a male, immediate family member of Grace Lee. Though we can’t tell if it’s her brother, father, or male child.”

  Nate understood that DNA matching was about percents and a lot of different family relations produced the same percents. It was the idea that Grace could have a child that had thrown him. He tried to get the thought out of his head. “Her father is still alive, no children that I know of. Only the one brother.”

  “Then you can conclude that these remains belong to James Lee.” Nate was nodding but she kept plowing on. “The tox screen showed virtually no heroin or opioids of any nature.”

  Nate felt his heart settle. Grace had insisted that Jimmy was clean. So had Kevin. Now they had proof.

  “However, there were traces of chloroform and high numbers for galantamine hydrobromide.”

  “What’s that?” Nate was not Grace. He knew murder weapons and guns. He knew domestic disputes and what could go wrong during a routine traffic stop. He did not know Galanavanata whatever…

  “It’s a dementia drug, but it’s also a sleep aid. And it’s lethal in high doses.”

  He made her spell it. Checked that the lab results indicated a fatal dose and she assured him that it did. It was only after he hung up that he began speculating. The lab techs wouldn’t do it. They dealt in numbers. But to Nate, that made it sound like Jimmy had been chloroformed to knock him out, then he’d been given the sleep aid to kill him. He might have even died after the scene was set.

  The thought saddened him. It was hard to get clean. It was hard to stay clean. And Jimmy had done it. Then he’d been murdered. No question about it now. The needle staged in his arm was just that, a stage. No heroin was in his system, it had all stayed in the needle. Exactly as Grace had suggested.

  He headed back into the room and tried not to interrupt Grace as she further explained the evidence against Slater X while she answered all the questions the Denver PD was throwing at her. But he slid the notepad over to her, unsurprised when her eyes went wide for a moment before she closed them. Though she was only looking at the lab numbers, she understood without having to be told. Grace stopped talking for a moment, then she looked at Nate. “They murdered him.”

  She paused, and for a moment Nate thought she was going to throw her arms around him and cry, but she didn’t. “They matched the DNA, too? Because that seems fast.”

  He nodded. “She ran the tests concurrently.”

  Grace, being Grace, simply understood. Seeing as she had herself together, he asked if he could head back out to the hallway to make more calls. She nodded and it was thirty minutes later that she came out to find him.

  “They’re going after Slater X now.”

  “Good. Zaragosa sat down with the Chief and told her everything. They’re opening an investigation into Derry Winfield.” He put his arm around her and said, “You and I need sleep.”

  He was grateful when the Denver PD offered the use of a safehouse and an armed guard. They were far out of Dark Falls, but not far enough. They’d stirred the hornet’s nest these past few days and Nate wasn’t feeling safe yet.

  * * *

  Grace woke to darkness. The shades had blackout filters and so did the curtains. A huge ticking clock on the wall told her it was three in the afternoon. She still hadn’t slept much. Something had woken her.

  Beside her, Nate sat bolt upright, his eyes wide and wary.

  Yes, something had woken both of them. But what?

  She listened to the front doorknob turn and watched as Nate grabbed his gun. Shaking his head at her, he motioned her to get behind the bed. Her heart pounding again—too many times in the past few days—Grace tried to get close to the floor and make herself small. If Nate was worried, she’d stay out of the way.

  She heard him rack the slide on his gun, loading a bullet into the chamber. The noise meant he thought he needed it. That scared her more than anything.

  The guard was supposed to tap the door three times before coming in. But the knob was turning without the signal. Not good.

  Grace recounted to herself that beds were often good bullet shields. Not always, but the sheer mass of material would often stop someone from being injured. She wished Nate was back h
ere with her.

  Moving her head lower, she looked under the cheap bedframe and spotted his feet. He was planted, aimed for the doorway, and now she could hear angry footsteps beyond it. She held her breath, tried to stay quiet. Tried not to scream like she wanted to.

  The door banged open and she saw a pair of boots. No words were said, just gunshots echoing through the small space, ringing her ears. Nate’s feet disappeared from view and she felt the bed move as he landed on it. Her hand flew to her mouth to smother the gasp she’d made.

  “Where is she?” a voice growled.

  “I don’t know.” Nate’s voice meant he was still alive and Grace felt tears leak from her eyes. Nate was going to die defending her.

  “This is my last stop. You and that Lee bitch are it. Then I disappear.”

  If Nate died, this guy, probably Slater X, was going to come around this side of the bed and execute her. So Grace decided. If she was going to die anyway, she was going to give Nate a fighting chance.

  She popped up to her feet. “I’m right here.”

  The barrel of the gun raised quickly, moving from Nate to her. In that moment, she thought about all the things she hadn’t said. About the trips she hadn’t yet taken. About one more hug for her Mom and Dad. And about Nate.

  But Nate was moving, too. Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, he pulled the trigger.

  Twice. Three times.

  By the time Nate fired his sixth shot, even Grace could see that it was flying through the open doorway into nothing. Slater X had fallen, unmoving, to the floor.

  She stared for a few moments. She’d seen the scenes so many times before, but she’d never been present for the death. She’d never been the target. She’d never been the one defended.

  At that moment, her thoughts broke, and she threw her arms around Nate. He didn’t hug her back.