“Anyway, when she died, Dad just withdrew into himself. I thought he’d come around eventually, but when he didn’t, I tried to get him to go out, to see people again. He thought I meant that he should start seeing other women—and maybe I did—but I told him he was wrong. And that it was also wrong just to sit home and brood day after day the way he was doing.”
Connie sniffed and looked off, no doubt reliving the incident she was describing.
“And we got into a terrible argument, said some things we both regretted—at least I regretted them,” the other woman said with a deep sigh. “Anyway, my father broke off all communication with me. I was angry, so I decided the hell with him.” A sad smile curved the corners of her lips. “But, well, he’s my father so I decided I should try to mend this breach between us. I called him—and called him—and I just couldn’t reach him,” she said with a note of desperation. “After a couple of days, I started to get this uneasy feeling that something was wrong so I went to his house. And he wasn’t there,” she cried, trying her best to keep her voice in check.
“Maybe your father did go on that vacation,” Kenzie suggested.
But Connie shook her head from side to side. “My father’s a very detail-oriented person. If he ever did decide to go on a vacation, he’d notify the post office to have them hold back mail delivery. Or, at the very least, he’d have his neighbor pick up his mail for him.”
She looked at Kenzie with fresh tears in her eyes. “His mailbox is one of those large models—he used to get packages with kits in them,” she explained. “Anyway, there was so much mail in the mailbox, it was overflowing. There’s mail on his lawn, Kenzie,” Connie cried, as if the sight of that mail had literally caused her pain. “So much mail that it’s noticeable from the street.” She let out another shaky breath before she could continue. “Anyway, that’s when my father’s neighbor called me.”
“Your father’s neighbor had your number?” Kenzie asked.
Connie nodded. “I gave Mr. Moore my cell number right after my mother died so he could call me in case my dad did...something stupid or got too sick to call or... You have to understand, my father wasn’t himself after my mother died...” Her voice trailed off. And then she sat up a little straighter, her eyes holding Kenzie’s prisoner. “Something’s happened to him, Kenzie. I just know it.”
“Not necessarily,” Kenzie told her in a very calm voice. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Connie. You have to think positive,” she advised the other woman. She kept her voice even, almost cheerful. “This could all be a just a misunderstanding or he just needed some time to himself, or—”
“Or he could be lying in some alley, bleeding or dead,” Connie cried, interrupting Kenzie. “Tossed aside like so much garbage.”
“You don’t know that for a fact, Connie, and until you have reason to believe that’s the case, I want you to focus on positive thoughts,” Kenzie instructed, keeping her voice just stern enough to get the other woman’s attention.
Connie covered her face with her hands, crying again. “I should have never yelled at him,” she said, her voice hitching, “never told him that he was acting like an old man when he had so much of life to live still in front of him.”
“Sometimes fathers need to be yelled at,” Kenzie told the other woman with sympathy.
Connie raised her head, her eyes pleading for some sort of reassurance. “Have you ever yelled at yours?” she asked.
Kenzie laughed. “More times than I could even begin to count,” she told Connie.
It wasn’t true. At least she hadn’t yelled at her father in years, but that wasn’t what this woman needed to hear right now. She needed to be able to assuage her conscience in order to think clearly, so Kenzie told her what she wanted to hear.
Connie nodded, sniffling and once again struggling to get control of herself. “Then you’ll look for my father?” she asked hopefully.
Kenzie nodded. “You just need to fill out this paperwork and we can get started on our end.”
Kenzie opened up the large drawer to her right and took out a folder that was filled with official-looking forms. Beneath the folder she had another file folder filled with forms that were already filled out.
Those she had already input into the system over the last couple of years. Some of the people on those forms had been found, but there were still a great many who hadn’t. Those people bothered Kenzie more than she could possibly say. Not because they represented opened cases that counted against her, but because they represented people who hadn’t been reunited with their loved ones. People who might never be reunited with their distraught loved ones.
She didn’t know what she would do if she ever found herself in that set of circumstances. Which was why, her Uncle Brian had told her when he’d assigned her to this department, she was the right person for the job.
* * *
Connie broke down and cried twice during what should have been a relatively short process of filling out the form.
The second time, Kenzie kindly suggested, “Do you want to go outside and clear your head?”
But Connie bit her lower lip and shook her head, refusing the offer. “No, I want to finish filling out the form. And then I want to help you find my father.”
She could relate to that, Kenzie thought. But even so, she had to turn Connie down. She smiled patiently at the woman. “I’m afraid that it doesn’t quite work that way.”
Connie looked at her, confused. “How does it work? I don’t mean to sound belligerent,” Connie apologized. “I thought I could help, because I know all his habits. But I just want to know how you find someone.”
“A lot of ways,” Kenzie answered matter-of-factly. “We talk to people at your dad’s place of work, to his neighbors, find out if he had a club he liked to frequent more than others—”
Connie cut her off quickly, shaking her head. “He didn’t.”
“All right,” Kenzie said, continuing. “A favorite restaurant, then—”
Again Connie shook her head. “My father didn’t like fancy food and he didn’t believe in throwing his money away by having someone else cook for him when he could do a better job of it himself.”
“How about his friends?” Kenzie asked. “Did he have anyone he was close to?” she asked, already doing a mental sketch of a man who had become a loner in his later years.
Connie shook her head just as Kenzie had expected her to. “My father stopped seeing his friends once Mom had died and after a while, his friends stopped trying to get him to come out.” She sighed again. “I guess they all just gave up on him—like I did.”
“It’s not your fault,” Kenzie underscored. “And I’d still like to have a list of his friends,” she told Connie. “One or two of those friends might not have given up trying to get him to come out of his shell,” she said to the other woman.
Connie looked almost wounded. “You mean the way I gave up?”
Part of her job, the way Kenzie saw it, was to comfort the grieving. Guilt was a heavy burden to bear. Kenzie did her best to help Connie cope.
“You had your own life to live, your own grief to deal with over the death of your mother,” Kenzie insisted. “And you didn’t give up on your dad. You just gave him a time-out so he could try to deal with the situation on his own.”
Connie sighed. “When you say it that way, it doesn’t sound so bad,” she told Kenzie, a trace of gratitude in her voice.
“And it’s not,” Kenzie told her firmly. “Sometimes you can’t drag a horse to water, you have to let him see the water and then clear a path for him so that he can go to it at his own leisurely pace.”
Connie’s mouth curved. “I never thought of my father as a horse,” she commented.
“Maybe more like a mule?” Kenzie suggested with a smile.
Connie sighed. “He could be so stubborn, there was just no talking to
him.”
Kenzie nodded. “I know what you mean. I have a few relatives like that of my own,” she told the woman. She saw a little of the color returning to Connie’s thin cheeks. “Feel better?” she asked.
“A little,” Connie admitted. “I’ll feel a whole lot better once you find him,” she said.
“So will I,” Kenzie assured the other woman. When people came in to file a missing person report, she took great care in making those people feel as if this was a joint undertaking and that she was in this together with them. It seemed to help them hang on. “Now, if you could give me as many names and addresses of your dad’s friends, that would be a great help.”
“I’ve got my mother’s old address book at home. I kept it as a souvenir,” Connie explained. “Will that help?” she asked.
“That will be perfect,” Kenzie assured her.
“And you’ll find my father?” Connie asked again, desperately needing to hear Kenzie make a promise to that effect.
“We’ll do our very best to find your father,” Kenzie told her.
Connie nodded, rising to her feet. “Okay. I’ll get that address book to you today,” she promised.
“That’ll be great,” Kenzie told her.
In her opinion, Connie looked a tiny bit better as she left the office.
Now all she had to do, Kenzie thought, was to deliver on her promise and everything would be fine.
Chapter 2
“Here, you look like you could use this.”
Detective Jason Valdez placed a slightly misshapen container of coffee on the desk directly in front of his sometimes partner, Detective Hunter Brannigan.
Hunter raised his half-closed green eyes slowly from the container and fixed what passed for a penetrating look at the man who worked with him in the police department’s Cold Case Division.
“You got this from the vending machine?” Hunter went through the motions of asking even though the answer was a foregone conclusion on his part.
“No, I had a carriage drawn by four matched unicorns deliver it. Yes, it’s from the vending machine,” Jason answered. “What do you think, I’m going to drive over to the closest coffee house to get you some overpriced coffee just because there’s a fancy name embossed on the side of the container?”
Removing the lid, Hunter sniffed the inky-black coffee in the container and made a face. “This is swill,” he pronounced.
Jason took no offense. Everyone knew that the coffee from the vending machine was strictly a last resort, to be consumed when nothing else was available.
“But it’s swill that’ll open up those bright green eyes of yours,” Jason told him, sitting down at the desk that butted up against Hunter’s, “and I’m betting after the night you’ve had, you could use any help that you can get.”
Hunter moved the container aside. “How do you know what kind of a night I had?”
“Because I’m a detective,” Jason answered. “And because you always have that kind of a night, especially when it’s on a weekend. For some reason, unbeknownst to me, women seem to gravitate to you, willingly buying whatever you’re selling.”
Hunter laughed. “You’re just jealous because you’re married and Melinda would skin you alive if she even saw you looking at another woman.”
“Yeah, there’s that, too,” Jason agreed. He shook his dark head that recently sprouted a few gray hairs. He blamed that on his wife, as well. “I swear, ever since my wife got pregnant, she’s turned into this fire-breathing, suspicious monster.”
Hunter shook his head, suppressing a laugh. “There’s no accounting for some people’s taste, I guess.” And then he grew more serious. “Just don’t give her any reason to be suspicious.”
“Any reason?” Jason questioned. “She’s got me too busy running all these errands for her and going around in circles. Any free time I used to have now gets totally eaten up. I couldn’t hook up with anyone else if I wanted to—which I don’t,” he emphasized in case that point had gotten lost in the conversation.
“Just hang in there, Valdez. Once the baby comes, Melinda will turn back into that sweet little woman you married.”
Jason looked skeptically at the man sitting across from him. “You really believe that?”
Hunter lifted and then dropped his shoulders in a careless shrug. “Hey, it’s good to have something to hang on to,” he told Jason with a grin.
“I guess,” Jason murmured. “It’s for damn sure that these cold cases certainly don’t fill that void,” Valdez said. “Sometimes I wonder why we keep beating our heads against that brick wall.”
Instead of a flippant remark the way he’d expected, his partner addressed his question seriously. “Because, every once in a while, there’s a crack in that wall and we get to give someone some closure about a loved one. That, my friend, in case you’ve forgotten, is a good feeling,” Hunter said.
Without thinking, he picked up the container Jason brought him and took a sip. Hunter made a face almost immediately, setting the container down again. This time he banished it to the far corner of his desk.
“I think the vending machine people have outdone themselves. This tastes like someone’s boiled socks,” Hunter declared in disgust.
“How would you know what boiled socks taste like?” Jason asked, apparently intrigued.
Hunter never hesitated. “I have a very vivid imagination,” he answered.
James Wilson, a prematurely balding, heavyset man, peered into the squad room. Spotting whom he was looking for, he crossed the floor over to Hunter.
By the time he reached Hunter’s desk, Wilson was breathing heavily, sucking in air noisily.
“You really should see a doctor, Wilson,” Hunter said. It seemed to him that each time he saw the detective, the man just got heavier and heavier. There had to be a cutoff point.
“Yeah, yeah, you and my wife,” Detective Wilson said dismissively. He made an annoyed face. “You want to hear this or not?”
“Sure,” Jason answered, speaking for both of them. “What brings you huffing and puffing into our corner of the world, Wilson?”
Wilson looked from one detective to the other, then answered with a single word. “Rain.”
“You’re a bit late, Wilson,” Jason told the other man. “It rained yesterday. Unseasonably so,” the detective added. “Ever notice how Californians drive in the rain? Like they’ve never seen the stuff before and just want to get home before they drown.”
“Don’t mind him, he’s a transplant from New Mexico,” Hunter told the detective. “I’m sure you didn’t come all the way over here to talk about the unusual shift in the weather.”
Wilson smiled, making Hunter think of a cat that had secretly swallowed a canary. “Indirectly, I am.”
While Hunter claimed that his evenings out had no effect on him, last night had been particularly taxing. He’d gotten all of three hours’ sleep, and it was beginning to catch up with him. Opening a drawer, he checked to see if he was out of aspirin. He was.
“Wilson,” he said, closing the drawer again, “I’ve got a headache building behind my eyes and I’m not in the mood for twenty questions. Now, is this belated weather report going somewhere or not?” he asked.
Instead of answering the question, Wilson asked one of his own. “Mind if I sit?”
Hunter played along and gestured toward the chair next to his desk. “Now, what did you come all this way to tell me?”
James Wilson worked on another floor for another division, but what would have seemed close to another man was like a trek through the Himalayas to the man now sitting beside his desk. It had to have taken a lot to bring Wilson here, Hunter reasoned.
“You know that cold case you keep coming back to?” Wilson asked. When Hunter didn’t respond, Wilson added, “That first one that you picked up?”
Hunter knew exactl
y which case the other detective was referring to. It was the one that really haunted him because he could never identify the victim for a very basic reason.
“You’re talking about the man who was missing his hands and head,” Hunter said.
Like a game show host, Wilson pointed toward Hunter, then touched the tip of his nose as if the other detective’s answer was dead-on. “That’s the one. You know that rain we had yesterday?” Wilson asked.
“The rain you led with?” Hunter asked. It was a rhetorical question. “What about it?”
Wilson enjoyed having other people listen to him and it was obvious that he was stretching this out. “Well, apparently it washed away some dirt.”
“It was a torrential downpour,” Jason recalled. “A lot of dirt was washed away.”
“Yeah, but this dirt was covering up what turned out to be a shallow grave.” Wilson paused, whether for dramatic effect or because he’d temporarily run out of breath wasn’t clear.
In either case, both Hunter and Jason cried out, almost in unison: “What was in the grave?”
“Hands and a head,” Wilson informed them almost smugly.
Hunter was on his feet immediately. “Where are those hands and that head now?” he asked.
“Where do you think? The ME’s got them,” Wilson answered.
Hunter started to hurry out of the squad room, then abruptly stopped. They were two men down today, bringing their total down to two. Jason and he couldn’t both leave the squad room at the same time. He looked back at his partner, a quizzical look on his face.
The latter waved him on. “You go, Brannigan. This was your baby to begin with. I’ll man the desk and answer the phones—not that they’ll ring,” Jason added.
“You sure?” It evolved into a joint case, although it was more his than Jason’s since he had taken the case over from the retiring homicide detective who hadn’t been able to close it.
“I’m sure.” Jason grinned, looking at his friend. “Looks like the color came back to your cheeks, Brannigan. Both of our names might be on the report, but this is your case. I wouldn’t deprive you of going down to see this latest piece of the puzzle,” he told Hunter.
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