by Mark Stone
“There’s more to life than money,” I growled.
“I’m not talking about money,” Peter said. “I’m talking about safety and stability. You spent the night in the hospital, didn’t you? And, unless I’m mistaken, your wife is now in a similarly dangerous line of work.”
My mouth fell open. I tried to think of something, anything to come back at him with. My mind was a blank, though.
“He might not know me, but he’ll grow to know me. He might even grow to love me,” Peter said. “And that might be newer to him than I’d like to believe.” He shook his head again. “I can promise you I’d never be the kind of person who’d go to a lawyer asking for my rights to be terminated, that’s for sure. And here I was thinking Charlotte was the kind of woman who would never do something like that.”
Peter stepped away from the doorway, though I couldn’t think clearly enough to move.
“I came here hoping you might be on my side, thinking you might see me wanting to do the right thing and want to help out,” Peter said. “Having you with him would certainly do a lot to ease Isaac’s transition, but I see now that it’s not going to happen. I see now that you value hating me more than the future of your nephew.” He walked away, muttering as he did. “I guess there really was no one in Isaac’s life who put him first.”
16
“Would you like to explain to me just what the hell you were thinking?” I asked Justin Knight, my eyes wide and my heart beating a thousand times per minute if it was beating at all.
“Calm down, Dillon,” Boomer said from his seat right next to me at the coffee shop where I’d convinced Justin to meet me. Well, ‘convince’ was a strong word. What I did was scream at the man until I was blue in the face and tell him that if he didn’t come to me right this minute, I was going to pull his spleen out through his throat. They might have been harsh words, especially seeing as how they were directed at someone I considered to be one of my best friends, but this was a serious situation.
I had just been told off by my half-brother, and if that wasn’t bad enough, the source of the conversation was the absolute most important thing to me in the world.
“I won’t calm down, Boomer,” I said without turning to look at him. My attention, all of it, had to be focused on Justin. It was all I could do not to smack him across the face. “This is about Isaac. This is about Justin putting my nephew in danger.”
“I did no such thing,” Justin said sternly swallowing hard and looking over at Boomer, who insisted on coming with me after Rebecca called him, letting him know just how furious I was about the whole thing. “I would never put any kid in danger, much less one who is as close to me as Isaac is.”
“Bull!” I said, slamming my hand against the outdoor table and garnering looks from the fellow customers, all of whom were trying to enjoy drinks and appetizers against the backdrop of a street that looked out at the Gulf. “If you were close to him, you wouldn’t have done what you did!”
“Don’t tell me what I feel, Dillon,” Justin said, pointing at me with his index finger. “I almost married that woman. In a different world, I would have been Isaac’s stepfather.”
“All the more reason why you should have known how dangerous bringing Peter Storm into this was,” I replied, my voice higher than I would have liked it. Still, I was upset and this was better than slapping the tabletop again.
“I didn’t bring him into anything,” Justin said. “Charlotte came to me, just like I told you. She asked me to look into terminating her parental rights, and when that happens, I’m obligated to inform the other birthparent. Do you think I wanted to? I dated Charlotte for a long time, Dil. I know the woman. I know what she thought of Peter, and I know that she would have rather died than see her son with him.”
“And you still told him about what she did,” I roared, lifting my hand to hit the table again. Boomer grabbed my fist before I was able to bring it down, though, stopping my motion completely.
“I’m friends with the lady who owns this restaurant,” he said. “I’d like to keep it that way, if you don’t mind. As it turns out, letting my detective beat the hell out of her property probably isn’t conducive to that.” He shook his head. “Now, I understand that you’re upset, and I sure as hell get why, but everybody is going to have to use their inside voices.” He looked from me to Justin and back again. “Is that clear?”
“You do understand what’s important here, right?” I asked, glaring at Boomer. “Peter is Isaac’s biological father. He’s also one of the richest people in the city, one of the best connected people. We’ve seen, time and time again, just what sort of strings he can pull. If you think he can’t get custody of that boy, then you’re dreaming.”
“I know that,” Boomer said almost mournfully. “But that’s above my paygrade.”
“What?” I balked, infuriated. “Boomer, you’re the chief of police.”
“But I’m not a judge and neither is Justin,” he responded. “All any of us can do is our job. I’ll run this precinct, you do your damnedest to find Charlotte, and Justin will cater to his clients.”
I stared at the lawyer. “Not to sound like a kid’s song or anything, but one of those things is not like the others,” I growled.
“Not to you, it isn’t,” Justin sighed. “But that doesn’t make what I do any less valuable. I get that you don’t agree with what I did in regards to Isaac and Peter, but I can’t change what is. You’re right to say that Peter has a decent shot at getting custody, but that’s because-as you say- Isaac is his biological son. In my experience, the courts do their best to keep families together.”
“He’s not his family,” I said quickly. “I’m his family.”
“I know that,” Justin said. “I’m just not sure a judge will see it that way.”
I blinked hard, my entire world shattering at my feet. “Then we’ll make him see it that way,” I said, feeling my phone buzz in my pocket. “You say you have Isaac’s best interest at heart, Justin? You’re going to have to prove it.”
“What do you need?” he asked without the slightest hesitation in his voice.
“I need you to do your job,” I answered. “Make a case for me to take over as Isaac’s legal guardian. If I don’t find Charlotte, God forbid, then at least I’ll know I did all I can for my nephew’s future.”
I pulled the phone from my pocket. It was from Jack and it read: I might have found something.
“Until then,” I said, standing and nodding at the men. “I’m going to work as hard as I can to make sure that never happens.”
17
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said, looking at Jack Lacey as I ducked under the caution tape that designated Charlotte’s house as an active crime zone. The place was just as it had been the last time I’d seen it. Which was to say that it was ridiculously neat, insanely welcoming, and studded with pictures of people I knew and cared about. In fact, I was pretty sure I caught a faint whiff of Charlotte’s perfume as I walked into the living room. It would have been enough to send me into a spiral of sorrow if things weren’t so dire already that I knew I needed to keep myself together.
“I’m not?” Jack asked, shrugging at me. “I thought I was a cop now.”
“You know that’s not what’s going on” I answered, settling beside him. “You work for the police department temporarily as a consultant to me.” I shook my head. “And, if I’m not here, then you technically don’t have anything to consult. So, like I said, you’re not supposed to be here.”
“Seems like you’re splitting hairs to me, Storm,” Jack said, grinning at me. “Not that it matters. This is far from the first time I’ve been in a woman’s house when I wasn’t supposed to.” He looked back at the door. “Not the first time caution tape was involved either.”
“You’re very worldly,” I muttered, glaring at the man.
“I’m in a hurry, is what I am,” he said. “And once you’ve seen why, you probably will be too.” He turned and
headed down the hallway which led to Charlotte’s bedroom. “Which makes me wonder where the hell you were exactly. I figured you’d be burning the midnight oil working on this, but I haven’t so much as heard a peep from you in hours. Are you losing your edge there, Storm?”
“I’m not sure how much my edge has to do with anything,” I answered honestly, passing by the open door to Isaac’s room and glancing in at it. My nephew’s room was just what you’d imagine when thinking about a young boy’s living space. Where the rest of the house was neat and put together, Isaac’s room was the sort of messy men never seem to grow out of, regardless of how old they get. His covers were thrown haphazardly across the bedroom, his shoes were in a pile in the corner, and a picture frame had fallen and was cracked on the floor. As strange as it was, the mess made me yearn for the boy, making me miss a relationship that hadn’t even been taken from me, yet. Still, if Isaac was forced to live with Peter, it could mean that everything changed. It could mean that the boy I loved more than myself might disappear, replaced by someone hardened by circumstance and fed a steady diet of the wrong sorts of values.
“Things have come up,” I said quietly. “Charlotte’s disappearance has opened up a whole new can of worms.”
“That tends to happen,” Jack said. “You’re talking about the boy, right?”
I blinked hard, looking over at the man who, to my surprise, kept walking past the door to Charlotte’s room and toward the kitchen. “How did you know that?”
“I’m the Finder, Storm,” he said, smiling at me again. “As in, ‘more than one person’. This isn’t my first case looking for a single mother. As soon as they go missing, the first question everybody has is what’s going to happen to the kids. Normally, family swoops right in and grabs them, but the only family Charlotte had was the kid, and the only other family the kid has is that sonofabitch brother of yours. I figure people are either nudging at Peter to step up and he’s backing away, which would piss you off. Or, worse than that, he actually wants to step up for a change, and that’s scary the hell out of you. Since I don’t see much about your face that’s righteously indignant today, I’m going to guess the latter is true.”
“You’re good at this,” I muttered.
“I wish I wasn’t,” he answered. “At least, in this case. Not that anybody with a lick of sense would ask me my opinion, but for my dollar, I’d say that kid is better off with you than anybody on the whole damn planet, save his mother, of course.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “And I’m working on it but that’s not why I’m here. You texted me saying you found something.” We walked into the kitchen. Jack leaned lazily against the counter. “Mind telling me what that is?”
“I said I was hoping to find something,” he answered. “And I don’t think I did, unfortunately.”
“What?” I asked, narrowing my eyes and throwing my hands into the air. “That’s absolutely not what you said. I was in the middle of something, Jack, something important.”
“I know,” he said, his face taking on a serious expression. “How about we have some coffee, and we’ll see if we can’t calm you down.”
“Are you out of your mind?” I asked. “I don’t want any damn coffee. I want to-”
As I spoke, he picked a fork up from the counter and jammed it into the power outlet. A spark flew from the wall and the lights went out.
“What the hell, Jack?” I gasped. “You could have electrocuted yourself.” I shook my head hard as I walked toward him. “Why would you even do that? Have you lost your-” Looking at me and putting the pieces together, I understood what I was looking at, what I had been listening to. “Someone was watching us?” I asked, tilting my head to the side.
“There we go,” he said, rubbing his obviously burned fingers and looking over at me. “I knew it wouldn’t take the great Dillon Storm very long to figure out what was going on here.” He dropped the fork back onto the counter. “I was looking in the house earlier and found a damn surveillance system. As far as I can tell, it has at least three cameras running throughout the house, complete with microphones. It’s a live feed, and it’s constantly running. Someone has been watching Charlotte and Isaac, Dillon. I don’t know how long it’s been going on, but it’s definitely happening.”
My body shuddered as I thought about that,-about the insane invasion of privacy that was-about how dehumanizing it would have been if Charlotte had found out about it.
“Where’s the hub?” I asked, my hands balling into fists of fury at my sides.
“The wires feed up toward the roof,” he said. “So, I’m guessing the whole thing is centered in the attic somewhere. Does Charlotte use her attic much?”
“As far as I know, she just uses it for storing Christmas decorations,” I answered. “I’d bet she hasn’t been up there since last January.”
“We need to be get the hell up there then,” he said. “We need to find out exactly what sort of setup we’re dealing with.”
I nodded at Jack and rushed into the living room. Grabbing the string hanging down in the corner of the space, I yanked hard, unleashing a ladder that fell between Jack and me which led up to the attic. As the room was opened up, I heard a strange and soft humming coming from above. Grabbing my gun, I looked back at Jack.
“Wait here,” I said, nodding at the man. Then, climbing up the steps, I gasped at what I saw. There was an entire room: a makeshift bed, a hotplate, a laptop and a set of headphones, even bowls of half eaten food littering the floor, half eaten fresh food.
Someone had been here. Someone had been living here in Charlotte’s attic, and she very likely didn’t even know it.
18
“This is insane,” I said, my pulse pounding and my heart racing as I walked through the attic. I looked at boxes and boxes of things. There were the Christmas decorations and plastic tree that I, myself, put into boxes and lugged up here after delivering Isaac’s Christmas present to him last year. There were chests filled to the brim with Charlotte’s shoes and Isaac’s old baby clothes. There were even photo albums that Charlotte had carefully crafted. I had flipped through them before, and doing so would provide almost a linear experience of her life. There were pictures from her childhood, pictures from our time together, pictures from her pregnancy, and pictures from Isaac’s time as a baby. They went all the way up to just a few years ago, and as I moved through the pages now, all I could think was that whoever lived here secretly had very likely done the same thing.
His hands were all over these items. His feet had fallen on the same places on the floor that mine were falling on right now. But his intentions were likely very different. I wanted the best for Charlotte and her son. I worked hard to make sure they had the best life possible. This man, he wanted to lie to them. He wanted to take advantage, and if he was also the person responsible for her disappearance, he wanted to take her and either keep her forever or kill her and do away with her body.
The thought of it all was making me sick, and for the first time, I wondered if Boomer was wrong in thinking I was the right person for this job. What if my closeness here wasn’t a boon? What if it was the thing that was going to stop me from seeing all of this clearly? What if this was the case that had broken me?
“Dillon,” Boomer’s voice sounded from behind me. “Find anything over there?”
After stumbling upon the hidden home, I called Boomer, of course. He came immediately, bringing Jonah along to take a look at the computer before we hauled it into evidence.
Nothing out of the ordinary,” I said, taking a deep breath and steeling my expression before I turned around. I might have been having doubts about myself, but I sure as hell wasn’t going to give up, and I saw little need in letting Boomer think I was off my game. “Which says a hell of a lot, given what’s going on here.” Blinking hard, I asked the question that had been welling up in my head since the minute I set eyes on the secret room in this place. “Why the hell wasn’t this found earlier, Boom?”
/> Boomer stepped toward me. He knew I was upset. More than that, he knew I was right. This was a place of interest. It was the home of a missing woman. It should have been searched from top to bottom the second a team of officers came here. It shouldn’t have taken this long. Jack Lacey and I shouldn’t have been the ones to find it. I should have had this information already. Without it, I was just spinning my wheels.
“I’m going to find that out, Dil,” he said with as much confidence as he could muster at the moment, given the fact that someone had dropped the ball on this.
“I’m sure you will,” I answered, glaring at him. “Though, let’s be honest, the fault with this lies with one person. Who did you have head up the search of this house, Boomer?”
“Let me deal with this, Dillon,” he said. “It’s not your job to discipline other officers. That falls on me.”
“Maybe so, but I can’t do my job if they don’t do theirs,” I answered. ‘I want to know who did this so I know better than to follow breadcrumbs they leave out for me next time.”
“There won’t be a next time,” Boomer said. “When I’m done, the person responsible for this mistake won’t have to wonder how bad it was. I promise you that.”
“Boomer, I-”
“I’m your boss. You don’t get to tell me how to do my job, Dillon,” Boomer said. “Now, get your ass over here and listen to Jonah. You might learn something you need to know.”
I grimaced at my friend and did as he asked. Shooting Jack a meaningful look, I motioned for him to follow suit. If this had taught me anything, it was that Jack Lacey was worth my time. He could be invaluable in this investigation. Because of that, I wanted him to hear everything I was about to hear. It would save me the trouble of having to get him up to speed.