Snapped

by Laura Griffin

  She clenched her teeth and looked away.

  “Not to mention the D.A. I had to call her up at a freaking baseball game. Let me tell you how happy she was to hear from me.”

  Sophie bit her tongue and focused on looking out the window. If she opened the floodgates on her emotions, she doubted she could stem the tide. No way in hell did she plan to add crying in front of this man to her list of humiliations today.

  She dragged her tote bag into her lap and found her sunglasses. She shoved them onto her face and leaned her head against the door.

  “That’s it?” he asked. “That’s all you have to say?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “How ‘bout explaining why you hauled off and hit a police officer?”

  Her throat tightened. She remembered his hands clamping around her wrists. It had triggered something, some inner terror she didn’t know she still had, and she’d panicked. Jonah knew about her kidnapping. She would have thought he, of all people, would understand. For him to be so dense made her feel physically sick. She’d been so wrong about him.

  She closed her eyes and rested her cheek against the cool glass.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “Wake me up when we get there.”

  She drifted off. For a long while she floated in and out of consciousness, only vaguely aware of the vibration of the truck and the changes in speed. It wasn’t all that restful, but it kept her from having to keep up a conversation.

  She thought of the waves crashing against her skin. She thought of the stench of that cell. She thought of Jonah, leaning against the wall and watching her shuffle out in those hideous shoes.

  Her head jerked up and she turned to look at him.

  “What baseball game?”

  He glanced at her, obviously surprised by her sudden question after hours of silence. “Huh?”

  “You said you called the D.A. at a baseball game. What game was it?”

  “Rangers–White Sox. Why?”

  She stared at him through her sunglasses, and the fury was back. She was fully awake now. She looked out the windshield as the truck bumped over a gravel road. It was pitch dark, and the headlights illuminated only a narrow swath.

  “You waited six hours to call.” She could hardly say the words, but she knew they were true. “You told my brother not to come get me and then you made me sit in that jail.”

  His silence confirmed it.

  Sophie took off her shades and slid them into her tote bag. She hadn’t thought it was possible to be angrier than she was leaving that police station, but she was learning all sorts of things about herself today.

  Like she couldn’t bear to have her hands bound.

  Like the most shameful moment of her life was having her mug shot taken.

  Like she was incapable of peeing in front of strangers.

  She wished she’d never met Jonah Macon.

  “We’re here.”

  He drove past a grove of trees and pulled up to a camper. It was white. Old. Big, too, and Sophie was surprised to see it. She’d pictured a tiny silver Airstream, like her dad kept at his deer lease.

  Sophie got out. She ignored Jonah as she stretched her legs and tried to get her bearings.

  He came around the truck and stood in front of her, hands on hips. “You’re still mad.”

  “You’re perceptive.”

  “You want me to be honest with you?”

  “No, lie to me.”

  He looked annoyed. The headlights on his truck switched off, and they stood there, staring at each other in the dark.

  “I thought about getting you out right off the bat, but you were in the safest place you could be. And with your track record—”

  “My track record?”

  “Yeah, your track record. I tell you to stay at work, you go apartment hunting. I tell you to stay at the ER, you head for the beach. You’re a flight risk, and there’s a very dangerous person looking for you, and I’ve got too much fucking work to do to go chasing after you again if you take off. So, yes, I left you in jail for a few hours before moving heaven and earth to get you out. And this is the thanks I get!”

  He stomped up the steps to the camper and opened it with a key. She followed him inside, fuming.

  “Thank you, Jonah, for telling one of your buddies to arrest me! For having my gun confiscated! For having me strip-searched, and fingerprinted, and humiliated in front of a department full of police officers who know me, not to mention my entire family, who’s going to hear about this. Thank you for treating me like some common criminal, like some hostage, after I agreed to come out here voluntarily!” Her hands were fisted at her sides as she glared up at him in the dim light of the camper. “I wasn’t fleeing anywhere! I was returning Scott’s truck to him, with a full tank of gas, like I said I would. Because when I tell someone I’ll do something, I do it. I’m trustworthy, Jonah. If you ever took the slightest interest in getting to know me instead of just screwing me, you would know that, and none of this would have happened!”

  She stood there, chest heaving, as he gazed down at her with a steely expression. The side of his jaw twitched. He was extremely pissed.

  Well, so was she.

  She turned away from him.

  And suddenly she felt exhausted—more tired than she’d ever been in her life. She slumped into the nearest chair. It was a worn armchair, avocado green, and she didn’t think she’d ever be able to move from it.

  Jonah closed the door and locked it. For a few minutes, he moved around the camper, slinging groceries, opening and slamming cabinets, showing her just what he thought of her little speech.

  Sophie glanced around. The place was spacious, for a camper. At one end was a living room with a built-in table and a U-shaped bench. There was a cramped kitchen and what looked to be a tiny bathroom. On the far end was a queen-size bed with an army-green blanket on it.

  Sophie closed herself in the bathroom. She turned on the water and stripped naked for the third time that day. Then she stood under the spray and tried to wash away the stress. It didn’t work. She got out just as tense and furious as she’d been when she stepped in. Of course, there was no towel, so she stood in the little room drip-drying and squeezing water from her hair into the sink. Finally, she wrestled herself back into her T-shirt and panties and stalked out of the bathroom.

  The camper was dark, and Jonah was a massive lump on the left side of the bed. She stared at him and tried to tell whether he was asleep.

  He sat up and looked at her. The light from the bathroom fell across his face, and she saw his eyes linger on her damp T-shirt.

  She walked over to the empty side of the mattress, and he watched her warily.

  “You coming to bed?”

  She snatched the pillow up and took it across the room, where she tossed it down on an empty patch of carpet.

  “I’d rather sleep in hell.”

  Sophie awoke with a crick in her neck and a large man scowling down at her.

  “My dad’s here.”

  She sat up and brushed hair from her eyes. She tried to move her neck and winced at the pain.

  “How’d you sleep?” His tone was smug, and she narrowed her gaze at him.

  “Fine. You?”

  “Fine.”

  She glanced around. The bed had been straightened, and she looked longingly at the mattress. Then she glanced back at Jonah. He was still scowling.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Damn coffeepot’s not working.”

  Sophie looked over her shoulder at the kitchen. A lousy night’s sleep she could handle. Lack of coffee was another matter. She got to her feet. He handed her a blue pill and rested a cup of water on the table beside her. She took the pill without comment but couldn’t bring herself to thank him.

  “I’ll be gone all day. Stay out of trouble.” He grabbed his keys off the table and left, leaving her staring out the window after him as he trekked across the grass to meet the approaching pick
up. She recognized Wyatt Macon behind the wheel.

  Sophie watched them talk to each other through the open window. Jonah was in his full detective outfit—slacks, button-down, holster, badge. He had a big day ahead of him, apparently, despite the fact that it was Sunday.

  He was a dedicated cop. And she admired him. And as angry as she felt, she knew that she was half in love with him, too, and that scared her. Because as good a cop as he was, as good a man as he was, he could be infuriating. And controlling. And arrogant. She wasn’t sure she could handle a man like that for any length of time. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to try.

  She went into the kitchen and discovered a dismantled coffeepot in the sink beside a mug. All of it was covered in a layer of wet coffee grounds.

  Jonah had gone to war with the French press and lost.

  Sophie rinsed the pot. She found a saucepan and set some water to boil on the propane stove. As she waited, her gaze landed on a familiar gym bag sitting in the corner.

  He’d been to her apartment.

  Her chest tightened with remorse. She went over to the bag and crouched down to look through it. He’d packed T-shirts. Gym socks. Sneakers. A dizzying amount of racy underwear. Sophie sighed. What was she going to do with this man?

  She picked the most practical items she could find and got dressed. She compiled a mental to-do list and resolved to have a better day. Then she made two cups of strong black coffee and went out to greet Wyatt.

  Allison watched the sun come through the trees lining the winding highway. She passed an S-curve sign and tapped the brakes as a plastic orange fence came into view.

  Allison slowed as she neared the spot where Sophie Barrett’s Tahoe had sailed off the road. She cut a glance to the side and noticed the singed patch of brush that marked the site of the explosion. More than three days had gone by, and now Allison had even more questions than answers.

  Focus.

  She trained her gaze on the road in front of her. She worked on mapping out the day ahead. She worked on ignoring her emotions. She worked on analyzing her case objectively, instead of letting this gut-churning anger get the best of her.

  Five victims, and those were just the ones they knew about. There could be more. And it wasn’t even the body count that shocked her, it was the way in which they’d all been killed. So coldly. As if a human life was worth nothing more than the squeeze of a trigger or the toss of a match.

  She rounded a bend, and the sun flashed in her eyes. She pulled her shades from her pocket, and her fingers brushed over the business card she’d tucked there days ago at the sandwich shop.

  Allison slid on her sunglasses. She pictured Tyler Dorion, with his hearty handshake and ambitious smile. In his quest for headlines, he’d gotten in over his head. He wasn’t the first journalist to do it, but he had to be one of the youngest, and Allison couldn’t seem to get a handle on the rage that had been consuming her since she’d seen his charred remains.

  When she finally reached the Delphi Center, she was feeling calm and determined. She badged her way past the security gate and parked in the nearly empty lot. Not too many people working this holiday weekend, but she’d managed to pull in the expert she needed. She collected the brown paper evidence bag from the passenger seat and made her way up the wide marble stairs for the third time this week.

  A few minutes later, she stood inside a sterile laboratory, with a visitor’s badge clipped to her lapel and a lab-coated scientist at her elbow.

  “This is the subject’s backpack?” he asked.

  “The victim’s, yes.”

  Allison watched as Dr. David Lemberger unzipped the bag and lined up the contents neatly on a worktable, atop a piece of fresh butcher paper. As head of Delphi’s QD section, Lemberger specialized in questioned documents, and his talents included everything from tracing printer toner to authenticating ransom notes. Mia had described him as a word wizard. With his round spectacles and trimmed gray beard, he seemed to fit the image.

  She watched him gaze down at the tattered spirals of a budding reporter. “Three notebooks, eighty pages each,” he muttered, stroking his beard. “And what is it you need exactly? I assume you’ve read through these.”

  “I have, yes. They were recovered from the victim’s apartment. I’m interested in the story he was working on at the time of his death.”

  He reached for a box of gloves, but to Allison’s surprise, they were made of cloth. He must have seen her curious look.

  “Cotton,” he said. “Latex can smear pencil and ink.”

  After donning the gloves, he lifted the corner of one of the reporter’s pads. “There are some pages torn out.”

  “Exactly.” Allison looked at the torn paper caught in the spiral. “I think those pages might have been important, because of what came immediately before. In one case, he writes the name and cell phone number of another murder victim—Eric Emrick—and then starts taking notes, like from a phone interview. Next page, it cuts off.”

  Lemberger made a tsking sound as he counted the pages. “Seventy-four here, so six missing. Not necessarily consecutive, although we can find out. He used a ballpoint pen, which is good.”

  “It is?”

  “Requires more pressure. I can most likely recover the words for you.”

  Allison sighed with relief. “I was hoping you’d be able to do that. Can you rub over it with graphite or something?”

  He smiled up at her. “You’ve been watching too much television, Detective Doyle.”

  “Allison.” She’d dragged him in on a Sunday morning—the least she could do was keep this informal. “And, what? That’s not how it works?”

  “The rubbing method typically fails to visualize the indented writing and also destroys it for other, workable methods. As a general rule around here, we prefer to use nondestructive techniques when dealing with evidence.”

  “Other methods being?”

  “Oblique lighting should do the trick.”

  He walked over to the wall and switched off the lights, then took a handheld spotlight and positioned it beside the first page beneath the missing interview notes.

  “Let’s just hope all the important stuff was on the last page,” Allison said. “Deeper indentions, right?”

  “It’s easier that way, but I can go several layers deep.”

  “You can?” Allison looked at the page he was examining. The task was made more difficult by the fact that several pages’ worth of writing were overlaid. “Doesn’t the writing get all jumbled together?”

  “It does, but we can pull it apart. Determine which words go with which page based on the depth of the indentions, the angle of the writing, the meaning of the words.”

  “You can sort through all that?”

  “Absolutely.” He smiled slightly. “That’s why we’re called tracers.”

  Allison stared at the page, trying to decipher the shadows.

  “I’m seeing numbers,” she ventured.

  “Dates, it looks like. And the word ‘D-Syst’?”

  “D-Systems.” Allison’s heart skipped. “The company where the victim interned this summer and last. How are you getting that? It looks like chicken scratch to me.”

  “Years of practice,” he said. “Hold the light, please?”

  Allison tried to hold it at the same angle he had as he pulled a magnifying glass from his pocket and studied the page.

  “Something about ‘Project Shadow Tracker.’ That’s underlined three times, heavy pressure. Possibly something important.”

  Allison had never heard of it. “Are you seeing any names?” she asked hopefully. “Dates?”

  “Says here ‘07 AFG’ and a few more acronyms: SO, AR, USNS, RM.” He glanced up. “That mean anything to you?”

  “Nope.” Allison pulled a notebook from her pocket and jotted it all down.

  “I’ll prepare a report,” he told her. “But you said this is a high-priority investigation, so maybe you can at least get started.” He flipped
to the next page, but the indentions there were so faint, they were practically invisible.

  “We can try one more method. Ever heard of an Electrostatic Detection Apparatus?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s an instrument that uses a toner that collects within the indentions so they can be visualized. It’ll take me some time to complete an ESDA analysis, though. It’s a bit more complicated.” He checked his watch. “I’ll have to get back to you later today.”

  Allison gazed down at her cryptic notes. What did these letters mean? She wished she had an audio recording to work with instead of all this jumble. But she remembered what Sean had said after their meeting at D-Systems. He was an investigator, and so he investigated. Allison should adopt that attitude. This was a homicide, not a bike theft, and no one had promised it would be easy.

  She tucked her hand in her pocket and fingered the business card. She planned to keep it there as a reminder, until whoever killed Ty Dorion was in jail or hell, whichever came first.

  Jonah spotted four familiar cars when he pulled into the station and found the better part of the task force gathered around a box of doughnuts. Looked like the hub of the investigation had moved from the bullpen to the break room. Noonan’s constant hovering and spin-doctoring had the effect of quashing creativity, which was what they needed right now to crack this case open.

  “I knew Maxwell was holding out on us,” Sean said. “I should go right back there and kick his scrawny ass.”

  Allison rolled her eyes. “Perfect. Just what we need. How about a police brutality lawsuit on top of everything else?”

  Jonah stepped into the room and traded looks with Ric. “I miss something?”

  “Project Shadow Tracker mean anything to you?”

  “No. Should it?”

  “I took Dorion’s reporter notebooks to Delphi to be looked at by their questioned documents expert,” Allison said. “He uncovered a bunch of writing from an interview with Eric Emrick. Acronyms, mostly, but there are a few full words.”

  “Lemme see.” Jonah took the notebook from her.