Dead End

by Mariah Stewart

  He knew that it was Annie he’d left behind, and that sooner or later he’d have to deal with that. For now, he could simply tell her he’d been called away, and rather than making a scene at the wedding, he’d thought it best to just slip out quietly. Surely she’d understand. She was, after all, with the FBI.

  She’s also a shrink, he reminded himself, and more likely than not would see right through that smoke screen.

  Well, so be it. He’d deal with it.

  And sooner or later, they’d both have to deal with the fact that while Dylan Shields was gone, he sure as hell wasn’t forgotten.

  3

  Anne Marie sat at the red light and speed-dialed Evan’s cell phone for the fourth time. He always had his phone with him, and it was always turned on. Why wasn’t he picking up?

  Maybe he’s in a meeting and has the volume turned down. Or maybe he’s at a crime scene and can’t take the call. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was almost two in the afternoon. He could be home, sleeping. Maybe he’d been out on a case all night and had only been home for a few hours. Not unusual for a homicide detective to play catch-up during the day if he’d been up for more than twenty-four hours.

  She’d find out soon enough. She was less than six miles from West Lyndon and Evan’s townhouse.

  She closed up her phone and tossed it onto the passenger’s seat, and tried to ignore the uneasiness that had been haunting her since she’d looked for Evan at the wedding and found that he was gone.

  That had been three days ago. She hadn’t heard from him since, despite having left several messages for him on his home, office, and cell phones.

  Not a good sign. Definitely not a good sign.

  As she turned the corner onto Evan’s street, she was surprised to see his car parked out front. Annie pulled into the space behind his and turned off her engine. Walking alongside then in front of his car, she placed her hand on the hood. It was cold. The car had been there for a while.

  Okay, so I was probably right about him sleeping.

  She slipped the key he’d given her three months ago, when their relationship passed from occasional to steady, into the lock. Assuming that he was in fact asleep, she opened the door and quietly entered the townhouse then paused in the foyer. From the basement, she could hear music. Loud blues, which grew louder with every step she took in the direction of the steps leading downstairs.

  “Evan?” she called.

  “Yo!”

  Well, if nothing else, he was awake.

  She descended the steps into the long, narrow space Evan had been working on for the past year. His goal was to have a fully operational family room-complete with wide-screen TV, a bar, and a built-in stereo-before next Christmas. For months, he’d barely had time to work on it. Today, he appeared to be determined to make up for lost time.

  In the center of the room, Evan stood over a table saw. At his feet, a pile of two-by-fours was stacked unevenly. He turned on the saw and proceeded to cut first one, then another, of the lengths of wood until they were all of a uniform size. Annie sat on the third step from the bottom, watching the pile grow, making mental bets with herself as to how many minutes would pass before he would turn around and talk to her.

  Finally, she stood up, unplugged the saw, and turned off the radio.

  “Why, yes, I was able to find a ride home from the wedding, nice of you to inquire.”

  “Any one of a dozen people would have been more than happy to see you home on Friday night. I knew you’d have no problem getting a ride.” No longer able to cut, he started to stack the wood in an obsessively neat pile, an attempt on his part, she knew, to concentrate on anything other than her.

  “That’s it? That’s all you have to say?” Her eyes narrowed. “You knew someone else would take me home after you dumped me?”

  “I didn’t dump you. I got called out.”

  “Not another…?”

  “Yup.”

  “Same as the others?”

  “The same-but different this time.”

  “Are you going to elaborate?”

  “Same MO. Throat slashed. Vic is the same age as the others, but no one seems to know who she is. No ID. No one’s reported her missing. And she’s Hispanic. The others have all been white, reported missing before the bodies were found. This girl, it’s like she came out of nowhere. I’m not sure what to make of that.”

  “You’re sure it’s the same guy?”

  “Like I said, same MO. Same cause of death, the missing shoes-”

  “Any chance of a copycat?”

  “We never released the details, no one outside the investigation knows about the shoes.”

  “I realize this is an important case, but you could have taken one minute on Friday night to tell me you were leaving.”

  “I couldn’t have gotten to you even if I’d tried.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you were in the Shields zone. No outsiders allowed.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Is it? I did come over to the table, but I couldn’t get through the throng. Couldn’t even get your attention, you were so caught up with whatever story whichever Shields was telling at the time.”

  “If I didn’t know you better, I’d think you were jealous.”

  “Maybe you don’t know me so well, after all.”

  “Are you serious? You’re jealous?”

  “Let’s just put it this way, Annie. It’s really tough having to compete with a dead man for your attention. Especially when that dead man was, by all accounts, an absolute paragon of-”

  “Stop it, Evan. Just… stop it.”

  She turned her back and started toward the stairs. She got up to the second step and turned back to him.

  “I will say this one time, so listen up.” She took a deep breath. “If you are waiting for me to tell you that I did not love Dylan, you are going to be very disappointed. I did love him. I loved him with all my heart. I planned to marry him and grow old with him. When he was killed, I thought I’d never feel that way about anyone, ever again. I accepted that.”

  “Annie…”

  “Don’t. You started this, you will let me finish.”

  She came down off the steps.

  “The first time I met you, I knew how I was going to end up feeling about you. Don’t ask me to explain it because I can’t. But I met you, and I thought, Well, now, how about that? Lightning can strike twice, apparently. Then we began dating, and for a time, I was confused, because I wasn’t sure I understood how anyone could be lucky enough to find that kind of love more than once. And I knew that I loved you, pretty much right from the time we started seeing each other. There was just something in you… something so good and honest, something that just spoke to my heart.” She took a long breath.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, but there was something else I saw in you that I saw in Dylan as well, and I don’t mean this to sound as if I’m comparing you to him. I’m not. It wasn’t that you were alike. It’s more in the way he cared about what he did. It might sound corny, but he took the whole business of fighting crime very seriously. He was always on the side of the victims, always stood for those who couldn’t stand for themselves. I loved that in him. I saw all those same things in you-that same determination, that same dedication-and I loved it in you, too. I really felt that in spite of what had happened, I would have my happily-ever-after. With you.”

  Evan rubbed the back of his neck, then shoved his hands into his pockets. He just didn’t know what to say.

  “I’m sorry that you felt left out on Friday. I have to be very honest with you-I did feel uncomfortable, after a while, the way Dylan’s family was turning my sister’s wedding into a sort of memorial service. But you have to understand that this is a very close family. In some ways, they are still trying to come to grips with Dylan’s death. His father will probably never accept it. He’s still reeling from it. I feel bad for all of them. It hasn’t bee
n easy.”

  “You didn’t seem to be protesting too much when I saw you.”

  “What was I supposed to do, Evan? Tell them all to just get over it, to get on with their lives?”

  “You didn’t have to sit there all night and be part of the wake. It looked to me that you fit right in.”

  “I did not know what else to do, Evan. I did not know how to gracefully walk away. They see me as a link to him. Especially Thomas. Dylan loved me; they have to love me, too. If he hadn’t died when he did, I’d have been one of them.”

  “You are one of them.”

  “This is a family that has been shattered by a death they believe wasn’t supposed to happen. It makes it all the more difficult for them to accept because they still don’t really know what happened that night. That wound is still festering. That one of their own was murdered, and none of them-none of the big bad FBI Shieldses-has been able to bring his killer to justice.”

  “Someone else said something like that, someone I was talking to near the bar. He said that the FBI still didn’t know what went wrong.”

  “True. And it haunts everyone, everyone who knew him.”

  “Are you haunted by him, Annie?”

  “Not by him, maybe, but for him, I guess. I wish I did know what happened that night. I wish I did know who killed him, and why. I wish there could be justice for him. It was set up to look like it was part of that undercover drug deal, but no one ever thought that felt right, and no one has been able to come up with an alternative that makes any sense, either.”

  “What didn’t feel right? It’s not unusual to have an undercover op go bad.”

  “The dealers Dylan and Aidan were meeting didn’t arrive until after Dylan had been shot. They pulled into the alley just after, and of course, the agents in the building across the alley opened fire, and-”

  “So you’re thinking if the dealers had been onto the op, they wouldn’t have shown up at all. If anything, they’d have sent their henchmen to kill Dylan and Aidan and simply disappeared.”

  “Exactly. But these men came to the buy, just like they’d planned. And they all denied having known that Dylan and Aidan were law. They all swore they had no clue.”

  “Of course they’d deny it. No one in his right mind admits to setting up the FBI.”

  “True. But no way, if they’d shot an FBI agent minutes before, would they have shown up at all. That’s just plain stupid, and these guys have been at this a long time. They’re far from stupid.” She shrugged. “And that’s what’s so hard to accept for everyone. Dylan’s killer got away with murder, and no one has the slightest idea who he is. That’s what keeps it raw, keeps it stuck in everyone’s craw. Not knowing why, or who.”

  “Does anyone really think they’ll ever answer those questions?”

  “Realistically, no. But they’ll never stop asking, never stop talking about it.”

  Evan shook his head somewhat vaguely.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry for what happened to him, I swear I am. But I can’t fight them for the rest of my life, Annie. There are just too damned many of them. Your sister married into the family; they’re always going to be around.” He took a deep breath. “I’m always going to feel as if I’m sleeping in a dead man’s bed. I’m just not sure how long I can go on doing that.”

  “Oh God, Evan, I had no idea you felt that way. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry I can’t change the situation,” she said softly. “But I can’t change what was or what is. I’m so sorry, for both of us. I was hoping that you and I…”

  Her voice trailed off and she made a gesture-a sort of “I give up” flutter of her hands-before going up the steps and directly to the front door. Once in her car, she sat quietly for a few moments, trying to compose herself, fighting back the tears that had been threatening to fall, trying to stop the hollow feeling inside her from spreading, but it soon engulfed her. With a sense of sorrow and regret, she put the car in gear and headed toward the airport. It was going to be a long trip back to Virginia.

  Evan sat on his back steps, his forearms resting on his thighs, mindlessly peeling the label from his bottle of beer, dropping the little scraps of paper at his feet. The deck he’d started building in the spring was just as he’d left it two months ago, mostly frame, some little bit of floorboard. Incomplete, like the basement.

  Like his life.

  Well, he’d almost had it all, hadn’t he? The girl, the job, the future he’d always dreamed of. Then, of course, he had to go and let that green-eyed monster take over his intellect, had to go and open his big mouth. Well, that was the end of that. Shit, he must have sounded like a bratty adolescent who’d caught his girl walking with another guy to her locker.

  He blew out a long breath that was filled with exasperation and self-doubt. He had some big decisions to make, and he’d have to make them now, before things between Annie and him got any worse.

  Like they could get worse.

  He went inside, dropped the empty beer bottle into the glass recycling bin, and got himself another, then went back outside. He walked the deck frame, balancing carefully as he followed the narrow supports that would eventually be covered with flooring.

  If I get that far.

  He stood at one end, the end where he’d planned on building steps that would go into the narrow backyard. A few months ago, back in the early spring, he and Annie had stood out here and discussed flower beds. She’d been excited about the prospect, and they’d spent an afternoon talking about how he would go about digging beds around the entire perimeter of the yard so that she could plant her favorites-roses, peonies, hollyhocks. All the staples of an old-fashioned garden, she’d told him, just like the one her mother had planted in the tiny yard of their twin home in Philadelphia ’s University City back when her father was a professor at Drexel. Annie’s cheeks had flushed with the joy of that memory, and her eyes had sparkled at the prospect of re-creating her mother’s garden.

  Evan had dug up one section that weekend, a short piece across the back face, and the following day, Annie had gone to the nursery and bought three peonies, which they’d planted together.

  “The man at the nursery said that they won’t bloom for a few years, but that’s okay.” She’d smiled up at him. “We can wait them out together. Just think how much we’ll appreciate those first flowers when they finally bloom…”

  That had been the last time they’d worked on it. The responsibilities that came with both their jobs had intervened. Now Annie’s garden lay before him, just one more loose end in his life. Just one more thing he’d started, but never got around to finishing.

  Evan put the beer down on the back-porch steps and went into his garage. He emerged a minute later, carrying a shovel. He went straight to one side of the fence, walked off a depth of three feet, and began to dig. When he finished with one side, he began to dig along the other, until the entire fence was framed with a newly dug bed.

  He stood in the middle of the yard, panting slightly from exertion. If she came back, the garden would be ready for her to plant.

  He leaned upon the shovel handle and asked himself just how likely it was that she’d come back.

  “Fat chance, Crosby,” he muttered aloud. “Why would she?”

  Because she loves me. His inner voice spoke without hesitation.

  Dragging the shovel, he walked back to the porch, took a long swig of lukewarm beer, and told himself something he already knew.

  The ball is in my court. First, I need to decide how I feel about her.

  Do I love her? Yes.

  Do I want her? Yes.

  How far am I willing to go for her?

  As far as it takes…

  But how, he wondered, could they plan a life together, with the specter of her dead fiancé standing between them?

  As long as questions about Dylan’s life remained unanswered, Evan knew he and Annie could not move forward, could not plan a life together. It was as simple as that.

  “O
kay, then. So that’s the bottom line.” He muttered the words aloud, acknowledging what had to be done.

  Maybe he’d known all along. Maybe Friday night had just brought it all into focus.

  He dialed Annie’s cell phone and was disappointed when he got her voice mail. Taking a deep breath, he began.

  “Annie, I’m sorry. I acted like a fool. A very immature fool. I’m trying to put myself in your place, and I guess maybe I’d feel the same way. If something happened to you… well, I doubt I’d ever rest until I found the truth. I’d owe you that much. Just as you owe Dylan. So. We need to talk.”

  He paused, then added, before he hung up, “I love you, Annie. With all my heart. I’m not willing to spend the rest of my life without you. If finding Dylan’s killer is what we need to do in order for this thing to work between us, then let’s do it. Let’s try to figure it out so that Dylan can be at peace. And so can we…”

  He tried to think of something else to say, then realized he’d said it all. He disconnected the call and slipped the phone back into his pants pocket. There was still another hour or so of daylight. The local nursery was only ten minutes away. Maybe he’d have time to pick out a rosebush or two.

  On his way to his car, his phone rang.

  “ Crosby.” He smiled, anticipating the sound of her voice.

  “Evan, we need you. We’ve found another body…”

  “Where?” His adrenaline began to flow, and Annie’s garden was, once again, forgotten.

  4

  It was four in the morning before Evan had a chance to check his messages. His message to Annie had been received-apparently well received, since she’d asked him to return the call, regardless of the time.

  “Hi.” She answered the phone on the third ring, her voice heavy with sleep.

  “Hi.”

  “You still on the job?”

  “Yeah.” He glanced around at the crowd of law enforcement personnel that seemed to grow by the minute.

  “Like the others?”