by Dale Mayer
“It looks like he had a wife at least. I didn’t see any sign of children.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” she said. “Because that would really suck if the bad guy killed off some little kid’s father at the same time.”
“I don’t think the killer particularly cared,” Baylor said.
“At least somebody is there with her. Are you expecting her to leave?”
“It sounded like they were packing her up to move her somewhere else.”
“Maybe to be with friends and family.”
“I would hope so,” he said quietly.
She nodded. “When there’s a disaster in the family, family is there to get you through it all,” she murmured.
“Speaking of that, is there somebody you want to call?”
She shook her head. “There was just the three of us, and now there’s just me,” she said sadly.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“I am too, but nothing we can do about it at this point. I didn’t realize my mother was so ill or at least that close to death,” she said. “My father’s death is just a shock all the way around.”
“And yet you’re handling it quite well.”
“No, I think I’m just delaying it,” she said. “I’ll deal with it all when I get home and get into a better situation, where I can actually grieve,” she said.
“That’s probably for the best,” he said.
Sipping her coffee, she sat and watched as he did a bunch more work. “Is Hudson sleeping?”
“He was,” he said. “Then he went out to get breakfast.”
She immediately lit up at the idea of food, then remembered her family, who would no longer have meals to share. She sagged back down again, faced with the reality of her situation.
Glancing up over his laptop, he frowned at her.
She shrugged. “Oh, it’s just reality again,” she said. “Finding out that what I hoped for which wouldn’t come to pass actually already did. I was doing fine until I remembered,” she said sadly. She crossed her arms over her chest, then slumped lower in the chair. “Can we go home today?”
“No, not yet,” he said. “I think the plan may be for tomorrow.”
She winced at that. “So what will we do all day?”
“We’ll stay here,” he said, as she quietly looked out the window.
“That might not be the easiest thing,” she said. “I’m bound to go stir-crazy.”
“I’m sure,” he said, “but we can’t do anything about it. The plans to be made to coordinate a flight for us are kind of a big deal.”
“Of course.”
“Remember. We’re now traveling with two coffins.”
“I’m hardly likely to forget,” she snapped. And then she sat back again. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t take my temper out on you.”
“Well, if you can’t take it out on me, who can you take it out on?” he asked. “I won’t take offense. And I’m sorry I have to bring it up, but the facts of the issue remain. Two coffins come home with us, and that’ll take some preparatory time and paperwork.”
“Right,” she said. “I was forgetting about all the regulations that have to be waded through.”
“It’s hard, I know, and I’m sorry.”
She nodded, and, as she stared out the window again, her mind churned with emotions. “I’m just a little bit of a mess,” she said.
“I know,” he said. “You’re totally allowed under these circumstances. Just try to relax.” Just then a repetitive knock came on the door, and then it opened to reveal Hudson, carrying a large bag of food.
She immediately hopped up, walked over, and took the big bag from him. “Gosh, how many are we feeding?” she asked.
“We could have a few more of the guys coming in,” Hudson said. Even as he walked in, another stranger was behind him.
She looked at him and said, “Hi, I don’t think I know you.”
“I’m Dane,” he said, reaching out a hand and giving her the gentlest of smiles.
“Was it you who stood watch outside, while I slept last night?”
He chuckled. “Yes, that was me,” he said. “And it was my pleasure.”
She smiled. “Of course you’d say that,” she said. “So polite.”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, thank you,” she said. “I didn’t feel right about Baylor going out alone last night. So I pitched a fit and insisted that Hudson go with him.”
The men just grinned and nodded.
She took the bag back to the table and looked at Baylor pointedly and his work filling the table. “Excuse me, but you’re in the way.”
He looked at the food, looked at her, then rolled his eyes. “Pardon me.” Quickly, he picked up his laptop and paperwork, then moved it off to the side.
Opening the bag, she pulled out multiple dishes. “Interesting fare.”
“Hey, at this hour, not a whole lot of choices,” Hudson said.
“It looks lovely, Hudson.” She smiled and said, “Thank you so much.”
*
Baylor watched Gizella as she set up the food and as everybody picked out a few offerings that appealed and sat down to eat. She was doing a pretty decent job of holding back her grief, but she was edgy, and that fuse would be easy to light and would cause a big flare-up. He knew that grief was one of those things that could sneak up and attack you when you least expected. Even when you thought you were dealing with it very well. And she was still in the very first stages.
Even though her mother had been on that list of potential early deaths that were expected, Gizella hadn’t believed it would come to pass. And that was based on her mother’s own words, instead of the doctors and her mother’s eternal willingness to avoid the truth. Somehow the mother had managed to keep her diagnosis from her daughter, probably after the last checkup. At the same time, her father’s death was a complete shock and was something Gizella was unprepared for, not only mentally but also emotionally. She had a lot that she needed to sort through with her father, and now that opportunity had been taken from her.
That would be the hardest thing in all this. Everyone thought there was plenty of time to make peace with someone. But all too often that never came to pass, and opportunities that could have led to healing remained open wounds that never quite closed.
Baylor had seen it time and time again, and he knew better than to walk away from somebody after an argument. It was so important to make sure that healing happened because there were times when life happened, and people were lost forever, and you could then do nothing about it.
Too many times he’d seen situations where someone had died, and the other person was completely racked with guilt because they’d had an argument the night before, and they’d never had a chance to resolve it. It was always a hard realization to know their last words together had been harsh rather than full of love.
He could only hope that Gizella would have an easier time of it. She had a lot of anger issues with her father, so she would have to adapt, and, to a certain degree, it would just take some time.
He bit down on his breakfast wrap—or whatever it was, and didn’t really care. It was food. It was filling, and he was tired and needed sustenance.
He really loved to cook when he was home. He loved to barbecue and enjoyed the barbecues hosted by Mason and Tesla at their place. Mason loved to barbecue as well. They often got into cook-offs and even rib competitions. That was his kind of outdoor respite. He loved being with his buddies and all the camaraderie that went with it. That all the families were expanding made him enjoy it even more.
He studied Gizella. While breakfast was happening, she stayed quiet, focused on her food, trying to keep her emotional turmoil at bay. He saw that, although she’d slept, she hadn’t really had much in the way of restorative sleep. Dark circles were under her eyes, and her grief pulled on her features. His heart went out to her. The double loss was an unexpected twist that nobody could have anticipated. He suddenly became aware o
f something he’d heard Dane say. He looked over at him. “Wait, what was that last bit?”
“We pulled more cameras farther out of the city,” he said, “tracking one of the vehicles that was on the dock at the time the boat came ashore.”
“Did you find anything?” Baylor asked.
Dane nodded grimly. “Yes, a driver hopped out at one of the villages not too far from here,” he said. “He went into another building and never came back out.”
“Define never came back out,” he said, slowly lowering his hand with the wrap.
“As in, he never came back out. The vehicle sat there for the next twenty-four hours before somebody else got into it and drove it away.”
“Interesting,” Baylor said. “Are you thinking that, whoever it was, he might have been killed?”
“It’s hard to imagine what other options we have.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Was this one of the guys on the ship?”
“It looks like it. But we didn’t see anybody else coming off.”
“Unless he got off early.”
“And that’s possible too.”
“It’s also possible they are cleaning up,” Hudson added.
“Yeah, sure. Wouldn’t be the first time. Particularly if we’ve got a government-sanctioned hit or something. They can’t have anybody left alive, possibly talking.”
“Which is what I suspect.”
“Then we need to go find this building and where the vehicle was.”
“We’re just waiting for you to finish eating,” Hudson said, with a laugh, pointing to everybody else’s plates.
Baylor realized everybody else was completely ready, including Gizella. “Wow,” he said, standing up, popping the last of his breakfast into his mouth. He walked to the kitchen, washed his hands, and drank two big glasses of water. Turning, he said, “Let’s go.”
On that note, everybody but Dane got up.
Dane turned, looked over at Gizella, and said, “I’ll stay here to look after you.”
“Great,” she said. “You realize I probably don’t need a babysitter.”
“Maybe not,” he said cheerfully. “But I started with this job, so …”
She frowned, looked over at Baylor. He smiled and said, “He’s safe.”
“Of course he’s safe,” she said, with a shrug. “He’s part of your team.”
Baylor was surprised at the trust she automatically extended to everybody on his team. “Yes, he is that,” he said. “And we’ll be back soon.”
“What does soon mean?” she asked.
“A few hours,” he said, motioning at Dane. “Unless Dane wants to go, and I’ll stay behind.”
With a quick grin lighting the dark depths of his eyes, Dane shook his head. “Oh no, I’m always happy to visit with a beautiful lady.”
Gizella snorted at that. “Don’t tell me that line actually works for you.”
“I don’t need any lines to work for me,” he said cheerfully. “I have the most beautiful woman in the world waiting for me at home.”
She smiled. “Well, that’s nice,” she said. “It’s always nice to see a happily married man.”
“The marriage hasn’t occurred yet, but it’ll happen pretty damn soon,” he said.
“Really?” Baylor asked him. “I hadn’t heard.”
“Well, we’ve changed our plans so many times to accommodate family that now we’ve pretty well just given up on that whole concept, and we’ll just go get married.”
Hudson laughed. “That would be my style. You can’t make everybody happy, so why even try. Just go and get yourself married and then have a big party afterward.”
“I kind of like that idea too,” she admitted.
Baylor looked at her with interest. “Interesting,” he said. “Usually females want a big wedding.”
“I’m not the usual female,” she said in exasperation. “Remember?”
At that, he laughed out loud because she was anything but usual. Thank heavens. “I do,” he said. Looking over at Hudson, he said, “Come on, Hudson. The sooner we go, the sooner we’ll get answers.” And, with that, the two of them walked out.
Chapter 9
As soon as the door closed, Gizella looked over at Dane and asked, “How come you got stuck babysitting?”
“It’s not a matter of getting stuck,” he said, “but we take turns.”
“So, because Baylor’s been looking after me, now he gets to break free for a bit?”
Dane laughed uproariously. “Hardly the same issue,” he said.
She shrugged. “Kind of feels like it though.”
“Well, don’t look at it as a punishment for me or for you,” he said with a smile. “There are a lot of reasons for us to stay here. Besides, I have a lot of computer work to catch up on.”
“Anything I can help you with?”
He frowned at her, considering the request. “I don’t know, maybe,” he said. “I actually need to know a little bit more about exactly what happened.”
“There isn’t a whole lot to tell you,” she said. “I saw three men, but really I only remember the one giving me the eye.”
“So you don’t think you would recognize the others if you saw them?”
She frowned. “I know this is wrong to say, but it’s the truth. They all kind of looked the same.”
He nodded in understanding. “Particularly when they have on similar clothing. Yes, I know,” he said. “It’s that much harder to tell them apart, and they do it partly for that reason.”
She shrugged. “Of course it’d be nice if bad guys just wore a Bad Guy sign.”
He burst out laughing at that. “It would be lovely,” he said, “but it’s not likely to occur.”
Just then her phone buzzed. She picked it up, looked at it, and smiled. “It’s Baylor telling me to behave.”
“Interesting,” Dane said. “Are you in the habit of misbehaving?”
“No, I wouldn’t have said so,” she said. “It’s not like I’ve led a blameless life, but I haven’t been out there wildly enjoying it too much either.”
“What do you normally do?”
“Make life miserable for lawyers,” she said, with a laugh. He stared at her in surprise. She shrugged. “I’m a lawyer myself actually. I work with wrongfully convicted felons,” she said. “So, when I say I make life difficult, that means the ones who wrongfully put them away—the prosecutors. If they’re still around, then I’m right there, haunting them with cases that they closed that maybe they shouldn’t have.”
“Ah, so law enforcement as well.”
“Injustice bothers me,” she said quietly.
“Good,” he said, “injustice should bother all of us, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem to matter for a large cross section of society.”
“That’s because, as long as the liars and cheats are on their side, they don’t give a damn. They just want to see their own change happening and not have somebody go against their wishes. It’s all about power and progressing their own agenda.”
“A little bitter?”
“Not bitter so much,” she said, “but you don’t do the kind of work I do and not wonder just how much of the world out there is even thinking in terms of society as a whole, versus what they personally want.”
“I think everybody says they care about society,” Dane said quietly. “But, when it comes up against their own fundamental wishes and goals, all of that slides off to the side.”
She nodded emphatically. “Exactly. So we have hundreds and hundreds of files from felons who contact us, requesting that their cases be looked into. We have people who lie about their cases, implying that an injustice was done. Yet, when we read the files, we realize there was no injustice, and they are sitting right where they belong. But occasionally we come across those guys asking very nicely, pleading for someone to take another look. After reading the file, we realize that they were completely railroaded into confessions or railroaded into jail with absolutely zero forensic e
vidence, zero confessions, and zero witnesses. They just made a nice patsy to close a case.” She said, “That drives me nuts.”
Although Dane didn’t appear to have anything for her to do or to help with, he gave her a pad of paper and a pen and asked her to empty her mind of everything that she thought could possibly be connected with this. “It doesn’t matter how large or small you think it might be. Significant or not, anything that jars your memory when it comes to that boat and any conversations or even snippets of conversations involving those men, write it down.”
She nodded, as she sat here, a cup of tea cooling by her side. “What if nothing comes?” she muttered.
“Then start writing stuff that has nothing to do with it,” he said. “And pretty quickly you’ll see that your mind will start flowing back into this whole scenario, and you never know. Something might pop.”
She nodded and started doodling, and then her mind took over. She wrote down Father passed away unexpectedly. Mother held back cancer news, and now she’s gone too. And that just seemed to open a flood of stuff. She quickly wrote down the sense of betrayal and the lack of empathy that she found in her family. The pain and the lack of understanding. Wondering why her mother would do such a thing, and the words just poured. Dane looked up a couple times, and she ignored him. It wasn’t what he had asked her to do, but this was what was coming from her mind, so she was good with that.
Besides, if she would ever heal, at some point in time, this could be a start and just make it easier. When she slowly stopped and looked at what she had written, she was back on the ship, thinking about how they had treated her mom. The yelling, the names, and the slurs they had been called. Her mother had cried a lot during that time, and the gunmen had laughed. She wrote down the word albatross and frowned.
“What’s that look for?”
“They said something that sounded like albatross,” she said.
“And how did they mean it?” he asked, tilting his head.
“I thought they were pointing at my mother.”
“Ouch.”
“See? I don’t think it means anything though,” she said.
“Just keep going,” he said.