One Little Secret

by Eliza Lentzski

  “This sounds like a needle in a haystack,” Sarah complained.

  “Pretty much,” I confirmed.

  “We can ask the Tracing Center to look for the information,” Celeste noted, “but they might never find anything.”

  “So now what?” Sarah huffed. Where she had previously been excited, she now appeared deflated. I could relate to her frustration, but we couldn’t let this hurdle stop us altogether.

  “Now we let Homicide know we’ve potentially got a double homicide on our hands.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Corpus Juris Secundim,” I read aloud. I had probably butchered the pronunciation. “Sounds like a Harry Potter spell.”

  I stood before the impressive bookcase in Julia’s law office while she worked at her desk. On the evenings she kept late hours for clients who worked second shift I dropped off dinner knowing that she would never take a break to do so for herself. That night’s meal was a red pepper hummus vegetable wrap from a Greek restaurant close to the Fourth Precinct.

  “It’s Latin for ‘Second Body of Law,’” Julia explained. “It’s an encyclopedia of state and federal laws.”

  “Isn’t that what Google is for?” I said, only half joking.

  Julia awarded me an indulgent smile. “Lawyers use it to look up relevant case law. Precedents that might help the current cases we’re working.”

  I slid a single finger down the well-creased binding on one of the texts. “Did they come in a Lawyer Starter Kit? Complete with red pens and yellow legal pads?”

  My joke fell on deaf ears. “No. My father gifted me his collection when I passed the bar exam.”

  “Oh.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Julia’s family in general was a sensitive subject, and her father, William Desjardin, the former mayor of her hometown, was even more so.

  Julia removed her reading glasses and set them down on her desk with a sigh. “I know I need to see him.”

  I held up my hands in retreat. “I didn’t say a word.”

  Her lipsticked mouth twisted. “I know. But it’s been weighing heavily on my mind these past few weeks. Each day that passes, my mother’s memories become more and more vulnerable to her disease. How long until she forgets me altogether?” She shuttered her eyes with the weighty statement.

  I ached for her. Julia was so strong, so proud and capable; it was these qualities and more that I admired about her. But her mother was her kryptonite. It was the only time I’d seen her let her guard down when we’d first met, months ago.

  Julia inhaled sharply, collecting and reorganizing her emotions. “As much as I’d prefer to never speak to my father again, he—by court order—is my mother’s keeper. If I want to spend time with her, I’m going to have to make up and play nice.”

  “Are you thinking about going up there soon?”

  Embarrass was just over a three-hour drive from the Twin Cities. I myself had done the round trip in one day when I’d needed to escape Embarrass. If Julia was going up to visit her parents, however, I assumed it would be at least one overnight. Maybe more. Selfishly, I didn’t want her missing from my bed for even one night.

  “It’s just a thought right now,” she said. “I’ll let you know though if they become plans.”

  I worried my lower lip. “I’ve got something I want to talk to you about, but it’s really sensitive and definitely not any of my business.”

  Julia cocked her head and looked concerned. “You know you can talk to me about anything, Cassidy.”

  “Even Jonathan?”

  She quirked an eyebrow. I was sure she hadn’t been expecting me to ask a question about her brother. He’d killed himself at her family’s cabin in Embarrass, not long after returning from a tour of duty.

  “What about him?” she inquired.

  I cleared my throat, feeling more awkward than any conversation I’d ever had with her—and that was saying a lot because I typically felt awkward.

  My questions about Jonathan were part curiosity and part professional. I didn’t see much overlap between Julia’s brother and Kennedy Petersik beyond unnatural deaths, but maybe there had been warning signs that had predated Jonathan taking his own life that could be used to better identify Kennedy’s death as a suicide or homicide.

  “You can ask me whatever you need to,” she encouraged.

  “Are you sure?”

  I watched her lips thin as if reconsidering her offer, but she nodded.

  “Before he killed himself, did anyone suspect Jonathan had been depressed or suicidal?”

  Julia exhaled like a deflating balloon. “I’m going to need some wine.”

  +++

  Julia sat on her white couch with her legs tucked under her body. She’d exchanged the pencil skirt and Oxford button-up blouse for black leggings and an oversized t-shirt. I did my best to ignore how the fine bones of her clavicle peeked out of the top of the too-large shirt. We weren’t there for that.

  She’d poured herself a large glass of red wine. Both it and the rest of the bottle sat on the coffee table between us. She took an introductory sip from the glass. Her lipstick stayed on her lips and not on the edge of the glass.

  “Alright, Detective. What do you want to know?”

  “What was Jonathan like?”

  It was a softball of a question compared to my initial inquiry back at her office. Even then, however, she sat for a minute with the request.

  “Jonathan was the favorite,” she began. “He was everyone’s favorite—not just with my parents. Everyone in Embarrass only had glowing words for him. Handsome. Charming. Genuine. Athletic. Smart. Accomplished. I think enlisting in the military was the first time he’d done something my parents disapproved of.”

  “Why?”

  She’d mentioned something to the effect when she’d first told me about his death. As much as I wanted to remain silent and let her control the trajectory of the conversation, I was too personally invested to keep my curiosity to myself.

  Julia wet her lips before her response. “My parents aren’t pacifists; they’ve never shared a strong opinion about the country’s involvement in foreign affairs. I think they were disappointed because—to them,” she qualified, “you enlist when you have no other options. It’s something poor people or those without direction do. It’s not something a Desjardin was supposed to do.”

  She paused, waiting for my reaction. I swallowed my pride, but at the same time, I couldn’t very well argue with her; I’d had no noble reasons for becoming a Marine. My family wasn’t poor, but I’d certainly been directionless. I hadn’t enlisted for love of country or to defend democracy across the globe. I’d been bored and had stumbled into a local recruiting office.

  “You told me he came back from his tour … different.”

  “Haunted.” She said the word with the conviction of someone who’d sat with the idea for a long time. “If you didn’t know him well, you might not have noticed anything was off. But he was my brother, and I noticed.”

  “I was living in Minneapolis when he came back,” she continued. “I’d recently passed the bar and was courting offers from a number of criminal law firms. My parents came down from Embarrass and we all went to the airport together. I hardly recognized him when he first walked out. It was more than the new beard or how tan his skin was. He’d become …” it was his eyes. He just looked … haunted.” She shook her head. “I don’t have another way to describe it.”

  I knew that look all too well. It was the same stare I saw when I looked around the therapy circle I sometimes attended at the local VA hospital.

  PTSD is a modern acronym, but the diagnosis is as old as war. Each generation has had their own name for it, and yet it persists. In the Civil War it was described as ‘exhaustion’ or ‘soldier’s heart.’ During World War I, the symptoms were called ‘shell shock.’ They named it ‘battle fatigue’ in World War II. Some memories from combat fade with time, but there are sounds you can’t forget, scents you can’t get rid of.


  I nodded tightly for her to continue.

  “We had dinner in the city,” she resumed. “Jonathan didn’t talk much—not about himself, at least. He asked a lot of questions about what was new with all of us, and we were more than happy to fill the silence by talking about ourselves.” She paused to take another fortifying sip from her glass of wine. I knew this conversation was taxing, but I loved her a little bit more for her openness and honesty.

  “After that, he went back to Embarrass with my parents, and I stayed on in Minneapolis.” Her mouth drooped at the memory. “My mom wanted me to come back, too. She told me it was selfish to stay in the city since Jonathan was newly home. We fought about it, and I resented Jonathan for it. He’d never said anything about me coming back, but I still resented the insinuation that I should drop everything going on in my life just because he was back.”

  “So you weren’t in Embarrass when he died?” I asked.

  Julia’s eyes closed. “No.” The word came out with difficulty. “I visited when I could, but when you’re a new junior associate, you’re working around the clock to make an impression with the partners.”

  “Did he ever talk to you about what it had been like over there?”

  “No more than you do.”

  It wasn’t intended as a shot against me, but I knew that Julia wanted me to talk more about my tours in Afghanistan. She knew the big stuff though—which I’d only ever shared before with doctors and therapists who I needed to convince I was mentally stable enough to return to being a cop. All of that disclosure had been coerced.

  “Something here would remind him of a story from over there,” she said. “The stories came out in bursts. Stories without beginnings or endings. But I never witnessed him being, ah … confused.”

  “Confused?” I questioned.

  Julia’s eyes dropped from my face to her hands. She twisted the stem of her wine glass between her fingers. Her voice was quiet. “Confused like you get sometimes.”

  I sat up a little straighter. “Oh. You didn’t witness his PTSD.”

  Julia eventually looked up. “No.” She wet her lips. “I don’t know if those same things triggered him. But I also don’t think he experienced a traumatic event like you did.”

  I held up one hand to stop her. “It’s okay. You don’t need to make excuses for why I am the way I am. Or why I’m more screwed up than other veterans.”

  Her painted lips twisted into a frown.

  “It’s really okay,” I reiterated. “I didn’t want to make this about me.”

  Julia nodded. “What else do you want to know?”

  “Did he leave a suicide note?”

  She shook her head. “No.”

  “Do you know why it was ruled a suicide and not homicide or an accident?”

  She drew in an audible breath and hollowed out her cheeks. “The police found gunpowder residue on his hands. Well … on everything. And I suppose it could have been an accident that he’d been staring down the double barrel of a shot gun at the exact moment it went off.”

  Her shoulders lifted and fell in a gesture of helplessness. Her explanation and tone had been casual. Flippant, almost. But I recognized the defense mechanism. It was the same nonchalance I witnessed in my fellow soldiers in Afghanistan. We treat death with a casualness so we don’t go mad.

  + + +

  “I’ve never been down here before,” I heard an amused voice. “Guess I wasn’t missing out on much.”

  I looked up from my computer screen to see Detective Jason Ryan standing in the open doorway of the Cold Case Division office.

  My lip curled at his attitude. Our office was a shit hole, but only we were allowed to say that.

  “Can I help you?” Sarah spoke up from her desk. Her clipped tone indicated she’d been similarly unimpressed with Detective Ryan’s attitude.

  I expected Ryan to stumble over himself—most unsuspecting cops did when they first saw Sarah. But he appeared equally unimpressed with my colleague as she with him.

  “I heard you found your matching bullets, ladies. Congratulations.”

  The way he said the L-word sounded patronizing.

  I pushed away from my desk and leaned back in my office chair. “To what do we owe the honor of your company, Detective Ryan? Need some help on another one of your cases?”

  His lips twitched, but he didn’t take the bait. “I’m going to need everything you’ve collected regarding the Petersik case.”

  “What makes you think we’re keeping intel from you?” I posed.

  “I know you’ve been poking around, Miller. Talking to the dead girl’s parents. Going to the crime lab.”

  “I told you I thought there could be a connection. Don’t get mad that I was right.”

  “Since you’re so chummy with the folks at the crime lab and seem to have all the time in the world,” Ryan sniffed, “why don’t you go see about Kennedy Petersik’s cell phone records? I want to know exactly where she went on the day of her death. If she went to the mall, I want to know. If she went to the movies, I want to know which one. If she took a detour to shit in the woods, I want to know what it looked like.”

  Sarah stared blankly at Detective Ryan and his posturing. “You could say ‘please.’”

  Ryan ignored my colleague. “And I need information and contact numbers from the original cold case. I want to talk to everyone involved.”

  “I can look up Michael Bloom’s family to let them know we’re re-examining his case, but it may not be welcomed news,” Sarah remarked. “Sometimes opening a case back up only re-opens the wound for the family. If they’ve moved on, they’re not going to want us to drag them back.”

  Ryan’s eyes narrowed to a squint. “Who are you again?”

  Sarah straightened in her office chair. “Dr. Sarah Conrad. Victim’s Advocate. In other words, I don’t work for you, Detective.”

  I held up my hands, hoping to keep the peace before egos spun out of control. “Hold up, guys. We’ve got to work together as a team. We’re all here for the same reason—to find out how and why a young woman died.”

  Neither Sarah nor Ryan blinked or budged from their respective spots, but they had gone silent, at least for the moment.

  “Doctor Conrad, why don’t you come with me to see about procuring cell phone records from the crime lab?” I proposed. “Please.”

  Sarah continued to glare at Detective Ryan. Her nostrils flared. “Sure.”

  I waited until we were outside of the building to confront my colleague. Even though we’d left Detective Jason Ryan behind, Sarah continued to look annoyed. Her hands were shoved deep in the pockets of her jacket and the heels of her ankle boots stomped against the pavement of the Fourth Precinct parking lot.

  “What was all that doctor business about back there?” I asked.

  “I’m not just a pretty face, Miller,” she snipped. “I’ve got a doctorate in social work.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve never thrown around your title before,” I observed. “I didn’t even realize you had one.”

  “Because you’ve never treated me like a second-class citizen,” she said. “But you’re like a unicorn. You’d be surprised how many cops around here think they’re better than us civilians. And the fact that they even refer to us as ‘civilians’ is ridiculous.” She threw her hands in the air out of frustration. “Just because you have a badge doesn’t mean you’re some god.”

  I let Sarah continue to vent without interruption. I wasn’t about to defend myself or my fellow police officers. I knew firsthand how the badge tended to attract arrogant individuals who simultaneously suffered from inferiority complexes.

  Sarah drew a long breath, and I chanced a smile. “Am I driving or you?”

  Sarah rolled her eyes. I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction she’d expected from me—something, certainly. But instead of laying into me about my lack of commentary, she started to walk in the direction of the employee parking lot.

  “I’ll drive,”
she tossed over her shoulder. “I’ve had enough of that tin can you call a car.”

  + + +

  Celeste Rivers was behind her stand-up workstation when Sarah and I arrived at the City Hall crime lab office. Unlike our first visit, she was the only employee present. She wore the long white lab coat again, which seemed to be an unnecessary uniform, and her white blonde hair was pulled back in a tight bun.

  When she noticed our entrance, she left her desk and approached the half-wall partition. “Uh oh,” she clucked. “I hope you at least brought a bribe this time.”

  I opened my empty hands. “Next time,” I promised.

  As if sensing the nature of our visit, she opened the hidden gate on the partitioning and let us into her side of the office.

  “More bullets?” she inquired. Her voice was almost teasing.

  “What do you know about acquiring a person’s cell phone records?” I asked.

  “As in using GPS to track a person’s whereabouts?” she posed.

  “Not in real time, no,” Sarah corrected for me. “As in recreating where a person used to be.”

  Celeste bobbed her head as if she’d forgotten. “Cold Case. Right.”

  “Is that something we can even do? And is it accurate and reliable?” I asked.

  I’d seen my share of murder documentaries, but those had all been decades-old criminal investigations. I wondered how the technology had been refined over time.

  “Our phones are constantly tracking our movement, but it’s not as precise as say—tracking the chip in your dog or mapping out a running route,” Celeste began. “Anytime your phone uses data—not just when you’re making or receiving phone calls—it’s connecting to a cell phone tower. Bigger cities have more people and therefore need more cell towers, which helps us more accurately pinpoint someone’s location. But the cell phone tower that provides voice and text messages is different from the cell tower that provides data usage.”