Cast the First Stone

by David James Warren

  I’m starting to think that first blockbuster is a fluke, a literary anomaly. I’m sure my agent thinks this too, but his emails to me are full of how’s that new ending going, and we have publishers interested.

  Everyone, trying to keep me from wallowing in the dark truth.

  I blew it, and big, and there’s no going back to the life I had. The career, the legacy that I was good, painfully good, at.

  What’s left is my screen saver swirling against a blackness, hiding an empty page.

  I set the box on my desk—the first table Eve and I bought together—careful not to bump the mouse, then I leave. Shut the door.

  Because that’s where the stories, and the memories, and even the failures should stay. Locked under the cover of darkness.

  I turn back to the party, the wounds fresh and pulsing in my gut, now keenly reminded of the brutal truth.

  Try as I might, there are no happy endings.

  Chapter 2

  The worst part about the dream is the helplessness. You know what I mean, the way you watch from the outside, your feet cemented, your body encased in a sort of glue, and even the words issuing from your mouth are garbled as you scream for everything to stop. Or in the case of this particular re-occuring nightmare—to run.

  Please, Oh, God, run.

  Because every single time I’m standing on the corner, screaming, as a young mother, her toddler on her hip, goes into the Daily Grind coffee shop. That’s when my heart starts pounding, my breathing thickens, and the sweat coats my body because I know her. She’s Melinda Jorgenson, and in her identification photo she had blonde hair, was wearing a pair of yoga pants, a T-shirt and tennis shoes. In my dream, she’s fresh from her morning walk and meeting her mother—I don’t remember what she looks like. Most importantly, she is carrying her two-year-old son.

  Blue eyes. Blond curls. He’s holding a Beanie Baby, a frog, I think.

  The dream is merciful. It never recalls the after photos or Silas’s gruesome scene shots. Some things a detective, no matter how much he’s seen, just never forgets, and Melinda Jorgenson clutching her towheaded kid in death is one of them.

  But in my dream, they’re always alive for at least ten agonizing seconds while I stand in the cement, screaming at the top of my lungs.

  Run.

  The building explodes and although I expect it, I still flinch. Dust and smoke boil out, flames sear the morning air, and only then does the scream break free.

  I’ve learned to shut my horror down before it breaks the veneer of slumber, at least most of the time. But I wake to my whimpers, my heart a fist against my chest, thundering in my ears.

  My body is shaking, the sweat coating my chest as I wake now. The room is pitch, just the blood red glow of the numbers on the alarm clock against the ceiling. The whir of the fan is a hum, rhythmic and safe.

  I’m not standing on a street corner watching people burn alive.

  I loosen my hold on my sheets, kick them off and just breathe.

  Seven people died that morning. If I think hard, I can probably remember their names. Memory is cruel that way—it steals the moments you want to save, and leaves behind the rubble.

  Eve stirs beside me and rolls over. “Babe, you’re sweating.” Her eyes open and she raises herself onto her elbow. “Which dream was it? The ice—?”

  “The bombing.”

  She makes a noise of understanding, her hand trailing up to reach my face, hold it.

  “It’s okay.” I weave my fingers through hers. “Go back to sleep.”

  She drifts back to her side and climbs back under a mountain of covers, dressed in long pajamas, despite the relative summer heat. She’s always cold, and when we were first married she would press her iceberg feet to my legs and chill me to the bone. She wears wool socks now—it’s simply easier, maybe than to wait for me to come to bed. I miss her toes against my skin.

  Tonight, she escaped upstairs shortly after my parents left while I wrestled with the leaky faucet, avoiding the file box in my office.

  The after pictures of Melinda Jorgenson and her son have found me, however, so I get up, walk to the bathroom, and shut the door. The light burns the images away and when I scrub some water on my face, it flushes away the memory enough for me to find myself.

  I’m awake, edgy, and not a little peeved, so I flick off the light and creep across the room and litter of pillows on the floor. Our dog—no, Eve’s dog, a tiny salt-and-pepper rescue mutt named Oliver—lifts his head from one of the mounds, but deems me inconsequential and goes back to sleep.

  Apparently, I do this too often for Oliver to get worked up.

  But it’s the quiet hours that lure me to the muse, to prod at the words that seem to hide when the light of day hits. In truth, I’m a thief, searching for story as I sneak around my house in the middle of the night.

  God, please I’m begging you, if you’re up there, give me words.

  The moon is striping the floor outside Ashley’s room, pale fingers beckoning me to linger. So I do, then tiptoe in because my seven-year-old sleeps like me—her covers in a tangled mess. But she possesses the body temperature of her mother, so I straighten them out, pull them up and burrito her inside them. The light through her shuttered blinds turns her hair white, her cute pink mouth puckered up. She’s curled around a stand-in for Gomer, some counterfeit friend she pulled from her wealth of stuffed animals shoved into the closet and spilling out into her room.

  She is spoiled, I know it and I don’t care. I’m not unaware of how lucky I am that she is alive, healthy, happy and mine. And Eve along with her.

  It’s these little moments that can break me, and I blow out a breath and lean down, press a kiss to that downy cheek.

  Then I creep down to my study.

  It’s just how I left it, the file box on the desk, the computer icon swirling. I shut the door. Flick on my desk lamp.

  Light puddles against the file box and for a long second, I debate.

  But I know what’s in there without looking, thanks, so I set it on the floor and with a shove of my bare foot push it away, next to the leather chair that is supposed to inspire me with deep thoughts.

  Instead I sit down on the padded office chair Eve got me for Christmas and, with a breath, wiggle the mouse.

  It’s still there, still waiting for me to end the sentence, the cursor blinking as if asking where I’ve been.

  I’m mid-scene, my hero—a police Inspector (what else would I write about?) is dissecting the remains found at the scene of a bombing with the local crime scene investigator.

  Okay, I admit it, I don’t have a lot of imagination, and yes, I pulled from what I know. Although I’m a lot less paunchy than my protagonist, and Eve probably wouldn’t approve of my portrayal of her character. More cleavage, a little more sass, although that’s not a complaint on the prototype.

  Fiction, I’m discovering, is harder than writing true crime. For one, in true crime, there’s an ending, although not usually a happy one.

  Apparently, a happy ending is some kind of requisite in fiction, an argument my agent and I keep circling.

  I start at the top and begin to read.

  Butcher found Gabby leaning over her microscope, her eye pressed to the lens, a dozen micro-slides lined up beside her.

  “Any luck?”

  “You’d better have coffee when you slink in this late,” she said, not looking up.

  “Why aren’t you at home?” He didn’t mean his tone. It just wasn’t always easy to keep his thoughts straight around Gabby. She wore her dark hair back in a ponytail, no makeup. Pretty despite her shapeless medical garb.

  “I found something.” She got up and went over to a table of twisted black wiring, plastic, and other bomb debris, all labeled. “The bomb was on a timer. I found the remnants of an alarm clock. It’s a simple design, but effecti
ve.”

  Butcher took it apart. “He planted it, then walked away to watch.”

  “Mmmhmm.”

  The cursor blinks. Now what?

  I know what did happen next. Next, his partner comes in and drags him away to shoot darts down at the Gold Nugget, missing a perfect opportunity to discuss with ahem, Gabby, not just the case but maybe add a little heat to the spark between them.

  Geez, I was stupid back then.

  “Rem?”

  Although the voice is soft, I still jump, and then feel a little silly sitting here in my pajama bottoms, bare-chested, staring at my screen.

  Eve shuffles in and sits down in my not-so-inspirational chair. Her auburn hair is down, curly, worry in her pretty hazel-green eyes. “The dream, again?”

  I shrug.

  “You have to let it go.”

  “I did. I have. It’s just—” And then my eyes betray me because they fall on the file box. And the last—the very last—person I should tip off about Booker’s final gift to me is my wife. She’s like a bird dog when she scents a mystery and the fact that former Inspector John Booker would save—and send me—these files is like throwing a pheasant in front of a Labrador retriever.

  Poor woman simply can’t help but pounce.

  In a second, she has the top off and has pulled out the first couple files. “These are—wow.”

  “I know,” I say, but I’m not going to touch them. Especially if I want to get any sleep in the near future.

  “There are at least thirty cases in here.”

  A tiny swell of relief hits me. So, Booker didn’t include all of my cold cases. “Which ones?” Okay, I confess, I’m just a little intrigued.

  She has them piled on her lap, and is sorting through them, by dates. “There’s that case about the girl who was found in the alley outside Sunny’s.”

  Right. I remembered her. A working girl, about nineteen, she’d died early in the morning, the last John’s payment still in her pocket.

  “And the one about that waitress—strangled in a parking lot near Lulu’s diner.”

  “Those are all in my early years of being an Inspector.” I slide down to the floor and notice her eyes darken as she picks up one of the thickest files. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Aw, c’mon. I wasn’t a detective for nothing. “Tell me.”

  “It’s the coffee shops bombing file.” She makes a face.

  I take a breath. Yeah, if John had collected my early career top hits then he would have surely included the coffee shop bombings. Plural. Three bombings, all within 48 hours of each other in the Minneapolis area. Twenty lives in total. Then they simply stopped. And are still unsolved, Melinda Jorgenson and her son’s murderer still at large.

  No wonder I can’t sleep.

  I reach for the file, but Eve pulls it away. “No. It’s no good sifting through it again. We went over every stitch of evidence. I spent hours and hours and hours…”

  “I know,” I say. “I remember. You were obsessive, too.”

  She sighs. “It was my first big case. My first real opportunity to show my dad…” And now she swallows, looks away and I want to get my hands around John Booker’s dead throat and squeeze. Because it wasn’t long after this that Eve’s father was killed by a drive-by shooter linked to one of his cases. And with him, her kid brother, Ash.

  Bittersweet memories for all of us because it was her grief and desire for justice that drove her into my arms the first time.

  She closes the file. Presses a hand on it.

  Like always, I have to fix it. “I’ve always told you that was the moment I fell for you. I’ll never forget walking onto the scene and seeing you standing there. I’d heard about this whiz crime scene investigator, and there you were—”

  “And I’d been warned by everyone—including my dad—to stay far away from the infamous lady-killer Rembrandt Stone.”

  “There were no ladies slain on my watch.” But I’ve made her smile.

  “Oh, you thought you were all that, though, Rem. You came striding into the crime scene, the cracker-jack detective, carrying a cup of coffee, as if you were there to watch us work, then you spilled it all over me, and I dropped my camera.”

  “You knocked the coffee out of my hands. I wasn’t fast enough to grab the camera.”

  “You were standing right behind me. Invading my personal space.”

  “Checking you out, actually.”

  “I knew it.” She’s really grinning now.

  “You were so beautiful, I couldn’t think straight. I nearly said it right then, just blurted it out. At least I got your attention, though.”

  “Yeah, which you conveniently used to wheedle me into a first date.”

  “Charm you. And you turned me down. Even though I know you were in love with me, too.”

  She’s full-out laughing now, and the sound pours light into my darkness.

  “Lie to yourself all you want, Rembrandt Stone. But I’ll never forget the look on your face when you busted my camera. Half angry, half embarrassed. You were trying to figure out what to do, and I kept thinking, here I was, smitten with you because you were this hot shot, New York Times bestselling author, and suddenly all I saw was this flustered guy. It made me…I don’t know, maybe I fell in love with you that moment.”

  “You didn’t act like it. You were so angry—”

  “My camera was broken. Besides, I could hardly let on that I liked you. I had a reputation for not dating anyone I worked with. In fact, if you hadn’t spilled coffee on me, I probably wouldn’t have spoken to you again, at least not outside the job.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you’re hard to get to know—really know. But you showed me a glimpse of yourself, and followed it up with an apology coffee, all humble and sweet and what could I do? I hate playing games, and you cut right to the chase. I suddenly discovered the guy behind his reputation.”

  “So, you’re saying you’re glad I ruined your camera.”

  “It was a Canon EOS-3, worth about five thousand dollars, so, uh no—”

  “I’m kidding. But it did give me a reason to talk to you again. I’m not sure I would have had the guts, otherwise.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you were Danny Mulligan’s daughter. And there were non-negotiable rules to keep.”

  “You like breaking the rules.” She runs her fingers over the veins in the top of my hand.

  “Yeah, I do,” I say, my breath catching. “Especially with you.”

  Silence, and the memories are thick between us. “We had a lot of fun back then.” Her voice is soft.

  “If you call spending too many hours with crime scene evidence, fun.”

  “I do.” She takes her hand away to trace the sticker on the top of the file. She’s blinking. “I did.”

  I look away. Because our glory days as Eve and Rembrandt, CSI and hot shot detective are over.

  She gathers up the folders, and I notice she’s putting them—at least the first few—in order. Another thing she can’t help. “Eve—”

  “It’s okay, Rem. I understand.”

  It’s a canned, practice response. It’s okay, Rem. I understand.

  She wants to, I know it. She understands loss, and frustration and even helplessness, but she wasn’t there the day when my future looked me in the eye, and I surrendered.

  Wasn’t there for the fight between Booker and me. Didn’t hear the words.

  I can’t go back.

  But I pretend her words help, nod and help her stack the files. That’s what marriage is about, sometimes, agreeing that the lies are truth.

  Leaning up to put the files away, Eve hesitates and then, cradling the stack in one arm, grabs something from inside the box. “Look at this.”

  She hands me a wat
ch.

  It’s a vintage watch, very old, the kind that needs winding and even as I take it, I glimpse a visage of John sitting at his desk, playing with the dial. I lay it out in my hand. It’s cool and heavy and the memory takes root. Chief Booker wore this every day that I knew him. The watch face is an old friend, see-through to the gears inside, with hatches that mark the time, bigger at the quarter hour. Almost as wide as my thumb, the band is leather, fraying at the edges, the clasp a little bent.

  The tiny gears sit unmoving, hands stuck at 3:27 as I spin the dial. It moves, but nothing turns. Of course it’s broken. Turning it over, I read an inscription on the backside. Be Stalwart. The etching is written in script, and it’s faded, the edges smooth, aged.

  “John gave you his watch.” It’s not a question, but more of a breath from Eve, a moment of wonder.

  “No. It probably fell in there.” I start to hand it to her, but she shoves it back to me. “He gave you his watch, Rem. When did you ever know John Booker to do anything by accident?”

  She’s right, as usual, but especially with John, the most serious, darkly purposeful man I’ve ever met. He never did anything without forethought.

  He was my mentor, the man I wanted to be my father, and the person who believed in me when I didn’t.

  “It’s his way of forgiving you,” she says, and I look up at her. Frown.

  I didn’t realize she saw it that way, and it stops me, a little pinch in my gut. I’m about to retort that I wasn’t the one who needed forgiveness, but it’s late, and I don’t want a fight.

  And deep down inside, I fear she’s right.

  She puts the files in the box as I rub my thumb over the inscription. Stalwart. An old word that means loyal. Reliable. Hardworking.

  Everything I thought I was. Or wanted to be.

  Eve has terrifying mind-reading powers because she takes the watch from my hand and puts it on the desk. “He gave it to the right person.”

  I look away, but she touches my face. “I love you, Rem.”