by Jan Coffey
Terri lived the life of a cop around the clock. That is, until her sister showed up at the end of this past summer. Still, the job never suffered. Terri was the best of the best. Thirty-eight years old. Too young to die. Way too young.
Some two hundred people, mostly dressed in uniform blues, crowded the funeral home halfway between New Haven and Westbury in a dead gray city straddling rusted train tracks and a murky brown river. Terri hadn’t lived here, didn’t work here, didn’t go to church here. But the younger sister had arranged for the service to be held here. She’d chosen a place as isolated and off-track as she was herself.
Gavin’s gaze focused on Lacey Watkins sitting in the front row. Chairs on either side of her sat empty. No friends. Nobody to hold her hand. The last one left of their family. Black knee-length skirt and black fitted shirt. Dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail. She just stared at a flower arrangement by the foot of the podium. No emotion showing. No tissues in hand to wipe away tears…real or pretend. From this angle he could see the mask of indifference that she wore like a second skin. He knew it didn’t mean she wasn’t feeling anything. It was just there. He’d seen the same expression on Terri’s face plenty of times. It was a give-nothing-away look. On Lacey, it made her look like a beautiful statue. Untouched. Cold.
“We celebrate Terri as one who has gone before us and who will greet us again.” There was a pause and a long moment of reflection before the speaker encouraged the crowd to repeat lines of prayers.
“Hey. Sorry, man.”
Gavin turned his head and acknowledged the squarely built man who edged in next to him. Luke Brandt was a detective at New Haven PD. Gavin had retired this past year from the force to start his own private investigation firm, but that didn’t stop him from staying in touch with the old crew.
“When did you get back?”
“Last night,” Gavin told him.
Terri had died in a hit and run accident in Westbury a week ago Saturday. Gavin had been in Las Vegas going over the security arrangements with the management company for some concerts coming up at Mohegan Sun. No one had called him about Terri’s death until he was back in Connecticut.
“When did you find out?”
“Last night.”
“That’s tough.” Brandt shook his head with a frown.
Gavin had never been close with Luke. They both played their cards close to the vest. That’s just the way they were built.
“How’s the case going? Any leads on the car and the driver?”
Luke shook his head. “The Chief could tell you more about what’s been done. But as far as I know, they’ve got nothing.”
The service ended. Gavin saw Lacey Watkins stand up as a line of people approached her. Her response wasn’t much different from before. A nod. A brief handshake. He saw her glance around once at the door, clearly impatient to get out.
“Sort of sad to lose Terri and have that one hit the jackpot.” The detective stared at Lacey.
“Jackpot?”
“Pension. Life insurance. Savings. Everybody knew how Terri was about socking it away. Gotta be a pretty good pile of cash. It doesn’t get better than that for a jailbird.”
“Back up. Terri always said her little sister was a troubled kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she still did three years for it. Not exactly a jailbird.” His flash of temper surprised him. Must have been for the sake of his old partner. Terri loved her sister. Gavin didn’t think he’d ever seen her as happy as this past summer when Lacey agreed to move back here.
“I’m just saying it’s a pretty sweet deal.”
Gavin was in no mood to play defense attorney. He shrugged and walked away. Brandt obviously had never lost a sister.
He wanted to meet Lacey, convey his condolences. Terri had been keeping the two of them at arm’s length. She’d told him why, too. Too many one-night stands. She didn’t want to have to shoot him in the balls when he got close to Lacey and started something. Gavin had no doubt Terri would have done it, too.
A gaggle of uniforms surrounded him. Everyone knew him. They wanted to know what he was up to. Many expressed condolences to him. Marg Botto, the last girlfriend of Terri’s that Gavin knew of, stopped him. Marg and Terri had parted ways last spring.
“It’s not right,” she said, holding it together. “I can’t believe she’s gone.”
Gavin patted Marg gently on the shoulder and cut through the crowd. By the time he worked his way through to Lacey’s seat, she was gone. But he saw the small purse left under the chair. He picked it up. Compact and light, the black case was easy to carry and obviously easier to forget. The main door to the hall was packed with people taking their time getting out. A side door was ajar, and Gavin caught a glimpse of fallen yellow leaves plastered to a cement walk.
He pushed open the door. A crowd was gathered in front of the building. The walkway snaked through some ornamental shrubbery and down to the parking lot behind the funeral home. Lacey was hurrying down the path. Limping.
He followed her. “Where are you going that’s so important?”
Today was about Terri and there were a lot of people still here to honor her memory. A life worth honoring. Terri had been so consumed by the idea of helping her sister, of rebuilding their family. She talked all the time about Lacey and how she’d never had a fair chance at life. And how it was a miracle that they were being given another opportunity.
Lacey reached the car and yanked unsuccessfully on the latch. When it wouldn’t budge, she banged on the roof of the car and her shoulders sagged. She hugged her middle, her head dropping onto her chest, her bluster crumbling before his eyes. Her body began to shake as she leaned onto the car.
“Shit.” He didn’t do well with women in tears. Uneasiness rushed through him. He felt like an intruder, watching her fall apart like this. And he was also an asshole for thinking that she didn’t care.
The tap on a horn made her jerk her head around. Gavin realized he was blocking a car from going by. Lacey’s gaze flicked over him, and she quickly turned away, brushing back tears.
He took his time approaching her. “Hi. You left this under your chair.”
“Thank you.” She reached out awkwardly and grabbed the purse, refusing to look at him.
“I was going to keep it, but I was afraid there might be a cop or two around.”
The look she sent him was worth the wisecrack. Her eyes were green and they glistened like emeralds.
It was impossible not to stare. She had the same body type and facial mold as her sister. But there were many differences. The slant of her dark green eyes. The full lower lip. The soft line of her jaw. The pale skin. The slender column of her throat. His gaze moved down to the rise and fall of her breasts under the fitted shirt. The sudden wave of lust rushing through him was unexpected. And uncalled for.
“Gavin MacFadyen,” he said, getting his head back into the moment. “I was Terri’s partner at NHPD.”
“Terri often…” Her husky voice faltered. “She often spoke of you.”
“I’m sorry about what happened,” he managed to say. “I was away. I didn’t know.”
She looked at the car. Gavin didn’t want her to go yet.
“Are you okay? Is there anything I can do?”
A slight shake of the head. A few more tears escaped. She had the keys in her hand.
Gavin dug deep for some way to delay her. “Can I take you out for a cup of coffee? A late breakfast? Can we go someplace and talk?”
She shook her head and the beep of the car lock told him his time was up.
He yanked one of his business cards out of his pocket and offered it to her. He was relieved when she took it. He held her hand for an extra beat, waiting until she met his gaze again. Her fingers were like ice.
“Just call me if you need anything.”
“Thank you.”
Gavin opened the car door for her and gawked as the black skirt hiked up to mid-thigh when she got behind the wheel. He felt lik
e he was back in high school, but it didn’t matter. The buttons of her shirt strained, teasing him with a glimpse of a white flesh above a black bra.
She closed the door and started the car before he could come up with some other lame invitation.
There was no point in analyzing what had just happened. The woman was beautiful and vulnerable and he was attracted to her. True, this was the first time they’d met, but he knew so much about Lacey that he felt he’d known her forever.
Heading back to his car, Gavin realized that he wasn’t the only one watching her drive away.
Across the parking lot under a tree, an old man in a gray raincoat and battered fishing hat was staring at Lacey’s silver Honda as it moved along the driveway to the street.
Read More of Road Kill
Jan Coffey
Cross Wired
Prologue
Thursday January 3, 6:57 p.m.
New York
Freezing rain, razor-sharp on the skin, continued to fall. Across the five boroughs of the city and into the suburbs, traffic moved at a crawling pace on every expressway. The Cross County was the usual parking lot, and the Henry Hudson was down to one lane, but the worst was the Cross Bronx, completely shut down because of a horrendous accident.
The driver of the limo leaned over and switched off the radio, apparently abandoning all hope of finding a reasonably clear route out of the city. Now they would simply inch along, one car in a line of the thousands of other commuter vehicles going north on the FDR Drive.
In the back seat, the passenger pushed aside the work he’d brought and glanced at his watch. He was going to be late for dinner. His daughter and her husband and three children were in from the West Coast until Sunday. Christmas week had been spent with his daughter’s in-laws in New Hampshire, and this week the gang had been with them in Connecticut. He’d have liked to have it the other way around. He’d been home most of last week. This week, though, with the exception of New Year’s Day, his schedule was booked.
His wife phoned him at the office to tell him their daughter was now considering staying for another couple of weeks with the kids in Connecticut. He looked again at his schedule and shook his head as he paged through it. There wouldn’t be any relief now until the end of the month. Not until the company’s big deadline. He wouldn’t be able to spend any time with them.
He started to call his wife. He had an eight-thirty breakfast meeting in the city tomorrow morning, and he contemplated telling the driver to turn around and take him to his apartment in Midtown instead. He could do without this commute tonight.
The cell phone rang before he could make the call home. He looked at the display and felt his spine stiffen. A bitter taste edged into his mouth, and he considered not answering the call. He wished that were an option, but it wasn’t. He knew he’d be answering.
He even knew what the call was about. His old partner had phoned him daily this past month. Old skeletons were peeking out of the closet. This wasn’t the first time; over the years, the episodes had come in waves. But this one was worse than anything they’d faced before. There was no getting around it. Still, they just had to put up with situations like this until the test samples were all gone. The last time he’d counted, there were only seven left.
Seven.
He pressed the button on the console and waited until the window between him and the driver slid shut before answering the call.
“Hello, Mitch,” he said, looking out at the blackness enshrouding the East River.
“Have you been watching the news this afternoon?” his partner asked without a greeting. The agitation in his voice was clear.
“No.” He reached for the TV remote and turned it on.
“There’s been another shooting, this time in San Francisco.”
He switched the channel to CNN and muted the sound. In a moment, the closed captions began to scroll across the bottom of the screen. “Was he one of ours?”
“Yes,” Mitch said, his voice rising.
“Did he live?”
“No.”
Six left, the passenger thought grimly.
“Then we don’t worry about it.” He glanced at his watch again. “I’ve got to go.”
“Wait,” his partner snapped before he could end the call. “This is different from anything we’ve seen before. The violence is worse.”
“That’s not because of us,” he said calmly. “All the test cases have been the same. The ones that remain are the earliest specimens. They’re older now than the others were. Adolescent hormonal shifts are complicating the equation. That can result in more damage.”
“Curtis, they’re flipping every couple of days,” his partner said, obviously trying to keep his voice down. “How could you be so relaxed about it?”
Unlike his old friend, who’d turned his back on industry and was quickly becoming fossilized teaching biology to imbeciles in the California state university system, he was having a late-career resurgence. Over the course of this past year, all the doors were again opening. Money was pouring in. His name was the talk of the business. For a change, everything was going right.
It was hard to imagine that the two of them had, at one time, worked so closely. They had always been like night and day in terms of composure, in their goals, in their hunger for results, in their willingness to take risks to succeed.
“Listen to me, Mitch. I’m not relaxed about any of this.” This was exactly what the other man needed to hear. “But there’s nothing we can do about it, just as there was nothing we could do about it three years ago when we lost a large sample size, or fourteen years ago when we found out everything was going wrong and we had to shut the project down.”
“You’re not hearing me,” the other man said, his voice now bordering on hysteria. “There are others who are getting dragged into this. Innocent people.” He spat out each word slowly. “And there is something we can do about this. We can identify them, pull them out of…”
“Do you really want to tell the world what we did? It’s not only your neck and mine that we’re talking about. How about our investors? Do you want to expose them? And do you really think they would put up with it? Do you really believe that coming out into the open would solve all the problems?”
The pause on the other end of the line gave him some reassurance. His partner was still as timid as he’d always been. He needed to keep Mitch from panicking, but fear was good.
“I want you to stop watching the news.”
“I…I can’t.”
“You can,” he said forcefully. “There are only six left, Mitch, and they’re taking care of themselves. Time is on our side. All we have to do is sit tight, and everything will go away.”
There was another pause at the other end. He couldn’t understand why his old partner couldn’t quite fathom the probable consequences of this “coming out.” So many careers would be ruined. More than a few corporations and major hospitals would be rattled to the foundations, possibly irreparably. Some would go down. Politicians would lose their seats. Some of them would end up in jail. The Merck fiasco with Vioxx wouldn’t hold a candle to what they’d be facing. There’d be criminal charges in this case. He didn’t want to go there.
“Are you still on the line?” he asked.
“I’m here,” Mitch said heavily. “There’s one thing that I can’t shake loose.”
“What is it?”
“What happens if one of them does make it through after an episode of violence? What happens if one of them survives?”
There would be more detailed tests, interviews, close scrutiny. The intellectual and psychological conditions of the object would become unstable. And then there was the possibility of early memory being triggered. There would be no end to their problems.
“You leave that to me. I’ve taken care of those kinds of details before. I’ll take care of them again when I need to.”
~~~~
Chapter 1
Monday January 14, 11:56 a.
m.
Wickfield, Connecticut
During the night, a thick crust of ice had formed on top of the six inches of snow that had fallen over the weekend. The pale disk of a sun had done nothing to soften it this morning. The street and the two driveways at the end of the cul-de-sac had been plowed, but the large pair of boots punching through the snow between the two houses carved its own path.
His head hurt. The pounding was louder. Voices, faces, places, numbers, all writhed in his pulsing brain.
He ripped a branch off a young oak tree that snatched at his jacket. Icicles showered down on him in retribution. He threw the branch fiercely to the side, and it bounced and skittered across the unbroken glaze of snow. He blinked through the gray haze that seemed to cover everything. Sky, snow, houses, everything was gray, and yet his eyes still stung from the light and the pain in his head.
He barely noticed the cold, but it was a labor to breathe. Somewhere, in a dark corner of his mind, the idea pulled at him that he wanted to lie down on the snow and just go to sleep. But he couldn’t. His feet kept stomping ahead of him toward his neighbors’ back porch.
The pounding voices in his head wouldn’t go away. He knew where he had to go, what he had to do, how to end it all.
He didn’t bother to knock on the door. Neither car was in the driveway. He turned the knob and pushed open the kitchen door. Wickfield was safe. Nobody locked their doors.
He’d been in the house many times. He knew they were in the basement. The cat appeared in the doorway leading to the living room and stared at him with distrust for a moment before disappearing. The pulsing flashes of light and the voices were getting louder. He had to stop them.
He stumbled across the kitchen, his boots leaving clumps of gray snow on the tiled floor. He yanked open the basement door with such force that it rebounded off the wall and smashed him hard in the shoulder. He didn’t feel it, not at all, and went down the wooden steps without bothering to flip on the light switch.