IF SHE RAN

by Blake Pierce

“Does that make you happy?”

  DeMarco seemed genuinely shocked by the question. “It sort of does. I don’t need the responsibilities and requirements that come with a relationship right now.”

  Kate chuckled. She had never been in the Land of One-Night Stands. She’d met Michael while in college and married him a year and a half later. It had been the kind of relationship where she had started to understand that they would spend their lives together as soon as their first kiss.

  “So where’s the next step in this case?” DeMarco asked.

  “I’m thinking about revisiting the initial case rather than just using it as a reference. I’m wondering if there’s new information that might have come up within the Nobilini family. But…well, like your story about your girlfriend being killed while you sat on her parents’ sofa, it’s not territory that is easily ventured back into.”

  “So more awkward visits and conversations tomorrow?”

  “Maybe. I’m not sure yet.”

  “Is there anything worth filling me in on before I step blindly into it?”

  “Probably. But trust me…it would be better saved for the morning. Going into it right now is only going to keep us up late and screw with my sleep.”

  “Oh. Those kinds of stories.”

  “Exactly.”

  They finished their current glasses of wine and paid their checks. On the way up to their rooms, Kate thought about the story DeMarco had just told—of that sad glimpse into her past. It made her very aware that she knew very little about her partner. If they were working in a normal relationship, seeing one another nearly every day rather than once or twice every few months, that would certainly be different. It made her wonder if she was doing her part to truly get to know DeMarco.

  They parted ways at their rooms—Demarco’s directly across the hall from Kate’s—and Kate felt the need to say something. Anything, really, to let her know that she appreciated DeMarco’s willingness to open up.

  “Again, I apologize about last night. It’s dawning on me that I don’t know you well enough to be making decisions like that for both of us.”

  “It’s fine, really,” DeMarco said. “I should have told you about it last night.”

  “We need to be intentional about getting to know one another. If we’re trusting each other with our lives, it’s kind of necessary. Maybe outside of work sometime.”

  “Yeah, that would be nice.” DeMarco paused here as she opened her door. “You said you had some thinking to do…about the old case. The Nobilini case. Let me know if you need someone to ping ideas off of.”

  “I’ll do that,” Kate said.

  With that, they entered the rooms, ending the day between them. Kate kicked off her shoes and went directly to her laptop. As she booted it up, she called Director Duran. As she’d expected, he did not answer his phone but the line was then redirected to his assistant director, a woman named Nancy Saunders. Kate put in a request to have digital copies of the Nobilini files sent to her email as soon as possible. She knew that DeMarco had brought a few, but it was just the overview of the case. Kate felt the need to get back into the grittiness of the case, right down to the finer details. Saunders committed to getting it done, letting her know she’d have them by nine o’clock the following morning.

  Cass Nobilini, Kate thought.

  She’d thought of the woman almost right away, after Duran had told her about the possible connection. She’d thought of her again when she’d heard the wails and screeches of Missy Tucker as she grieved her murdered husband, and then again while talking to Jack Tucker’s friends.

  Cass Nobilini, the mother of Frank Nobilini. The woman who had found it insulting and darkly improper for the media to latch onto the event of her son’s murder just because he had once worked closely with a few popular men in Congress as a financial advisor. Kate felt that she had been a fool to even pretend that this case was not going to lead her back to Cass Nobilini in some way.

  It was that thought that remained with her for the remainder of the night, clinging to the forefront of her mind as she eventually lay down in bed and drifted off to sleep.

  ***

  She could still see the crime scene in her head. The wear and tear of memory made it a little faded and rusty, but the haziness was stripped away whenever she dreamed about it. In her dreams, it was as clear as if she were watching television.

  And she saw it that night, managing to fall asleep shortly after nine yet twitching and moaning slightly in her sleep as the midnight hour approached.

  The scene: Frank Nobilini, killed in the alley and still holding his BMW keys. The case had eventually led her back to his home, a four-bedroom house in Ashton. She’d started in the garage, which had smelled faintly of lawn trimmings from a recent grass-cutting. She’d felt like she was in some haunted place, like Frank Nobilini’s spirit was there somewhere, waiting for her. Maybe in the empty space where his BMW was supposed to be but, at that time, had sat in a parking lot several blocks away from where his body had been found. The garage had been cold and like some weird tomb. It was one of the handful of scenes from her past that always came back vividly for reasons she had never understood.

  There had been no clues of any kind at the house, no signs of why someone might want to kill him. One would think that maybe it was for his very nice car, but the keys had been in his hand. The house had been clean. Almost eerily so. No paperwork trails, nothing of note in the address books or the mail. Nothing.

  In her dream, Kate was standing there, in the alley. She was touching the still-sticky smear of gore on side of the wall in the same experimental way a child might touch a stray drop of syrup on the kitchen table. She turned and looked behind her, wanting to look down the alleyway, but saw the interior of the Nobilinis’ garage instead. As if she had been invited inside, she walked to the wooden stairs that led to the door that would take her into the kitchen. She then moved in the way that only dreams allow, fluidly, almost being projected rather than moved by her legs. She somehow ended up in the bathroom, looking to the large tub/shower combo installed in the wall. It was filled with blood. Something was moving beneath the surface, causing little bubbles to rise to the top of the blood. When one would pop, it would send tiny droplets against the porcelain side of the wall.

  She backed away, stepping through the bathroom doorway and into the hall. There, Frank Nobilini was walking toward her. Behind him, his wife, Jennifer, simply watched. She even gave Kate a harmless little wave as her dead husband lurched down the hallway. Frank walked very zombie-like, slowly and with an exaggerated gait.

  “It’s okay,” someone said from behind her.

  She turned and saw Cass Nobilini, Frank’s mother, sitting on the floor. She looked tired, defeated…as if she were waiting for an executioner’s blade.

  “Cass…?”

  “You were never going to solve it. It was over your head. But time…it has a way of changing things, doesn’t it?”

  Kate turned back to Frank, still advancing. As he came by the bathroom door, Kate saw that some of the blood had come out of the tub and into the floor, seeping out into the hallway. When Frank stepped in it, it made a wet sucking sound.

  Frank Nobilini smiled at her and raised his hand to her—slightly decayed and mottled. Kate slowly backed away, raising her own hands to her face, and let out a scream.

  She woke up, feeling the scream lodged in her throat.

  That damned house. She had never understood why it had rattled her in such a way. Maye because of Jennifer Nobilini’s screams and wails, laced with the picture-perfect house…it had all seemed surreal. Like something out of an artsy horror movie.

  Kate sat up and slowly inched her way to the edge of the bed. She collected a few deep breaths and looked at the clock: 1:22. The only light in the room came from the numbers on the alarm clock and the faint glow of the security lights outside, barely shining in through the closed blinds.

  She’d had dreams concerning Cass Nobilini and th
at first case before, but this one had been a doozy. Her heart was still hammering in her chest as she got out of bed and walked to the mini-fridge for a bottle of water. She sipped some down as she walked over to the bedside table where she had set her laptop up.

  She flicked on the bedside lamp and logged into her email. She had only one new one, and that had come from Assistant Director Saunders. She’d tasked an agent with digging up the Nobilini files and they had been delivered to her shortly before midnight.

  She knew that there was no way she’d return to a deep sleep, so she opened them up one by one, a bit uncomfortable by how natural it seemed and how familiar those old files felt. She looked through them briefly at first, in the same way someone visiting a somewhat familiar location might give the area a once-over before truly starting to study the place. When she came to the last of the twenty-six pages, she went back to the beginning. But before getting deep into it, she went to the little complimentary coffee maker and set a pot to brew. As it started to percolate, she made the bed, relocated the laptop to the small table against the far wall, and made herself a little workstation.

  Within five minutes, she was reading each of the files line by line and sipping on a cup of very dark, very cheap coffee. The account of Frank Nobilini felt like an old friend, the sort of friend that only called with bad news. The case detailed every conversation she’d had with neighbors and friends in Ashton. As she read over them all, she was unsettled with how similar they all were to the conversations she’d recently had concerning Jack Tucker.

  The only thing that had even remotely resembled anything of merit had come from twenty-two-year-old Alice Delgado, a nanny for a family in Ashton who had cared for two kids, ages eight and eleven. Alice had admitted to making sexual advances toward Frank Nobilini when they had crossed paths at a local park. Frank had responded with flattery and polite rejection. While that had been the extent of it, the news of Frank’s death had made Alice feel incredibly guilty—so guilty that she had contacted Jennifer Nobilini to confess. Jennifer, the caring and apparently flawless woman she was, had forgiven her almost right away.

  Aside from that one detail, there had been nothing. Not in conversations, not at the crime scene, not in the Nobilinis’ home. And nothing in the criminal records for Frank or Jennifer—no history of criminal activities, no enemies to speak of…nothing.

  Kate had remained on the case for six months, then took a step back, working on it only as a background project for another eight months before the case was totally given up on. It had not been the only unsolved case in her career, but it had been the only unclosed case with such a degree of strangeness to it.

  As she read through, she did her best to apply Jack Tucker’s death to it. And the more she read and reacquainted herself with the case, the more certain she became that Jack’s murder was linked. It was either done by the exact same killer or a copycat.

  It was 4:10 before she felt she had given the notes and files their proper attention. She stared at her second cup of coffee for a moment and then slowly picked up her cell phone. She placed a call to the twenty-four/seven resource line at the bureau. It was a bit slower than a direct call to Saunders or Duran during the day but it was better than nothing.

  After giving her name and badge number, she was greeted by a voice that was far too warm and pleasant for a quarter after four in the morning.

  “Agent Wise, how can we help you?”

  “I need the current address and phone number for a woman that probably lives somewhere in New York. Cass Nobilini.”

  “Okay, and is this going to be the best number to send that information to?”

  “It is. Thanks.”

  But even before she ended the call, Kate felt guilty as hell. There was a very large part of her that hoped Cass Nobilini had decided to move. If Kate could make it through this case without having to cross paths with Cass, she’d consider herself fortunate.

  You know that won’t happen, Kate thought. You’re just not that lucky.

  She got her answer twenty minutes later when she got a return call from the bureau. After giving the phone number for one Cass Nobilini, the address confirmed it.

  “127 Harper Street. Ashton, New York.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Kate was wired on nerves and late-night coffee as she and DeMarco loaded up into the car the following morning. They’d had a quick complimentary breakfast within the hotel before leaving, but Kate had not been able to eat much. Her stomach felt even more unstable as she pulled the car out into Sunday morning traffic, realizing that she was going to have to try to explain her history with Cass Nobilini to DeMarco.

  “Here’s the thing,” Kate said. “I don’t want you feeling like I’m keeping things from you and I certainly don’t want you to feel like I’m expecting you to go into this blindly. So I need to tell you about Cass Nobilini. I need to tell you how, even above the unsolved murder of her son, dealing with her was the hardest part of this case.”

  “Was she confrontational?” DeMarco asked.

  “No. Not quite. But…well, it’s hard to explain.”

  “We’ve got a twenty-minute drive out to Ashton. Try.”

  Kate knew she had to get it out—if not to inform DeMarco, then to simply expel it from her mind so it would quit nagging at her. She was pleased to find that once she got started, it really wasn’t that difficult at all.

  “Eight years ago, when Frank Nobilini was killed, I met Cass Nobilini—Frank’s mother. She had been told the news about a day or so before the FBI arrived. She was grieving, sure, but she was also…determined. That’s the best word I can think to use. She was determined to figure out who had killed her son. She was extremely helpful when we spoke with her but as far as she was concerned, everyone was a suspect. Everyone from the guy that got his order wrong at the deli to the mailman. I wish I was exaggerating here, DeMarco, but I’m not. She would call at least four or five times a day to ask me if I had considered someone in particular. And the longer we went without finding a killer, the more persistent she became. The more time that went by without us coming up with a suspect, the more insistent she became that she could figure it out herself…that we were very bad at our jobs. And because I was the lead on it, I got the brunt of it all.”

  “Was it like a coping mechanism?” DeMarco.

  “That’s what the bureau psychiatrist said. And honestly, it’s not that uncommon in cases where the death is sudden and the killer is never found. But Cass went above and beyond. There was one day where I had to sit down with her and get a little mean; I had to tell her to back off and let the bureau do their job. She responded in an honest way, telling us that if we were doing our jobs the right way, we’d have her son’s killer in custody.

  “She obeyed for the most part, though. At first. When we were quietly taken off of the case and just sort of had it running the background, I got a call one night. A call from Cass Nobilini. This was about five months after we’d stopped running hard after the case. She called me and told me that she knew who had killed her son. She said the FBI needed to come back to Ashton. And I had to tell her the truth—that unless she had hard evidence to support her claims, the bureau couldn’t become active on it again. Of course, she never had that evidence. So she called me one more time a few weeks later to let me know that she would forever blame the FBI—me, in particular, as the lead agent on the case—for not bringing her son’s killer to justice.”

  “That’s a little unfair,” DeMarco said.

  “It is. And unrealistic, too. But for some reason, that always stuck with me. At the risk of sounding like a diva, I always took failure very hard. The fact that I could never find such a blatant killer and was being blamed by a mother of the victim for never finding the killer…well, that’s haunted me for years.”

  “And we’re about to pay her a visit,” DeMarco said. She rubbed at her head and gave a lopsided grin. “Now I feel really bad for giving you such a hard time about Missy Tucker. Did you call
ahead?”

  “No. I probably should have. But I didn’t want to give her any warning. I have no clue how she’ll respond to seeing me.”

  “Since she lives in Ashton, I’d assume she’s already heard about the murder. Any chance you think she might be expecting you to show up?”

  To that, Kate had no answer. What she didn’t dare say, though, was that she was actually hoping Cass Nobilini would not be home.

  ***

  It was the same house Kate had been inside eight years ago. She was pretty sure the porch had been repainted and that most of the landscaping was new, but it was eerily familiar otherwise. As she and DeMarco stepped up onto the porch steps, Kate felt a little foolish at the fact that her heart seemed to be trying to beat right out of her chest.

  “You good?” DeMarco asked.

  Before she could even think about the answer, Kate knocked on the door with a hard, rapid motion.

  Almost right away, there was a response from inside, a sing-song “Coming! One second!”

  The past came roaring back to Kate. Being blamed for not finding the killer, having to tell Cass to calm the hell down and stay out of the way of the FBI. It all hit her as she heard the footfalls approaching and for a moment, she nearly wanted to make a run for it. But then the door was opening in front of them and a woman straight out of Kate’s past looked out at them. Most of her hair was now gray and there was an abundance of wrinkles on her seventy-year-old face, but she looked remarkably upbeat, all things considered.

  It was clear that Cass recognized her right away. She looked from Kate to DeMarco and then back to Kate. The slow smile that crept onto her face seemed genuine enough.

  “Agent Wise,” Cass said. “It’s…well, I guess it’s nice to see you.”

  “You, too.”

  “I thought you’d show up sooner or later. You’re here in town about Jack Tucker, I take it?”

  “Yes.”

  Cass nodded and let out a sigh. She stared at Kate for a moment, just long enough for a thick tension to worm its way back into Kate’s heart.