The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set

by Danielle Girard

  Though the room was warm from the fire, the same deep chill she had felt since John’s death slid under her skin. “What is it, Jim?”

  “I should have shared this with you sooner.” He handed her a number ten envelope. “It was wrong to keep it from you.”

  Hailey lifted the flap, unsealed, and drew out a white page.

  When she unfolded it, she saw it was a photocopy of a letter, the bottom signed Nick. “Fredricks?”

  “We knew each other some time ago.”

  The top was dated November 15, 2003, about five months before Nicholas’s death. Trembling, Hailey read it through twice before pausing to consider what it meant.

  Only nine sentences long, the letter was vague. After reading it a few more times, she decided the threat in the letter was intentionally cryptic.

  In the first three lines, he praised Jim, commented on the specifics of his voting record and on his handle of the issues facing those “not enjoying the same economic prosperity” as they did.

  Midway through, though, the tone changed.

  I am concerned how recent events might change the direction of your platform. I would so mourn the loss of you as an ally, Jim, particularly, of course, in light of our shared interests.

  Fredricks made no specific reference to what the recent events were, or what he meant by shared interests.

  It was the last three lines that made the skin on her neck and shoulders tighten with chills. There, Fredricks had added a quote. One Hailey had recently learned was Jung …

  Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people.

  Then Fredricks wrote: I know your darkness, Senator.

  The letter the police had found lying next to Jim, after he’d been shot, had ended with the same last line.

  When Hailey was done, Jim reached for the page. She hesitated, then handed it over.

  “Who shot you, Jim?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly don’t.”

  In the last year, she’d gotten to know Jim well. She’d watched him interact with Liz and Dee and had noticed that he glanced away at the end of an answer that wasn’t entirely truthful. I’m not worried about anything, Liz, he would say, but his eyes focused downward.

  His furrowed brow, the pull of his mouth. Gone was his smooth politician expression. He wasn’t lying now.

  “Do you know how Fredricks died?” she asked.

  Jim’s gaze flashed to hers. “He was shot.”

  “It happened just blocks from here. What I meant was—did you ever have a theory about why he was shot? You knew him.”

  Jim stared at the fire, the threads of yellow and red reflecting in his eyes, casting his skin orange. “I thought about it a lot—I still do. Nick had some trouble in his earlier years. He immigrated to the States from Germany in high school. His family moved to Brooklyn, and after school, he went to work for the NYPD.”

  She knew this already. “Do you know what he did for the department?”

  “He worked in media relations, writing mostly. After that, he moved to Washington to get involved in policy—specifically, gun policy.”

  “Do you know why he left the department?” she asked.

  “I don’t think it suited him, working for the police.”

  “Meaning?” Hailey prompted.

  “He was outspoken about his beliefs,” Jim said. “DC suited him better, although, even there, he was outspoken at first.”

  “You think he might have been killed because someone didn’t like his politics?”

  Jim let out a short laugh. “Most of Washington would be dead if people killed over politics.”

  It was true.

  “The shooting never made sense to me. He’d been a pacifist for a number of years, and he was a well-respected thinker. The police assumed it was random violence. His wallet was stolen, and his watch.”

  “But in this neighborhood?” Hailey asked. “It’s hard to imagine a holdup here.”

  “It is very disturbing,” Jim agreed.

  “What does he mean about ‘your darkness’?”

  Jim shrank then, still staring at the dying flames in the hearth. “This is messy, Hailey.”

  She felt the chill dig deeper under her skin. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s messy.” He stood. “I’m going to need a drink. You want one?”

  “Please.” Normally, she would have said no, but it had been a long day. Jim returned with two crystal glasses, half filled with dark, amber liquid and perfect squares of ice. He set one in front of her.

  Jim and John used to sit in this room, drinking from these two glasses. She couldn’t bring herself to pick up her drink.

  “Dee and I were adopted,” he began.

  “I knew that. By your aunt and uncle.”

  “My mother’s sister and her husband,” he said. “Dad had been in the war, and we were all living in a Quonset hut community, down in L.A. The war really messed Dad up, wrecked him, really. Dee and I were just kids.” He closed his eyes, cupped the drink between his hands, resting them on his belt.

  “I was seven. Dee was five. Dad brought back a Luger, something he’d pulled off some dead Nazi, I guess. He never really told the story, but he loved that gun. Worshipped it.”

  Hailey didn’t touch her glass.

  “When he got really drunk and passed out,” Jim continued, “I used to take it off him, carry it around, and pretend to shoot Nazis.”

  Hailey shivered.

  “It was never loaded,” Jim went on. “He’d only gotten three bullets, and he always hid them separately. He thought they were worth something. The jackets were covered in green enamel, the way German bullets were during World War II. He called them his emeralds.

  “One night, when he was really drunk, I took the gun out to play with it in the dark.” He paused. “A little girl … Dottie.”

  Hailey feared where the story was going. John should be next to her. Did he know this? She took a drink from the glass, cringing at the clinking sound of the ice.

  “A black girl,” Jim went on. “Those hut communities were mixed then. She appeared beside me. Scared me, so I dropped the gun. She got to it first, took off running with it.

  “Her older brother was a bully, a kid as big as a truck, skin so dark you could hardly see his eyes. And mean. Just angry and mean. Their dad hadn’t come back at all, and rumor was he’d been released from the army but just hadn’t come to get the kids or their mother, who was a fragile little lady, not much bigger than me and Dottie.”

  Something creaked in the hall. Jim frowned and rose, crept from the room, and returned a minute later.

  “Does Liz know this story?” Hailey asked.

  He shook his head. “No one does.”

  So John didn’t know. Would it have changed how he saw his father? Would it change the way she saw him?

  “Dee?”

  “Well, yes. Dee knows because she was there and my parents. And there is one other person who knew.”

  Hailey waited, but he shook his head as though the answer would have to wait.

  She sensed it already, how the story would end. She wished she were under her covers, asleep.

  How many more secrets could she keep?

  “So Dottie took off with Dad’s gun. She was wearing a pair of khaki pants rolled above her ankles, pants that had been her brother’s. Rolled up like that hid the places where he’d torn through the knees. The only things I could see in the dark were her bobby socks, a dirty white color, the little lace ratty along the top.”

  Jim squinted as he spoke, his eyes partially shuttered, as though he was describing a picture he had in his head. One he’d had for more than sixty years.

  “She stopped once or twice, pointed the gun at me, yelled ‘Bang. Bang.’ Like some sort of joke…

  “I couldn’t keep up with her. The only thing that kept me running was the thought of what would happen if her brother got hold of that gun, or if my father
woke up the next day and it wasn’t there.

  “The place was so dusty, it was like running through a swarm of flies. We reached the lot where the older kids used to play with this one ball that the whole place shared. It was empty.

  “I was so thankful that her brother wasn’t there, but she didn’t stop. Dottie kept running, laughing, and calling back to me that I was a sissy boy because I couldn’t catch her.”

  Jim took a long drink. “Finally, she slowed down enough for me to lunge at her, knock her down. I held her down. I was so angry, and she just kept going on. ‘You just mad because you can’t run as fast as a girl,’ she said.” His lips narrowed. “It was true too, but I wanted her to take it back.”

  He paused and raised his glass. The crystal caught the fire’s light, like faceted stones of red and orange in his fist. “I pointed the gun at her—to scare her.”

  Hailey drained her glass, preparing for what Jim would tell her. Seven years old. Camilla’s age.

  He cupped a hand above his eyes as though shielding his face from a bright light. Hiding his emotion. Jim rarely showed emotion. Visions of the night John died—the shot, Jim’s scream, Ali in his arms.

  Hailey felt herself trembling, something inside her knocking and shaking. She wanted to leave, to run, but instead, she gripped the arms of the chair, holding still.

  Jim patted his face as though splashing water on his skin. His eyes were red, the skin beneath them flushed. “Dottie and I struggled for a couple minutes, me on top of her, trying to get her to tell me I wasn’t a wimp.” He sighed. “The things that mean so much when you’re a kid.” He stopped, staring back at the fire, his face burning with adolescent shame.

  “What happened, Jim?”

  “A few minutes later, she pushed me off and got up, turned away. She was just stronger than me. Not much bigger, but stronger. She called my dad a no-good drunk.” His face trembled and he cupped a hand over his mouth. “God, he was a no-good drunk, but hearing her say that made me shake with fury. Part of it was that she was a girl.”

  Hailey could imagine the fear he’d had of his father, the punishment that would come from losing it. The drinkers were the worst. Of all the killers she’d dealt with, the alcoholics were the meanest.

  “But I think the bigger part of it was that she was black. It’s a terrible thing, that kind of hate.” He straightened his back as though preparing to receive the verdict in his case. “I pointed that gun at her and I pulled the trigger.”

  Hailey collapsed back into the chair. “Oh, God.”

  “I don’t remember looking down at it, figuring out where the trigger was or anything. And I’d never shot a gun before.” He met her gaze. “I’ve never shot one since either. I’ve got no idea how I did it, but I wanted her to be sorry, and I pointed it at her. It exploded, knocked me flat on my backside. I hit my head on a rock. When I got up, stunned, I tried to find her in the dark. For a second, I thought she’d run off, but then I saw her socks. Those white socks. When I saw the blood, I pissed my pants and ran like hell.”

  “She died?”

  “She died,” he said as though the words caused him physical pain.

  Hailey leaned forward and set the glass down. Jim tipped his own to his lips until the amber disappeared. Then he set his down too. He was crying.

  John’s death. That was the only other time she’d seen Jim cry. “No one heard the shot?”

  “That field was out from the huts, close to the tracks. Trains passed by at all hours and if anyone heard the shot, I always figured they thought it was a train or a car on the freeway a few blocks down.”

  “What did you do?” Hailey asked.

  “That night? I ran home with the gun and got my mom. She was the one who could handle that sort of thing, though Dad happened to have sort of sobered up that night too. Relatively, anyway. Mom told Dee to stay in the hut, but she followed us. Dad decided to tell the police that he’d done it, been playing around with the gun just like I was, and it went off accidentally. Mom begged him to tell the police the truth, but he’d made up his mind.”

  His father had sacrificed himself for his son. Of course he had. That was what parents did. It was what John would have done too. Anything for their kids.

  “God, that night is still so clear. Mom and Dee crying, Dad trying to sober up, and me standing there in wet pants, thinking I loved my dad more then than I ever had before.”

  They sat for a few moments in silence. Hailey thought about the boy who’d been shot at the police station—Dwayne Carson. Seventeen.

  How many young victims had she seen in her time in the department?

  Too many. Way too many.

  “That’s why that night—when John …” Jim whispered.

  She didn’t want to talk about the night John was killed. “Who else knew?”

  Jim looked up. “Who knew what?”

  “Who was the other person who knew about Dottie? Aside from Dee.”

  His shoulders dropped, folding in until they nearly touched.

  “If you never told anyone, who did?” Hailey remembered what he’d said, that Dee had felt guilty. “Dee. Who did she tell?”

  He shook his head. “She’d never tell anyone.” His expression faltered, a frown tugged at his lips. “Never again.”

  “But she told someone once.”

  He nodded.

  “I need to know who it was, Jim, who she told.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed against the thin skin of his neck like a knife carving a path. “Nicholas Fredricks.”

  “Damn,” she whispered.

  Chapter 11

  Hailey came out of the den and ran straight into Dee. Hailey jumped backward.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you.” Dee peered into the den. “I just got back from dinner with Tom, and I was checking on Jim.”

  Jim’s voice drifted through the doorway. “I’m big enough to take care of myself,” Jim snapped.

  Dee didn’t seem fazed, but left him alone. This was the third or fourth night in a week that she had been out with Tom Rittenberg. She seemed different too. Less stressed, happier. Things with Tom must have been getting serious.

  Hailey followed her toward the kitchen. How long had she been there? “Did you hear our conversation?”

  Dee sat at the kitchen table. “I know he was talking about Dottie.” She fingered her locket. “And Nick.”

  “Nick.”

  Dee knew him too. More than knew him. Hailey studied the locket, the way she worried it. Hailey didn’t think she’d ever seen Dee without it.

  Dee caught Hailey staring at the necklace. “The locket was a gift from him.”

  Dee and Nick had been together. “You met through Jim?”

  “No. We met through some mutual acquaintances in DC. He came back here for me. He’d gotten a teaching position at Cornell, and I’d planned to go with him in the fall. We’d started talking about getting married.”

  “And then he was killed.”

  “Yes.”

  A twelve-year-old murder. John’s aunt was in love with a man who had been killed. How had she never heard about it? John had never so much as mentioned that Dee had been with someone. She could see Jim keeping it quiet, but why hadn’t John told her? Did he not know? And Liz?

  “I’m so sorry, Dee. I didn’t know.”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  Twelve years didn’t seem that long. Ali would still be in high school. Camilla would be in college. They would still be missing their father. “I don’t think I’ll ever get over John’s death.”

  Dee looked up. “No. I don’t imagine you will.”

  The words struck hard. Of course she wouldn’t get over John. But she’d expected Dee to say something different, something like, “It gets easier.”

  But maybe it didn’t.

  The cop in Hailey took over. “Can you think of anyone who would have wanted to hurt him?” Hailey asked.

  “If I knew who might have killed him, I wouldn’t have
kept it to myself.”

  “Of course not.” It was a stupid question. Dee would want to find his killer as much as anyone.

  “But Nick did have a way of getting people worked up,” Dee admitted. “He and Jim used to get into it all the time.”

  “I can see that,” Hailey said. “What was Nick’s perspective?”

  “His background made him see things differently. He’d come from Germany where his family was very poor. America was this wonderful place where life would be different, where they could finally have enough. And it was that way for his parents. They had enough to provide for their kids, to feed everyone. For them, that was a lot. It was enough.”

  “And for Nick?”

  She smiled softly.

  “He wanted this country to live up to that ideal he had in his mind. He wanted to see it the way his parents did. After high school, he worked in the police department. Three of his cousins were already on the force. He wasn’t interested in being an officer, so he took a job with administration. He worked with their press office until someone realized how well he wrote. After that, he wrote all sorts of things for the department—speeches mostly, but press pieces and articles for the Times and the Post about the complexities of holding people to the law, but not limiting their freedom.”

  “Sounds like someone we should be listening to now.”

  “They still teach his articles in a few criminal law programs.”

  “He left the department abruptly, right? What happened?”

  “The police took a call about a child hanging around the grounds of an inner city high school. It was late at night, and there was no one else around. The caller said the child might have a weapon. The officer came to the scene—this is before the days of cameras and cell phones recording everything. The kid was shot. The officer swore he had a gun, but there wasn’t a gun on the scene, and no one else could corroborate his story.”

  Hailey could already hear the end of the story. The police wanted to cover it up. “Nick was supposed to write about it.”

  Dee nodded. “A speech for the police chief, actually.”

  “And they wanted him to lie.”

  “More like misdirect,” Dee said. “It was to prevent a riot, they told him.”