The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set

by Danielle Girard

  No. He knew her too well.

  She should have pulled that file. She should have scoured every lead, every piece of evidence.

  He grabbed her arm, his fingers searing the skin. “You want to explain that to me?”

  Hailey twisted herself free, turned away, and kept running.

  “Do not walk away from me!” he yelled and the echo exploded off the concrete walls.

  Hailey turned back, shaking. “You’re drunk.”

  She flinched at his hard, sharp laugh.

  “The rest of them might think you haven’t pulled it because you’re too grief-stricken—too fragile—but I know Hailey Wyatt.” He jabbed his trigger finger into his chest. “I know you.”

  She shivered.

  “So just answer one question, Wyatt,” he demanded. “One fucking question.”

  She stood firm, her hand on the banister.

  His voice dropped into a whisper. He pressed his hand down on her shoulder.

  “How the hell did John really die?”

  Chapter 17

  The anger burned through Hal like electricity, sparking at the hesitation in her eyes.

  The lies.

  “He was shot,” she said.

  He shook his head.

  “By an intruder,” she said, a tremor in her voice.

  “Bullshit.” The pieces fell together in his mind. John Wyatt was not killed by an intruder. Hal pushed past her, slammed up to the front desk, and retrieved his service weapon.

  How long had he known it? Months. How long had he kept himself from recognizing the truth? To protect his partner. His friend. Lying to himself and everyone else.

  He was done.

  She could go to hell.

  Hailey followed behind him.

  His car was at the bar, but he’d find another ride. He was done with Hailey Wyatt and her lies.

  Someone called his name. Sheila jogged toward them. He felt a sudden tightness in his belly.

  Crazy Sheila.

  Crazy, hot Sheila.

  Hailey stopped beside him, the lies between them like angry static.

  Hal focused on his ex-wife.

  She was a beautiful woman. Thinner than she’d been when they were married—maybe too thin. The same wide amber eyes smiled at him. That smooth, perfect skin.

  “Sheila.” Hal motioned to Hailey. “You remember my partner?”

  Sheila nodded but her eyes remained on Hal. “I was hoping I’d catch you. They told me you’d called about a guy being held in the jail, so I took a chance.”

  “You caught me, all right,” he said. A charge passed between them as she touched his arm. “You can go on home, Wyatt.”

  “You need a ride,” she said quickly. “Back to your car.”

  He met her glare with his own anger.

  “I’ll give him a ride,” Sheila cut in.

  Hailey would hate that. How she would hate him walking away from her. And worse, walking away with Sheila. She could stew in her lies and her deceit. She had it coming. “Yeah. Sheila can take me.”

  Hailey narrowed her eyes at him. A slight shake of her head. Hal ignored all the signs. Knew that she was telling him Sheila was a bad idea.

  He didn’t give a damn what Hailey thought.

  Sheila moved in beside him. “He said you could go.”

  “I’ll make it home, Wyatt,” Hal said, lacing his arm over Sheila’s shoulder.

  As Hailey walked away from them, her heels clacked on the cement. Hal didn’t look back. “I could use a drink,” he said.

  Sheila squeezed his arm in excitement.

  Already, Hal felt the slow onslaught of regret.

  No. He’d been shot at, held at gunpoint, lied to.

  Damn it, he deserved a fucking drink.

  They ended up in a hole-in-the-wall bar a few blocks from his apartment. Sheila was playing the game hard. She ordered shots of Patron to remind him of their honeymoon and paid for them with cash so that he wouldn’t remember the credit she’d charged up in his name.

  She bought the first three rounds. After that, he had a vague recollection of pulling out his credit card. They walked home. She was first up the stairs. Moving slowly, seductively, she swayed her hips to hypnotize him.

  It worked.

  He fumbled to unlock the door, carried her inside, and kicked it closed.

  This is a mistake. He slid his tongue into her mouth, palmed her backside, and lifted her up. She kissed his neck and trailed her fingernails along his shoulders and back.

  He didn’t care. Not tonight.

  He dropped her in the center of his unmade bed and unbuttoned his shirt, watched as she shed her jacket, her sweater, her bra …

  His face against the creamy skin of her neck, he inhaled the smell of her—rose water on her skin and gardenia in her hair. Smelled it and remembered the night they’d met, the morning he’d asked her to marry him, the drive from their wedding to the coast for their honeymoon.

  Redwoods and dense fern, the sky threatened rain. Sam Cooke blasting from the radio, the two of them laughing. He pulled the memories in, wrapped them between his fingers with her hair, and fought to let go of James Robbins and Blake and Fredricks.

  Let go of Hailey Wyatt.

  Some time later, he slept. An empty, dark sleep without dreams.

  Chapter 18

  Trembling, Hailey made her way to the car, clenching her jaw and fists, holding it all in.

  Losing John.

  Losing Hal.

  Hailey revved the engine and squealed out of the parking structure, opposite from where she’d left Hal and Sheila.

  God, she was an idiot. She had driven away the one person she could trust completely.

  And now she was stuck living with a liar.

  Who knew how much of what Jim had said was lies. How could she trust him about the night John died?

  “I don’t know.” Jim had said, carrying Ali. The shaking. Liz screaming. Jim shouting.

  Then, John. The blood.

  So much blood …

  At the intersection of Van Ness and Broadway, Hailey hesitated. Why did Hal have to push? Why couldn’t he be more like Bruce?

  Bruce didn’t want the truth. He clung to the hope that they would end up together. That meant letting her keep secrets. Bruce knew that.

  Only Hal forced it. He had always been subtle. Until tonight. Now all the things she’d worried about since John’s death—they were all out.

  Because she had never pulled his case file.

  Never even thought to pull it.

  Hailey turned toward home.

  She needed to confront Jim—to see his face and gauge how many more lies were behind the ones she knew about.

  She was not playing along anymore.

  The house was dark when she parked in front. She wondered if the confrontation might have to wait until morning. She held the scrap of paper from Jim’s shredder and the draft of the newspaper article by Donald Blake.

  As she came back into the hall, Jim came down the stairs, his bathrobe tied sloppily across his middle.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

  She held the sliver of paper in one fist, the letter in the other.

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Evidence.”

  He slipped his hand into the pocket of his robe. “You want to go downstairs?”

  She followed him into the den.

  Instead of sitting behind the desk, Jim sat in one of the big armchairs, the one closer to the place where John had died. That was how she thought of the chair.

  She stood in front of him.

  “What is it?”

  She handed him the article and watched as he scanned the byline and the note. Then he read the article as though he’d never seen it before. Convincing.

  But he read too quickly.

  “Blake. You mentioned him earlier.”

  “You’ve never seen that before?” she asked.

  “Never.” His eyes didn’t wav
er. Nothing moved in his throat. He didn’t fidget or look away.

  She lay the shredded piece on the photocopy and slid it across the page until it fit like a puzzle piece over the full picture. “I found this in your shredder.”

  “My shredder?”

  “The one in your cabinet, Jim. Blake’s family was killed in gang fire. After he wrote this. The dead gunrunner broke into Blake’s house. Dennigs, Wesson, Fredricks. You, Jim. It’s all related.”

  John. Was it possible John was part of this too?

  She’d worked so hard to push the night he died from her thoughts. And now, it was right there. They’d been fighting. Jim and John. Jim had called something bullshit. Horse manure. He’d said, “That’s a load of horse manure.”

  She pressed her palm to the painful pulsing in her chest. How she wanted to take the girls and leave. But where?

  “I didn’t kill Nick.”

  Nick. “But you haven’t told me everything. You know more about his death.”

  “I had no reason to hurt him,” Jim said. He didn’t deny it. He did know more than he was saying.

  She was done with him. “Don’t bother trying to convince me. From now on, Jim, don’t bother. I’m going to tell Hal. All of it.”

  “All of it?” he repeated. The reference was to John. Not trusting herself to speak, she only nodded.

  Dee appeared in the doorway. “You guys okay?”

  “I need to go to the station for a bit,” Hailey told her.

  “Liz is asleep,” Dee said. “I’ve got work to do, so I’ll be up for a while.”

  Hailey didn’t want to leave the girls. But she didn’t want to wake them either.

  “I can work in the kitchen in case someone wakes up,” Dee said.

  “I’ll be back in an hour or two,” Hailey said. “Are you sure you don’t mind?”

  “Not at all. I’ll be up twice that long working on a budgetary proposal.”

  “You should go to bed, Jim,” Dee told him.

  Jim frowned but didn’t argue. Instead, he padded toward the stairs.

  Hailey forced herself to turn and leave.

  As she drove down Broadway and through the tunnel, driving faster than she should have, she watched her rearview mirror. The tears welled up, burning in her eyes. She needed to talk, to let it out. How long had she held it all in?

  As she made a left on Powell Street, the sobs came in a rush. She swiped at her eyes to clear her vision. How much she wanted to confide all of this in someone. Suddenly desperate to tell it, she turned again on Green and, when she was sure there was no one behind her, turned onto August Aly.

  “I didn’t kill Nick,” Jim had said. No outrage at the implication that he was involved. No shock at the accusation. He had known she thought it. So why not tell her what else he knew? If he wasn’t involved, who was he protecting? Dee had been in love with Nick. Surely he would want to find the person who’d killed the man she loved.

  Parked in front of Bruce’s building, she dialed his number.

  “I’m downstairs,” she said. “Will you come meet me?”

  Quiet on the line.

  Silence.

  “Uh—” he finally said.

  “I’m downstairs.”

  “Yeah,” he said, clearing the sleep from his voice. “I can’t.”

  “You can’t—” Hailey gasped. “Oh. You’re not alone.” Then there was a woman’s voice in the background, groggy, close to the phone. Curled against him.

  “Are you okay?”

  She didn’t answer. Why was she surprised? He’d been with other women before. But after John’s death, he’d promised they would be together. That he would wait for her to be ready.

  “Wyatt?”

  Still, she couldn’t bring herself to speak.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? We can talk in the morning.”

  “Don’t bother.” She slammed her palm into the wheel, dropped the phone, and punched the dash. “Goddamn it!” The car shook beneath the weight of her anger, and she screamed until the sound stabbed in her throat.

  The door of Bruce’s building opened. He came out in jeans and a Cal sweatshirt—the same clothes he threw on after they’d been in bed together.

  She revved the engine and peeled from the curb.

  It wasn’t Bruce she needed.

  It wasn’t Jim.

  It wasn’t even John. Bruce had been right about that. Her marriage with John hadn’t been working.

  Hal. It was Hal she couldn’t lose.

  She drove back down Broadway, the tears drying on her cheeks as her cell phone buzzed on the seat. Bruce. She didn’t answer.

  Not ready to go home, she went to the only other place she could think of. The station was quiet when she arrived, strangely calm. She parked in back, took her gun from the glove box, strapped on her holster, and got out of the car.

  Music blared in the hallway of the basement. The door to Records sat open.

  A lab tech stood at a counter, typing on a computer, bobbing her head in a way that should have made typing impossible. She had beautiful dark skin and amber eyes. Hailey recognized her from the other day, when Hailey had been pacing around the lab, waiting for the results on the prints from the button and from the letter Jim had received when he was shot. How much had changed since then. She’d trusted Jim then. She and Hal had been okay.

  Hailey thought of Sheila and hoped Hal wasn’t still with her.

  The tech turned the music down.

  Hailey showed her badge and introduced herself.

  “I remember you from the other day,” the tech said. “I’m Naomi Muir.”

  “I’ve got something I need to run against existing evidence. If you can tell Roger I left it for him?” Hailey pulled the cork from her pocket and handed it to Naomi.

  “We’re not testing for prints?” Naomi asked.

  “No. Wine. I want to see if this is the same vintage as the one we’ve got in the Fredricks’ case.” Hailey gave her the case number, and Naomi wrote it on the outside of a paper sack, dropped the cork inside, and taped the top closed.

  “You the contact?” Naomi asked.

  “Tell Roger to call me as soon as he can. Only me.”

  Hailey had never made a request like that. Every piece of evidence always went to either her or Hal. It was always who was available first. What would happen if Roger questioned it? Or if Naomi didn’t make it clear?

  If Roger told Hal …

  She’d have to come clean sooner than she’d planned.

  Either way, Hal deserved answers.

  And she deserved the repercussions.

  Naomi took down the instructions, confirmed her cell phone number, and put the bag in the plastic bin headed to the lab. As Hailey left, Naomi turned the music back on.

  “Who is that?” Hailey asked.

  “Velvet Underground,” Naomi said. “Cool, huh?”

  “Very,” Hailey agreed, though she wasn’t sure if it was cool or awful.

  The door to Records was locked, so Hailey rang dispatch and asked them to page the on-call officer. When the officer showed up, he stank of cigarettes. He shivered and rubbed his hands together in the cold, foggy night air. “Always happens the minute I get outside.”

  “Sorry, Simon.”

  “No worries, Lady Wyatt. Who you here for?”

  Hailey looked into the room, the metal shelves she’d stared at so many times, the case boxes she’d pulled and studied, created and added to. Closed. Left unclosed.

  Simon cleared his throat and Hailey looked up.

  “John Wyatt,” she said.

  Simon stepped backward, whistled, and spun on his heels. He took a couple of steps and began to skate down the cement floor. Heelys. She didn’t know anyone still wore those.

  Simon set a box on the counter, opened the book, and had her sign it out.

  “You okay, Lady Wyatt?”

  Hailey nodded.

  “You take it easy now.”

  She nodded again,
carried the box to the elevator, and rode it up to the fourth floor. Walking toward Homicide, she prayed she could get to one of the interview rooms unseen. The department was silent. She went straight to the far interview room and locked the door.

  Sitting in a cold steel chair, she stared at the case information. The file number was printed on the front: H, for homicide, and the numbers 5987513.

  Below that, John J. Wyatt.

  She stared at the unopened box. His clothes would be inside. The slug they’d taken from the wall where it had sunk three inches after exiting his back, between the thoracic vertebrae T4 and T5, the shot a through and through. Entered the lower left side of his chest, punctured his lung, nicked his vena cava, and exited through his spine.

  Photos of the scene, of him on the table.

  The autopsy.

  Before the funeral she’d opened his shirt to see the Y-shaped wound that Shelby Tate had so carefully re-stitched on John’s chest. The red puckered stitches were purple and blue on the edges where the yellow thread bound them.

  The blood had been cleaned off.

  The pictures of him at the scene would be worse. Gory. Blood was everywhere. On the floor, his clothes, on all of them. Blood on her hands from trying to stop the bleeding.

  Then, on his face when she’d held his cheeks and kissed him goodbye.

  Her clothes would be inside the box too. The blouse she’d been wearing, her slacks.

  Reports. Diagrams.

  She could handle this. She had to.

  The worst would be the pictures, but they were images she knew.

  Images that followed her into sleep, and into waking, every day.

  Hailey cut the seal on the box and pulled off the top. A thick brown folder sat on top.

  She would do what she should have done a year ago. What she had forgotten to do. No. She had known this file was here. She had chosen to ignore it.

  Because ignoring it was easier than reliving that night.

  And now she had no choice. She had lost her partner. She had lost her best friend. She had to find a way to get him back, to make this right.

  She took out the folder and set it on the table. She would read the entire file on John’s death from page one.

  Chapter 19

  At four in the morning, Hailey was still sitting in the empty interview room, mapping trajectories across the copies of the crime scene drawings from the file.