by Payge Galvin
“Maybe we should do this some other time,” Malone suggested, rubbing his eyes. “I had kind of a late night last night.” Maybe the blonde girlfriend Max had seen Blake posed with in his sports pics really had kept him up all night.
“Seriously? You want me to come back?” Max didn’t have to fake the half-amused, half-uneasy laugh that went with that. “Let’s just get this done so we can both go our separate ways.”
Malone sighed, as if resigned. “What’s your first question?” he asked.
Max pulled out his notepad. “Well, I hear you’re from a football family,” he said, beginning with the easy stuff. “How did your father influence your love of the game?”
Malone seemed to relax as he settled into answering the standard questions, talking about his childhood in Rio Verde, his high school football years, how he chose to stay in his home town for college, rather than choosing a higher-profile football school.
“Your girlfriend’s a hometown girl too, isn’t she?” Max asked.
Something scared crossed Malone’s face, and his gaze slid over Max’s shoulder, back toward that bedroom door. Crap, she was probably still there. Except it wasn’t exactly a secret the dude had a girlfriend. She was right there in the stories about him.
Unless some other girl was behind that door, a different girl from the one everyone saw him with in public. Maybe it wasn’t death Malone was worried about being caught at, but sex. Cheating. The world was full of stories.
“Yeah,” Malone said warily. “Stacy’s always supported me. I’d do anything for her.”
Clearly, a change of subject was called for if Max wanted Malone to trust him enough to finish the interview. “So how does it feel to be the first Rio Verde player to attract the notice of NFL scouts?”
Malone grew more at ease again as he talked about his hopes for the future and his love of the game. When Max asked his take on the latest pro sports drug scandal, Malone didn’t even blink. “I care about my body too much to fuck with that crap. Drugs take back everything they give you, with interest.”
The quarterback was definitely hiding things, but Max was less and less convinced those things had anything to do with drug dealing, let alone murder.
A star quarterback sex-and-cheating scandal would be worth something too, Max thought as he wrapped up the interview, yet he felt uneasy at the thought. It was one thing to expose the son of a senator known for his strident anti-sex legislation for sleeping around, and another to out an athlete who never talked about his sex life in public. Yet if Blake was cheating, the public deserved to know, right? If nothing else the blonde girlfriend who posed for photos with him deserved to know.
Yeah, and would Max want to find out Claire had left him for another guy through some reporter’s exposé? Not so much.
Max told himself sex went cold a lot slower than a dead body anyway, and he had more time to decide whether to try to unveil Malone for sleeping around than he did to uncover the murderer in the coffee shop. Max made a mental note to dig deeper later and wrapped the interview up.
Malone held out his hand as they stood. Max didn’t take it.
Malone smirked. “It’s been a pleasure,” he said. “Now, don’t darken my doorway ever again.”
“You got it,” Max said. Once Malone saw that the feel-good piece was harmless, he’d trust Max more, too.
Max booked it out of there and unlocked his bike. He did another circuit around The Coffee Cave—the harried looking barista now seemed to be training a couple high school kids to mix coffee drinks—then grabbed a quick lunch from The Dog House and headed back to work to organize his notes and write up the day’s obituaries.
After the obituaries, he moved on to sorting through some ever-exciting police blotter stories: a cat caught in a tree, underage drinking on campus (this was news?), some frat boys deciding to celebrate the Fourth of July early by exploding weed firecrackers on their grill.
So when Max came to a police report about a murder, he did a double-take, because he’d almost given up believing anything actually happened in this town.
He stopped and read the report more closely. One Thomas “Tommy” Holloway, dead of a gunshot wound, found with a high level of coke in his system. A quick public records search revealed the man had a string of minor drug convictions.
That called for interviewing someone at the police department for more details. Sadly, Sarah, whose beat the department was, wasn’t out with the flu, and when Max passed the report on to her, she didn’t seem nearly as excited as he was. “Drug deaths are more common in Rio Verde than you think, Max,” she told him patiently.
“Are murders more common than I think, too?” Max pressed.
“Actually, yes,” Sarah told him. “But I’ll follow up on it, just in case.” She turned back to her desk with a jaded sigh that made Max vow he’d never let himself become that burned out on his job.
As he returned to the police blotter pile on his desk—the next story was something about a dog keeping the neighbors awake—he realized avoiding burnout sometime during the next four decades might not be as easy as it sounded. Still, he made a mental note to do some digging of his own into Thomas Holloway’s life and death that night. Rio Verde wasn’t that large a town—it didn’t have the murder rate of a place like Phoenix, whatever Sarah said. Two drug-related murders in a week could be a coincidence, but Max wasn’t betting that way.
Not that Sarah—or anyone else not at The Coffee Cave the night Boots died—knew about the first drug-related death.
After Max finished with the police blotter reports he roughed in a draft of the feel-good quarterback story. As he wrote, he was more convinced than ever that whatever Blake Malone was up to, it wasn’t murder, drug-related or otherwise.
Max biked home by way of The Coffee Cave again—past campus bars that almost looked sleepy by day and that one dance studio that he was always surprised could stay in business in this town—but he still didn’t see anything unusual. A public records search on Thomas Holloway that night didn’t turn up much either—just the string of petty drug charges Max already knew about and the dates the guy had been born and died. It was as if, aside from those few public-records events, he’d never existed at all. In other words, Holloway was another dead end.
Right. Time to get back to tracking down his fellow coffee-shop conspirators instead. It was all he had. He was willing to bet Blake was innocent, and he wanted to let some time pass before he tried talking to Allie again. That still left nine other people to investigate.
Max found out from the Cave facebook page that singer-Dillon’s last name was Varga, but he also found out Dillon had more or less disappeared: he didn’t have any gigs scheduled at the Cave or anywhere else, and according to neighbors he’d abandoned the apartment whose address Max tracked down.
Max called Senator Cunningham’s office, too, saying he was working on a story about the Arizona-born children of state politicians—he hadn’t ruled Joe IV out as a murder suspect, after all—but as soon as the senator’s campaign manager, Renee-something, learned the story was about the younger Joe and not his father, her tone went faux-polite as she tried to offer him some bland quotes about how Joe had been such a strength and support to his father this campaign season.
When Max told her he was hoping to focus his piece more on the senator’s son himself and would really appreciate an interview, Renee’s tone cooled. “I’ll pass your message on,” she said, with a well-practiced tone that made clear that no way in hell was she doing that. Either she was protective of the senator’s brat or he really had something to hide. Max thought about bringing up the photo of Joe and Whitney—he was pretty sure that would get her attention—but it would also draw attention to it, and he didn’t want to blow his chance of breaking his backup scandal if the murder story didn’t pan out.
Though when he thought of putting Joe and Whitney on the front page, he felt as uneasy as he did at the thought of revealing whoever Blake had hidden behind his
bedroom door. How would Max feel, if every time he and Claire fucked he had to worry some asshole would turn it into a front page story?
Though if it meant they actually were fucking, Max reflected, it could be plastered across the front page of the New York Times for all he cared. Maybe then Claire would at least return Max’s calls. She’d never gone this long after a fight without at least sending him a pissed-off text to let him know she cared. Well, besides that first text, which still didn’t sound right to Max. The conviction that more was going on than he knew, that Claire was keeping secrets of her own, grew, but he told himself he was just being paranoid.
Claire didn’t call again, and Max slipped into something of a summer routine. Days spent writing obituaries and covering Kids Klub events at the mall—not to mention county fairs and livestock shows in tiny towns with names like Creek Wash and Wash Creek and who knew what, all while hoping someone else would get the flu so he could write an almost-real story again. But he thought of Claire—again, Max?—and he stuck not only with the fluff pieces he was writing by day but also with the online ASU Rio Verde summer classes he was taking in the evenings, ignoring the restlessness that always before would make him wonder whether it was time to look for something new.
In between the internship and classes, he ate a lot of ramen noodles, jerked off to a lot of memories of Claire, and wasted hours upon hours scouting public records files for any whisper of a mention of his Coffee Cave co-conspirators.
He didn’t find one, any more than he got any answer to the repeated messages he left with Renee-the-campaign manager. What he did find, a few weeks later, was one Douglas Coughlan, who showed up with a picture on Rio Verde’s missing person’s site. One look, and it was clear Douglas Coughlan and Motorcycle Boots were the same guy. But Douglas Coughlan had no more of a public presence than Thomas Holloway. Oddly enough, drug dealers didn’t seem to be in the habit of posting their resumes on LinkedIn.
After work each day Max swung by The Coffee Cave on his bike, hoping to find—he wasn’t sure what he was hoping to find. He only knew that as May gave way to June and then to July—and as the desert’s dry heat gave way to pre-thunderstorm-season-humidity—he didn’t find it. He only found a series of rotating baristas, none of which lasted more than a week, and increasingly empty tables as word of how short-staffed the Cave was these days got out. People complained about it on the Facebook page, just like they complained the music had gone to hell with Dillon gone.
One particularly sticky July evening, when the sky kept rumbling but refused to produce any rain, Max climbed the stairs to his apartment feeling particularly cranky. Who knew Claire could ignore him for two whole months? He’d continued texting her without any luck. He tried knocking on her apartment door, too, but she was never there, no matter how late he knocked. He had a key to her place, just like she did to his, but he wasn’t about to be that creepy guy who waited for his girlfriend—or even his ex-girlfriend, a term he was slowly coming to accept really did apply here—in the dark of her own apartment. Girlfriend or ex-girlfriend, he respected her too much for that. Which meant whatever secrets she was keeping, she went right on keeping them.
So as he reached the third-floor balcony outside his student apartment he resigned himself to another night alone with the Internet—strictly for researching the murder, not for stalking Claire—and with his own fantasies which, since they involved Claire, couldn’t be found on the Internet but only in his own head and hands.
He eyed the apartment door resentfully. He wasn’t looking forward to the empty rooms and empty bed on the other side of it, but what could he do? He put his key in the lock.
The door was already unlocked and unbolted. Max’s heart leapt. Claire, he thought in that moment. Only Claire had a key to his place. She was back. That she was perfectly willing to break into his apartment didn’t matter in that moment. All that mattered was that she was there. Max knew he’d tell her everything. After that first rough night he’d thought he was dealing fine with everything that had happened at The Coffee Cave, dead body and all, but he’d been less fine with it as the weeks went on. He felt the tension he hadn’t even known he’d been holding leave his shoulders as he stepped inside.
Claire didn’t come out to meet him. That wasn’t right. Claire was paranoid about home security, and she always came to the door when it opened, not only because she was happy to see him but to make sure it was him and not some random break-in. When Max teased her about it, she only said, more seriously than he’d expected, that you could never be too careful, because there were all kinds of people in this world.
Max walked into the silent dining-slash-living room, uneasiness creeping down his spine alongside the sweat from the sticky day. Claire never left the front door unlocked, and never let him leave it unlocked, either.
The living room’s couch cushions were askew, and the carpet was scuffed around them. Uneasy didn’t begin to cover how Max felt then. He dropped his laptop case beside the couch. “Claire?” he called out.
No answer. Max kept walking, more slowly now, the thin carpet not enough to muffle the creak of his steps against the wooden floor below it. Down a short hall, the bedroom door was wide open.
Max and Claire had always kept both their bedroom doors closed when they weren’t inside, as if to keep their tangled sheets out of sight of casual visitors. Max’s gut tightened. Something was very wrong.
In the bedroom it became clear what. This room hadn’t just been disturbed, it had been ransacked: drawers overturned, clothes strewn all over the floor, mattress shoved off the bed and boxspring slashed.
On top of that bare boxspring, Max found a single sheet of paper.
A single sheet of paper that read, in rough blocky text: You don’t know what you’re messing with. If you value your life, back the fuck off.
Chapter 6
Claire
Claire knew what she was messing with.
Finally, after months on this case, she knew. A few days ago, someone had finally let a name slip during a deal: Jason Chamberlain.
In the time between then and now, she’d tracked down all the info she could about the man. According to his official criminal record, he was just a small-time drug dealer, like a dozen others she’d dealt with these past months. According to the unofficial file of things the department wanted to pin on him but couldn’t, he was far more than that.
Claire set the photo she’d been studying down on her coffee table alongside the others. She’d spent hours studying every picture she’d been able to find of Jason Chamberlain, committing his every last feature to memory. When she saw him, there’d be no mistakes. She’d know.
In fact, she was now certain she already had seen him, at least twice, accompanying some of the smaller-time drug dealers she’d dealt with. She hadn’t known then what she did now: that Chamberlain’s reach extended far beyond local dealers. By Rio Verde standards Chamberlain was already a big deal, but Claire’s contact let slip that his ties extended well beyond the city.
The drug ring they were trying to break wasn’t just based in the city, either, but was state-wide. Chamberlain was just the man Claire and her colleagues needed to lead them to bigger game. Claire just needed to get enough evidence to bring him in.
One dealer had died and another was missing. Claire would bring Chamberlain in.
She loved this feeling, when a plan began to come together, when she knew all over again she was doing something she was good at, something that mattered.
Claire yawned. From the arm of the couch, her cat—who bore the horribly unoriginal name of Kitty—studied her through lidded eyes, as if to say, Go the fuck to sleep. The cat knew as well as Claire did the long hours she’d been keeping on this case.
Keeping long hours had never stopped Claire from getting enough sleep before. She knew well enough that it was precisely when she was busy that she needed to be awake and alert.
Claire gave Kitty a baleful look. “It’s easy for you,” she
said. “Cats like to sleep alone.” Turned out not getting laid was hell on a girl’s sleep cycles. Who knew?
Max hadn’t even texted her tonight. That was a good thing, Claire told herself. It meant he was getting over her. He should get over her. If anyone deserved to be truly happy, it was Max.
But the thought of Max with someone else made Claire sadder than she had any right to be, especially when she was the one who’d first lied to him and then walked out without even telling him why.
Claire’s gaze strayed toward the laptop lying beside the couch. She hadn’t only lied to Max about her job. There was something else she hadn’t told him.
She knew she should just go to bed. She didn’t need to look at that cam footage, not tonight. She had no right to look at it any night. Let it go, girl.
Just one more look. Claire turned the laptop on, hating herself. She pulled up her browser and logged into Max’s webcam, using their shared password.
She’d had no business turning the webcam on when she’d left Max’s place for the last time, but she’d only been thinking that if they had to be through, if she had to lose him forever, at least she could ease off gently, and hang on to that one little bit of Max until he realized the cam was on and flipped the switch. Never mind that she would counsel any female friend of hers who had a boyfriend doing the same thing to run far, far away. It had been a spontaneous decision, made in the heat of the moment as she walked out the door. Honestly, she’d thought Max would notice that night, or else in a day or two. She hadn’t expected it to go on this long.
But it had, and she had no one to blame but herself if she kept logging in, wanting one more glimpse, one more look—of that innocent smile, those long-fingered hands, that lickable chest, the unselfconscious way he walked around the apartment in his boxers when he thought no one was watching. Yet Claire always wound up just feeling sad in the end, seeing Max there all alone. Sad and lonely, because she wasn’t there with him, and all the things she knew weren’t enough to shake the feeling that she should be.