Set in Stone

by David James Warren

  Fitzgerald is right now sitting in temporary lockup down at the city jail.

  “Wow.” Gene nods. “That’s tremendous.” He hesitates, then. “Rem, I have to tell you, that after we talked, I started thinking. I mentioned he was in the military, right? So I called around, and a couple of my buddies knew him. They have quite a story—said this guy was real popular with the local ladies, if you know what I mean. Used to leave them twenty-dollar tips with the words, thank you for your service written on the bill. Got to be a sort of thing with his platoon, a joke. You know, because that’s what everybody said to us when we came stateside.”

  I’m staring at him. “You sure they were talking about Fitzgerald?”

  “I think so.”

  “Do you have their names? I’d like to contact them.”

  “Sure. No problem. I’ll send you their contact information.”

  Eve has tightened her grip in mine.

  We got him.

  “Thanks, Gene,” I say, and reach over the bed to shake his hand.

  He shakes mine, and I notice he’s wearing a ring.

  “Nice ring,” I say.

  “Yeah, it’s a state champion ring,” he says. “Section A champs, football, class of ’84.” He grins. “I know, silly. But you never forget your high school glory days.”

  He says goodbye and leaves.

  Eve turns to me. “A class ring.”

  “You think that’s the ring Leo was wearing.”

  “If we can find his school, maybe we can see if this Johnny is real.”

  “We’ve got him, Eve. Did you hear what Gene said about the twenties? I’ll interview these guys and…this is over.”

  She’s nodding, but wears the strangest look.

  “What?”

  “His shoe size. It’s a fourteen. The print from Hollie and Lauren is from a twelve.”

  “Are you sure? Maybe it was smudged?”

  “Maybe. I’ll take another look. But, Rem …” She pauses and holds my gaze for a long time before finishing. “What if Leo isn’t the guy?”

  Not a chance. I’ve been following Leo Fitgerald for three lifetimes. “It’s him Eve. I know it.” I turn to Zeke.

  “Listen. I need you to think hard about the shooting. Someone tried to run me over a couple days ago, and we’re wondering if there’s a connection. Do you remember what kind of car he was in?”

  Zeke makes a face, shakes his head. “It was black?”

  “Luxury car?”

  “Maybe. I’m sorry, Rem. I don’t remember. Why?”

  “We got the ballistics report back—it’s from a 9mm Beretta.”

  “Malakov’s crew carries .45 automatics.”

  “Yep.”

  “So, not a cop shooting,” Eve says. “I suppose that’s a relief.”

  “It doesn’t help us figure out who bombed my Porsche.”

  “C’mon, tough guy. One case solved per day.” Eve pulls me away.

  “Is that a rule? A vitamin?”

  “A warning. Back to bed, pal.”

  I raise an eyebrow and turn up the corner of my mouth. “That sounds like a promise.”

  She winks, but the reality is we’re living at her parents’ house and by the time we arrive, Bets is making dinner. “I know you were going to have Burke and Shelby’s baby shower at your house, but since it’s…well…”

  “Rubble is the word I think you’re looking for, Mom,” Eve says.

  “Right. Anyway, I asked if they might want to have it here.”

  She’s made a cake and potato salad, and Danny is outside at the grill, and maybe I am ready for a party.

  Because Jackson is buttoned up, and I don’t hate this plane of existence. If this is my only choice, I’m in. This is my life.

  I change (and ignore another call from Mayor Vega, yes, I know, but I’ll talk to her in the morning) and help haul food outside to the picnic table.

  Burke and Shelby arrive before sunset, toting little Daphne. Sams is here, with new plans for the house, which Eve dives into, with promises to stop by in the morning.

  I knew remodeling was in our future. Fate won’t be completely bested.

  The smell of burgers scents the summer night, and I’m close to thievery by the time Zeke and Frankie finally show up. She’s carrying a gift bag. I think it’s for Shelby, but she walks over to me. “I found this. I want you to have it.”

  I take it, look inside. It’s a small box. “What is it?”

  She smiles, and again the resemblance to Booker is simply uncanny. It’s like having him in the room.

  “It’s his watch,” she says. “I found it in his belongings.”

  The watch. The watch. I look at her, and a strange feeling rushes through me, something almost akin to panic. My throat dries and I swallow. Eke out a “Thank you.”

  And then I carefully bring the bag inside, to my room and set it on the bedside table like the bomb it is.

  Because, this is my life.

  The night settles around us as we eat and open gifts, a beautiful lavender twilight that blankets the horizon. I’m polishing off my second burger, sitting on the steps of the porch, when Burke walks over to me.

  Sits down.

  I look over at him. “Why aren’t you assembling your Babyzen Yoyo six stroller—”

  “What even is that? I mean, if you can’t say the words, should you be putting your baby in it?”

  I laugh. “How is fatherhood?”

  He looks at Shelby, rocking Daphne. “Terrifying.”

  I smile. “Uh huh.”

  “And amazing. And tiring and, did I mention terrifying?”

  My gaze goes to Eve. She’s sitting on a lawn chair, and she’s smiling. No, nearly glowing.

  Something is different about her. Maybe it’s the fact that we’ve stopped a killer.

  But for a moment, I’m in the kitchen with her, my arms around her as we stand at the window and watch our daughter—my Ashley, the one I know, the one who, just a few weeks ago asked me to find her stuffed bear, Gomer.

  My throat tightens, and I look away before my eyes water.

  This is my life. And Ashley will never be in it.

  “I’m thinking of leaving the force,” Burke says quietly.

  I look at him. “What?”

  “It’s just—after seeing what happened to you, and Booker, leaving behind Frankie—there’s just so much at stake, man. I just can’t…” He looks at me. “You get it, right?”

  And oddly, I’m right where Booker was, so many years ago. Panicking at the loss of my best detective. Coward.

  Maybe he’s a coward if he doesn’t face his feelings. If he doesn’t look at life in the face and see what he has at stake.

  I look at Burke. “Yep. I get it.”

  He sighs. “I thought you were going to really give it to me.”

  “Nope.”

  He says nothing for a long time. Then, “I love ya, Rem.”

  I look at him, but he gets up and walks away.

  Yeah, me too, Burke.

  Daphne is fussing, and it’s getting late so we pack up dinner, and Burke and Shelby leave, then Zeke and Frankie.

  I don’t tell Eve about Burke’s decision. Not yet.

  And I’m not even going to look at the gift bag.

  I don’t need the watch. Because, this is my life.

  I’m stuffing a bag full of wrapping paper when she comes out of the house, barefoot, empty handed. “Lemme help.” She holds the bag and I finish cleaning, then she ties it.

  I’m about to carry it to the trash when she takes my hand. “Rem. I have to tell you something.”

  I turn to her.

  The moonlight turns her eyes to gold, starlight in her smile. I am a lucky man. And maybe about to get luckier. “Yeah?”

  She waits a beat, then, “I’m pregnant.”

  I still, and my mouth opens.

  “Rem?” She presses her hands to my chest. “You’re breathing funny.”

  “No—I’m…oh…” I
am breathing funny. “I think I need to sit down.”

  She looks genuinely worried as I walk over to the picnic table and sit on the bench. “Rem?”

  “How did this happen?”

  She laughs. “Really?”

  “I mean—when?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime in the last month, I guess. The fertility shots worked.”

  Shots? But it doesn’t matter. I rub my hands over my face.

  “You look worried.”

  Of course I’m worried. I mentioned the miscarriages, and Eve is…well, high risk, at the least.

  Still. Pregnant. I take her hands, pull them to myself. “We’re going to have a baby.”

  For the first time, a flash of fear hues her eyes. “I hope.”

  I pull her tight. “It’s going to be okay, Eve. Everything is going to be okay.” I kiss her, and she folds into me, believing me.

  And you can feel it too, right?

  Everything is going to be okay.

  I can live with this life. These changes. The taste of hope back in my chest.

  We find ourselves upstairs in her dark bedroom, and she’s giggling. “We need our own house.”

  And how.

  But we’re noiseless, and after, I pull her into my arms, spooning. “Tomorrow we get our own place.”

  “Frankie says she has a friend who has a place we can rent. I’m going to meet her in the morning, and we’ll go check it out.”

  I kiss her neck. She tastes of home, and peace and maybe happiness isn’t a person, but a choice.

  I fall hard, and again sleep like a rock, and it takes the third ring before I wake to Eve shaking me. “Your phone, Rem.”

  Light dents the shadows, morning upon me. I roll over, swipe it up and press it to my ear. “Chief Stone,” I groan.

  “Sorry, Chief, but I didn’t know who else to call. Detective Burke isn’t picking up his phone.”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Officer Jackson. Sir, um...I don’t know how to say this.”

  Eve’s shoulder is curving under the golden light of dawn. I draw my finger down it. “Just spit it out.”

  “Leo Fitzgerald…he…well, he escaped, boss. He’s gone.”

  18

  Leo Fitzgerald is a slippery sucker.

  It's not easy to escape from jail, especially in a city. You're conspicuous, and even if you hide well, the likelihood of someone turning you in is high.

  Unless you know how to hide, to blend in. To evade police.

  I’m standing in my office, the door closed because I needed just a moment to think before calling the mayor with an update.

  Again.

  I run my hand over my forehead, staring at the darkened sky, turning bullet gray with the oncoming rainstorm, the clouds pregnant with doom.

  The case has been turned over to the Fugitive Task Force, but because Fitzgerald wasn't yet indicted, and still in holding, the U.S. Marshals Service hasn't stepped in.

  I’ve explained all this to Mayor Vega no less than six times today, along with the fact that we’ve deployed nearly the entire force to find him.

  “It’s been almost ten hours, Inspector.”

  “Chief, and I know, Ms. Mayor. We’re doing everything we can to find him.”

  I called for a perimeter nearly the minute my feet hit the floor, Officer Jackson still outlining how they think he escaped.

  “I just don’t understand how he got out.”

  “According to our investigation, he called the guard, saying he was sick around one a.m. He then overpowered him, used the guard’s own taser to incapacitate him, got his key card and used that to get into the control center.”

  “Where was the other guard?”

  “Patrol. But we found him also tasered, gagged, then suffocated with a medical waste bag, just like the first guard.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  She has no idea. Young cops, they both left behind wives.

  The worst part is, there’s another running theory that says Leo had an accomplice, someone who got into the control room and turned off the cameras. The digital recording is blank, even before the guard entered Leo’s cage.

  We haven’t gotten anything useful from any of the other prisoners being held in the block. And, like I said, no camera footage.

  “I’m going to say this again, ma’am—we need to alert the public. He’s dangerous, and the best way to catch him is to let people know we’re looking for him.”

  “And terrify everyone even more? Stone, your last stunt had my office fielding calls from terrified constituents for two days.”

  I’m glad I’m not in the same room, given the tone of her voice. “Tell people to stay in their homes, and should they see anyone matching his description, then to call us.”

  “Not yet,” she says, and I close my eyes, pinching the bridge of my nose.

  My headache is back.

  “Not until we know he’s breached the perimeter you’ve set.”

  I sigh.

  “Give me an update every hour,” she says, like I haven’t been doing that. She hangs up before I can reply.

  The task force has assembled in a conference room just down the hall, and I walk out of my office, heading back to the bullpen.

  Reagan is at his desk and looks up. “Your wife dropped this by, sir.” He hands me a manila envelope, and I open it.

  Inside is the sketch I ordered of Meggie’s attacker. I take it out and look at it.

  I’ve always had a hard time seeing a likeness from a sketch, and even now, it really doesn’t look like Fitzgerald, to my way of thinking. It’s not in color, and the eyes are too far apart, the jaw wider, too. But it does look familiar, so it must be right.

  I give it back to Reagan. “Put this on my desk.”

  I grab another cup of coffee—this might be number twelve—at the coffee station near the door, then walk over and survey the current leads. The task force has made a list of all of Leo’s former employers, known contacts and military buddies, and is checking in with all of them.

  On another board is a tentative timeline of his escape. It goes blank after 1:47 a.m., although the bodies weren’t found until after the five a.m. shift change.

  Nearly a three-hour window.

  Burke is looking at a map of the city, a red perimeter outlining our estimated border, although, frankly, it could be hours off.

  He’s holding a cup of coffee. “He’s probably long escaped the perimeter,” he says, reading my mind, then takes a sip. “If he caught a taxi, or took the train, he could be all the way to the Mall of America. Maybe even gotten a ride from some trucker.” He points to a gas station a block from the Mall.

  “Which means by now, he could be in Tennessee.”

  “Or Colorado, or Montana.” Burke finishes off his coffee.

  “Did we check the bus stations?”

  “Yes. Scanned all the cameras, and talked with the employees on shift at the time. No one matching Fitzgerald’s description came on the radar.”

  I walk over to the known associates board. Look it over. “And no one here has seen him?”

  “Not for years.”

  Like I said, slippery.

  “He’ll make a mistake, Rem,” Burke says, but his words do nothing to dent the roil in my gut.

  My phone vibrates and I fish it out of my pocket. Eve.

  “Hey babe, what’s up?”

  “I’m at the house, Rem. And besides it being dark and creepy, I’m not sure what you want. Clothes? Books?”

  Deep sigh. “I have no idea.”

  “I’ll be here for a while. Can you come by?”

  “I don’t know. I’m pretty tied up here—”

  “Go,” Burke says, and he’s one to talk. He’s supposed to be on paternity leave. But there’s nothing worse than sitting at home when you want to be on the front lines. Shelby’s five phone calls today have told me that much. “You can’t do anything from here,” he adds.

  He’s right. Burke i
s at the helm of the task force.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I say.

  “I was thinking I should get the baby clothes out of storage. You know, just in case the remodel takes longer.”

  I smile, glance at Burke, then turn away. “Yes, you should.”

  I know what you’re thinking. It’s high risk, Eve is older, but women have babies, even at this age. And I have a good feeling about this baby. Besides, fate owes me, don’t you think? I pause. “Everything is going to be okay,” I say again, for both of us.

  “Love you, Rem,” she says and hangs up.

  Love you, too.

  “You all right?” Burke asks I pocket my phone.

  I nod. “Let’s just find Fitzgerald so I can get on with the rest of my life.”

  “I’m going to make more coffee,” Burke says, and I leave him to that.

  I have Danny’s truck, and rain spits on the windshield as I pull onto the street, the sky an eerie green. Traffic is snarled—I’m caught in rush hour, and by the time I pull up to the house, it’s over an hour later and dark outside. But Eve probably took a cab, and I think the electricity is off to the house, so I park at the curb and run through the downpour to the front porch.

  Our poor house. With the tree gone, it looks like a giant thumb has pressed in the roof, one side of the porch sagging. The front door is ajar, so she must be here. I push it open and turn on my phone light. “Eve?”

  No answer. I step inside. The place still smells soggy and mildewed. We’ll have to replace everything. “Eve?”

  Maybe she’s upstairs, but our bedroom has been roped off—probably Sams’ work. He’s also put up plastic sheeting over the open edge of the room. I stand in the shadowy darkness and listen to the rain hit the plastic. It’s almost enough to drown out the thump of my heartbeat.

  Stop panicking, Rem. She’s fine. But I dial her number anyway. It goes to voicemail.

  I head back down the stairs, and it’s in the landing that I hear a sound in the kitchen. A chair scraping back, maybe. “Eve?”

  The family room is dark, and I work my way through it and stand at the door between the dining room and kitchen. More plastic covers the destroyed walls, the open roof. I flick my light around the room.

  No Eve.

  I turn back, to retrace my steps and that’s when I see him sitting in my wife’s rocking chair, the one she inherited from her grandmother.