by RJ Scott
And now I’d seen an overgrown tangle of weeds where hewn limbs had been tossed around like child’s toys.
“I’ll be there by tomorrow afternoon,” Avery confirmed, and I felt a hundred times lighter, knowing that I would have a friendly face with me. She at least was used to setting up operational bases, whereas all I was doing, as a pencil pusher out of HQ, was flailing around and promising to pay for an entire hotel as if I had an endless government budget. I rationalized the hotel was small, that we would want a base that was steady and isolated from everyone else. At least Bryan had said it was a good call, which meant I’d done something right.
By the time the call ended, we’d populated the shared data area with details of the body found, discussed the injuries, and concluded that there was nothing we could do until the coroner came back to us. I logged out, put the laptop into the smaller room safe, where it only just fit if I pushed it at an angle, and then I headed out. There was a young boy in reception, the same one who had waved at me yesterday.
“Lucas Beaumont,” I introduced myself and held out a hand, which he shook soberly.
“Hello, Mr. Beaumont, Special Agent, sir.”
My instinct was to say for him to call me Lucas, but I recalled being his age and not wanting anything to do with old people, least of all being on a first-name basis. Not that I was that old, but I was to him.
I stood and chatted with him for a while before asking how I could get out of the hotel.
If people like you, then they’ll tell you all kinds of things. That had been Grandpa’s advice when I was growing up, although Dad’s advice to suck it up and straighten myself out were the words I remembered the most. But then, Dad had this way of pushing his way into my thoughts at the weirdest of times.
I made it six steps from the door when I was stopped by a hand on my arm. I tensed immediately, spinning to face whoever it was, with my hand ready to go straight for my weapon which I wasn’t even carrying.
“Joe Dwyer, owner of the bank,” the man said and didn’t appear at all fazed that I’d spun on him like a mad man. He held out a hand, and I shook it. “Heard the feds had hit town.”
“Yes, sir. Special Agent Lucas Beaumont.”
He stared at me as if he was sizing me up. Then he withdrew his hand and huffed. “Well, I’d appreciate it, with no disrespect implied, if you would stay the hell away from my bank. I can’t have some agent creeping around and scaring my customers.”
I had no answer to any of that. Seemed to me as if he’d been watching too many cop shows, some of which appeared to have been set in the forties.
“Nice to meet you, sir.” I stayed neutral, and I swore his expression was more sneer than welcome.
Small towns.
I headed for the police department. The door to the PD was open, and I went straight in, coming face-to-face with a man who was currently standing on his chair and pulling at something on the ceiling. I should’ve really said hello, but what if he fell off the chair?
“I’ll be with you in a minute,” the man said, and then in a flurry of motion, he pushed up a metal grid and then jumped down off the chair. “Sorry, that bulb has been flickering all morning.”
I didn’t know whether to be horrified at the lack of health and safety or to return his wide grin. I chose the latter because he seemed okay.
“Special Agent Lucas Beaumont,” I said and flashed my ID.
“I know,” the young man said and thrust out his hand, which I shook. “Tate, general fixer of computers, and all round jack of all trades. I can also hook you up with anything you need when you’re in town, I also know a lot about many things.” He waggled his eyebrows, almost comically, and it somehow put me at ease. “Actually we’ve all been wondering when the feds would get here.”
“We’ve only just been handed details of the case,” I defended.
Tate’s smiled widened. “I wasn’t criticizing, but we’ve been expecting you. Come on, I’ll show you the captain’s office.”
I glanced at the wide-open space and the two offices at the back, considered suggesting I could find my own way, but I pushed down the comment, which no doubt wouldn’t have come across as a simple observation but as sarcasm. Anyway, it was only polite that we had formal introductions, even though I’d already met Captain Sawyer. Tate knocked on the door and then opened it before I heard a “come in.”
“Good morning,” Captain Sawyer acknowledged, then gestured at the chair opposite him. “Have a seat, and we can talk about the case.”
“Coffee?” Tate asked from the door.
“Please.” Did I sound too desperate? When I’d gotten to the lobby, the doors were all locked, and it was young Harry who had let me out, and I’d shot out of the hotel like a startled rabbit. I know it was because I didn’t want to face early morning Josh until I was properly settled into town. He messed with my equilibrium and I wasn’t sure why.
Tate shut the door, I took the seat, and then it was all business. We turned our chairs so we could see the board Sawyer had created. It was old school, and I liked it, a timeline of events, the names of the women who had been identified, and in the middle was the name Casey McGuire. It was the discovery of his body that had ramped this case up from potential ancient victims who had been unburied to the possibility of a serial killer. Of course, there might have been no link at all between Casey and the women, except of course, for the manner in which their bodies had been disposed of.
“We have another name this morning,” Sawyer murmured, and I held my breath. Could it be Carmen? Was it possible that after all these years, Grandpa Toby was going to be proved right? “Amelia Shaw, vanished in 1976, aged twenty-seven.”
He picked up a card on which he’d written her name and details, and I tried to ignore the stab of disappointment that was so instant I couldn’t even temper it with the respect that this missing woman deserved. Guilt washed over me at the fact that I was losing my shit over this, and I focused back on what we had.
“What do we know about her?”
“Married, family in Corning. They’ve only just sent it through.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and stared at the board. Most of the information was lined up perfectly, but I could see where space had been made at the end for the body on Adam Gray’s land.
“Has ID come in on the body we found?”
Sawyer shook his head. “We know it’s Adam Gray. Logan ID’d him from his last visit.”
I knew better than to argue with local knowledge, but the purist in me needed official confirmation from the coroner. I’d been on teams before dealing with small-town crimes that had blown up in their faces, and this case—bones, Casey McGuire, and now Adam Gray—was bigger than anything I’d seen before. “We will need an official identification if we can get it.”
“There’s no family I’m aware of, so I imagine it will come down to forensics,” Sawyer at least didn’t argue with my point.
With the absence of the remainder of my team, all of them way more experienced than me, I had to take control of my part of this case without coming across as the federal agent who messed with cases and didn’t listen to the locals.
I really needed not to fuck it up.
Six
Josh
It wasn’t real.
It was a dream.
Even asleep, I knew I was dreaming. I knew there wasn’t an actual fairy holding the teeth that had just fallen out of my mouth, whilst sitting on my keyboard and telling me that I needed to hide from the FBI. I knew that rationally, but in my dream, I was agreeing that we needed to draw up a plan for buying more cake to poison all federal agents, if only I could find my wallet.
“Dad!” Harry’s knocking and shouting pulled me straight from sleep just as I was about to search the kitchen for said wallet, which was always just out of reach.
Vestiges of the dream chased me, and I snapped awake, feeling anxious and panicky. Worse when the keyboard half stuck to my face and I had to pry it off. Gr
eat. I’d finished what I needed to do, logged out, then apparently I’d lost the battle for sleep and ended up twisted in an odd position at my desk. My back ached, my left leg was still asleep, and my right was all pins and needles that sparked and fizzed and made me yelp. Then the cramp in my left began, and I hopped up to stand, wobbling to the door and unlocking it.
“Are you okay?” I darted into the hotel reception, panicking that Harry was up in the middle of the night and that he’d not been able to get into my room, and I was the worst dad in the history of dads. Light burned my eyes, and when I could finally focus, I saw the large clock behind the desk showed it was seven a.m. I groaned and pressed my fingers to my temples.
“I just wanted to tell you that Mr. Beaumont has left the hotel, and I saw him going straight to the police department. He did not pass the deli or collect his two hundred dollars.”
“How did he leave the hotel? I locked all the doors.”
“Yeah, I saw. Why dad?”
“Because there’s a murderer on the loose.” I knew I’d locked the doors. Or had I? Hell, I’d meant to wake up and unlock them way before anyone woke up. God, had I really locked the doors and not thought about how people would get out? What if there’d been a fire? What the hell am I thinking?
“I know where the spare keys are, remember? You showed me in your worrying phase in which you had that dream about me being locked inside and the hotel filled with water and I drowned.”
“Huh?” Okay, I knew Harry was expecting me to process everything because he was smiling at me with encouragement, but I needed coffee.
All the coffee.
“Dad, you need to stop sleeping on your desk,” Harry observed and pointed at me. “You have the escape key stuck to your face.”
“I do?” I traced my face, attempting to find the key, but there was nothing, and Harry left me looking at him blankly for a moment before he snorted a laugh.
“I made coffee,” he added, and I’d never been more grateful for those three beautiful words. “I let out our only guest, who was standing in the middle of the reception, looking as if he was completely stuck on how to get out, and then I made coffee.”
“I don’t like you unlocking the—”
“I locked them again after he left. It’s a fire hazard though.”
I ignored the fire thing, because I knew I was being irrational. No responsible hotel owner would lock all the freaking doors. “We don’t know him—”
“He’s FBI, not a murderer, Dad.”
“The two are not mutually exclusive. What if he…” I was talking nonsense, going around in circles, and I needed to stop. So because he’d been the freaking grown-up in this family, I pulled Harry into a hug, and he reluctantly allowed me to do so. It used to be him hugging me, but he was growing up, and clinging to his dad wasn’t high on his to-do list.
“Did I ever tell you that you are my favorite son?”
He wriggled away from me and snorted another laugh—the sweetest sound in the world.
“I’m your only son, Dad,” he said with a mock sigh.
“That’s what you think.” I waggled my eyebrows theatrically, and he rolled his eyes.
This was the standard back and forth we had whenever he made me coffee. I bumped his arm with mine and then we went into the kitchen. It was for sure just past seven, and it was a Saturday, which meant Harry had the desk for the morning working on school stuff. Then I would take over later in the afternoon, and he’d head out to get up to no good with Marco. That precious time was enough for me to work on cleaning empty rooms, fixing broken things, and replenishing stocks of toiletries on a grocery run. I’d stopped offering food when the bookings were low, but maybe I needed to think about offering breakfast because there would be a team of feds descending on the hotel who I didn’t want hanging around too long. But mostly, I felt guilty that the sexy man in one of my guest rooms had left the building without breakfast. I’d deal with that later because after working for most of the night, I was ready for coffee and a shower. In that order.
The coffee was heaven, and by the time I’d powered through two cups, I felt more alert, taking the third mug to my room and then luxuriating under the rainfall shower head in my man-sized shower. It was my single indulgence. The rest of my room was on the shabby side, undecorated since I’d taken it over and reminiscent of the seventies with way too much orange and brown. One day I’d get in there and decorate, but my place wasn’t a priority, not when the rest of the hotel was looking tired. I kept on top of things as much as I could, but I was one man, and my work wasn’t keeping up when everything was done on a shoestring.
After this morning I’d be many dollars richer. I’d cracked that software like a walnut and earned my money without being seen. Then I’d covered my tracks.
At least I hoped so.
It was this niggling doubt that chased me from sleep and followed me as closely as the dreams. Maybe now I should give up, sell the hotel, move us into a smaller place in town. I was stuck, though. The mortgage on this place was huge; back when I’d taken the hotel over, it had a steady flow of guests, but these last five years, with recession hitting everyone, I was lucky if I made my monthly mortgage payments. At least my loans were with a bank in West Falls and not with the bank in town—the last thing I needed was for Joe Dwyer to be up in my business, knowing every move of my money.
Knowing that I was so close to shutting up shop? No. I had my pride.
Dressed and finally feeling halfway human, I moved to stage two of my morning—finding and delivering breakfast to our single guest. After all, it was only right I did that when the poor guy had seemed so tired sitting in my kitchen in the dark and was potentially running on fumes and one hot chocolate in the middle of the night.
“I’m taking over breakfast for Mr. Beaumont,” I told Harry, who barely glanced up from the notebook that he was working in at the main desk.
“Okay, Dad.”
“I’m locking the front door.”
“Okay.”
“And this afternoon, I don’t want you going out to see Marco.”
That got his attention, and his head snapped up so fast that his long bangs fell around his face. “Daaad…” he whined.
“I didn’t say you couldn’t see each other. He can come here, stay the night even, but I don’t want the two of you drifting around town, or worse, out in the woods or down by Iron Lake. Okay?”
“No one is gonna—”
“Harry.” I didn’t have to say anything else, but I could see him weighing up the options and realizing there was an opportunity for a bargain.
“Can we order pizza?”
“Yes.” Ordering pizza meant Calabresi’s, which meant Marco would bring it over, along with various desserts. I knew my sister would make sure the boys had more than enough, because Chloe was all about feeding the kids. There’d be some left over for me and maybe Lucas. Yep, I liked that idea.
“Okay, then, I’ll ask him.”
And I’ll tell my sister, I thought to myself. I wanted my son and my nephew where I could see them. I also wanted to talk to her about keeping herself, Luca, Nonna, and the girls together until whomever had killed Adam Gray was found and dealt with. What with skeletons and vanishing lakes and Casey and the church burning down, my small quiet town was becoming a place people didn’t want to visit.
Unless they were federal agents or journalists.
I expected a lot of journalists today now that the news of a body being found plus social media photos of the hand, had appeared. But I was relieved that I’d agreed to fill the hotel. The side of me that saw the income warred with the sensationalist way they were destroying my town.
And yes, it was my town. I’d been born here, at home to a mom who’d lived here her entire life and to a dad who’d moved all the way from West Falls, which was twenty minutes around the other side of Iron Lake. They’d moved away a long time ago, but I had history in this town. When Sadie and I had spent one teenage night
having not altogether wonderful sex and Harry had been conceived, this town had become the one place I felt safe. Sadie left and hadn’t looked back, but I’d stayed, and with help from my sister and friends, I’d become a dad to a baby boy and made things work.
I headed straight for the diner, hoping I wasn’t too late for the morning pastry drop. If there was one thing that they did really well, it was muffins and Danish. With a bag of goodies, because taking food just for my federal agent guest wasn’t going to go down well with the cops in the PD, I then went to Calabresi’s for coffee.
My sister was waiting at the counter, chatting with Nonna, who scampered over to me and pulled me down into a hug. Chloe was probably in here getting coffee for her next library shift.
“Josh,” she exclaimed, and we hugged. “Terrible things have happened,” she announced.
“Which is why I want you, Chloe, and the girls to all stay around here with Luca until we know what went down.”
“I have work. Library, remember?”
“Well, for now, put a sign on the door and stay at home.”
“That’s what I said,” Luca added as he came into the room and held out a fist to bump.
Chloe pressed a hand to her chest and fluttered her eyelids. “I might swoon with the fear,” she trilled, and then shoved a hand at my arm. “I’m going to work.” She pointed at the library. “It’s right there, and you can all watch me walk over for my two hour shift.”
I rubbed my arm where she’d hit me, and rolled my eyes at Luca who shook his head in warning. Chloe was a strong woman who didn’t take any shit, and I knew better than to make my worry so damn obvious. So I did what all the best brothers did—changed the subject.
“Harry negotiated a sleepover with pizza tonight for him and Marco, and I’ll be there.”
“Admit it. You just want the pizza.” Chloe laughed—my sister knew me way too well.
“Absolutely. Extra pepperoni and no olives.”
Nonna shook her head. “Heathen.”
