by Aimee Hix
“Being straight with her won’t work. She needs more coddling than you or I are built for, my girl.”
“Yeah, I’m aware of the genetic defect that you’ve saddled me with, pops, but I can’t exactly recruit Mom or Ben for the job,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Hey, dear brother, do you mind interrogating our new houseguest to see if this dead guy is the one who’s been terrorizing her? I’ll give you my dessert like when you did my algebra. Cool, thanks.”
“I knew you were having him do your homework. Just coloring, huh.”
“It was just algebra and I only got a C.”
“He was six, Willa.”
“He’s also supposed to be a genius. So what’s up with the C?”
He started to laugh. “You can never tell your mother.”
I doubled over laughing, tears instantly coming to my eyes. He was so clueless.
“Oh, Dad. She’s known for years. Ben ratted me out the second she found him with chocolate pudding all over his mouth. That kid couldn’t keep a secret from himself.”
Except that he was an elite white hat hacker, but that was really more a secret we were both keeping. And Seth. The three of us. And the ATF. Which meant all the federal agencies knew. So it really was only a secret from our parents.
“That is a discussion for another day. I was really thinking more that Mom could sit with the two of you. She’s tougher than you think she is, Will.”
For her to be tougher than I thought she was she’d have to be damn near indestructible. I knew who was the real badass in the family and it wasn’t anyone with Pennington genes. I just didn’t want to put any more on my side of the scale. Yeah, I measured our relationship like that. Yeah, it’s fucked up. What part of being in therapy was confusing?
“It’s … you’re right.” There was no point in arguing with him about it. He was right like he always was when the subject was Mom.
He shoved a can of green beans into my hands and pushed me toward the stairs. I set the can down on the floor just outside the door to the storage room. My mother would never serve canned vegetables—BPA lining.
Chapter
10
I spied on Aja and my mom in the kitchen and my heart twinged.
“Hey, sweetie.” They saw me spying on them and my mother motioned me into the room. I tried not to think too hard about what all had gone down in that kitchen. A new tile floor that replaced cracked and stained, long-past-its-expiration-date linoleum had helped. The cheerful yellow paint to cover the spots of blood that had been washed off before they got home helped too. But home improvements weren’t going to erase the memories. I was always going to see that night.
“How’s it going?” Mom asked.
I looked over at Aja. “We’ll see.”
She got my meaning instantly and put down the spoon she had been using to stir whatever healthy and amazing smelling dinner she was making. We flanked Aja at the table.
She looked at me, then my mom, then back to me. “Uh oh.” She placed her pencil on the seam of the book and shut it. “What’s happened?”
“Aja … Damian, what’s his last name?” I still held out a sliver of hope that the dead kid wasn’t someone she’d once cared about.
“Murphy. Damian Murphy. Why? Did they arrest him?”
My mother put her hand on Aja’s back and the girl seemed to melt into it.
“I have a friend who is a police officer and she needs to come talk to you about Damian. Okay? She’s a homicide detective.”
Jesus, Willa, that was the best way you could break it to the kid?
Mom pulled Aja into a one-armed side hug and reached out the other hand to me, placing it on my arm. In between gentle murmurs of consolation, she looked up and gave me a sad smile, mouthing that I did fine.
My phone blipped. Jan was on her way. I got up to call her from the foyer. My mom had the Aja situation under better control than I could. I had no idea how they taught people to be a mom, but she must have been the valedictorian.
“Hey, Jan. Aja confirmed the ex’s last name is the same as your victim.”
“What did you tell her?”
“Nothing. I just confirmed the name and told her you wanted to talk,” I replied. “She’s prepared though. She’s tough.”
I sounded a little defensive, I knew. Jan didn’t let it phase her. Like she hadn’t blinked at any of my rants about the police hiring someone who’d used their resources to send a killer after me.
“Good to know. You made any progress on our other case?”
“I’ve perused it. I’m getting back to it tonight. I got pulled away to deal with a floater today.” My voice was light. If she wanted a rookie partner to hand down her wisdom to then she was getting the real me and not some earnest, scrubbed suckup.
“This is the job, kid. Learn to multitask like a grownup detective.” Then she hung up on me.
I walked back to the kitchen. “Hey, Aja, my friend Jan is on her way. You just need to be honest with her. Tell her what you know and she’ll do the rest. Okay?”
She nodded, biting her lip. While I was trying to figure out words to be comforting or some reasonable facsimile of it, Mom had taken over again. It was more her area anyway. I decided to check out the dinner situation and I felt a look burning the back of my neck. When I turned my mother was staring at me with a nervous expression. Fine. A case could be made that I was inept in the kitchen and my mere presence had the ability to ruin food. I raised my hands to show I wasn’t wielding a dangerous spatula or spoon.
“We’ve called Aja’s parents but there’s an issue with their charter plane company.” She rolled her eyes and I almost laughed. It was rare that my mother took an attitude, but she was fully capable of it.
“Aja, do you have any questions?” I asked
She looked at me and I knew that I had made a rookie mistake. I figured she’d ask some pointless questions about what Jan would ask her but, like a normal human person, she was concerned about the fate of the person she’d once cared about. Lesson learned. You lead them where you want them to go.
“What happened to him? Like, I know it wasn’t a car accident or anything because you said she’s a homicide detective but, like, was he … ?
I swallowed and shoved my hands in my pockets. She didn’t need to see that they were shaking. My mother hadn’t missed it. She softened her expression realizing that my reluctance wasn’t because she’d done a terrible job raising me to be a person who gave a damn but because I was dipping my toe back into the waters.
“I didn’t see him, so I don’t know for sure.” And the body being in the coroner’s van before I got there suddenly made sense, as did Jan’s bunt of my wild speed ball accusation.
“She did mention there might have been a fight.” The vague terminology for someone being beaten to death wasn’t vast.
“Where was he?”
How were we not done with this?
I looked at Mom again with the rescue me expression she knew too well. She shook her head almost imperceptibly. Now? Now people were taking the kid gloves off?
“He was found in a wooded area near his house.” The address on the license had showed he’d lived farther from the spot than it was to Aja’s house, but she didn’t need to know that. Before she could ask for more specifics, I slipped in a question of my own.
“What did Damian do outside of school? Was he involved in sports?” Something besides being beaten that could explain bruises. And his sudden physical transformation.
“He was really into art like me but then over the summer he just … stopped. And he started going to the gym with friends. New friends.”
“Did he join a team at school? Football? Wrestling? Was he interested in the MMA club they tried to start?” What in the hell spurred on the change?
She shoo
k her head. “No, and he dropped art. I mean, he couldn’t change to a new course but he stopped coming at all. He failed it the first quarter and I guess the last two, as well.”
She guessed? “Aja, how long ago did you break up with Damian?”
“November.”
She’d been dealing with this for over three months?
“And how long had he been bothering you?”
“Um, it was kind of why I broke up with him. I mean, he’d be, like, super distant, and then totally overbearing, wanting to know where I’d been and who I’d been hanging out with. It was a bummer. And we didn’t have anything in common anymore at that point.”
“How’d he take it?”
She shrugged. I recognized the shutting down mechanism. Yay for partially functioning mental health. I didn’t know how to short-circuit it but I saw it.
“He was probably angry?” my mother asked. It was leading the witness a bit but considering he’d been vandalizing her house, this wasn’t exactly putting words in Aja’s mouth.
Aja mumbled something. Even Mom seemed to have missed it the words were so quiet.
“What did he do, sweetheart?”
“He threatened to kill my cat.”
Threatening to kill an animal wasn’t normal. It wasn’t close to normal. It was in a different state, an exceedingly long car ride from normal.
“He didn’t. He said he would but … I gave her to my cousin.”
So not that he didn’t but that he couldn’t. Three months ago. She’d been terrified of this guy for three months and her damned parents were off doing whatever self-involved assholes who didn’t deserve children did instead of staying home and, you know, parenting.
“Oh, sweet girl.” Mom wrapped Aja in her arms.
Cat killing, even threats, had a way of getting your attention. I thought about Fargo and what I’d do if someone threatened to hurt her. I concluded that I’d beat that person until I got tired of hitting them and then hurting an animal wasn’t something they would be capable of thinking about ever again. I had a lot of anger in general; they’d likely stop thinking about everything long before I got tired of punching them in the face.
Had Damian diversified his attentions? Maybe a new girl who was just as tuned into the crazy as Aja had been? Maybe one who confided in someone a hell of a lot sooner than Aja had? Someone less likely to follow the legal—okay, legal-ish—route? It was something to suggest to Jan.
The doorbell rang and I was grateful for the excuse to walk away from the emotional intensity for a moment.
I let Jan in and nodded her into the kitchen. I knew Nancy would stick with Aja and that allowed me to slip downstairs and grab the file on the cold case murder. Jan would fill me in on her interview with Aja anyway and I’d been ordered to multitask like a grownup detective.
I took the file and my laptop to the bed. The laptop was new and I was still working out my relationship with it. I wasn’t sure about the touchscreen or what I did on the mousepad that caused the view to keep shrinking to Alice in Wonderland proportions. It was frustrating when all I wanted to do was type up a case file. I’d had Ben optimize (his word) the case management software for my more visual working style. That had been the whole thought process behind the touchscreen—that I could move and draw out my conclusions.
The reality was that I just kept banishing pictures and notes to some screen Neverland and couldn’t find them again without listening to my baby brother harangue me about my lack of technical skills and pitiful hand-to-eye coordination. I was getting ready to drag his butt back to the dojo to give him a demonstration of my hand-to-eye skills. I’d make him hold the body bag during drills if he didn’t get off my case and get me the file scan interface I’d been asking for these last few weeks.
I’d gotten barely a paragraph typed in when my phone lit up with a text asking me to come back upstairs. Five minutes. I just wanted five minutes to finish one task completely. If this was multitasking as a PI it blew dead bears and I would like to take a hard pass, thank you very much.
I smooshed all the papers in the file back in as quickly and neatly as possible. If a second text came in from my mother, I would be in trouble. And if you think staring down a neo-Nazi was the scariest thing I’d ever do in my life, I would show you her hard mom stare and you could tell me which you preferred. You’d choose the neo-Nazi every time.
I just needed to hit that first step—we called it the snitch step because it gave you up every time no matter where you stepped or how lightly you hit it—and I was home free, but when I rounded the corner from my room my father was standing at the foot of the stairs, one hand on the banister knob and one on the wall. Blocking me and smirking. Old game and probably his passive-aggressive way of getting back at me for liking Mom more than him. What can I say? She’s a better cook.
If he wanted to play, we could play. I had dirt on him. I weighed using it or saving it. I still had some currency from my injuries. I could hobble into the kitchen claiming rib pain but I decided to lay down my ace. That didn’t mean I wouldn’t use the rib when I needed it (ribs took forever to stop hurting), but I was taking the old man down for the fake stakeout. He had a secret and he’d long suspected I knew.
“I have pictures, you know. Proof. And you know I’ll use them.”
He narrowed his eyes at me and the hand braced against the wall dropped. “You’ve got squat and you and I both know it, pie pop.”
The old nickname burned, as he’d intended, but I kept my game face on. If he thought a little putdown was going to cause me to crumble, he’d raised the wrong kid.
“I’ve got distance and close-up. I’ve even cropped a few for the best details.”
I felt him taking my measure. Was I bluffing? He knew my skills were impressive—hell, he’d taught them to me—and he was sure he could discern even the tiniest tell.
The phone blipped in my hand. Two texts. A third would be real trouble and we both knew it. I had no problem taking him down with me. I was loyal to a certain extent but if push came to shove, I chose me.
“What’s it going to be, old man? Do I out you to your wife? She’d never trust you again, you know.”
Real fear showed on his face and his hand wavered on the banister. One more push and I’d have him. He had too much to lose. “Your own father?”
“Versus Mom? You bet your ass.”
He moved aside, defeated. I hit that step and it let out a squeal that sounded like victory.
I was winded when I turned the corner round the stairs and into the kitchen. Actually winded from the rush of the standoff. I had to watch my back now. I’d made an enemy. He’d know the proof was on my phone and he’d try to get it. I couldn’t upload it to the cloud where Ben would have access to it since I’d made sure I’d severed his wireless connection to my phone. I’d have to use one of the burner phones I’d gotten for just such an instance. I’d text myself the pictures of Dad in my stash of junk food, chocolate smeared on his mouth and fingers, as insurance. It was a flawless backup.
“Sorry. I was helping Dad. I told him you’d texted that you wanted me but he said it would take a second and you could wait.”
Game, set, and match. Send me on another fake stakeout, I dare you.
Nancy merely nodded rather coolly and stirred the pot of, again, ridiculously delicious-smelling food.
“I needed to see you, kid,” Jan said.
Lizard brain flicked out its forked tongue to test the air and found a crackle of danger.
“Big girl detectiving here, boss.” I waggled the file folder at her, flinging crime scene photos onto the table and floor.
“Good to see you’re taking this seriously,” Jan said.
I restrained my eyes from rolling freely and picked up the errant pictures.
She continued. “I need to get a witness statement from you regarding the brea
k-in at Aja’s house the other day. The one in which your truck was damaged. The one about the intruder this morning seems less critical but I need it for the file.”
That explained Nancy’s frosty nod. I had neglected to mention that specific series of events to my parents. But, hell, I was presumably an adult and a professional buttisnky, at that.
“I began a sweep of the house using appropriate single-man floor-by-floor, top-down procedure. I had completed a sweep of the attic level of the domicile when, upon hearing a noise outside the residence, I discovered the front door and my vehicle had been damaged.”
A perfect statement summary. I’d have gotten a gold star from my training officer for that succinct yet complete description of the events.
“Impressive recitation of the facts,” Jan said. Her dry tone indicated that she was buying exactly none of the shit I was slinging. “Now can I get a few more details? In your own words, please. I don’t need examples for the report writing manual.”
I was already in trouble so I laid it out as baldly as possible.
“I freaked out. It was only supposed to be me helping her feel safer and possibly to convince her to get the hell out of Dodge and then she said he’d been in the house, that he’d touched her bed, slashed her pillows and it just started tumbling in my head so that by the time I started the search, which again had just been to make her feel better, I missed the signs. He’d been in her house. He’d touched her bed, Jan. And I felt so exposed. Like he was watching us at that moment. He’d gotten inside her head and he was in mine too.”
The stirring had stopped. Jan, normally so reserved, reached her hand out to me and lightly brushed my knuckles. I had to get through it all before I couldn’t.
“I hid her in the laundry room and forced myself to do the sweep.”
Nancy came up behind me, close, but not touching me.
