Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Thank you.” Ash wasn’t a cop. He hadn’t said he was a cop. It was amazing to him how people’s minds worked. They often wanted a solution and so found one even if it was erroneous. There were other kinds of investigators besides cops these days.

  Ash made his way down the hall and felt his pace getting slower and slower the closer he got to the hospital room on the left. He’d been in a panic to get here and now that he’d made it, he wasn’t entirely sure what he was going to say. Sorry just didn’t cut it.

  The room was dim and filled with the usual array of hospital noises. The blip and whir of machines. The low drone of a television turned to some kind of station about DIY home improvement. The sucking and blowing sounds of a respirator. The hallway smelled sterile with more than a hint of bleach. The room itself was much the same. Industrial-strength cleaner tinged the air with a sharp smell and the dim light made it difficult to see if Mindy was asleep where she had curled up in a chair.

  Ash stared at the respirator. That was not a good sign. If the kid was too out of it to breathe on his own, it suggested this was not going to end well. Ash peered at Mindy’s tiny form in the chair. She looked pale and exhausted. The roundness that had seemed to begin to fill out her cheeks after at least two days of good meals was just gone. Her features were sharp and her cheeks sunken. In this position, with her head lolling backwards onto the headrest of the chair, it was possible for Ash to see her collarbone poking out of her neck. She looked like a bird who could be picked up and squashed if the captor squeezed just a little too hard.

  He had no idea how long he’d been staring at her when her eyelids flickered and then opened. She spotted him immediately. Her gaze focusing as she sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Ash?”

  “Yes. I’m sorry it took so long for me to get here.” He felt bad about that. But it wasn’t like anyone had notified him. She hadn’t. No doubt she had been too consumed with worry for Darren. “Detective Lowell called me and asked me to come down here.”

  Her mouth twisted into a bitter smile. “Because he didn’t want to come himself.”

  “He can’t.” Even as Ash said the words, he realized how hollow they sounded. Lowell was the one who had put Mindy and Darren into this position to begin with. The least he could have done was to be here in their hour of need.

  Mindy seemed to be well ahead of Ash on this score. “You mean,” she began sarcastically, “that Lowell found out Caprico and Sellers were suddenly interested and that would have made things a bit awkward around here. Yeah. I guessed as much when Sellers and Caprico told me they couldn’t imagine why Lowell would be interested in this case.”

  Now Ash felt really bad. He could not imagine what it would be like to have a brother laying there with a machine breathing for him and to have the one person who was supposed to be on board with this whole operation pretend he wasn’t interested in the case at all. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t as though Mindy could truly understand what went on behind the scenes in an internal affairs investigation. She just knew that she had been trying to make sure that her brother didn’t wind up exactly where he was and now she didn’t even have any support to help her get him through this.

  Mindy sat forward in her chair and stared at Darren. “He’s going to die. I can feel it.”

  Ash wanted to argue with her, but the kid didn’t look so good. Darren was pale. His lips were bloodless. He obviously couldn’t breathe on his own. His heart rate was dangerously low. His entire body had a bluish cast to it. The doctors were likely keeping him alive by using the machines. And the one thing that was going to determine the rest was brain activity. What was going on with that? If Darren was braindead, then there was no point in any of this.

  “What does the doctor say?” Ash almost hated to ask the question. It seemed so mundane when the entire situation was anything but. “Are they giving him a decent prognosis?”

  “No.”

  Her flat answer told Ash probably more than he needed to know, and yet he could not keep his mouth closed. “Brain damage?”

  “Yes.” She swiped at her eyes with her fingertips and Ash could see that she was struggling not to cry. “He’s guaranteed to have at least some brain damage. They don’t know the extent of it. He still might not live. It’s just so… so…” She trailed off as though she didn’t know what it was.

  Ash knelt in front of her chair. She was exhausted. He could see it. Without thinking about how she might take it or what he might be inferring, he reached out and pulled her into his arms. Ash held her thin body as gently as he could. Within seconds, she was crying. Sobbing actually. Huge, wracking sobs that shook her whole body and made her seem as though she was about to fall apart.

  He wanted to ask what had happened. He wanted to know where their operation had gone so terribly wrong. But now wasn’t the time. Now was the time to whisper softly in her ear and gently stroke her back. He felt her sag heavily against him and shifted until he was sitting in the chair and she was in his lap. He shouldn’t have done it. The position was too intimate. But grief does strange things to people in emotionally vulnerable positions.

  “I’m so sorry.” She tried to pull back and swipe her nose. “I’m getting your shirt soaked.”

  “It’s a T-shirt,” he told her quietly. “Cotton doesn’t care if it gets wet and neither do I. Are you starting to feel better?”

  “Yes.” Her nose wrinkled and she looked so young and so cute that Ash nearly went to pieces himself. “No! How can I say that I feel better when Darren is never going to be the same? How can I pretend that my life is going to go on when his is in the crapper? And it’s my fault, Ash. My fault!”

  “Mindy, stop.” Ash shook his head. He reached out and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. She weighed less than nothing sitting there on his lap like a child. The woman needed care and feeding and someone to love her. She had earned that. “You weren’t responsible for Darren’s decision to take too many pills.”

  “But the pills were given to me!” she protested. Her eyes gleamed with tears and so looked distraught. “Caprico only gave me a handout the first time. Darren didn’t get one. I got to Dino Golf—to the maintenance shed—and they said they had already let Darren go home because his withdrawal symptoms were so bad that he couldn’t function at work.”

  Ash was building a picture in his head. Caprico had known that Darren was desperate. He had sent Mindy home to care for her desperately jonesing brother with a package of his drug of choice. That rat bastard had known exactly what would happen.

  “Where were the drugs?” Ash asked, trying to keep his voice soft and coaxing.

  She shuddered against him and he could not resist the urge to hold her closer. “They were in that bag you gave me. The bag with the money. Caprico took the money out and then gave me back the bag. So, I shoved the package of product in the bag and put it under my end table right beside where I was sleeping.”

  “And he was where when you got home?” This was sounding rather suspicious.

  “In bed.” She made a face. “He whined and moaned and then he got up and ate all of my pie.”

  Ash tried to set that slight aside for now. It could be fixed later. He would buy her an entire banana cream pie if he thought it would make her smile. “So, he dug through your stuff looking for product?”

  “I guess.” She seemed uncertain. “I must have really zonked out because I didn’t hear anything. I just had this feeling at like four this morning that there was something wrong.”

  “Does your brother have a cell phone?”

  “Yes, but I don’t know where it is.”

  “Can you pull up texts from that cell phone using your online account?”

  She looked uncertain. “I suppose I could. I don’t have a computer so I’ve never set up the online account. I pay my bill in the store around the corner from my apartment.”

  There was a thought forming in Ash’s head. It was a very dirty thought. A dark one. And yet the idea that someon
e who was having such serious withdrawal symptoms could quietly extract a bag of pills from a zippered duffle bag and then sneak off to another room to take them seemed implausible. Darren would have been ripping that bag open with such desperation that he would have woken the whole apartment complex. And that was if he had been lucid enough to think about looking for it in the bag to begin with.

  “What?” Mindy whispered. She rested her cheek against his chest and snuggled close. “What are you thinking? I can see the wheels turning in your head.”

  “I’m thinking that we need to find that phone record,” Ash murmured. “But I want you to be very honest with yourself here, Mindy. This is not your fault. The entire reason you had pills on you to begin with was because of Darren. He had gotten himself into trouble and you were trying to fix it. Again. End of story.”

  “I should have…”

  “No. You shouldn’t have,” Ash argued. He wasn’t going to let her argue against herself. “I know you well enough to know that you pride yourself on logic. And there is no logic in that line of thought, Mindy.”

  She made a face. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

  “No?” He sighed. Then he looked at the hospital bed where her brother clung to life only because an army of machines refused to let him quit. “I know you well enough to imagine what you were like at seventeen years old.”

  “Seventeen?” She made a face. “God, I was a nerd! I was in every academic club that they offered at school. Honor roll. The whole nine yards.”

  “And why were you like that?” Ash prodded. He had his suspicions, but she needed to hear this from her own lips.

  Two lines appeared between her brows. “My mother was really sick. By the time I was seventeen she was down to working part-time. She did that for another three years. But she was really struggling to keep going and hearing about how successful I was at school made her happy.” Mindy made it sound like a foregone conclusion. Mother was ill and needed a pick me up. Mindy provided that. End of story.

  “Do you feel like your mother was working any harder when you were seventeen than you are now?” Ash wondered out loud.

  Mindy looked scandalized. “My mother was ill! It’s not the same thing.”

  “Did your mother go to college?”

  “Sure. She had an associate’s degree. She worked in a doctor’s office. That’s how she first got diagnosed with the cancer.” Mindy was proud of her mother. Ash could hear it in her voice. “It wasn’t her fault that Dad ran off.”

  That wasn’t always true. But Ash wasn’t going to touch that. “My point was that your mother was a woman who had enough life experience that she was somewhat prepared for that responsibility. It was her responsibility to take care of you guys. And you always helped because you wanted to ease things for her.”

  “Yes.” She looked confused. “Why does any of this matter?”

  Ash didn’t respond to that query. He sighed instead. “I remember what I was like at seventeen. Arrogant and full of myself and dating a girl who was a cheerleader and on the Homecoming court and the prom committee. I’ll freely admit now that I was a total jackass. But if something had happened and my mom was left to fend for me by herself, you better believe I would have been on it.”

  “I bet you would have been,” Mindy whispered. She smiled up at him in a way that made him feel like a million bucks.

  But that was not the purpose of this exercise. “So why,” Ash continued, “does your brother seem so very determined to make your life more difficult instead of doing what he can to help you out since you’ve so graciously stepped into the mother role here?”

  Mindy didn’t answer. She swallowed. She looked down. And finally, she rested her head against him once again and remained silent. There was no reason to say it. They both knew. The answer was that Darren Hall was just one of those people who was too immature for the life he had been unwillingly thrust into.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mindy had to go work. There was nothing for it. She had already swapped shifts with another coworker, but the truth was Mindy did not have days off. She could not afford them. She could not actually remember the last time she had not gone to work on a day. Whether it was a weekend or a weekday, Mindy was working.

  “You know,” Kevin sneered when Mindy walked through the doors that evening to work the five to midnight shift. “Just because you were up late last night turning tricks does not make it all right for you to just call in and swap shifts. That is not policy.”

  Mindy did not even spare Kevin a glance when she clocked in. “My brother is in the hospital. He might die. But thanks for your compassion and understanding, Kevin. I really appreciate that you appreciate my dedication to my job that I’m here at all.”

  It was actually satisfying to see his mouth open without any words coming out. But Mindy figured it was going to be short-lived, so she hightailed it away from the computer and hustled to find the to-do list that should have been left behind by one of the morning crew.

  The best part about working this shift was that Mindy was filling in for a young woman who usually ran the gift shop. It was a nice change of pace. And since these were not Mindy’s regular coworkers, there wasn’t a lot of awkward questions to answer. She could hide in the back of the gift shop and stock T-shirts and magic mirror toys without having people ask her every other minute how Darren was doing.

  Not that Darren wasn’t constantly on her mind. Mindy knew that Ash was right. It was not logical to feel responsible for what Darren had done. He had made his own decisions. They were poorly informed and probably motivated mostly by selfishness, but he was still the one making them. What was she supposed to do? Tie him down until he agreed to do things her way?

  Mindy had gotten into a steady rhythm of folding T-shirts. She was making neat stacks on a piece of brown wrapping paper on the floor when she felt a very heavy gaze on her from a short distance away. That was when she spotted the shoes. Uniform shoes. Shiny. Black. And they were paired with a pair of dark blue poly blend trousers, a utility belt, and a button-down dark blue shirt with a shiny badge on one pocket and a patch on the arm.

  “Sergeant Caprico,” Mindy said in what she hoped was a firm and at least not wobbly voice. “Can I help you with a T-shirt? Were you shopping for yourself or for a friend or relative?”

  He made a low sound that she took to be straight up disgust. Then he nudged a stack of neatly folded T-shirts with his toe to knock them over. “I don’t want a friggin’ T-shirt. Why would you think that?”

  “Because this is where the T-shirts are and I cannot imagine another reason for you to be here if you didn’t want to look at a shirt.” Mindy stared up at him and wished him to hell and back.

  He curled his lip and glared down at her as though he was looking at something on his shoe. “Oh, you can’t imagine another reason? You can’t imagine that your boss has called me to let me know he thinks you need to be arrested for prostitution?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Mindy was floored. In fact, there were so many pieces of Caprico’s last sentence that concerned her, she didn’t even know where to start. Perhaps she needed to start at one place in particular. “I’m sorry, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And just because Kevin and I are no longer seeing each other, it doesn’t mean I’ve turned to prostitution. I’m not even sure how that makes sense.”

  “You were with Eads?” There was actual amusement in Caprico’s tone. Mindy could tell. “That’s pathetic. What woman is so desperate that she would sleep with Kevin Eads?”

  “I don’t know,” Mindy shot back. “Tons of them if you ask him. But that’s none of my business. We stopped seeing each other a good six months ago.”

  “He thinks you’re turning tricks.”

  Now Mindy was getting pissed. “Yeah? And did he tell you that he was sure that’s what I was doing all day long and all last night too? Hell, Sergeant Caprico, you could be my alibi for part of that time.”


  Caprico’s smile disappeared. “Don’t screw with me, Ms. Hall.”

  “Don’t come in here trying to accuse me of a crime you know damn well I didn’t commit. You’re wasting my time and yours.” Mindy tried to decide what was really going on here. It wasn’t good. If Kevin had called Caprico, that kind of suggested there was an established relationship there. How established was it? That was the real question. “And another thing,” Mindy said angrily, “I get the impression that your partner, Detective Sellers, doesn’t really know all about your involvement at Dino Golf. Why is that I wonder?”

  Caprico went from amused to unamused to deadly. His glacial stare nearly pegged Mindy to the ground. “You had better be careful what you say and who you say it to. I don’t appreciate people telling stories about me.”

  “They aren’t stories. They are straight observations.” Mindy’s heart was really racing now. She was dancing with danger and she knew it. “If you don’t want to be caught doing something suspicious, you should just stop doing it. And why would Kevin call you I wonder? Is he part of your little gang? I know you’re not the only one in town, Caprico. I think we’ve all figured that out. But I did think Sellers was your partner in crime as well as law enforcement. And now I’m starting to believe he’s just a patsy. Just an oaf who doesn’t know what’s really going on.”

  “You’d best shut your trap,” Caprico growled. In one smooth motion, he squatted down beside Mindy and reached out to grab her neck.

  At the last second, she twisted out of the way. She had no weapon though. Nothing to keep him from trying to make a grab for her again. Without thinking about it, she reached for the box cutter she had laid aside earlier. She lifted it up and took a swipe at Caprico when he tried to snatch her arm. The thin blade ripped into the skin of his forearm and drew blood.