Misadventures in Blue

by Sierra Simone

  Misadventures in Blue

  Sierra Simone

  This book is an original publication of Waterhouse Press.

  * * *

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not assume any responsibility for third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2019 Waterhouse Press, LLC

  Cover Design by Waterhouse Press

  Cover photographs: Shutterstock

  * * *

  All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic format without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  To Josh, for all these years of couch time. I love you.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Don’t miss any Misadventures!

  Excerpt from Misadventures at City Hall

  More Misadventures

  About Sierra Simone

  Chapter One

  Jace

  A burglary sounds more exciting than it is.

  Burglars are opportunists, generally, and the ones smart enough to do it more than once are smart enough to know how to do it right. Know what you want and take it while no one else is around.

  Sticking a gun in a bank teller’s face isn’t going to get you anything but a prison sentence—but if we’re talking the kind of theft that happens without anyone getting hurt? And for shit that isn’t federally protected? Well, be clever and you might just get away with it.

  Anyway, alarm calls for business structures at night usually turn out to be nothing. Bad wiring or teens goofing off or—most commonly—a night cleaning crew with an old alarm code. And the turns-out-to-be-nothing calls are frequent enough that I’m surprised when I get to the scene and actually find broken glass everywhere. A brief and welcome shot of adrenaline pulses through me as I call it in and draw my weapon to search the premises.

  Empty.

  With a disappointment that is as irrational as it is unwanted, I update dispatch and call my sergeant.

  “Russo,” she answers in her usual clipped way.

  “Hey, Sarge, it’s Sutton. I’m responding to that alarm at 10533 Mastin, and I think you should call Detective Day in. It looks like another one of her doctor’s office robberies.”

  I can tell by the pause on the other end of the phone that my sergeant has no idea what I’m talking about.

  “She sent an email about it last week,” I add. “Asking to be alerted if there was another one, which I think this is.”

  I hear clicking and sighing and guess that Russo is double-checking her own inbox to find Detective Day’s email.

  “All right, kid,” Russo says. “Found the email. Looks like calling her in is what we need to do.”

  That at least gives me some kind of satisfaction. Maybe there is no one to chase, nothing to do, but at least I can make sure the right person gets the right information.

  But it isn’t a lot of satisfaction.

  Well, Jace, what did you expect when you took a job working for a suburban police department? Firefights? Car chases?

  No. I knew exactly what I was doing when I applied at Hocker Grove Police Department. My sister just had her second baby, my folks were retiring, and I wanted to put down roots. I wanted to buy a house and maybe get my degree and settle down. I wanted something more than the stop-and-start life of active duty in the army like I had before.

  I wanted to come back to the place where I grew up.

  I walk out of the doctor’s office and crunch across the broken glass back to my car for the crime-scene tape, taking in the typical Hocker Grove night as I do. I take in the empty parking lot, still puddled and damp from an earlier storm and lit by lonely light poles, and I take in the distant roar of the interstate and the rustling of wet tree leaves in the wind.

  I smell the suburban air, a mix of wet grass and gasoline. The almost-country and the almost-city mixed together.

  I smell home.

  Although for being home sweet suburban home, Hocker Grove is plenty busy and plenty grim. As the second-most-populous city in the state of Kansas, with almost two hundred thousand people, every type of crime comes out to play. Domestic abuse, drug abuse, battery, assault, theft, and so many auto burglaries that they have their own unit in the investigation division.

  As I know from my own childhood growing up in a shitty apartment tucked behind a Walmart, Hocker Grove isn’t all happy middle-class families and prosperity. But even with all the work that needs to be done, the pace of life here after six years in the army and three hellish stints in Afghanistan feels, well…boring and uneventful.

  Russo arrives right as I am pulling the tape from my car, and after her come Coulson, Romero, and Quinn. Together it doesn’t take long to get the scene roped off and secure, and afterward, I slide into my car and start sketching out the beginnings of my report. I hate paperwork, but if there’s one thing I learned from the army, it’s that there’s no point in putting off things you hate. Especially paperwork. It just bites you in the ass harder when the time comes.

  “I heard they called in the Ice Queen,” Quinn says, coming over to lean against my car and talking to me through my open window. Quinn’s fresh out of field training, like me, but a couple of years younger, and sometimes that couple of years feels like decades.

  But as my grandmother used to say, I’m an old soul, and I’m sure fighting in a literal war did nothing to make that soul any younger. So I take a deep breath and try to be patient with the fact that this guy wants to shoot the shit while all I want is to get my work done.

  “Ice Queen?” I ask, not looking up from the report screen of the mounted tablet in the car.

  “Yeah, man. Cat Day. You haven’t heard about her?”

  I could point out that in a department of nearly four hundred commissioned officers, there are a lot of people I haven’t heard of, but I don’t bother. Quinn doesn’t need my help keeping a conversation going.

  “So get this. Years and years ago, she was engaged to another cop, and he was killed in the line of duty. Killed right in front of her. And when the other officers arrived on the scene, they found her sitting on the steps outside the house where he was killed and she’s covered in his blood from trying to do CPR, and the first thing she says is, ‘Can I wash my hands?’”

  He pauses for effect. I keep typing.

  He keeps going, with more hand gestures now, to drive home his point. “Not ‘Oh my God, my fiancé is fucking dead’ or ‘Someone wheel me to the psych ward because I just watched the man I love bleed out’ or anything like that. Nope. ‘Can I wash my hands?’ She wasn’t even crying. And they said she never did cry, like ever, not even at his funeral. How messed up is that?”

  Honestly, I don’t think it’s messed up at all.

  Everyone reacts to trauma differently. I once saved a civilian’s life by shoving my fingers into an open wound in his thigh, and three hours later I was eating nachos in the DFAC and compla
ining about how the Chiefs couldn’t get their shit together. The only way to keep living after these moments is to focus on the tiny realities that, when stitched together, make life normal. Washing your hands. Nachos. Talking about things that don’t matter.

  To stay normal you have to pretend to be normal.

  It’s compartmentalization—but you can’t say that word to the therapists and counselors because then they start nodding and writing stuff down.

  “Who’s they?” I ask, looking up from my tablet.

  Quinn’s red-blond brows furrow together. “What do you mean?”

  “You said they are saying this stuff about Detective Day. Who?”

  He waves an impatient hand. “It’s just like—stories, man. Gossip and stuff.”

  “Why does anyone care?”

  “Because she’s still, like, a frigid bitch,” Quinn states as if it’s obvious.

  His words piss me off. “That’s unprofessional to say,” I tell him. “Not to mention shitty.”

  Quinn rolls his eyes and his body at the same time in a kind of oh come ON gesture. “You’re no fun, Sutton.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I say, getting back to the report.

  “Ugh. Fine. But mark my words when you meet her. Frig—”

  I give him an irritated glare, and he finally, thankfully, shuts up and leaves me alone.

  Ice Queen.

  I wonder what she’s actually like. My mom was a firefighter, and I know being a woman and a first responder means walking along a wire with no safety net. Too passive and you get ignored for promotions and recognition. Too aggressive and you get labeled a bitch. Act like a man and you’ll succeed—but then you’ll be punished for not being enough like a woman.

  This reflection, along with random thoughts about being home and being bored, filter through my mind as a civilian car rolls into the parking lot. A very nice civilian car.

  I watch with interest as it coasts into a spot and stops and then with even more interest as a woman climbs out in a blouse and skirt—no uniform, although there is a badge clipped to the waist of her skirt.

  Detective Catherine Day.

  She’s slender, upright, with posture and movements so graceful that there must be ballet shoes in her past…ski trips and horses too. Light-blond hair waves just past her shoulders, sleek and glamorous in that Old Hollywood kind of way, and the drape of her silk blouse and the fitted hug of her pencil skirt scream money and delicacy and restraint.

  She is sophistication embodied.

  And all of this refined dignity is coupled with a direct, determined stride and quick, efficient assessments of her surroundings. She exudes confidence. Independence. Power.

  I don’t know about the ice part, but the queen?

  Yes. I can sense it from here.

  In the thirty seconds it takes her to tuck her leather portfolio against her stomach and walk into the building, Catherine Day obliterates any thoughts of boredom or disappointment, and I feel a strange jolt of unhappiness when she walks out of my sight.

  I close out my tablet with a few impatient stabs and get out of my car. Talking to her is the only thing I want to do.

  Chapter Two

  Cat

  I’ll never concede that crime scenes and high heels don’t mix.

  I duck under the yellow tape to find the on-duty sergeant and notice a spray of broken glass on the ground. With a rueful glance down at my nude Manolo Blahniks, I pick my way carefully through the sparkling debris to the woman facing away from me, talking into the radio on her shoulder. I’ve never been more grateful for my years of ballet and yoga as I am when I make it to her with my balance and dignity intact.

  Sergeant Russo gives me a friendly—if slightly disbelieving—once-over as I reach her, eyeing my silk blouse and tailored pencil skirt. A sleek leather portfolio is tucked under my elbow.

  “Just rolled out of bed like that, huh?” she asks, letting go of her radio and gesturing for me to follow her through a doorway to the real crime scene.

  I smile as we walk in, but I don’t answer. Nicki Russo and I went through academy together, and while we’re friends, her remarks about my clothes have always been more than a little pointed. Detective Dry Clean Only is her favorite nickname for me—which I suppose is nicer than the one they call me when I’m not around.

  Officer Ice Queen.

  They’ve been calling me that since Frazer’s funeral twelve years ago. The funeral where I didn’t cry, didn’t mourn, didn’t expose a single sliver of the raw, howling pain I actually felt.

  “Tell me what we’ve got,” I say, setting aside the sharp memories and taking in the scene. “Same as last time?”

  Russo nods. “Even down to the timing. Doctor’s office, hit after ten. The window around the door is broken—likely what triggered the alarm. We had a uniform here within seven minutes. He searched the office and the rest of the building. No one in sight.”

  I look around the half-lit waiting room. There’s glass from the broken window out on the sidewalk and a spray of shards glinting on the carpet. The usual array of pointless, uninteresting magazines are still neatly arranged on the tables, and the corner houses a collection of wooden toys. Except for the glass, it could be any well-kept, undisturbed waiting room, all but—

  “The television again,” I murmur, finding what I was looking for. A bare TV mount on the wall, random wires and cords dangling from the ceiling above it.

  “Yep,” Russo agrees. “My guy saw it right away. He was the one who told me to call you, by the way. Actually read your email about it all.”

  “And you didn’t read my email?” I ask absently, walking up to the wall and examining the mount.

  “Do you know how many emails I get in a day?” asks Russo.

  It’s a rhetorical question, so I don’t bother answering, but I do say, “That was attentive of your officer to remember it. I’d like to speak with him, if I may.”

  “Sure. And the office manager is here too. She might be able to give you a preliminary report of what’s missing.”

  “Nothing else will be missing,” I say, more to myself than Russo, still looking at the mount. It was poorly installed, and drywall dust litters the carpet below, as if dislodging the television from the mount sent a shower of the stuff everywhere. “They just want the TVs.”

  A string of similar robberies has plagued the city for the past two months. It’s always doctors’ offices, it’s always TVs, and it’s always at night.

  I normally work in crimes against persons—homicide, stalking, assault—but my experience working a similar case for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation a few years back had my sergeant pulling me to work this one. I don’t mind, since my usual caseload is a lot grimmer than stolen televisions, but it has been unexpectedly frustrating.

  I have one of the highest case clearance rates in the department; I’m not used to failing. Yet I’ve been on this one for four solid weeks with nothing to show for it.

  It’s galling, and an unfamiliar itch of restlessness works its way down my spine. It’s everything I can do to maintain my poise as I turn back to Russo.

  “The scene techs are taking pictures?”

  “Already done. They’re working on trying to lift prints now, but good luck with a fucking waiting room, you know?”

  I make an agreeing kind of noise as we head back toward the scheduling desks, where a wan young woman stands next to a copier. She looks stunned, a confused kind of afraid, and a frisson of impatience skates through me.

  There are far worse things than a stolen television—particularly one stolen when no one was around—and I want to tell her that. I want to tell her she doesn’t realize what horrors life can present. What fears. Even when Frazer died, I still managed to keep my pain and terror and guilt locked safely inside—

  I stop the train of thought immediately. It’s not helping the strange restless itch burrowing deeper and deeper into my chest. An itch that seems to be equal parts vexation over the case an
d some indefinable physical need.

  I take a subtle breath, remind myself that this girl is probably in her early twenties and that I don’t need to infect her with my jaded, thirty-seven-year-old weariness.

  “I’m Detective Catherine Day,” I say, extending my hand.

  She looks at it for a moment, lost, and then seems to remember what’s expected and shakes it. “Gia,” she replies.

  Russo grins at her. “Good Italian name.”

  “Uh, yeah. Pisani. Last name.” She lets out a huffy little laugh, as if realizing how wooden she’s being. “Sorry. This is just so weird.”

  I give her a small smile. “We’ll need you to submit a complete list of everything missing or disturbed in the office, Gia, but whatever you can tell me now will be helpful for the initial report.”

  She shakes her head, looking lost. “It’s only the television… It’s bewildering. It’s just gone.”

  “But no one was hurt,” Russo tells her. “And in the grand scheme of things, a TV is not the worst thing they could have taken. They could have taken medicine to sell off or all sorts of expensive medical equipment.”

  Gia chews her lip. “You’re right, of course. Absolutely right. It’s just this is my first real job out of college, and I have no idea what to do or if it’s somehow my fault…”

  I catch her uncertain gaze, touching her elbow as I do. “It’s not your fault, and I’ll guide you through as much of this as I can.”

  With Gia somewhat mollified, I manage to get a decent preliminary interview out of her, arrange for a follow-up later this week, and ask for a complete inventory of the equipment and other valuable items in the office. Then Russo and I head back outside to the parking lot to find the responding officer.