by Coyle, Matt;
“I’ve heard of him.” I touched my still swollen nose, remembering Rankin’s MMA beauty who put her foot through my face.
“Well, I would hope so.” The icy chuckle. “I’m sure the Eddingtons gave you Randall’s phone records when you were investigating his disappearance. Even a low-rent PI like you would find out who he called on the night he disappeared.”
“Time to go, Moretti.”
“Anything you want to get off your chest, Cahill?” He stood up. “Now would be the time, before the phone comes back from the lab. You could tell me how Alan Rankin is involved in all of this. Might make for a shorter stay in the state’s hotel.”
Sweat pebbled my forehead. I went to the front door and opened it. “Time to leave.”
Moretti gave me the wolf smile and stopped in front of the door.
“You take care of yourself, Rick. Your secret’s safe with me. But the clock is ticking. I’m sure we’ll see each other again soon.” He walked out the door.
I went back out onto the patio with Midnight. The November night chilled the sweat along my forehead. I stared out at the view. Midnight leaned against me and sighed. I tried to breathe.
Moretti had me in a vise. Each new piece of evidence was another twist tighter. How many more twists did he have? I’d find out with the next knock on the door. But why did he spill tonight? And why tell me my secret was safe with him? Was he telling me that he was running the investigation alone? Why?
Moretti hated me. Because of my father. Because of me. He’d never needed an excuse to stick a knife between my ribs and twist it. But as much as he enjoyed making my life miserable, he wasn’t stupid. He’d just given me evidence that would be used against me in court after he arrested me.
Why tell me about the call to Alan Rankin on Randall’s phone the night he disappeared? Maybe he thought I killed Randall and then called Rankin on Randall’s phone. He wanted to play me against Rankin, but why? Wasn’t I a big enough prize for him?
CHAPTER TWENTY
I WOKE UP early the next morning. Or, at least, got out of bed early. To wake up, you had to have been asleep. I’m sure I cobbled together a couple hours in between sweat and spin cycles. Just not enough to take on the life I’d built for myself.
Moretti was out there somewhere. Collecting new evidence and building a case. The next knock on the door would be with handcuffs and a murder warrant. Right now there wasn’t much I could do about it. Running wasn’t an option. Neither was standing still.
I got out of bed and threw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, went into my office and turned on my computer. Midnight followed me and laid down under the desk. I still owed Brianne two days of work. Something to do while I hoped Scott Buehler from The Reader came up with something on Moretti that would distract him long enough for me to find a way to stay out of prison.
I logged on and pulled up Gmail, using the password Brianne Colton had given me to access her husband’s account. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but figured I’d know what it was when I saw it. If there was anything to see. Jim Colton had died. That much was certain. How was still in question. At least to me and Brianne Colton. I wasn’t convinced her husband had been murdered, but I wasn’t ready to sign off on suicide yet, either.
I scrolled through Colton’s personal emails, starting two weeks before his death. Brianne had told me she’d already gone through them and hadn’t found anything that pointed to suicide or to someone wanting to kill Jim. Still, I wanted to be thorough and I had the time. For now. I checked Colton’s inbox first and then his sent file. Luckily he wasn’t prolific. Most of the emails were to and from old SEAL and GRS buddies. They were about life in general, the mess in the Middle East, and occasionally old war stories. He never mentioned Moretti or the asset seizure arrests. He did ask Oak Rollins about private security and stated it might be the next move for him.
Colton’s emails were terse and mostly devoid of feeling. However, when he mentioned Brianne, I could sense it still hurt. Although it’s difficult to discern tone in emails, Colton came across as a bit wistful about Brianne. But not suicidal.
I went back another three months. More of the same. The first couple weeks after Brianne left him, Colton let out some pain to Rollins but nothing about LJPD or Moretti.
I found the first and, so far only, email addressed to Kyle Bates, the SEAL from Colton’s unit who I’d interviewed in Coronado. It was sent nineteen days before Colton’s death. Oak Rollins was also a recipient. The email read: “I thought I saw Dirt today. I caught him from behind. Same build, same head. Walked just like him. That bull-legged swagger. I almost called out his name, but the guy turned and I saw his face. Not him, of course. Just some guy getting on a yacht. But for a second I really thought it could be Dirt. Brought me back, boys. Gone times.”
I checked the return emails from Rollins and Bates but didn’t learn anything more about “Dirt.” They both thought the sighting was strange and joked that it couldn’t have been Dirt because he couldn’t sail for shit.
The three of them had all been in the same SEAL unit, but only Colton and Rollins had worked together with GRS. Dirt had to have been an old SEAL buddy. The email didn’t feel like an “aha” moment, but the date it was sent scratched at something in my memory. I pulled Colton’s file out of a desk drawer and found the cell phone records from the last month of his life. I checked the date of the Dirt email. Colton called Oak Rollins that night for the first time that month. In the next eighteen days, the last of his life, he called Rollins thirteen more times.
Who was Dirt and why did things seem to start moving faster in Jim Colton’s life after he mistakenly thought he saw him? And could the man Colton mistook for him have had anything to do with his calling the FBI five days before he died?
I felt for the first time that the case had some momentum. I called Brianne. Straight to voicemail. I needed to talk to her about “Dirt.” I wanted to talk to her because when I wasn’t thinking about prison, I thought of her.
I wanted to see her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE STREETS WERE still and mostly empty. The marine layer pressed a low ceiling on the morning, graying out everything but fifty feet ahead. The haze gave me some cover as I drove up Soledad Road into La Jolla. Then again, it would do the same for anyone following me, like one of Moretti’s boys in a police cruiser. I pulled up in front of Brianne’s house, safe from any rainbow light bars in my rearview mirror. Brianne’s 1965 cherry-red Mustang convertible sat in the driveway.
There was a lot to like about Brianne.
I rang the doorbell and waited. A dog barked, more of a howl, inside the house. There hadn’t been a dog the last time I was here. Nobody came to the door. I knocked again. The dog howled again.
“George, shush.” Brianne’s voice through the door. More throaty than usual.
The door opened. Brianne stood slightly stooped holding the collar of a large brindle boxer. Amber hair piled wild atop her head. A little red around sleepy eyes. No makeup. Toned bare legs and feet below a short kimono. I’d awakened her. Half asleep, she looked as good as she had on the stage in performance mode.
Rules. Couldn’t break the rules.
“Rick? Why in the Lord’s name are you knocking on my door at seven twenty-five in the morning?”
“Country girl like you, I thought you’d be up.”
“You see any cows that need milking in here?” She opened the door wider, but kept hold of the Boxer. “I haven’t lived on a farm since I was eighteen.” She wiped a stray strand of hair from her eyes. “Lord, I’m not even presentable.”
I thought of the Sammy Kershaw song “She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful,” but kept it to myself. “Sorry.”
“Well, come in then.” She stepped back to let me in and the Boxer snarled and held his tail low. “George, that’s enough.”
“George, huh?” I slowly knelt down and turned slightly to the side. “As in Jones or Strait?”
“Both.”
I clicked my tongue and called the dog by name.
“He doesn’t like strange men,” Brianne said, still holding George’s collar.
“Something we have in common.” I clicked my tongue again. “Let him go.”
Brianne squinted at me then shrugged her shoulders and released the dog’s collar. I clicked again and looked down at the ground. George snuffled then walked toward me, tail down with a slight wiggle in it. I stayed partially angled away from him. He tentatively sniffed my hip, but his legs weren’t convinced. He had to lean forward because his back legs wouldn’t come any closer. I let him sniff. He moved a little closer, sniffed my shoulder, and stuck his tongue in my ear. Ten seconds later I had him on his back, scratching his chest and belly.
“I guess this makes me not so strange.” I stood up. George whined and waved a paw at me.
“Maybe not, but you’re still a bit different, Rick.” Brianne shook her head and a couple strands of red hair washed across her forehead. “Hard candy on the outside and soft nougat on the inside.”
“Probably closer to bittersweet.”
She laughed and walked into the kitchen. George and I followed. He ran his head under my hand. I gave it a scratch. The kitchen was rustic and had a butcher board island twice the size of mine that doubled as a breakfast table. A large window over the sink would have had a view of the the mountains of East County if it weren’t foggy. There was a large fenced-off herb garden to the right of the covered patio in the backyard.
“Coffee? It will take a few minutes.” She pushed a button on the coffeemaker on the polished wood countertop. “You probably like yours blacker than a moonless night.”
“I only like coffee in ice cream, but thanks anyway. Sorry for dropping by unannounced.” Not that sorry.
“It’s okay. It’s not really that early.” She sat down at the island. “I had a gig downtown last night and got home late.”
“I thought after you dumped the guitar player, you’d take a break for a while.” I took a seat across from her.
“Seth’s a professional. He wouldn’t let a little breakup get in the way of a payday.”
“Good to hear.” I doubted it was that easy for him. Hadn’t been for Jim Colton. Wouldn’t be for me.
George pressed his body against my leg as he walked by, then returned and repeated.
“That’s enough, George. Go lie down.” Brianne pointed to a doggie bed in the corner of the kitchen. George gave her hurt Boxer eyes and slunk over to his bed.
“Midnight’s going to think I’ve been cheating on him when I get home.”
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, you can tell it bothered me.”
“Well, maybe not as much as me coming on to you the other night.” She studied a spot on the place setting in front of her.
I thought of Kyle Bates’s story about Brianne coming on to him, but let it lie. For now.
“A beautiful woman who I like very much showing interest in me is a highlight, not a bother. Under any other circum—”
“Okay. Enough said.” She smiled and made the rules that much harder to obey. “So, why did you come over this morning?”
“I’ll get to that in a second, but tell me about George. Was he here the night Jim died?”
“No. He was at my apartment. I took him with me when Jim and I split.”
Brianne got up and poured herself a cup of coffee. “If you don’t drink coffee, can I get you some orange juice or water?”
“Sure, I’ll take some water.” Brianne handed me a bottled water and sat back down with her coffee. “Thanks. I went through some of Jim’s emails this morning. Who is Dirt?”
“Was. Doug McCafferty. A SEAL buddy who died in Iraq ten years ago.” She sipped her coffee. “He was in the two pictures in Jim’s den that I thought were in the wrong spots on the wall. Why?”
“Jim sent an email to Oak Rollins and Kyle Bates nineteen days before he died saying he thought he’d seen Dirt.”
“I know. It freaked him out.”
“He told you about it?”
“Yes. He saw the man right before we met for lunch that day in Seaport Village.”
“How often did you two meet during the separation?” Colton hadn’t mentioned the lunch in his email.
“Not that often.” A long exhale. “Jim wanted to reconcile.”
“And you didn’t.”
“No.” She stared at her coffee.
A bad day for Jim Colton. He thought he saw a ghost and his wife didn’t want him anymore. Three weeks later he’d be dead. The lunch with Brianne and her revelation to Jim that they’d never get back together put a different spin on the events that happened afterward. Was this day the beginning of a spiraling depression that ended with him putting a rope around his neck? His emails would say no, but Colton was old school. Kept his emotions to himself. Where they could fester and metastasize. Just like my father. He committed suicide. With a bottle. It just took nine years.
The frequent calls to Oak Rollins could have been to cry on his shoulder about his marriage, or his version of shoulder-crying. But why the call to the FBI? I needed to talk to Rollins again and I needed someone at the FBI to return my calls.
“Jim didn’t seem like a guy who got freaked out over anything,” I said. “What did he do?”
“You’re right. He wasn’t like most people. At least most non-SEAL people.” She leaned forward. “But seeing this guy really got to him. Jim said his physique was exactly the same as Doug’s and that his walk and mannerisms were just like him, too. He said he almost forgot Doug was dead and that he was about to shout his name when the man turned toward him and Jim saw his face and it wasn’t Doug. He said it felt like Doug died again right there in front of him.”
“And then you two had lunch and you told him you didn’t want to get back together.” The words felt barbed leaving my mouth. I could have left them unsaid.
Brianne tilted her head and stared at me. Pain, maybe anger in her eyes. Finally, “You know, Rick, there’s something hard and cruel in your soul. It’s not the only thing there, but it’s there.”
I hadn’t thought about my soul in a long time.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to be cruel.”
“Yes, you did.” Calm. “You just stated a fact, but you wanted it to hurt a little bit.”
She was probably right. I shoveled some of my own pain onto Brianne and others before her. People I cared about. I sympathized with Jim Colton’s marital woes even though I’d had much more in common with Brianne in my own long-ago marriage. Maybe I jabbed at her to push off the guilt I still felt about how I’d failed Colleen.
“I am sorry.” I was. “Do you want to talk later?”
“No. Let’s get it over with.” Same hurt, angry eyes.
“I’m just trying to find the truth, Brianne.”
“That, I believe.” She took a sip of coffee, but her eyes remained on me. “In your own way.”
However right or wrong she was about me could wait. I’d gradually come to feel that something was off about Jim Colton’s suicide. Nothing definitive, just little pieces here and there that made me doubt. But when I stood back and looked at Colton’s death from thirty thousand feet, suicide made the most sense.
“Your husband saw the man he mistook for Doug McCafferty and found out you two weren’t getting back together nineteen days before he died. Right afterwards, he started calling Oak Rollins a lot more often than ever before and he seemed sad in his emails.” I let out a long exhale, delaying the question I had to ask for as long as possible. “Is it possible that feeling like he’d lost an old friend all over again and realizing you two were never going to get back together could have sent him on a downward tilt that he never recovered from?”
Brianne stared at me. The hurt left her eyes leaving only the anger. “When are you going to make up your damn mind, Rick?”
“What do you mean?”
“Half the time you sound like there’s something suspicious a
bout Jim’s death and the other half you try to blame me for driving him to suicide.”
“I’m not blaming you, Brianne. We’re each responsible for our own actions.” I knew that better than anyone. “I’m just saying the information about Jim seeing a man who reminded him of a dead buddy and finding out you two were definitely over seems to have affected him deeply. His behavior changed immediately after that day. I’d be stupid not to consider suicide a legitimate possibility without compelling evidence pointing to the contrary.”
“You’re forgetting his call to the FBI.”
“He called the FBI two weeks later. The call was most likely work related.” Or it could have been about Chief Moretti and his asset forfeiture arrests, but I didn’t want to give Brianne another hook to hang her hopes on. Besides, Moretti’s involvement in Colton’s death, or anyone else’s, seemed less and less likely after what I’d learned today.
“Really? How come he never called them on his private cell phone before?” Her eyes more challenging than angry now.
“You can’t be sure of that. You only have one month of phone records.”
“Wait here.” She jolted up off her stool and dashed out of the kitchen.
George took the opportunity to get out of his bed and amble over to me. I rewarded him by scratching him behind the ear. Brianne returned to the kitchen a minute later with a few sheets of paper gripped in her hand. She slammed the papers on the island in front of me, and George scampered back to his bed.
“I got more records from AT&T since we last talked.” She folded her arms tightly against her chest. “I went back four months and didn’t find another call to the FBI.”
“Why the sudden urge to check phone records?”
“When you quit, I’ll have to investigate on my own. The phone records seemed like a good place to start.”
“I’m not quitting, Brianne. Just because I have doubts doesn’t mean I’m not doing the job. I want to get you an answer once and for all. Did you find anything else in the phone records?”
