Southern Cross

by Jen Blood

  “I kissed Diggs the other night,” I said. I looked at him. He didn’t even look surprised, a flicker of anger in his eyes the only trace of emotion I could see.

  “I mean—technically, he kissed me,” I continued awkwardly. “But there was a second when I kissed him back.” I looked down, tracing the scar on my wrist. “I’m sorry. I didn’t plan on it happening…”

  “I know that,” he said. He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his head tilted a little. There was something naked, soulful, about his dark eyes when they met mine. The anger was gone.

  “I was fifteen when I met Lucia,” he said. It wasn’t what I’d expected—Lucia was Juarez’s first wife. His only wife. I’d been curious about her, but had never asked. It seemed too personal, somehow… Plus, what woman really wants to talk to her boyfriend about the lost love of his life?

  “It was one of those instant connections that you read about sometimes, with her,” he said. “We met, and… that was all. We dated, we fell in love, we married. So easy.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  He smiled a little—that sad, dark smile he didn’t really show the world. The one I was just getting to know. “I know… I am, too. She was killed, and it was like all the light went out of my life, for a long time. But we had something… important. As though, when I was with her, all the planets were aligned. Everything was exactly as it should be.”

  “It’s not like that with you and me,” I said quietly. He shook his head.

  “I didn’t realize, when we first met,” he said. “I should have—the two of you denied it enough. I should have understood then.”

  “Understood what?”

  He smiled. Rolled his eyes. “That your planets were already aligned.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but one look from him stopped me. What was the point arguing something I didn’t even believe anymore?

  “You saved my life this year,” I said instead. I looked at my hand again, studying that angry white line. I wiped my eyes, which continued to leak copiously. “I mean—beyond the thing where you actually found Diggs and me and dragged us out of the woods last summer. I’ve really…” I stopped and wiped my eyes again. I was dangerously close to getting maudlin. “Well, hell.” I did a little deep breathing since words were obviously failing me, and eventually gave up trying for grace and eloquence. Clearly they were beyond me. “You know, I think Blaze has a thing for you.”

  I don’t know what I expected him to do with that revelation, but it wasn’t laugh at me. That’s exactly what he did, though. “You mean Allie?” he asked.

  “Yeah, Allie,” I said, indignant. “That’s so hard to believe? I haven’t seen a ring on her finger.”

  “That’s because she’s single,” he said. “I’m not really her type, though.”

  “She doesn’t like tall, gorgeous, sensitive guys? You sure seem like her type when you two are in your little huddles together.”

  He brushed the tears from my eyes and shook his head at me, as though I were the most hopeless idiot on the planet. “I just mean, you’re more Allie’s type than I am,” he clarified.

  “Oh.” I took a very long, very deep breath, then let it out very slowly. I sat back and looked at him. “So… this is it, huh?”

  “I think so. You don’t?”

  I thought of Diggs again—hopeless Diggs, with his temper and his past and his passion and his ability to push every friggin’ button I had. Then, I looked at Juarez: stable, sensitive, heroic. And gorgeous. I was an idiot.

  I shook my head. “No, you’re right.”

  He stood, leaned in, and kissed me on the cheek. Then, he pulled me to my feet. “We should go see if there have been any developments. It could be a good lead you’ve given us—Jenny Burkett and the California connection. We could be closing in on something.”

  “Do you mind if I go back to the hotel for awhile, actually?”

  “Now?”

  “I want to look through Diggs’ room again. Check on the dogs. Get a little breathing room. Just for a little while.”

  “Yeah, of course,” he agreed. “I’ll just let Allie know and we can go.”

  “No,” I said quickly. “Stay here. If you feel like I need an escort, get someone else—you’re too valuable to be playing bodyguard right now.”

  He looked at me. “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  He hesitated, his eyes dark with sympathy. “We’ll find him, Erin,” he said. It was the first time he’d said it since this whole thing began. I looked at the clock: 10:35. An hour and twenty-five minutes.

  “Yeah,” I said, with a slightly embittered laugh. “Because things always work out that well.”

  “Not always,” he agreed. “But sometimes, they do.”

  01:05:42

  Agent Keith took me back to the hotel while Juarez retreated to the war room with Blaze and the others. When I got to our room, I grabbed Einstein and Grace and then lingered for just a second, staring at the rumpled sheets. Jack’s clothes hung neatly in the closet. There wasn’t time to cry about it, but Diggs was wrong if he thought Jack Juarez was just an easy way for me to deal with life without him. It had definitely run deeper than that.

  With that uncomfortable realization behind me, I took Stein and Grace up to Diggs’ room to enact the only plan I’d been able to come up with thus far.

  The glass from Diggs’ broken mirror had been cleaned up, but otherwise his room was in the same condition it had been when I’d left: overturned bureau, dirty clothes, blood on the carpet… and no Diggs. I went in with Einstein and Grace, closed the door behind me, and went straight for the window. I already knew what I was there for—I’d known the moment Blaze had said a business called J. Enterprises owned that bar in the Kentucky woods.

  J. just happened to be the initial my father had gone by as a kid, years and years ago. It also happened to be the initial carved into the chest of more than a dozen girls brutally hunted and murdered in northern Maine over the past forty years.

  It was probably just coincidence that now a shell corporation with that very initial was tied to a rash of kidnappings, murders, and a potential mass murder-slash-suicide with the potential to rock the nation.

  Probably. But, Mitch Cameron was here when Diggs and I flew into Kentucky. He claimed it was to check up on me, but what if he had other business in the state? I thought of his words just before he shot Max Richards point blank last summer: You’ve become a liability, Max. We warned you about this when you left the fold…

  I had no idea what “fold” he was talking about. And maybe I was just reeling with fatigue and hunger and the sting of just being dumped for a guy who would probably end up dead before the night was out, but this seemed like a lead to pursue. If my father and J. and Mitch Cameron and the Payson Church were somehow tied into J. Enterprises and the clusterfuck surrounding Jesup Barnel, I planned on getting to the bottom of that connection.

  I took a roll of masking tape from my bag and went to the picture window along the far wall of the room. I looked at Einstein, now up on Diggs’ bed beside Grace.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” I said. I imagined Diggs’ reaction to all this. He’d never let me hear the end of it. I didn’t have a bat signal, though, and I was out of good ideas.

  I tore off three pieces of masking tape and taped them into the shape of an awkward, block J on the inside of the window. Then, I took the MagLite I’d taken from Juarez’s room and trained it on the tape, so anyone outside would be sure to see. If it worked for Scully, why shouldn’t it work for me?

  Grace hopped off the bed and trotted over to me, tail wagging slowly.

  “Don’t start,” I said. “If you’d told me when this whole thing started that your owner was the one behind it, we might not be in this mess.”

  Grace whined mournfully, which I took to mean she was sorry for dropping the ball. Or else she was hungry. Either way, I scratched her behind the ears and went to the bed
with her.

  “Come on. We give this ten minutes… then I’ll have to come up with something else.”

  I had no idea what that something might be, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

  I leaned back on Diggs’ bed and picked up his file on Mitch Cameron. So evolve—don’t get a friggin’ lobotomy, he’d said earlier that day. I thought yet again of all the people who’d died so far in this quest to find the truth about my father. Diggs was right: I hadn’t pulled the trigger. Still, he was crazy if he thought I could consider myself completely blameless in all the bloodshed of the past year.

  Now, he might very well join their ranks.

  And I had no idea why.

  I opened the file and began reading.

  It didn’t tell me much, really: Mitch Cameron had been Special Forces until 1975, when—according to a very official-looking death certificate—he was killed just before the fall of Saigon. From what I could gather from the file, Diggs had worked with a friend of his to do a composite sketch based on his memory of Cameron the night we’d both nearly died last summer. From there, they must have done some kind of reverse-aging process, because the final result was a computer-generated printout eerily similar to the photo in a newspaper article on Cameron’s death in ’75.

  Cameron was born in Lynn, Indiana, in 1950. Diggs had a map he’d marked of the town. Just as he’d said earlier, my father, Max Richards, and Mitch Cameron lived on the same block together.

  I scratched Einstein’s head. He sighed and rested his paw on my thigh while Grace kept a polite distance from us, her head on her paws and her eyes half-closed.

  To pass the time once I was finished with the file, I amused myself by going through Diggs’ stuff. Which was wrong. And he would hate me for it. And yet… I didn’t care anymore. The way I figured it, if we actually found him at this stage of the game, he probably wouldn’t waste his breath bitching about me poking around a little. It could be faulty logic, but I chose to run with it.

  In the worn old duffel beside his bed, I found a flip portfolio of photos I hadn’t seen before. A lot were shots from his travels over the years: Tokyo, Yemen, Fallujah, Capetown, Bangkok, Sydney… It’s not like I’ve never left the country before, but I might as well be a shut-in when you compare my passport with his. After the travel pics, there was a shot that I’d seen framed in his father’s office—the only one he had of Diggs as a kid. In it, Diggs was probably eight or nine. He stood beside an awkward-looking, pudgy boy with the same ash-blond hair and the same Diggins grin. Diggs’ arm was draped over the boy’s shoulder. His brother, Josh.

  There were half a dozen shots of me over the years, from fifteen on up. One was from the only summer we actually dated… or whatever it was we did that summer. I was nineteen. We were on the lam at the time, running from a couple of psychotic drug dealers Diggs was doing a story on. I was in bed in the picture, a sheet pulled up to my chest, while the sun poured in the window of our seedy hotel hideaway. He’d taken it the morning after our first night together. Biblically speaking, I mean. We’d spent plenty of nights together non-biblically before that. And after.

  He told me that night that it would change everything. I don’t want to just sweep this under the rug—I can’t do that with you. I won’t.

  He was right: nothing was quite the same for us after that. I’d never actually been with anyone before, biblically speaking. And you know how everyone always says the first time is the worst, and if women gauged sex by that fumbling first encounter they would probably never knock boots with anyone again?

  Their first time definitely wasn’t with Diggs.

  Of course, it wasn’t just the sex—it was the laughter and the moonlight, the urgency and the feel of his arms around me and the way he whispered my name, his forehead tipped to mine, the first time he pressed past that final barrier between us. People may have been trying to kill us just outside that sleazy hotel room, but I’d never felt safer in my life than I did in his arms. That night, my universe was knocked sideways. The man who’d been my best friend, my mentor, my confidante…

  It sounds corny as hell, but I can’t really help that. That night, Diggs became the love of my life.

  And then, of course, Diggs and me being the stubborn jackasses that we are, spent the next thirteen years doing everything conceivable to push each other away.

  I flipped past the picture and looked at my watch. Time was moving way too fast.

  After the shots of me and every third-world country on the planet, there were a slew of photos of Wyatt and his family: baby pictures and candids and that prom shot of Rick and Danny that I’d noticed in the Durhams’ parlor when we first got to Justice. I flipped through quickly, but then turned back when something caught my eye.

  Before I could fix on exactly what that something was, both dogs catapulted themselves off the bed in a fit of frenzied barking so sudden I nearly jumped out of my skin and into next Tuesday.

  There was a knock on the door.

  I made both dogs lie back down, then went to the door and pressed my ear to the wood. The peephole might have come in handy, but they’re not that useful during power outages. Einstein growled from his spot on the bed.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “I’m assuming that sign is for me,” Mitch Cameron said. “Though I suppose I could be wrong.”

  I opened the door.

  He was drenched, wearing a blue LL Bean raincoat that left pools of water on the floor. He looked around uneasily before he came in the room. There was a black leather briefcase in his left hand. Einstein was on his feet now, the fur on the back of his neck on end. His growl deepened. Grace stayed where she was, whining anxiously.

  “Have you started a kennel?” Cameron asked. He kept his eyes on the dogs uneasily, his hand creeping toward what I suspected was a gun at his side.

  “They’re all right,” I said. “As long as you don’t come after me, they’ll leave you alone.” At least I hoped they would.

  He nodded toward the window. “You need to take that tape off there. And move the damned light.”

  I didn’t argue. Once the tape was gone, I turned back to him. He was still standing in the doorway, hand at his side. Grace had laid back down on the bed, but Einstein was standing next to me, watching Cameron’s every move.

  “Diggs is missing,” I said. “I didn’t know what else to do. Since one of your favorite pastimes seems to be spying on us, I thought maybe you’d seen something. That you could tell me where he is.” I decided to leave out the part where I suspected he might be in on it, at least for now.

  “I’m not your partner,” Cameron said coolly. “We aren’t in this together.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” I asked, my voice rising. “You think I want to be playing out little X-Files fantasies with you when my—” I stopped, willing myself to calm down. “I told you: I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “What makes you think I would help you?” he asked, still cool. “Your friend hasn’t been sticking to our agreement as well as you have. It would be easier if he was simply out of the picture.”

  “I know that, Mr. Cameron.”

  I watched his face. He didn’t look especially surprised at my use of his name. The smile that he offered chilled me to the bone. I took out the file Diggs had put together and handed it to him.

  “You can take that. I won’t let him go near any of it again. He’ll drop it.”

  “Because you say so?”

  “Yes,” I said simply.

  He didn’t question that. Instead, he took the file without looking at it, opened his briefcase, and slid it inside. He snapped the briefcase closed again, straightened, and we stood there for a half-second, staring each other down. Einstein sat at my feet, his body warm against my calf. The candles flickered and the clock ticked and Diggs’ life hung in the balance.

  “When we talked to you that first night, you said you didn’t have anything to do with Jesup Barnel or anything that’s happening in Ju
stice right now.”

  His eyes never wavered from mine. “I didn’t say that, actually,” he said. “I told you I was more interested in you and your friend—which was true, at the time.”

  “But it’s you and… whoever it is you represent, who are pulling the strings on this whole thing. Isn’t it?”

  He looked away, a flash of annoyance crossing his face. It was the first real reaction I’d seen from him, and it made him seem unexpectedly human.

  “I’ve told you how many times now to leave this alone?” he asked.

  “I was leaving it alone—you know that. We came here because someone killed Diggs’ friend. That’s it. Neither one of us had a clue that you had anything to do with this. You have to believe that.”

  He scratched his head. There were circles under his eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. “I do believe that, actually,” he said. “We have many interests at the moment—a number of projects around the globe. It seems to be one of those tragic tricks of fate that your friend Wyatt got caught in the mix on this one.”

  “So, you know what they have planned for midnight.”

  He nodded infinitesimally.

  “And you know where they are.” Another nod. A surge of anger burned through me. “You have to tell me how to find Diggs.”

  “Why?” he countered. “Why do I have to tell you anything?”

  I took a step toward him, my voice rising. “Because none of this would have happened if not for your people—whoever the hell they are. He’s out there somewhere, and you know where. You saved us last summer. Since then, I’ve spent every second trying to make sure I never have to see you again. All I can see when I look at him now is that friggin’ gun pointed at his head.”

  “Because I’m the enemy, Erin.” His voice rose, his eyes suddenly dark. “I am not your guardian angel. Don’t make the mistake of thinking otherwise. I am your worst nightmare—and they will have me prove it, at the first opportunity.”

  “I don’t care!” I shouted. “I don’t care what they’ll do to me. I don’t care who they are, I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what they have to do with my father or who burned down the Payson Church or why they’re feeding Barnel’s insanity by helping him with this whole Apocalyptic nightmare. All I care about is finding Diggs. I don’t give a rat’s ass about the rest of it—I’ve already proven that once.”