Cast the First Stone

by David James Warren

  “Maybe I’ll just have a salad.”

  “We’ll see.” He was wearing the smirk again.

  She considered him, feeling a weird tug to say yes. As if it was already a foregone conclusion that she’d not only have dinner with this man, but like he said, they’d become friends.

  Still, they had a job to do. “We have about an hour before this is ready to run through the scanning mask…”

  “Trust me, we’re coming back, Eve. He’s not getting away with this…not on my watch.”

  A sudden darkness shifted into his eyes, almost a controlled rage and it spiraled down inside her, took hold.

  She couldn’t shake the bone deep idea that Rembrandt Stone was oh, so much more than the cover of his book, that he meant his words, kept promises, and would track down the perpetrator of this terrible act.

  “Okay, Inspector,” she said. And as they left, as they found Burke, waiting for them in the lobby, she made one promise to herself.

  She would not let herself fall for Rembrandt Stone.

  Chapter 9

  I am cheating.

  And I don’t care.

  I’m sitting in the original, not-overhauled location of one of our—Eve and my—favorite haunts. We only found the pub a few years ago, after the remodel, so seeing the vintage brick walls, the arches behind the mirrored bar, the scuffed wooden floors, and the hanging lantern lights has me in a nostalgic mood.

  Zepplin plays through the 90s-sized speakers in the four corners of the pub and I tap my fingers on the wooden table watching Eve as she tears apart her pretzel, one bite at a time, eying me with a smile.

  I grin. “I know, right?”

  I order a lager—an early version of what will later be award-winning, but is still today, monumental. I probably shouldn’t be drinking on the job, but this is a dream, right?

  Besides, Burke has always been the stickler, and nurses a Diet Coke to go with his bratwurst—my suggestion by the way because I know how he’s going to become an addict.

  Eve picks up a napkin, wipes her mouth. “Okay, true confession. I read your book.”

  I don’t know why this old information warms me to my core, but something about her admission makes me want to be the guy she will someday believe in.

  “And?”

  “My dad hated it, although I don’t think he even read it. I’ve never seen a copy at the house.”

  I’m not surprised by this, but this is fresh news, actually. Remember, I never got to know Danny Mulligan, but I would have liked to. He had a reputation as a good cop, the kind of guy you wanted backing you up. I would’ve liked him to like the book. And, me. “Why does he hate it?”

  “He says you gave away secrets, the kind of things only cops know. That you can’t be trusted.” She’s sizing me up, testing me.

  I’ve always liked that about Eve—she’s a straight shooter, doesn’t mince words. It’s also the reason why I never let her do the talking when we happened to question witnesses together. It’s good to play a few games, and she hates them.

  I frown at her words. “Your dad is wrong. If he’d read my book, he’d know I didn’t betray anybody. It was my story to tell. And I was careful. I didn’t give away any secrets. You can trust me, Eve.” I meet her eyes now, because I really need her to believe this.

  She nods, as if taking in my words. “So, why? Whatever possessed you to write a book?”

  I feel a sort of freedom in my answer, one that comes with impunity. It’s not like I’m going to wake up tomorrow with a hangover, regretting the previous night.

  In other words, it’s my dream, so I’ll do what I want.

  I take a gulp of my beer, wipe the foam from my mouth. “I started it as a journal. Just my thoughts, my daily activities. A place to sort it all out, you know?”

  “Sort what out? Life?”

  I lift a shoulder. “Why, maybe. The reasons people do what they do. Maybe I was looking for insight.” I lean forward. “Or to learn from my mistakes.”

  “You had an extraordinary amount of collars for a rookie detective.” Her pretty eyes are on me and Burke raises an eyebrow at me, even as he’s sopping up his fries with ketchup.

  “I got lucky. And smarter, perhaps.”

  Burke chuckles. “No, let’s just stay with lucky.”

  “Instincts, Burke. That’s what it’s called.” I reach over and snag a fry.

  “It’s a good book,” Eve says finally. “Unguarded.”

  I’m not sure what to do with that. Reviewers called it “gritty, honest, and a raw portrayal of the darker side of crime.” I stay silent.

  She is back to tearing her pretzel. “That story of the little girl who went missing.”

  Yeah, I remember, because for a long time I couldn’t shake the echo of our own dark years after Mickey vanished. Age four, she went missing from Minnehaha Park while on a family picnic. We searched for days, with dogs and local volunteers. She was found not at the park but ninety minutes north, near a wilderness park in Little Falls. She’d been taken by a coworker of the mother’s.

  I nod. “It was a passing comment from the father, during the initial interview that caught my attention. Something about his wife talking to a friend. We tracked down the friend, put a name to him and linked him to a truck spotted at the crime scene.”

  “And arrested him back at his job,” Eve says, her gaze holding mine.

  Okay, despite the dream, my throat is thick because I wrote about it—not just the case, but the anger that gnawed in my gut for weeks afterward. The nights I roamed the house, or haunted the gym. Maybe those were the secrets Mulligan hated revealed.

  I did leave a few things out, however, and I look away. There’s a reason a guy like me can’t believe in happy endings.

  All we can hope for are endings we might, somehow, survive.

  “I remember that case,” Burke says, reaching for a napkin. “Rem didn’t sleep for three days while we hunted for her.”

  I lift a shoulder, but really, how could I? Not with Mickey a ghost in my head. “I promised the family answers.”

  “You promise everyone answers,” Burke says, crumpling the napkin and tossing it into the middle of the table. “Someday you’re going to make promises you can’t keep.”

  He has no idea. I sigh. “Listen, answers are all they have left. Their lives are permanently shattered and there’s no coming back. If I give them answers, then maybe they can stop hoping and start figuring out how to live with the wreckage of their lives.”

  I hear my own jaded history in my words, the fact my parents spent the better part of their lives holding onto a barren hope. I’m not sure why I let this spill out, maybe remnants of the frustration of my waking life, the fact that I still haven’t mended from my own jagged pieces. Maybe you never do, really. Maybe, when tragedy hits, all you have left is the broken shards of happiness.

  My sudden morose comment has pushed silence between us, stolen the magic from the dream.

  As is her nature, Eve rescues me. “That’s why I became a CSI. Answers.” She offers me a smile. “We’ll find the bomber, Rem.”

  I nod, the image of Melinda Jorgenson and her son suddenly in my head.

  And, she called me Rem. Nice. We’re making progress.

  She grabs a napkin and wipes off her fingers. “I think I’ll get my father your book for Christmas. Maybe you could sign it for me.” She grins, and something about it strikes me as different, odd. Whole, unreserved.

  It makes me, ache, suddenly, to see it. Because I really miss that smile, the one without the fractures.

  If I could stop her father and brother’s murders, that would also be on my list of items to revisit. Another dream for another day, perhaps.

  “No problem,” I say.

  Her cell phone rings and she pulls out an ancient, but probably fairly new, Nokia,
presses it on. “This is Eve.”

  By her wince, the way her fingers go to her nose, pinching the bridge, I immediately want to leap in and fix whatever the problem is.

  Habits.

  “Okay, fine Sams. Just get the water on as soon as you can…”

  Samson, her younger brother. He’s a big real estate mogul now, but he started out working with his hands. He comes over every now and again and gives me grief about my meager remodeling skills, which frankly aren’t that terrible.

  I remember the wretched job he did on her kitchen in that tiny bungalow. Those terrible ice-blue tiles—wait, she must be mid-remodel right now. And, if I’m reading the conversation clues right, without plumbing.

  I’m barely stopping myself from offering her the use of my place, because I really do know better, but see, I also know…well, my wife. And how she loves her nightly baths. And more than that, seeing her young, and pretty and without the grief and worry and years and years of frustration that I’m about to put her through…

  I’d like to skip that part, please. Get right to the moment I come to my senses and propose. But that’s a good decade from now, so…

  Except, this is a dream, right? I can do what I want.

  “Yeah, I was there. It was bad.” Her conversation has switched direction, and she glances at me. She’s talking about the bombing. “I can’t discuss the case, Sams—fine. No, I don’t think it was political. Why would it be? It was a coffee shop.”

  She’s frowning.

  Samson, for all his brawn, started out with a philosophy degree, and has spent most of his life exploring the planet, when he isn’t installing reclaimed wood in new suburban kitchens. Two years ago, he hiked Machu Picchu, and before that spent a summer in the Borneo rainforest working on a clean water project. Eve has always thought it’s his way of living Asher’s dreams.

  But his question has my ears perking up. We never nailed down a motive for the bombings. I file it away however when she hangs up, returning to my previous thought.

  “You’re out of water?”

  She nods, then shakes her head. “I bought this cute bungalow off—

  Webster Ave South.

  I nearly say it, but something inside me cuts me off. A weird gut feeling I can’t put a name to.

  “Webster and Lake. It was built in 1941, so the plumbing is archaic. I don’t know why I agreed to a full-on remodel, but—”

  “You like a challenge,” I say quietly, smiling.

  She meets my eyes, something playful in them that I like.

  Burke is rolling his eyes. He’s finished with his brat and I’m guessing the photos have processed by now, so I signal to the waiter for the check.

  We’re back in the photo lab thirty minutes later and Eve lays out the pictures on a massive work table. “Which ones do you want enlarged?”

  I lean over her, aware that she smells good for a woman without a shower, and point to the twenty or so of the crowd.

  Meanwhile, I’ve asked Burke to get that list of coffee shops together because I’ve been wracking my brain for hours and I still can’t pull up the location of the second bombing.

  While my subconscious tracks it down inside my dream, I’ll drive around, maybe help the memory surface. Once I find it, I’ll just grab a table inside, study the pictures and wait for the bomber to show up.

  The hardest part will be convincing Burke that I haven’t lost my mind. I’ve toyed with the idea of simply telling him that we’re in my dream, but I’m not sure that’d make him any more cooperative.

  So, I’m back to my gut, my instincts, and hoping that’s enough for my partner of three years.

  Eve slides the negatives into an envelope and hands them to an assistant, with the request. “Can I bum a ride back to the warehouse with you? Silas has identified some of the bomb fragments.”

  I have to pick up my wheels anyway, so I nod.

  We drop her off at the warehouse, and with everything inside me, I want to suggest a get-together, later, at my place, something involving my shower.

  But I’ll wait until I wake up. Until it’s real, despite the magic of this dream that allows me to smell the scent of her in Burke’s car when I climb back in.

  In this time, this dream, she’s not mine yet, and somehow that thought puts a hand to my heart. Me, trying to be the guy I should have been.

  Besides, I have more important intentions.

  Dream or not, I have twelve hours before another bomb hits my city. And I plan on being there to stop it.

  Chapter 10

  "Stone really thinks there’s going to be another bombing?” Silas stood at one of the long tables in the makeshift lab room, sorting bomb debris through a screen. A spotlight shone down on the fragments, the rest of the room under low light to accentuate the features. In one screen, he’d collected the shards of what looked like aluminum from the coffee thermos that held the bomb. In the second, he’d gathered the warped steel edges of a water pipe, the container that housed the low-level explosive materials, which were currently under the gas chromatograph to trace the chemical composition.

  “Mmmhmm,” Eve said, picking up a fragment of the pipe. Jagged edges, coated with dark residue. She took a swab of it. “He says it’s a gut feeling.”

  Silas looked up at her, raised an eyebrow.

  “I know,” Eve said. “But he’s…well, not what I expected. He’s…earnest. And not the dark and mysterious renegade my father—and everyone else—makes him out to be. Part of me wants to believe him.”

  “I don’t want to know what that part is,” Silas said, and gave her a gimlet look. “Just watch yourself. I’ve heard stories.”

  She dropped the swab into a container and labeled it for processing. “What kind of stories?”

  “Just that Rembrandt Stone is not above breaking a few rules to get answers.”

  If I give them answers, then maybe they can stop hoping and start figuring out how to live with the wreckage of their lives.

  Rem’s words, spoken as he stared into the dark amber of his beer, clung to her. A desperation, perhaps, in his tone that kneaded her own scar tissue. “Maybe sometimes you need to break a few—”

  “No, Eve.” Silas looked up. “That’s the difference between criminal investigation and what we do. They’re all about hunches and interrogations and piecing what-ifs together. We look at the facts, the evidence and find the truth. It’s science, not instincts.”

  Silas held her gaze, and she couldn’t escape the sense that it had irked him, her going out for lunch with Rembrandt. And Burke.

  “Well, if I were to guess, given the blast wave pattern and the rate of deflagration, I think we’re going to find a mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil in this residue.”

  “And maybe antimony.” He held up what looked like a burned Dcell battery. “I think we have the igniter.” He set the battery into the basket.

  “It’s not a unique chemical signature, given the pattern of the recent Oklahoma and Centennial Olympic Park bombings.”

  “He’s a copycat at best because he used a digital alarm clock timer as the detonator.” He picked up a burned mass of plastic, the wires charred.

  “Which gave the bomber a twenty-four-hour window, once he set the time and attached the leads,” she said, making a mental note to tell Rembrandt.

  “What bombers fail to understand is that bombs do not destroy themselves in the blast. Up to ninety-five percent of the casing survives the explosion,” Silas picked up a six-inch piece of mangled pipe. “What we have here is a simple pipe bomb, packed with ANFO, with a clock timer, a model rocket igniter, and activated by a battery.”

  Which killed seven people, including a toddler. The pretzel from the pub had turned to sludge in her stomach. She pulled off her gloves and tossed them into a nearby hazardous waste canister. “We won’t know for sure if your
guess is correct until we get the results of the chromatograph test.”

  Silas followed her out of the lab room into the main area where the techs were still cataloging the debris. Dim light hovered over the expanse, the cavernous room raising gooseflesh. The body of evidence felt a little like looking for the right sprig of hay in a field of mowed grass. Still, the more evidence they collected, the more information they could develop in the lab. Standing at the crime scene, amidst broken and blown-out windows, shattered furniture, the rubble of coffee machines, and even personal effects, she’d had to make some split decisions. Think like a bomber. How would I build a bomb?

  The device would have to be undetected—hidden, perhaps under a table, in a bag, or even…and that led her to the coffee thermoses and a conversation with the arson examiner, who concurred with her theory. No, her guess.

  Okay, fine, she’d call it a hunch. Still, Silas was right. Rules and order kept her from making crazy assumptions and veering away from the truth.

  But just being around Rembrandt had made her already break some fundamentals. Like taking three hours to develop film of a crowd, in hopes of finding an unknown face at a future crime scene…yeah, he sounded crazy, and she’d drunk the Kool-Aid.

  Eve walked from table to table, where the evidence technicians had not only bagged and labeled everything. Shoes, a backpack, and even the charred remnants of a coffee bean burlap sack, sketching out each item’s found location on a grid of the scene.

  She read the label on the burlap. Green Earth coffee, out of Brazil. On the table next to it lay a coffee cup, bagged, slightly crushed.

  “Where was this found?” Item number forty-four—she found its number on the map. Silas came up to look over her shoulder.

  “It looks like it was picked up on the sidewalk across the street. Maybe from a patron who’d just ordered their coffee and was headed to the bus stop?”

  “It was on the side street, away from the shop. The bus stop is further up the street, on the opposite side.”