Gone Dark (A Grale Thriller Book 2)

by Kirk Russell

  “Don’t know, but I’ve heard it’s hard to prove.” He looked over and asked, “Are you for real?”

  He was smiling. That was the cruel streak in him. It showed in the way he smiled at certain things. She remembered waking up last Sunday morning lying on the rug near the TV next to Nick’s friend Joel wearing only a T-shirt. She kind of knew what he’d say now, but it would be another Nick lie. Yesterday, she’d remembered Joel undressing her with Nick standing there making a video.

  “Here’s what went down,” Nick said. “Deal with this because basically it’s why we’re breaking up tonight. Last Sunday morning early, I woke up and you weren’t in bed. You were spooned up against Joel, bare-assed, wearing only a T-shirt, out on the rug by the couch. That’s no bullshit. Ask him.”

  “How about if the police ask him?”

  “When I saw you lying there with Joel Sunday, I didn’t know how to deal with it, so I took a walk. It’s been eating my gut out all week. We’re over.”

  “Nice, Nick, and you sound so real. Have I ever told you you’re the best at lying? You’re better than anyone I’ve ever known.”

  “Last Saturday night I would say you were pretty close to pass-out drunk.”

  “Another lie.”

  “Ask Joel.”

  “I’ll bet you really think you’re going to get away with it, but I’m telling you right now you’re not.”

  Nick was twenty-seven and had lived in different places in the world. He saw her life as unsophisticated. She’d always lived in Las Vegas, and for him she was just someone to have fun with. That’s all I ever was, she thought. It hit her that her falling in love with Nick was a joke to his friends.

  He checked the rearview mirror again, then said, “Let’s just say we broke up because it was time. We had fun for six months and it’s over.”

  “Whatever drug you gave me, Nick, you didn’t use enough. You screwed up.”

  He shook his head and didn’t say anything for ten minutes or so. He knew, she thought. He knew it would be almost impossible to prove, her word against theirs with no evidence. She’d waited too long already, but she hadn’t remembered anything until late Wednesday night. Another thought: He gave me to Joel because he was done with me.

  “I remembered both of you undressing me.”

  “Didn’t happen,” he said.

  What had been so cool-looking about Nick wasn’t anymore. He’d grown a raggedy scraggle of beard, and his little bun was falling to the side of the back of his head. He wore the same stinking blue sweater all the time. He liked to lecture people about what was really happening in politics and America. He talked like he somehow knew more than everyone.

  “You were never who I thought you were,” Julia said. “You’re a paranoid freak who always thinks he’s being chased. What you did to me is disgusting. When the cops come for you, are you going to try to pin it on Joel?”

  “The cops that come for me better be kick-ass good shots.”

  “Oh, you’re going to shoot cops now.”

  That made her think about his box of medals again.

  “The guy I met last fall was totally made up,” she said.

  “Nope, not made up. That guy just thought you were more open and smarter than you are. You were invited into a community and you pretended not to understand. Mommy and daddy and brother got killed. It’s been years but you can’t deal with it. You’re frozen in time, a permanent teenager.”

  Years? Yeah, true that. It was April, so July Fourth would be three years, but Nick had no clue. He’d told her he hated his family, so even though she lost hers, she was lucky because she knew what it was to care. He talked big about how strong he was, but how hard is it to be strong if you don’t feel anything? Not too hard, she thought.

  “If I were you I’d forget about your little made-up drug-in-your-drink story. Breaking up with you, I should have done it a long time ago. You’ve got a killer body but you’re just . . . I don’t know, not there or not enough there, and your little pacifist thing is lame and kind of embarrassing to be around when you explain it to people who get the world.”

  “That’s so you, Nick. Tear down anyone who calls you on your bullshit. You’ll trash me to everyone, because that’s how you roll.”

  Up ahead, Las Vegas changed. It got duller and looked like a pale smudge of brown light.

  “Power is out,” Nick said. “Cool.”

  He said “cool” in a totally different voice, like he’d just switched to some different person. He wasn’t worried at all about what he did to me, she thought, and now had something more fun to talk about.

  Nick and his friends and the other people she hung with were fine with the power grid getting trashed. They all said the same thing: the old world is dying. Like some Game of Thrones-y type thing, like they weren’t going to need electricity anymore. She understood the vibe when it was about smaller, local, off the grid, and with battery storage, and the person talking about it knew something about renewables. Nick really didn’t. Nick talked political theories and threw complicated phrases around to make up for not having any ideas of his own.

  If someone agreed with him, he would say, “Exactly, you totally get it,” then put his joint down and high-five the guy. If it was a girl and she was cute, he’d flirt.

  They bounced hard in a pothole, and she flashed on Nick walking toward her and how she was barely able to breathe and her face flushed in the first weeks last September after she’d met him.

  He’d walked into the ice-cream store and said, “Sam Clark, who’s someone I trust completely, said there’s this unbelievable woman you’ve got to meet. Are you Julia Kern?”

  Julia remembered being instantly attracted to him and thinking if Sam sent him he’s got to be completely real. That felt very distant now. So much had happened in the last ten days. What was the date-rape drug? Ketamine? Some name like that. Who could she even talk to about this? Maybe Jo. Jo was a doctor.

  The lights in Las Vegas came back on. The car Nick thought was chasing them had passed the truck, but everyone was passing the truck. The guy still behind them was probably just some dude coming home.

  A wave of crazy sadness came over her and moved through her body. She’d been stupid and naïve.

  “Let’s talk,” Nick said as they reached the outskirts of Vegas. “I want to take back what I said about you and pacifism. It’s actually real cool even if it’s disconnected with what’s happening in the world. And breaking up sucks, right? But I think we both knew it was coming. You’re better off without me. I’m too selfish and caught up in changing things. I didn’t give you any date-rape drug or anything like that. I would never do that, so I’ll just forget that you said that. I hate to say this, babe, but you’ve got an alcohol problem that messes with your memory. I know we’re going to run into each other, so I want the split to be chill.”

  She was drinking too much, but nothing like he was saying, and definitely not last Saturday.

  “We’re done and you acted first,” he said. “I can be cool with that. One of us had to do something, right? I’ll get all your stuff together in my apartment and get it to you. The box in the back of your car you’re going to have to drop off for me. You down with that?”

  “You’re so screwed up, Nick.”

  “You don’t want to mess with me on this, Julia. There are a lot of ways you don’t want to mess with me. You really don’t.” He kept talking but wouldn’t look at her. “It never happened. You’ve got personal issues and need to see a—”

  He never finished the sentence. The inside of their car lit up as someone pulled out right behind them. Nick sped up and turned onto a street with houses. The car behind was going just as fast. They went around the next turn hard and knocked a mirror off a parked car with a loud bang as they skidded.

  Nick blew through a four-way stop heading toward an intersection where the light was already yellow. He sped up even though it would turn red. She screamed when a man ran into the crosswalk. It was w
ay too late to stop.

  3

  My cell rang. I told Jo, “It’s Julia.” I put her on speakerphone and heard background noise that sounded like police radio.

  “UG, we were in a car accident,” Julia said, and I heard agitation, fear, and worry. “We hit a guy. Not straight on but we broke his legs. An ambulance just got here. Two undercover cops were chasing him. Nick was driving because I had a couple of drinks at a party we were at. Nick ran away before the police arrived. I don’t know where he went.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Bruises.”

  “Where are you, Julia?”

  “North Fort Apache and I don’t know the cross street.” Her voice broke. “Hold on.”

  I heard her talking to a cop and overheard him give her the cross street.

  “We’re ten minutes from you,” I said. “See you very soon.”

  From a quarter mile away we saw police flashers. We parked and walked up, and two Las Vegas Metro officers intercepted us.

  Jo touched my back and said, “I’ll wait here for now but get me across. I want to make sure she’s not hurt.”

  I showed my FBI creds, and the younger of the two officers looked at those as I looked at my sister’s former car, a green four-door Subaru. Two tires were flat, and the driver’s side was raked where they’d sideswiped cars. Her mom’s car was a sanctuary for Julia, a tie to her life before, but at its age and with this amount of damage, the insurance company would likely total it.

  “Do you know the boyfriend, Nick Suthers, Agent Grale?” the younger officer asked.

  “I do.”

  I spotted Julia over near an unmarked police car. She’d lived with me since her parents—my sister, Melissa, and her husband, Jim—and her younger brother, Nate, were killed in a terrorist bombing here in Las Vegas almost three years ago. Julia’s bomb shrapnel wounds were still healing when we packed up the clothes and things she wanted from her bedroom, then moved her to my house.

  Much has been written about the stages of grief and moving forward, but I like Jo’s view as a physician. It rings truest to me. Jo says there is no normal with grief. It’s different for everyone. In Julia’s last two years in high school, she withdrew and her grades fell. I got her counseling. I tried different things yet felt powerless.

  “We found Nick Suthers’ wallet on the street with four driver’s licenses inside. Same photo but different names, and all kinds of credit cards in various names,” the officer said. “Detective Allred has the wallet.”

  “You’re saying multiple false IDs?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I looked for Allred and saw him as he spotted me. He lifted a long arm to acknowledge.

  “Who’s the young man they hit?” I asked.

  “He pushes pills for a gang here. We know him.”

  The older veteran officer who’d been quiet interrupted and asked, “Are you bomb tech Grale?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s your niece who was the only survivor of the Alagara bombing?”

  “Yes. Julia Kern.”

  “To most everyone in the department, everything you did then was right.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Better get her straightened out,” he said.

  In the months following the Alagara bombing, America kept track of the orphaned teenage survivor. This country has a big heart, and people wanted to know how she was. Media tracked her progress with headlines like “Alagara Survivor Returns to School,” “Julia Kern Heals; Stars at Soccer.”

  That changed in her senior year, when she was asked to speak to a local Rotary group on the topic of her choice. In her speech, “Violence and Us,” she argued that we like war and that if one doesn’t come to us we find a way to make one. She touted pacifism and labeled several of our invasions imperialism.

  The Rotarians are a thoughtful, kind-hearted body who can embrace a young person’s questioning, but the speech got picked up by other media, and you can pretty well guess what happened in current America. “Lone Survivor Anti-American.” Trolls arrived and set up camp. That’s not to say she didn’t hit back. This pacifist isn’t passive. She went at them head on.

  “Agent Grale, can I talk alone with you first?” Allred asked and then continued talking as we stepped away. “After the power came back on, the stoplight worked but cameras didn’t,” he said. “Witnesses say your daughter’s car was traveling at high speed and may have run a red.”

  “What do the undercover officers say?”

  “They’re not sure. They say their focus was on Mr. Henry Cataula hotfooting it away after trying to sell them fentanyl, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to determine whether the light was red when Mr. Suthers, if that is his real name, drove through it, but we’ll get a pretty good estimate on his speed.” He let a beat go by, then asked, “What can you tell me about the boyfriend?”

  I could tell him I didn’t particularly like Nick Suthers and that was a source of tension between Julia and me. I found Nick disingenuous and condescending. But Julia had fallen so hard for him that I continued to make an effort to like him.

  There were no boyfriends before Nick that I knew of. In her senior year Julia had visited churches and graveyards and intensified her study of pacifism. She met a Catholic priest in his late eighties and struck up a friendship with him. They talked philosophy. Whether the embracing of pacifism was the twisting force of grief, teenage idealism, or true inner belief that had surfaced I couldn’t tell you. I do know Julia still visits chat rooms where war and peace are topics.

  Coming on nineteen, she’s grown into a willowy, strong young woman with a presence. She no longer bows her head. She’s straight at you. She’s confident about her beliefs. Mine are wrong. Hers are right. When we disagree about politics, she takes it very seriously. It’s another thing that has strained our relationship, but that’ll change. I see aspects of my sister’s personality in Julia: a strong will, a need to live to her own code, a way of being, and a certainty and righteousness when angry. In some way, that’s prepared me. I have this feeling sometimes that Melissa is watching and laughing as Julia lectures me.

  “How is it that your niece is the girlfriend of a guy with four driver’s licenses with the same photo of himself and different names and credit cards to go with them?” Allred asked. “I guess I’m asking how can it be your niece is living with you but dating a dirtbag?”

  “He fooled me.”

  “He fooled you?”

  He repeated it as if saying, “That’s your answer?” Allred then nodded at a guy standing alone.

  “The fellow there with the untucked shirt and belly, who’s been drinking somewhere tonight so is questionably credible, says he saw another car that was either after them or with them. Could have been road rage. Type of car, any other detail, he doesn’t have it. Julia claims she and Nick broke up tonight just before the accident. Were you aware they were having trouble?”

  “No.”

  “Do you talk to her much? I’m asking because someone needs to explain to her that it’s in her interest to help us. If her boyfriend is a credit-card scam artist and she’s known it and doesn’t tell us, it makes it look like she’s part of it. But I don’t have to tell you that.”

  He sighed as if he didn’t want to be in this position.

  “Here’s what I have so far,” he said and ticked through a list using his left hand to count starting with his little finger. “She went to a party with her boyfriend but doesn’t know if he drank. Some unknown car for unknown reasons was chasing them. He’s got false identities falling out of his wallet, and she doesn’t know anything about them. He ran. She doesn’t know where. They coincidentally just happened to break up tonight.”

  He’d run out of fingers, so he dropped his hand and said, “I’ve got more, but you get my drift.”

  Allred was tall enough to look down at me, and I’m six foot one. His long face was somber. He wore size eighteen shoes and was known for them. Other than that, I kn
ew little about him. He got Jo across the tape then left us alongside his car with Julia, who bowed her head and wept silently. Allred, who was probably thinking about Julia’s bruises, had left a rear door open. Julia got in and Jo slid in alongside her. She didn’t care about the blood on Julia’s jeans or what it would do to her dress. She pressed close and held her as I walked back to Allred.

  “I’ll get into the fake IDs tonight,” Allred said, and then added, as if the two thoughts connected, “Julia claims she has never looked in her boyfriend’s wallet.”

  “Do you look through your wife’s wallet?”

  “Only if I’m missing money, so yes, and often. Julia gets to go home tonight but wants to start helping me no later than tomorrow morning. She doesn’t want to become an accomplice.”

  “You can’t begin to make that jump, Detective.”

  “Try me,” he said.

  4

  Julia, Jo, and I were still at the accident scene at 11:59. When my phone rang seven minutes later, I knew the bombs had detonated. The call wasn’t from Hofter, though. It came from Ted Mara, my supervisor on the Vegas field office domestic terrorism squad.

  Mara can move investigations like an air traffic controller, but when stressed, his voice tightens and speeds. That was there tonight.

  “The LA bombs detonated simultaneously. Damage is substantial,” Mara said. “There are fires that may spread, but LAPD is holding the fire department back until they’re sure there are no shooters. So far no reports of anyone killed, but the bombings were less than ten minutes ago. LA is in a rolling blackout. They were unable to reroute in time. LAX is down. Fly into Burbank or Ontario or drive. They want you there tonight. Give me the name again of the agent you work with in LA.”

  “Mark Hofter.”

  “Do you go through him, or do we need to send the LA office an electronic communication?”

  “I don’t think you need to do anything. It’s less than forty-eight hours before my TDY starts,” I said.

  “Report in here until we hit that mark.”