No Unturned Stone

by David James Warren

  6 am. Is that early? Burke and I had a standing 5 am date for a while, before we got old and moved it to post-work.

  I look back at Burke. “What’s the date?”

  He frowns.

  “July 2nd,” Eve says.

  Gretta Holmes. Waitress found dead in an alley outside a diner, killed early in the morning on July 2nd, 1997. One of my cold cases, although Booker had updated it, put it in the Jackson file.

  I’m not sure how it happened, but her case has brought me back in time. I hear Meggie’s voice. “I think it’s not a matter of fixing, but of creating a rewrite you can live with…”

  Maybe I don’t have to catch Ashley’s killer. I just need to reset, overwrite, get on the right timeline, whatever.

  I don’t know how it works, just that if I do this right, I get my family back.

  Which maybe means solving Gretta’s case, if I want to reboot my life.

  “We gotta go,” I say to Burke. According to my sketchy memory, Gretta died of a head injury. Not the MO of the Jackson killers, but maybe Booker knew something.

  “Go where?” Burke climbs out of the ring, and Shelby smiles at him and we so don’t have time for this.

  But what, exactly, am I going to say? I know there’s a murder going down, I feel it in my bones? “I need some coffee.”

  Burke looks at me. “Really?”

  It’s now I remember that our last big case was the coffee shop bombings, so maybe he’s a little skittish. I circle back around with, “I found this great breakfast place, but we have to get there before the specials sell out.”

  He’s still looking at me like I’ve lost my mind, so I climb out of the ring and head for the locker room.

  But not before I turn to Eve for another look. Wow, I’d forgotten how she could blow me away. Somehow, I manage a cool, “You look great, Eve. It’s nice to see you.”

  She offers a smile, as if surprised, and I wonder what the idiot twenty-eight year old me has been up to in my absence.

  ‘C’mon Burke!” He’s still flirting with Shelby. She’s not worth your time, I want to say, but maybe in this world she is, so I just grab him by the arm and yank him toward the locker room.

  We have lives to save.

  I’m yelling at him from the shower to hurry up and Burke’s annoyed and not just a little confused when he slides into my Camaro five minutes later.

  I’m in a suit again. Clearly, I need to write a note to my younger self to loosen up.

  Wow, sweet ride, how I’ve missed you. Right now, my Porsche is sitting in my father’s barn waiting for me to check the timing belt. She’s running with a hiccup, so I’m guessing the belt has jumped a tooth.

  But the Camaro will do. I punch it as we head down Hennepin Avenue to Lulu’s.

  1997. Not so long ago, but subtle changes have taken place. In my time, the football stadium is gone, replaced by the shiny metallic US Bank stadium of the Vikings. Now, the puffy white covered dome stands in the middle of the city.

  I take highway 55, get off at Lake Street and curse the lights that could be costing Gretta her life.

  Although, she might already be dead.

  We pull up to Lulu’s, a 1950’s diner on the corner of 41st and Lake. A tattoo parlor sits dark across the street, and next door, barks from the animal clinic suggest the dogs have heard something.

  Lulu’s sits alone in a weedy parking lot, a gleaming metallic building that conjures up Richie and the gang hanging out at Arnold’s diner. I get an image of the Fonz as I park the Camaro.

  She’s around here, somewhere, and if my memory is correct…

  “Did you hear something?” I say over the top of the car.

  Burke has gotten out, running a hand over his suit. He raises an eyebrow. “Like? My ears are still ringing.”

  Oh. I might have played Seger a little too loud, but frankly, nothing pumps the blood more than tracking down a killer to Old Time Rock and Roll.

  Or, the fact that I’m settling into a life—my life—like a pair of Levis.

  “I thought I heard…” I walk over toward the dumpsters, set at the edge of the lot in front of a wooded area of trash and debris.

  She’s here. I remember now, and—

  “Burke!” I’ve spotted her.

  She’s wearing yellow pants, tennis shoes, and a jean jacket and is sprawled face down, as if she’d been running, tackled and left to die. Her brown hair is in a puddle around her, soaked in blood.

  I crouch next to her and turn her over.

  A massive red and purple hematoma lifts from the side of her head, and a cut has opened, bleeding into her face. She’s not breathing. I wipe her mouth with my sleeve and start CPR.

  Burke is beside me, calling for 9-1-1.

  I’m still compressing, offer her two breaths, and back to the compressions. CPR has been updated since 1997, but I don’t remember the early training.

  “How did you see her?” Burke says, but I can’t answer.

  C’mon, Gretta!

  I check her pulse. Nothing.

  Sirens bruise the morning air and a few people clutter the parking lot, voyeurs to the tragedy in the weeds.

  I focus on Gretta. She’s still not breathing and I fear—know—the worst. But the fire department has arrived, and with them the rescue squad and a couple of EMTs take over as I back away.

  That’s when I see it. A twenty dollar bill in her grip. Victim number one? Well done, Booker.

  Gretta is young. Eighteen. The only daughter of a couple from the upscale neighborhood of Edina. I dread having to talk to them again—but this time, at least, when I tell them that we’ll solve the case, I’ll be able to keep that promise.

  I hope.

  Burke keeps the crowd away, but a woman pushes past him, her hands over her mouth.

  I remember her now. Teresa Birch. She wears a full sleeve of tats down her arms, dresses in fifties attire—this morning a hot pink dress—and wears her cherry red hair in victory rolls. Hard to forget. Especially when, in a time before, she offered to give me free breakfasts for life, wink, wink.

  I get up and walk away, watching the EMTs do their work. They can’t call it until they get her to the Hennepin County Medical Center, but I’ll bring in the CSI team and get them started. I know she hasn’t been here long.

  Someone saw something. In fact, her killer might be standing in the crowd. Which I face and stare down. A few businessmen, construction workers, a couple women.

  It starts here. Now.

  A Ford escort pulls up, and my body stills as Eve slides out. Shelby emerges from the other side, holding a radio.

  Eve walks over to the edge of the crowd, looks at the EMTs working on Gretta. Eve’s face is drawn, a frown tangling her expression. Then she meets my eyes, such a sadness in her expression it nearly steals my breath.

  It’s the same look she gave me last night.

  And with a jolt, I know.

  I’m not here for Gretta.

  I’m here to save Danny and Asher. Because in less than forty-eight hours, they die.

  7

  It wasn’t Julia. Of course it wasn’t, but every time Eve let her imagination snapshot Julia’s’s body, it looked like this.

  Broken, in the weeds, a glassy look to the heavens as if shocked.

  She blew out a breath, trying to shake away the grief. Focus. She was on the job after all, not looking at the fifteen-year-old body of her best friend.

  Her job was to see what other people missed. She had to detach. Think outside of her emotions. Eve stepped back and took another shot of the victim’s body with her Canon EOS3.

  “He’s freaking me out,” said Silas as he blotted blood from the edge of dumpster and dropped the swab into a vial. “He’s just standing there like a buzzard, watching us work.”

  “Who?”

  “Your buddy, Stone.”

  She glanced over her shoulder.

  Inspector Stone was watching them, standing at the edge of the crime scene, outside the
yellow taped lines, his arms folded over his chest, dressed in a pair of jeans, a pressed oxford and a suit jacket. He needed a shave. Or not.

  She’d wanted to go home and change. Thanks to Shelby, she still wore her track pants and a t-shirt, although she’d pulled her CSI vest from Silas’s car. Silas was dressed like she should be—in his uniform, a pair of jeans, white shirt, his CSI vest.

  “He was stabbed. That probably makes a guy a little pre-occupied with justice,” she said, not sure why she was defending him.

  She needed to get this stupid man off her brain.

  Not that she was making any marked progress. Even now she felt it, the little stir of attraction that would only lead to her noticing how he walked, breathed and shoot, wishing he’d look her way.

  Like he did today at the gym.

  Stupid Shelby. Of course they’d gone to the gym where Burke worked out. And at o-dark hundred hours, too. Sheesh, the woman was on the trail hard after Burke.

  “I can see the appeal,” Shelby had said as Rembrandt walked away, glistening with sweat, his dark hair disheveled, wearing a sleeveless shirt and a pair of boxing shorts, all hard-bodied and male. Eve fled to the locker room.

  Rembrandt and Burke had left by the time they emerged, but Shelby had Burke on her radar, and after hearing him call in the attack on her scanner, she practically dragged Eve off the elliptical by her hair.

  Okay, admittedly, Eve didn’t drop to the ground in protest, but still…

  Turning away from him, Eve zoomed in on the edge of the dumpster.

  The sky was high over the scene, glinting off the metallic diner and gilding the parking lot. An assembly of onlookers had multiplied as the morning drew out. Burke and Rem had interviewed most of the patrons from the diner, as well as any other onlookers while she waited for Silas to arrive in their CSI truck.

  “He’s pre-occupied with your backside,” Silas muttered, bagging some hairs found wedged into the edge of the dumpster.

  Oh, hardly. Because he hadn’t exactly gone out of his way to find her after he was released from the hospital a month ago.

  She felt like a fool, running to the hospital and sitting in his room like a groupie, or worse, a girlfriend, after he’d been stabbed. Sure, he’d been pale and broken, hooked up to oxygen, but when he’d opened his eyes and looked at her, he acted like he barely knew her.

  Or didn’t want to?

  So what—they’d shared a kiss.

  Okay, not just a kiss. Something that reached into her soul and took a hold of her.

  Oh, she was stupid. Because she’d been warned.

  By her father.

  By her brother.

  By Silas.

  And by nearly every woman in the police force.

  Rembrandt Stone was an enigma. A charming, handsome, dark haired, blue-eyed enigma, but the kind of man who might drive a woman like her, an investigator born to dig into mysteries until she solved them, crazy.

  So she’d walked away. And her phone hadn’t rung, not even once.

  Which meant that, no, he definitely wasn’t obsessed with her.

  “He’s not watching me,” she said now to Silas. “He just wants to make sure I’m—we—are doing our job.” She took another picture of the area around the dumpster, behind it, in front of it, then turned and shot the crowd.

  It was her crowd shot last time that had helped Rembrandt catch the coffee shop bomber.

  “If I’d been better at my job, maybe I would have discovered earlier the connection between Green Earth coffee growers and the social activist group intent on blowing up shops who used their coffee.”

  Silas looked over at her. “Seriously? The fact that you figured that much out between bombings put you on Chief Booker’s radar. Sheesh, Eve, he thinks you’re a CSI protege.”

  She didn’t want to tell Silas about the fact it was actually Rembrandt who helped her figure out that connection. Or that she’d talked her kid brother, Asher, into hacking into some database to find the coffee shops who sold the brand.

  And while he was busy hacking…

  For a delicious, brutal second she was back in the kitchen, her hands on Rembrandt’s chest, barely holding on as he kissed her, as she gulped in the taste of him.

  She’d made the first move. But she’d been nearly positive, by his reaction, that he was all in. Sometimes she could still feel his hands in her hair, smell the summer air on his skin, the dark, mysterious taste of him and oh brother.

  Enough. She had to expunge him from her brain because her father was right. He was trouble. Trouble and adventure and mystery, determination and justice and wow…yes, maybe her father should be worried.

  “It was Rem who found the guy. He staked out a coffee shop, driven by one of his legendary hunches, and nearly got killed.”

  No wonder he wanted to make sure she didn’t miss anything.

  “Rem?”

  Eve glanced at Silas, her face growing hot. “Detective Stone.”

  Silas’s mouth pinched. “I don’t like him. He’s reckless and doesn’t care about the rules—”

  “He’s…driven.” And frankly, she knew why.

  It’s what happened when you lost someone you love. She’d dug up the files on his brother’s disappearance. Rembrandt had been twelve, his little brother eight. Yeah, she understood driven. Obsessed.

  Motivated. After all she had her own regrets to drive her.

  Silas shot her a look. Thin, with hazel-green eyes, he was her best friend from college, the kind of guy who showed up with donuts and coffee to help her cram for her Forensic Toxicology final. Maybe he wanted more—she tried not to notice.

  “I think our victim was running. Look here.” Silas crouched next to a footprint in the mud near the dumpster. “Look at how deep this print is.”

  She took a couple shots and moved around for a better view.

  “Running from whom?” Rembrandt had come over, and great, how much had he heard? She lowered her camera as he crouched next to the print.

  He had nice hands. Solid. Strong.

  C’mon, Eve! Focus!

  He glanced out across the parking lot, where the police had blocked it off, as if seeing into the past and reconstructing the scene.

  His gaze landed on her. “Why does a woman run?”

  She didn’t want to look at him, but he had these blue eyes. And when he spoke, something terrible and tantalizing rumbled under her skin. “Fear? Hurt?” she managed.

  “That’s what I was thinking.” He still had his gaze on her, looking at her the same way he did this morning.

  She always had the sense, except for that moment in the hospital, that Rembrandt Stone could see right through her, into her soul.

  Or maybe that’s what he did with every woman.

  He nodded and got up. “Did you get crowd shots?”

  “Yes, she got the crowd shots,” Silas said, and his tone sounded like he wanted to add, you moron.

  Rem’s eyes narrowed.

  He seemed to be gritting his jaw as he turned away from Silas, took a breath. “From the direction of the prints, and her body, and even where we found her backpack—about ten feet from her body in the woods—it seems she was running from the road, across the lot. She wasn’t at the restaurant—we asked the patrons and no one had seen her, although the owner, Teresa confirmed she’s a waitress here. Said she was on shift later this morning. So…maybe she was in a car, about to go in, and got out on the sidewalk and ran instead.”

  “What tripped her?” Eve said.

  Rem pointed to a crack in the driveway, but then shrugged. “Maybe she was tackled.”

  “You said she had bruises on her neck, as if she might have been strangled?”

  “Just a guess,” Rem said. “We’ll have to wait to get the coroner’s report.”

  “How did she die?” This from Burke, who came up to Rembrandt.

  Rembrandt seemed to flinch. “I don’t know.”

  Burke stepped away with his radio.

 
; Eve turned, trying to track the steps Rembrandt had suggested.

  “Eve.”

  She drew in a breath as his voice followed her.

  “How are you?”

  She peered at him and frowned. “How are you?”

  “I’m—oh, you mean the fight this morning?”

  He laughed, his blue eyes sparking, and aw, she was such an easy target. “Naw, we were just boxing.”

  “I meant your wound,” she said and tore her gaze away from him before he conjured up more memories than she could deal with. Good thing, really, that it was just a few.

  The dangerous few.

  “Oh. Yeah. Uh…”

  “We haven’t talked since the hospital, so—”

  “You came to visit me in the hospital?”

  “Yes. Don’t you remember?” She stared at him, nonplussed.

  He made a face. “I was a little…out of it. Not in my right mind, maybe.”

  Oh. Oh.

  Then he wrapped his hand around his neck. “I said something stupid, didn’t I?”

  “No. You just…you acted like…” Now she was thirteen, her crush declared in front of the entire school.

  “I’m an idiot, Eve.” He’d dropped his voice, though, glancing over his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I should’ve reached out.”

  She blinked at him. Really? The last thing she expected was a self-deprecating apology.

  “I’ve probably been preoccupied with getting back in shape.”

  Yes. And doing a fine job of it.

  Then he smiled, and wow, her world broke right open. No, no, she refused to be this naive again. She wasn’t a cop’s daughter without knowing when she was being played.

  Rembrandt Stone had practically ignored her for an entire month...

  “What do you want?” She narrowed an eye.

  He frowned, but his smile still sat there. “Nothing, just…”

  “What are you doing here?”

  The voice stilled her, and she turned as—of course—her father, Inspector Danny Mulligan strode across the parking lot. He wore a dark suit, dress shoes and looked every inch the seasoned investigator from the downtown district.

  And, his words clearly weren’t for Eve, given the glare he shot Stone’s direction.

  Rembrandt’s mouth opened a second before he closed it and held out his hand.