No Unturned Stone

by David James Warren

  She turned back to the boards, no longer hungry.

  10

  I know I shouldn’t get cocky, but things are looking up, don’t you think?

  Eve still likes me. Even if I did blow it a month ago, today, I made her smile. I know the ham salad sandwich was cheating, but hey, give me a break, I’m a desperate man.

  I only have one chance to get this right.

  So, yes, I scrolled through my twenty-plus-year-old knowledge of my Eve, and remembered how she forgot to eat when she focused too long on a case. In fact, she’s always been just as obsessed as I am, which we’re going to fix right now.

  Then again, it was my obsessiveness and fear of losing myself and my family that led me to the Colossal Argument between me and Booker.

  So, maybe I just saved us all from future heartache.

  I’m feeling fairly stalwart—thinking of the inscription on my watch—as I head outside into the parking lot, get into the Camaro and motor down to 305 Chicago Avenue, to the Medical Examiner’s office. It’s located in the basement of the old HCMC medical building. It’ll move in about a decade to the western suburbs, a shiny new building with all the latest technology. But now it’s just a few blocks away. I turn up the volume to Don’t Look Back, by Boston, a stalwart song if ever there was one.

  There are only four cars in the lot—a Lexus, the coroner’s van, and an Integra. Burke has beaten me here and I spot him standing in the shade near the door. The July heat hasn’t wilted his shirt, and of course he’s wearing his suit coat.

  I’ve ditched my tie, my jacket, and rolled up my sleeves.

  I shut my door. “What?”

  “You went to see Eve, didn’t you?” He gives me his raised eyebrows look.

  I grin and he rolls his eyes, even as he leans off his car and falls in step with me. “You know you’re playing with fire.”

  “I’m not scared of Danny Mulligan.”

  “You should be, Rem. He’s not in charge of the Gang Activities unit for no reason. He’s the kind of guy who knows every hoodlum in downtown Minneapolis on a first name basis—because he’s tracked them down and arrested them. If he finds out you’re sniffing around Eve, you’re going to start getting visits—”

  I hold up my hand. “He’s going to like me. You just wait and see.” I reach for the door handle. “Besides, Eve is worth it.”

  Burke purses his lips and follows me in.

  The place is clean, clinical, and our footsteps echo off the tile floor as we head down the hallway to the tiny waiting room, more of an alcove with chairs that line the walls.

  I jerk at the sight of Jeff and Karen Holmes. They look exactly the same as I remember them, and of course they would because they, um, are the same. Jeff is dressed in a blue suit, yellow tie, a white oxford, and glances at his watch as if he might be annoyed. Again, I don’t like him. Karen, however, looks at me with a terrible mix of hope and dread in her eyes. She’s wearing a pink summer sweater, a pair of white jeans and dockers, her hair straight and when she tucks it behind her ear, I realize…

  I don’t want to do this again.

  It was hard enough the first time, with Karen collapsing onto the floor, her husband stalking down the hallway to leave her behind and Burke and I calling 9-1-1.

  I hope Burke has his phone out and I instinctively step closer to Karen before I stick out my hand to Jeff and introduce myself. His grip is cool, quick and firm like we might be here to make a deal. Buying a car or something. I’ve forgotten what the man does for a living, but something about him still raises my skin.

  “I’m so sorry to have to call you in—” Burke begins.

  “Have you found her?” Karen touches my arm, swallows.

  I touch her hand, removing it from my arm. “Yes, but…” I glance at the chairs. “Maybe we should sit.”

  She presses her hands to her mouth and I manage to get her to the chairs before she goes white. “Is she…”

  Burke takes a deep breath. “I’m so sorry, ma’am but, yes. We found your daughter this morning.”

  This time I have something to add. “We tried to revive her, but despite all our efforts…” Now it’s my turn to breathe deep. “I’m sorry, but she didn’t make it.”

  She leans over, her hands around her waist, and begins to keen.

  Jeff’s face has hardened, and he looks away.

  Well, at least we aren’t calling 9-1-1 again.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Burke says.

  “Are you sure it’s her?” Karen has gulped back her horror, her voice cut to a whisper. She’s reached out for my hand, and somehow found it.

  If she goes down, I got her.

  “That’s why we asked you here,” I say, and glance at Jeff. “We need a positive I.D.”

  “I’ll do it,” Jeff says quickly, and gets up.

  “I want to see her!” Karen bounces to her feet. “I want to see her, Jeff.” She has her hands pressed to her mouth, her breaths hiccupping.

  I’m not sure about the wisdom of his agreement, so we follow them down the hall and I knock on the door.

  The Medical Examiner, a man by the name of Kirchner is waiting for us and opens the door to allow them in. He introduces himself.

  This part is new. Last time, neither parent identified her until after Karen visited the ER, and then, only Jeff confirmed his daughter’s identity.

  Now, I’m glancing at Burke, staying close to Karen.

  They approach a sheet-draped body on a gurney, and I easily remember Gretta on the pavement, pale, not breathing, her makeup smudged, as if she’d been crying. Funny that thought comes to mind. Crying, as if she’d been in a fight.

  With the father of her child? I won’t ask the M.E. if he’s determined if she was pregnant. Not yet.

  But it’s on my radar.

  That and the cufflink Eve found. Last time we hadn’t been at the scene at the same time, didn’t talk, she didn’t find the cufflink and the clinic didn’t register on my radar.

  I’m sure a thousand other tiny changes have already occurred, but it’s too late to stop them.

  Sorry, Booker.

  At least Gretta hasn’t been transferred yet to a body bag. The smell of formaldehyde and other preservatives sour the air, bouncing off the stainless-steel surfaces, the bone hard cement floor.

  Jeff is still as he stands beside the body. I find it odd that Karen doesn’t reach for his hand.

  Kirchner warns them, then pulls back the sheet.

  Suddenly, I’m not watching them grieve over the body of their eighteen-year-old daughter. Instead, I’m in an updated version of this room, Eve’s hand in mine as we stare in horror at Ashley’s bruised body. Maybe it’s my recollection of the picture I saw in Booker’s file or…or maybe it’s an actual memory. But I can see her hair, muddied and wrenched free of her braids, her tiny lips, pale in death. I want to take her hand, run my thumb over it, urge her back to life.

  Daddy’s here, honey.

  My breath catches and, Oh, God, it feels like an actual memory, with the punch right in the middle of my sternum, every cell in my body wanting to scream at the swollen, battered visage of my beautiful daughter. Eve’s hand is in mine, tightening, then she utters a sound, not a scream, more of a rending of her spirit, her heart. A tearing from the fabric of her soul.

  No wonder I lost us.

  It. Was. Real.

  It is a terrible, brutal, soul carving horror to imagine—experience—your own child’s death. The room begins to spin.

  I haven’t rewritten anything, not yet, and a poison fills my body, every pore, every cell as I blink hard, trying to wipe the image away.

  Acid lines my throat.

  My daughter died, and I suddenly remember everything. The rank smell of the forest on her body, the cruel face of death, the way Kirchner—yes, still the same man, older, silent—waited for us to nod.

  Yes. This is Ashley.

  Yes, our daughter.

  Yes, the very life of us…

/>   I too want to drop to the ground.

  “No,” Karen says now, and her horror is merciful as it yanks me from the memory.

  She puts her hand to her mouth. “No—”

  And then, she turns and collapses into my arms.

  I’m right there to catch her, as if on instinct. Muscle memory kicking in.

  She is weeping, hysterical and not surprisingly, her husband turns and walks from the room.

  So maybe you can’t exactly change history.

  I shake my head. No. I refuse to believe that.

  I lower Karen Holmes to the floor, sinking with her. What else am I going to do? I understand. My heart, my soul, understands.

  So I hold her, a little awkwardly, maybe, and Burke is giving me a look, but it’s all I have right now.

  For both of us.

  She weeps and I tighten my grip.

  I’m not crying. But my jaw is tight just in case.

  Kirchner pulls the sheet back over Gretta’s body.

  “We need to ask a few questions,” Burke starts but I shake my head, then nod toward the door. Go after Jeff.

  He reads my mind, as usual and heads outside.

  Kirchner melds into the wall somewhere, and the room is quiet, save for Karen Holmes’s sobbing.

  Her hand fists my shirt, turning it black with her mascara and now I remember why I don’t wear suits. But it’s okay. It’s the least I can do.

  Except, I’m going to do more, much more. “I’m so sorry.”

  She finally leans away and stares at me, not really seeing me. “We called the police and no one did anything about it. They said she was a runaway, and that she was old enough to leave home, but…” Her jaw trembles.

  Parents know, right? When something is wrong?

  She finally meets my eyes. “I don’t remember your name.”

  “Rembrandt. Inspector Rembrandt Stone.”

  She is trying to gather herself, searching her pockets and I remember I still carry a handkerchief, so I hand it to her.

  The action feels so familiar, I’m digging through my layers to find the memory, and latch onto a different one.

  Eve. She’s sitting in the waiting room of a hospital, on brown chairs, her hands over her head, bent over with the news of Danny’s death. It’s so clear, I can hear her sobbing even as I crouch in front of her, hand her my handkerchief and take her into my arms.

  It’s the day I knew, right to my core, that my heart would belong to her. If only I’d spent a little more time listening to that voice instead of my ambition back then. But the memory is swift and thorough and is just as real as Ashley’s death.

  Eve will still lose her father and her brother, and then her beloved daughter.

  I haven’t changed history. I’ve just given it a shove in the wrong direction.

  Tonight, I intend to knock it on its backside and drag it kicking and screaming back into place.

  I help Karen off the floor and out into the foyer where Burke is interviewing Jeff.

  Glance at the clock.

  I have roughly six hours to track down Danny’s stakeout…and keep him from committing the act that will destroy us all.

  11

  Jeff and Karen Holmes give us nothing new, at least from my recollection.

  Gretta Holmes turned eighteen three months ago, and after a blistering fight with her father about her boyfriend, she ran away from home. They reported her missing, but the police never followed up because of the nature of her disappearance.

  Besides, the parents suspected she was holed up with friends from school. Periodically, Karen had received phone calls from Gretta and had even given her money through a trusted friend, her softball coach.

  Burke is giving me a run-down of this familiar information as we stand outside in the parking lot of a McDonald’s in Uptown. The sun is heavy on the backside of the day, and the heat is starting to run down my back. Burke is eating an ice cream cone. I’m finishing off a Diet Coke.

  I know what’s going to happen next, also. Burke and I will interview Teresa, the manager at Lulu’s diner, and she’ll tell us about how Gretta worked as a waitress. How she was a favorite with the patrons, and especially one who came in often. A blonde man, a little thick around the middle, who Gretta occasionally joined for an after-shift milkshake. Mid-thirties, he sometimes wore a suit, other times a t-shirt and jeans.

  It rolls through my mind now, that maybe this guy is the father of her baby.

  However, in the past, and probably again, Teresa hadn’t seen him on the day of Gretta’s murder—today—and Gretta was scheduled to work.

  “I think we should head to the diner, and talk to her boss, again,” Burke says, predictably. “She was busy with the morning rush when we were there. I’m thinking she’ll have more information for us. Maybe she saw the car that picked her up.”

  The car.

  Yes, she had seen a car because it was remarkably out of place. A Lexus ES. Good memory jog, Burke.

  But I just hum, and nod because circling through my brain is also the little information I know about Danny’s murder.

  Danny and Asher were at a convenience store just down the road from their home, picking up ice cream when the shooting occurred. They’d just gotten out of Danny’s truck, were walking into the building when a 1990 Buick wood-paneled station wagon pulled into the lot, and someone pulled out an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and peppered the Mulligan men with bullets.

  No one else was injured.

  Danny and Asher died on the spot, the wagon drove away and Booker asked for my help on the case twenty-four hours after I’d held Eve in my arms at the hospital.

  My guess is that he knew I needed something—anything—to do.

  Now, I wonder if Booker had other motives, even then. Like…if we never found the murderers, maybe I could circle back in time…

  The thought has my brain in knots, but I look up when Burke says, “Did you think the father was acting weird?”

  “Yeah.” I pause. “I don’t know. Maybe he couldn’t look at his daughter like that. Beaten, dead, knowing that he wasn’t there to stop it.”

  Burke finishes off his cone. “He looked angry. Like he’d like to end somebody.”

  “Wouldn’t you, if your daughter was murdered?” That came out a little too strong, so I add a shrug. “I’m just guessing.”

  Burke nods, wiping his hands. “But that’s what we’re here for. So he doesn’t do something stupid.”

  Like turn into a drunk and destroy the only thing he has left, his marriage? I suddenly wonder where Burke’s been over the past two years as I tried to put together the pieces of my life. “Maybe he doesn’t trust us to find the killer. Maybe he feels like he’s alone in the fight, and that everyone has given up. That if he doesn’t do something, then no one will.”

  I must be channeling the future me because there is too much passion in my voice to not let it take root and find hollow places.

  “All I know is that if anything ever happened to my child, I’d never stop looking for the killer.”

  I meet Burke’s gaze, something of defiance in it.

  He frowns. “Neither would I.”

  I feel like there’s a promise embedded in there, and I nod.

  A smile curves into Burke’s face. “There you are. Finally.”

  Huh?

  “After you got stabbed, you sort of, I don’t know, walked out of your life for a while. As if you’d been sidelined. You seemed to be phoning it in, and I started to wonder if we were still in this together.” Burke slaps my shoulder. “Maybe you have a chance with Eve after all.”

  “Of course I do,” I say, but his words have found a place inside that unnerves me.

  What happens to me, the other me, when I leave?

  By going back in time, rewriting my consciousness, am I turning my gray matter to pulp?

  I get in the car and follow Burke back to the station. The hour is late, and I need more information on the stakeout and events of tonight’
s shooting.

  The shooting that leads to the drive-by gang response.

  I remember this case better, of course. Danny had been the head of a drug-related, gang-centered task force. After his murder, I did a search on the Buick station wagon and unearthed roughly four thousand hits. I turned to my network of informants and hit a dead end.

  Not a whisper of who had put out a hit on Danny and Asher.

  Over the years, I’d fielded false leads, and a few informants who wanted to trade, but nothing unearthed solid evidence on who had shot them.

  But I knew who was behind it.

  Like Eve said, it’s Hassan Abdilhali, a Somalian warlord who’s applied his skills to the disenfranchised, disparate refugee population. How do I know?

  Because his brother’s death, on this night, makes tomorrow’s headlines.

  I just can’t remember where it goes down.

  I’m desperate for something to jog my memory as we pull up to Lulu’s. Burke goes in, and I follow him, my stomach stopping to beg as the smell of greasy french fries hits me. The place is decorated fresh out of the fifties, with metal stools at the malt counter, and red vinyl booths lined up along the side of the joint.

  Elvis is singing All Shook Up on the jukebox in the corner, and the menu board matches the waitress’s pink dresses. A malt machine fires up, and my stomach whines.

  I should have had an ice cream cone.

  Burke slides onto a stool and asks to see Teresa.

  She’ll ignore him, mostly, and talk to me, standing a little too close, touching my arm, so this time I’ll let Burke do the talking.

  In the meantime, I wander over to the rack and pick up the newspaper. Paging through the police beat in the back, I scan for recent arrests.

  I hear laughter and Teresa is standing close to Burke now. Touching his arm.

  Sorry pal. I turn back to the paper, and an article in the back, page twelve, catches my eye.

  Two young men had been arrested in north Minneapolis for petty theft. They had mug shots. And yes, I’m profiling, but they look Somalian. I read the names.