No Unturned Stone

by David James Warren

  “Oh, I’m glad you’re here.”

  The voice slides through me like honey. I look up and for a second, I can’t breathe.

  Eve stands in the doorway, her hair short—really short, almost shorn to her head, but still fluffy and pretty. She’s wearing a pair of linen pants, a sleeveless shirt and sandals. She doesn’t look like she’s coming from work, but maybe. A satchel hangs from her shoulder, and she’s holding a paper bag.

  A lunch bag. A wild hope shoots through me that it’s my lunch, and she’s here to bring it to me, and we’re that couple now, that can’t go a half-day without seeing each other.

  “Eve,” I say, and come around the desk. “You look…really nice.” I come up to her, too eager, maybe, but she is smiling so warmly, I can’t help myself.

  I reach for her.

  She laughs and puts out her hand to my chest. “Rembrandt? Seriously? You want him to kill you?”

  Him? I stop, and it’s then I spot a ring on her finger.

  Not my ring.

  A wave of despair sweeps through me.

  It was probably too much to hope, but…and then it hits me.

  Silas. I’m so going to murder him. “Sorry,” I mutter. I’m new here, so I’m not quite ready to commit a felony until I know all the facts.

  Eve takes a step away, as if reinforcing her words. “I was going through some old boxes, and I found this. I thought I’d drop it off for you.” She holds out the bag. Offers a tight smile.

  I take it and open it.

  My journey concert shirt. The image of Bets, bleeding on the ground, slashes through my mind. I must go pale because Eve touches my arm. “You probably saved her life that night.”

  I swallow hard, my eyes burn and I blink fast as I look at Eve. “You’re mom—she’s—”

  “She says hi, and that she missed you at Dad’s memorial birthday last night. But I get it. We’re so close to catching this guy—” Her gaze moves past me to the board. “My office sent over the DNA test you ordered. Did you get it?”

  Her office. So, she’s still on the job. Another sweet rush of relief. “I did.”

  “You’ll get him, Rem. No one is as good as you.”

  This time her smile is genuine, and in it I see fragments of our past.

  So I did mean something to her, once upon a time.

  And then the other part of her sentence pings inside me.

  Danny’s memorial birthday party.

  No…

  But Eve doesn’t look quite so haunted, quite so undone, so maybe I did fix something.

  “Eve, Babe. What are you doing here?”

  She turns to the voice, one that I know so well, and smiles.

  It’s a sucker punch right to my sternum, because not only do I know that voice, but I also know the smile Eve flashes.

  That smile is love. Acceptance. Knowing and being known.

  That’s the smile of intimacy. And she’s giving it to Andrew Burke.

  The screaming is back in my head as Burke walks over to the woman I love and kisses her, like it’s as natural as breathing.

  I, however, can’t breathe, as I stare at Burke. He’s wearing a uniform, as if he’s back on patrol, but there’s something easier about him.

  As if he’s not quite so tightly wound.

  He lets her go. “I’m just off shift. You ready?”

  She nods. “Daphne is in the car. We just got back from the library. She has a slew of books she thinks she’s going to read in a week.” She laughs and then glances at me. “Thirteen year olds—she’s exactly the right age to believe in Prince Charming and happily ever after.”

  Burke laughs, and takes her hand. Then he turns to me.

  His smile vanishes and a crisp air blows between us. “Boss,” he says, as if saying hello. Or goodbye. Or stay out of my way. I’m not exactly sure because my radar has short circuited.

  The entire right side of Burke’s face is distorted—a rumpled, shiny, ages old burn scar. It runs down the side of his face, into his neck and disappears under his uniform.

  I’m a good liar, yes, but not so good that I can tear my gaze away quickly. I linger a moment, then find my footing and meet his eyes.

  A chill slices through me because deep inside his gaze I catch a glimpse of something I’ve never before seen in Burke.

  Hate.

  I swallow, and nod. “Officer Burke,” I say in quiet, pained dismissal.

  He takes Eve’s hand and they walk to the door.

  I take hold of the frame of my door.

  An officer walks by me, holding a stack of pizza boxes.

  I could retch. Instead, I go to my desk, find my keys, grab my suit coat—apparently, I’m back to that—and head out to the parking lot.

  After everything I’ve been through, I don’t know why I want to fall to my knees and weep at the sight of my Porsche. Maybe because she’s still intact, the one thing in my world that hasn’t changed. In fact, she’s clean and beautiful under the warm June air. I get in and pull out, cranking the radio to drown out the cacophony of voices inside.

  Eve is married to Burke.

  Burke’s been seriously injured.

  He’s no longer my partner.

  Danny is dead.

  And Ashley…I sit at the light, the realization like tar through me.

  Ashely wasn’t murdered by the Jackson killer.

  Ashley has never existed.

  I turn the volume higher and shake my head to the words of the Kansas song, Carry on Wayward Son, mocking me. Somewhere in the lyrics it promises peace, when I’m done.

  Not a chance.

  I’m going to gamble big and hope that I still had the smarts to buy the 1930s craftsman on Washburn, just a stone’s throw from Lake Calhoun.

  I pull into the driveway. It’s not that different. Still painted its former gray, and minus Eve’s landscaping. I get out and try my key.

  It works and I have weak legs as I walk inside.

  I have done the math, figured out that Eve has not been here to decorate, but my chest still hollows at the starkness of my bachelor pad. A lot of over-sized leather furniture in the family room, a massive flat screen on the wall (I don’t hate that), and some shots of me on a boat, holding a prize fish.

  There’s a picture of me and Booker, his arm over my shoulder as I hold up my captain’s badge.

  Booker. He must be still gone, because I have the watch, right?

  I slide off my shoes and go into my kitchen. The bottle of Macallan’s is gone, and when I open my fridge, I’m shaken by the amount of rabbit food. Vegetables, fruit, and a few packages of tofu.

  You’ve gotta be kidding. I’ve turned Vegan. And, not one beer. Not that I need a drink this early, but…yeah, I’m gonna look.

  My former liquor cabinet is filled with containers of powdered protein.

  Fine.

  I make a shake and head to my office.

  I can fix this. I have to fix this.

  The leather chair Eve gave me when I retired from the force is gone, but the office is clean, the desk bigger and on the shelf behind it, my first and only book, The Last Year. A memoir about my cases.

  But beside those are a number of awards. Investigative commendations.

  So, I’m not a complete disaster. And I’m healthy.

  And I’m the boss.

  But I don’t have Eve. Or Ashley.

  This is not a world I can live in.

  I sit down at the computer and wiggle the mouse. The lock screen comes on, and since I’m not that original, I enter in the same password from work.

  Bingo.

  Then I start digging.

  Because I remember a fire, long, long ago, one that happened weeks after Danny and Asher’s death while Burke and I were tracking down the shooters. We arrived on the scene late, the house an inferno.

  Two children were trapped inside.

  It took something out of Burke to watch it burn, and he’d tried to enter the house. We fought, I won, and we watched th
e fire burn from across the street.

  I find the article of the fire, buried in decades of fires in the Phillips neighborhood, and scan it.

  Two officers injured in the fire. One died—and fate is cruel when I realize it’s Danny.

  And it’s all my fault. No, really it is. Because who else can change time?

  Footsteps on my front porch make me look up. Someone is at the door, fiddling with the lock.

  My instincts have me on my feet and out into the hallway, and when it opens, I grab the man and push him up to the wall.

  “Hey! What—Rembrandt. Sheesh, it’s me!”

  The guy is tall, decently built, and is wearing a t-shirt under a suitcoat. Brownish red hair, a little long, and in his mid-thirties. He puts his hands up. “Step back, bro.”

  I know I recognize him, I just can’t—wait. “Asher?”

  “Who did you expect, Santa?” He puts his hands down. “You need to stop working out so hard. You’re starting to look like the Rambo guy you love.”

  I love Rambo?

  Asher pushes past me. “I came home to grab an HDMI cable. Wouldn’t you know it? The children we hired at MinneHack think everything happens over Bluetooth.”

  He takes the stairs and I watch him go. Then, because I can’t stop, I follow him.

  He’s in Ashley’s room. Except the walls aren’t pink. The stuffed animals are gone and it’s been fashioned into a sort of computer hub, with multiple monitors on a standing desk and rows and rows of CPU units, all humming. Asher is searching through a big drawer, pulling out cables.

  “What is going on?”

  He glances over his shoulder. “Sorry. I know you’ve got that big date coming up tonight. I’ll try not to bother you.” He winks.

  Date? Big date? I’m more than a little horrified.

  Asher grabs the cable and pushes past me. “By the way, forget what I said about Shelby. She’s great. I’m sure you two will live happily ever after. Just give me a sixty day notice before you kick me out, okay?” He goes down the stairs.

  Shelby? The woman from dispatch that Burke dated, eons ago?

  I sink down on the top of the stairs, hearing an echo from a past I’d like to grab back. Or maybe you just stay here and try and live with your new reality.

  My answer is the same.

  Not a chance.

  The epic series continues with Rembrandt Stone in two months. Check out a sneak peek of book three. Join us in June for the next installment.

  Sticks and Stone - Preview

  The True Lies of Rembrandt Stone - Book 3

  The pieces of two lives sit in my brain like they should fit together, but no matter how hard I press, I can’t get them to line up.

  My life is broken into fragments that no longer match.

  All I know is that you can’t escape your past, no matter how you try.

  And believe me, I’ve tried.

  I’m standing on the muddy shoreline in the shadow of the Stone Arch bridge on the east bank of the Mississippi river. The morning sun is low, just brimming the horizon, gilding the water a deep, fire-orange, and turning the skyline of Minneapolis a brilliant gold. I’m watching my crime scene investigators tape off a wooded area of the historic Main Street Park just off Anthony and Main.

  A woman’s naked body is covered, awaiting the CSI director—my former wife, although she has no memory of that—and the coroner is on his way.

  I am nursing my second cup of coffee, the first one downed this morning at o-dark hundred as I crawled out of bed to the text of my assistant, Inspector Zeke Kincaid.

  My head is fuzzy because, as I said, I’m trying to fit together pieces that aren’t made for this puzzle.

  This puzzle belongs to Rembrandt Stone, Bureau Chief Inspector for the Minneapolis Police Department and head of the task force overseeing the Jackson serial killings.

  I am Rembrandt Stone, former Investigator turned failed novelist, father to a seven-year-old daughter, gone missing in time, husband to a wife who can’t remember being married to him, and the owner of a time-traveling watch.

  This is a lifetime I haven’t yet lived, and although the pieces are starting to form, I’m going to need a lot more coffee.

  And help.

  Here’s what I know—and you’d better write this down because I’m getting some of my facts mixed up as time folds upon itself.

  Four days ago, while I was celebrating my daughter’s seventh birthday, with my beautiful wife Eve, my former boss, Police Chief John Booker gave me his old broken watch—bequeathed to me after his death—and a file box of my old cold cases.

  Three days ago, I took said watch to a repairman who told me it was working just fine. Maybe, because as I was looking over my cold cases—specifically the first one involving the bombing of three coffee shops over twenty years ago—I inadvertently wound the watch.

  And ended up at the scene of the first bombing.

  I know what you’re thinking—me too. Maybe I’d had too much Macallan’s for a night cap. But stay with me—I solved those bombings and prevented the third. And woke up in a new reality. One where my wife stood on my doorstep and handed me divorce papers.

  One where Ashley had been murdered, two years before.

  One I desperately needed to escape.

  So, two days ago, I sought out the watchmaker, and he—and his daughter—suggested that I’d overwritten the events of my previous timeline.

  Intending to re-write them yet again, yesterday, I traveled back to my second cold case, one involving a young woman murdered near a diner. I’ll be honest—my goal wasn’t to solve her crime, but to stop another…the drive by shooting deaths of Eve’s father and brother.

  Really, it’s not that hard to change history when you know the time and place history is going to happen. Danny and Asher lived. More on that later.

  Yesterday, when I returned to this reality, I found Eve married to my partner, Burke.

  Former partner Burke. I’m still figuring out that glitch.

  And, worse, Ashley doesn’t exist. Has never existed.

  Are you keeping up?

  Maybe we should simply rewind time to yesterday when I arrived back—or should I say forward?—to now and discovered that my life wasn’t in tatters.

  I’m not a drunk, I’m not on the verge of divorce, my daughter isn’t among the victims, strangled in her pajamas, torn from our lives as she slept in her upstairs bedroom.

  On the contrary, I’m successful. Published.

  And I still have my Porsche.

  I have a good life.

  It’s just not a life I want.

  My house is the same—the 1930s craftsman, off Drew Avenue, close enough to the lakes for us—me—to feel like we’re near a park, but with the skyline just a stone’s throw away.

  It’s not been remodeled, and that’s probably because I no longer have Eve in my ear drawing out her dreams on graph paper. Inside, my office bookcase is filled with a row of best-sellers, my name on the spine, so now I know what I do on my nights off.

  I share the house with Asher Mulligan—I nearly tackled him as he came into the house, mostly because I didn’t recognize him, having never known Asher as an adult. Because, you know, he died. Until he didn’t.

  Oh boy.

  He is apparently my roommate, a white-hat hacker and someone with whom I’m friendly, if not close.

  I don’t know who I’m close to, really, because the only two people in my life I’d put in that category have each other now.

  Eve, my wife, and Burke.

  Andrew Burke, my former partner. Who now hates me, and bears a terrible burn scar across his face. I’m going to get to the bottom of that.

  My office is still a conference room, but now, instead of twenty-three horrific murders, thirty-eight cases line the board.

  Thirty-eight women killed by a man we—I?—have dubbed the Jackson killer, because of this calling card, a twenty dollar bill.

  What no one knows is that inscribed on
each twenty are the words, “thank you for your service.”

  Sick.

  The only anomaly in the lineup of cases is still the murder of my old boss, John Booker.

  My daughter’s case, however, is absent, because, like I said, she doesn’t exist.

  Never existed.

  See why I need to write things down? Because I sound a little crazy when I say it aloud.

  “Rem. I thought I’d find you here.”

  The voice turns me and just like always I’m blown over by the sight of Eve walking onto a crime scene.

  Her auburn hair is tied back, and she’s wearing a pair of hiking boots, jeans and her CSI vest. And, she’s just as beautiful as she was yesterday, or the day before, and twenty-three years ago when I kissed her on the steps of her home.

  She’s not mine. And she probably just rolled out of the bed she shares with Burke and I need to not let that find root in my brain if I hope to survive this world.

  Time is cruel. Or maybe it’s fate. I’m not sure, but frankly, Eve belongs to me. And I know that sounds rather Neanderthal, but that’s just where I am right now.

  I’m not sure why the idea of her, happy, with my best friend is worse than her divorcing me. I just can’t believe she moved on after what we had. Or maybe we, like Ash, never existed because Eve looks at me with a friendly smile, nothing of a spark in her eyes, and my throat thickens.

  I probably need more coffee.

  No, I need to rewind time, find my life, and throw the watch into the Mississippi.

  She is carrying a pair of gloves, but she doesn’t do the heavy lifting anymore. Not as director of the Crime Lab.

  She stands at the edge of the crime scene, stares at the body. “What do we know?”

  This information is recent, handed to me by Zeke, my assistant. “Female, early twenties. From the marks at her neck, she was strangled. She’s naked, but in her hand is—”

  “A twenty dollar bill.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is it marked?”

  “Yes,” I say and finish off my coffee.

  “I hope we can get some DNA off her.”

  “Maybe, hopefully, she fought him,” I say. “Look under her fingernails.”