“What?”
This was the first time hearing this kind of news from her. I’d been under the impression that she loved her job. The job was challenging, but she worked hard to garner fair trials and reasonable sentencing for clients who might not otherwise get a fair shake under the justice system.
“The office is pressuring me to take on more high profile cases.”
“That’s a good thing, right? Like they think you’re doing a good job?”
She nodded, but her face remained impassive. “I don’t think I morally have it in me to defend at that level. I’m a good lawyer. What if a murderer walked free because I did too good of a job?”
“Why not come back to work for the city?” I suggested. “I know you’d probably have to start out at the bottom, but wouldn’t it be worth it to be on the same team again?”
Julia frowned. “I like the work I do right now. But if they continue to press me to defend the murderers and the sex offenders, I’ll find something else.”
“What about starting your own practice? You could control which cases you accepted or not.”
She hummed in consideration. “That might not be such a bad idea.”
“We could scope out some office properties this weekend,” I proposed. “I’ve never been a fan of you working in that neighborhood anyway. And maybe you could steal Alice away to come work for you.”
Julia closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Lord, that sounds like so much work. I don’t know if I have it in me.”
I leaned forward in the tub, nearly spilling bathwater over its edge. “I know you can do it. You’re the hardest working woman I know. All you have to do is set your mind to it.”
“You sound very sure of yourself,” she observed.
“I’m very sure of you, Julia.”
She softly smiled. “How did I get so lucky?”
I leaned back in the tub, pleased with myself. “Stubborn persistence.”
CHAPTER SeVEN
Stanley was already in the office when I arrived the next morning. That itself wasn’t unusual—he often showed up to work before me—but I was almost positive he’d been wearing the same outfit the day before.
I dropped my duffle bag on my desk and put my firearm in the top desk drawer. “Hey. What’s going on?”
Stanley spun in his office chair to face me. “I got a plate number.”
“On that Jane Doe? Wow. I didn’t think you’d actually be able to pull the plates from that video. You’re good, Stanley.”
“The security video was useless for that. But once I knew what kind of car I was looking for, I went back to the other footage the original detectives had collected until I found a clearer image. I still couldn’t identity the driver, but at least we’ve got a plate.”
I tiled my head to the side and re-appraised my colleague as if seeing him for the first time. The stack of Styrofoam coffee cups at his desk. The crumbs clinging to his beard. Rumpled creases in his khaki pants. The dress shirt rolled up past his elbows. His hair that seemed to stand on end more than usual.
“When’s the last time you left this room?” I asked.
Stanley blinked, a little like a deer caught in headlights. “I, uh—.”
“You stayed here all night trying to figure this out.” It wasn’t a question. I knew.
“We were finally getting somewhere,” he began his protest.
I held up my hand to stop him. “I’ve heard enough. You need to go home and get some sleep.” I wrinkled my nose. “And probably take a shower.”
“I’m supposed to be at the warehouse today,” he resisted.
“Go home, Stanley. If Forrester gives you a hard time, I’ve got your back. You’re no good to anyone if you burn yourself out.”
“But I—.”
“Nope.” I held up my arm and pointed toward the front door. “Go.”
Stanley slowly stood from his desk, his shoulders slumped forward. He started to pick up the mess at his workstation, one Styrofoam cup at a time.
“Leave it, Stanley,” I stopped him. “I’ll take it from here.”
He released a loud, dramatic sigh, but finally grabbed his keys. His shoes squeaked as he shuffled out the office door.
I was in the middle of cleaning up Stanley’s desk when Sarah glided into the office.
“True or Dare, Detective Miller?” she smiled knowingly.
I shook my head. “Not that again.”
Sarah Conrad was beautiful, and it was clear she knew that. I suspected she’d always been attractive and had become accustomed to getting her way because of it.
“Did you have a better game in mind?”
“Truth,” I sighed.
“Again?” Sarah snorted. “I pegged you as a risk taker. Weren’t you in the Army or something?”
“Marines,” I corrected out of habit. To the average civilian there wasn’t much of a distinction, but it mattered to most soldiers.
Sarah continued her expectant stare.
“Fine,” I relented. “Dare.”
A grin spread across her face. “I dare you to steal one of Forrester’s taxidermy animals.”
“Damn, girl. How long have you had that one in the chamber?” I accused.
“They’re fucking creepy!” she defended. “What kind of weirdo keeps dead animals in his office? Maybe we should be investigating him—that seems like some psychopath shit.”
“Your dare isn’t fair. You know he never leaves his office,” I complained.
My complaint wasn’t an exaggeration. With the exception of refilling his coffee cup and presumably to go to the bathroom, I’d never seen Captain Forrester leave the four walls of his office.
“I’ll create a diversion, and then you sneak in there and get a chipmunk or something,” Sarah offered.
“Or we could actually do some work,” I proposed.
“There’s nothing to do. There isn’t ever anything to do.” She flipped through the file folders scattered on my desk.
“Not true,” I defended. “Stanley made some big progress on that Jane Doe case since you were last here.”
“Oh yeah?”
I leaned back in my chair and tried to stay out of her way as she shuffled through my work.
“Video surveillance shows her still alive when a vehicle dropped her off at St. Mary’s hospital. Stanley was able to isolate the car’s plate, so now we just have to run it.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” Sarah pressed.
“Stanley. I sent him home. I think he worked all night long. He was still wearing the same clothes from yesterday when I got in this morning.”
“And you don’t want to move forward without him,” Sarah guessed. “That’s very sweet of you, Cassidy.”
I wiggled in discomfort in my chair. “Not sweet,” I grunted. “Just being a good partner.”
She patted me on the shoulder. “I bet you are.”
The remainder of the morning passed by quietly and without event. I had expected Sarah to pester me into entertaining her, but she’d been uncharacteristically quiet. It made me anxious.
“What are you working on over there?” I asked. “You’ve been awfully quiet,” I couldn’t help observing.
Sarah stared at her computer screen instead of in my direction. “Nothing.”
My body seized with panic as I swept my gaze over my desk. I rummaged through the folders on my work surface. The Jane Doe file was gone.
“No!” I sprang from my chair. “Sarah! I told you I wanted to wait.”
Her hands jerked away from her keyboard and shot in the air as though under arrest. “I’m sorry! I’ve never had very good willpower.” She popped out her lower lip in what I was sure was a well-practiced pout.
“God damn it, Sarah. You didn’t even try.”
“Do you at least want to know what I found out?”
I did, but a bigger piece of me felt guilty about moving forward on the case without Stanley. This was his case.
Sarah didn’t wait for an answer.
“According to the DMV’s database the car’s not on the street anymore, or if it is, it’s using plates that haven’t been renewed since 2005.”
“So the driver ditched the car after ditching Jane Doe?”
“Maybe,” she hummed. Her fingers flew across the noisy keyboard. “Or …”
She pulled up the NCIC database and typed in the license plate.
“Ah hah!” she exclaimed. “Or, it was a stolen vehicle.”
My initial excitement crumpled. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
I leaned closer to the computer screen. “The date on this stolen vehicle file is after the incident though.”
“So the poor schlub who got their car stolen waited a few days before reporting it missing. Or maybe they were on vacation, and it was stolen while they were out of town,” she proposed.
“All of this guess-work and grey area is driving me crazy.”
Sarah clucked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Well that’s weird.”
“Hmm?”
“A rental car agency reported it stolen.”
“So someone rented a car so they could poison Jane Doe and dump her at the hospital?” I shook my head. None of it made any sense. “Can we find out who the last renter was?”
Sarah picked up the office phone and cradled the receiver in the crook of her neck. “I’m on it. This might take a while,” she warned me.
I wrinkled my nose. “More paperwork and computer databases.”
She smiled sweetly. “Better get used to it, Detective. Why don’t you be a doll and go grab us some lunch?”
I grabbed my keys off my desk, happy for the task. “What do you want?”
She cupped her hand over the receiver. “Surprise me,” she said before returning to the phone call.
I returned a short while later with a paper bag filled with sandwiches and kettle chips from the corner deli. Sarah was just hanging up the phone when I walked into the central office.
“Don’t tell me that’s the same phone call,” I remarked.
“Deborah at Rent-a-Center was chatty.”
I reached into the takeout bag and fished out a wax-paper wrapped sandwich for my co-worker. “Did Deborah at Rent-a-Center at least have anything useful to say?”
“I’ve got a name,” Sarah confirmed. “The car had been rented out to a woman named Tracey Green before it was reported stolen.”
“Did you run the name in NCIC?”
“Not yet—like I said,” she smiled, “Deborah was chatty.”
I abandoned my lunch for the moment and pulled up the NCIC database on my desk computer. The National Crime Information Center, shared between the FBI and state and local police departments, managed eighteen kinds of files: seven related to property and eleven concerning people including Convicted Sexual Offender Registry, Foreign Fugitive, Identity Theft, Immigration Violator, Missing Person, Protection Order, Supervised Release, Unidentified Person, U.S. Secret Service Protective, Violent Gang and Terrorist Organization, and Wanted Person Files.
I grunted when the search resulted zero hits. “No criminal record,” I noted, feeling disappointed. Perhaps Tracey Green had simply been the victim of circumstance.
Sarah stood from her desk to travel to mine. “Nothing? It seems like a pretty common name for there to be absolutely no hits.”
“Nothing. No arrest record. She’s not in protective services and there’s no missing person’s report. Tracey Green is a model citizen.”
Sarah reached around me and commandeered my computer mouse. She pulled up a second browser window on my computer screen, and her fingers flew across the noisy keyboard.
I peered up tentatively at my co-worker as she leaned over me. Her breasts were practically shoved in my face. “Now what?”
“Department of Motor Vehicle. They should have a picture from her most recent license.”
We waited while the archaic internal processor loaded the page. The image rendered at a tortuously slow speed.
I squinted at the grainy image when the screen had finally loaded. “Holy shit,” I exclaimed. “That’s our Jane Doe.”
“Nope.” Sarah’s lips popped on the p-sound. “That’s Tracey Green.”
I pushed my chair away from my desk and pressed my fingers against my temples. “Okay. So. Tracey Green rents a car for some reason,” I thought aloud. “Someone poisons her and then uses her own rental car to dump her body off at the hospital.”
“We shouldn’t assume the driver is the same person who poisoned her. A friend could have dropped her off,” Sarah posed.
“They would have stuck around,” I reasoned. “You don’t just drop a sick friend off at the Emergency Room and leave her to fend for herself.”
Sarah returned to her desk and grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
“To notify the next of kin.”
I gestured to the computer screen. “But we’ve got a lead—an actual lead. We’ve got to see where this takes us.”
“Sorry, Detective,” Sarah said, pulling on the light jacket. “Your job is to find out who killed Tracey Green. Mine is to find her family.”
The gentle whir of my desktop computer was the only sound in the office. With Sarah gone, I was once again alone. We finally had a name to go with our Jane Doe case, but I didn’t know what to do with the new information. Besides NCIC, I wasn’t familiar with any other database resources, and that had come up empty. I’d sent home the one person who could assist me to take a shower and catch up on sleep.
A yellow post-it note taped to my office desk phone gave me Stanley, Sarah, and even Captain Forrester’s home phone numbers. The call rang unanswered until Stanley’s voicemail picked up:
“You’ve reached Stanley Harris with the Minneapolis Cold Case Division. If this is an emergency, hang up and call 911. If you’re calling with a tip about an open cold case, please leave your name, number, and a brief message. And if this is my mom—no I’m still not dating anyone.”
The recording cut off and a sharp tone indicated that I should leave a message.
“Hey, Stanley. It’s Cassidy. Miller,” I felt compelled to add. “That’s, uh, that’s a really interesting recording you got there. Anyway, um, I’m calling to let you know that Sarah ran those plates you found.”
I finally got around to the purpose of the call. Hopefully the excitement over these new leads would distract him from being angry with me for moving forward without him.
“It was a stolen vehicle from a local rental car place. I’m sorry. I wanted to wait for you, but Sarah ran the plates before I could stop her, and at least we saved you some time, and now we’ve got a name.” I blurted out the final few words, certain my rambling message would get cut off by his answering machine. “Jane Doe. Her real name is Tracey Green.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Bombs never look like how they do in the movies. There’s no glowing red display that tells you how long you’ve got. There’s no deciding between cutting the green or the blue or the red wire. Bombs are old coffee containers filled with nails. They’re a cigarette carton packed with plastic explosives. It’s a motorcycle with Anti-Tank landmines hidden beneath the seat.
The bad guys don’t wear a uniform either. They don’t dress all in black or have scars on one cheek or a fake arm or a patch over one eye. They’re people whose car has broken down on the side of a dirt road. They’re women wearing multiple layers of clothing. They’re children running toward you with open arms.
The IED had been hidden under a metal card table in the dilapidated living room of our safe house. No one had thought to sweep the house for explosives. We’d successfully captured our target, and everyone was on too much of a high to follow through with safety protocol. The house was supposed to be clean, after all. It was a safe house—the one place besides the operation base where you could actually let your guard down.
The day was h
ot and cloudless. If not for the unforgiving sun overhead, I might not have noticed the glint of metal.
“Nobody move!” I yell.
It takes one more call of caution for the guys in my unit to pause in their revelry.
“What’s wrong?” Pensacola asks.
I drop to my knees to get a better view. There’s duct tape covering the majority of the surface area, but it’s definitely a bomb. The cell phone attached to the explosives is practically an antique, but it allows for a remote detonation of up to a mile.
A car battery supplies electricity to the cell phone and the detonator. As soon as the phone rings, it will activate the detonator and initiate the explosion sequence. When the detonator explodes, it provides energy for the main explosive.
Our options are limited. We can leave the house in the middle of the day with our captives in tow and hope we don’t come across the Taliban, or we stay and try to detonate the homemade bomb on our terms.
“Fuck.” I wipe at my forehead. A mixture of sand, grime, and sweat has made my skin feel gritty.
“Careful, Miller,” Pensacola urges.
I flex my fingers and reach for the devise. I see no tripwires that might act like a booby-trap. We’re thin on defusing supplies. All of the IED detecting and jamming devices are in the vehicle that dropped us off in the middle of the desert.
“You’re grinding your teeth again, dear.”
“Sorry,” I grumbled. “I didn’t notice.”
Julia and I sat in bed. She was reading a novel while I wrote in my dream journal. As part of my therapy, Dr. Warren required that I spend the moments before bed writing in a journal to put my head in the right place for conflict-free dreams. When I dreamed, it was like watching a movie where I played the reluctant star. Each night I tended to re-live the terrors of war, specifically the moments just before a homemade bomb had exploded. My unit had been holed away in what we’d thought was a safe house, but Pensacola had lost his legs and the rest of my team had lost their lives. The journal functioned like a Choose Your Own Adventure; writing a new ending to my story let me re-script what had happened out in the Afghanistan desert.
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