Set in Stone Page 6

  “Which dream was it?”

  I look over at her. “The ice.”

  She nods. “The one where you never get to shore.”

  So, my demons are at least consistent across timelines in their torment.

  “Go back to sleep,” I say and roll over and kiss her cheek. Then I get up because my body is edgy and rattled. And, frankly, I’d like to do something more than sleep in my bed, but Eve looks wrung out.

  And we’re in her parents’ home, right?

  So, I get up and pull on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and head downstairs in search of coffee.

  I’m quiet, and I make a pot of French press, then take my cup out to the family room, standing at the big picture window.

  The wreckage of last night’s storm litters the formerly manicured lawn. Hosta leaves shredded and cast about the yard, twigs down from the arching cottonwood beside the house, and froth from the lake edging the tattered beach. The dock looks intact, however, the boat up from the water.

  Overhead, the sunrise bleeds deep burnt orange over the lake and lighting the sky in an array of light blue, deep orange and fiery red.

  Breathtaking, really.

  “It’s always a sort of miracle to me how beautiful the sunrise is after a storm.” Bets comes up beside me, a sweater wrapped around her, her reddish-blonde hair pulled back in a handkerchief. “It’s like the chaos of the night congeals to form this beautiful fresh start.”

  That’s what I need. A fresh start out of all this clutter.

  The sense that it’s not in vain.

  “I can still remember waking up after surgery. I was hurting and scared and confused—and then I saw Danny’s face. He was standing there, just broken. He’d been crying—he never cries, but…he was scared, I guess.”

  We were all scared. I don’t tell her that the first time around, Danny was the one that was shot. It doesn’t matter anymore, really.

  “Funny thing was, I was always afraid of Danny getting a bullet through him on the job. The last thing I thought was that I’d get shot.”

  Um, and that’s my fault, too, if we’re honest. I take a sip of my coffee. It’s hot and bracing and exactly what my bones need.

  Everybody lived. That’s what’s important.

  “And I realized I’d lived my entire life afraid of what-ifs. But the what-if had just happened, and I came out the other side. And yes, it hurt, and I’m so glad it wasn’t Danny who was shot, but…each day is a gift, right? And if I live in fear of the what-ifs, it just leaches the happiness out of what I do have.”

  She has poured herself a cup of coffee and now takes a sip. Watches the sun as it turns the lake to crimson. “There will always be storms, Rem. But we can’t live in fear of them. We weather them. We get stronger. And then we get back up and go on in the beauty of a new sunrise.”

  I don’t know. “So much meaningless destruction.”

  I guess I say that out loud because she pats my arm. “Is it, though? Because my starter is ready and I’m making sourdough pancakes.”

  She winks and heads to the kitchen, and I hear banging behind me, the clatter of pots and pans.

  Danny appears in a moment, grabbing a cup of coffee, putting on fresh water for another batch and joins me in the family room, holding his phone. “Looks like a tornado touched down southwest of here, in a town about sixty miles away.” He looks up at me. “I guess it could always be worse.”

  Huh. And that’s when Eve comes down the stairs. She’s wearing yoga pants, one of my old T-shirts, her hair down and kinky and when she looks at me, a soft smile on her lips, I know I should have stayed in bed.

  But yes, Danny, it could have been much worse.

  Bets is plating pancakes, and the smell of bacon rises in the air. Eve steals a piece, as the front door opens and in walks Sams, Eve’s brother.

  Sams is a real estate developer, but in his early days, he was a remodeler. He’s tall with golden blond hair and wide-shoulders, and he grins at me like we don’t have a past.

  Hmm. Maybe in this world, we don’t.

  “I hear you guys might have a job for me.” He also steals a piece of bacon. He gives Eve a one-armed hug, code for, I’m glad you’re all right.

  “Maybe I’ll finally get that kitchen I’ve always wanted,” she says.

  I know it’s a jab but I gave her that kitchen once-upon-a time.

  And, apparently, I will again.

  Maybe Bets is right. If I live in fear of the what-ifs, it just leaches the happiness out of what I do have.

  Bets serves me up a plate of pancakes, sizzling bacon and a glass of orange juice on her counter. “Come eat, Rem.”

  Such a simple statement, but that’s it, isn’t it? I slide onto the counter chair feeling oddly like I’m climbing out of the clutter into a new day.

  Maybe fate is done wrestling with me.

  Maybe it’s time to let go.

  I pour syrup over the pancakes, pick up my knife and I’m about to dig in when my cell phone vibrates in my jeans pocket. I fish it out and look at the screen. Frankie Dale. Her name is plugged into my contacts.

  Huh. “Rembrandt here.”

  A breath on the other end of the line, a gulp and I put down my fork. “What’s going on?”

  “Rem, it’s…it’s Zeke.”

  I recognize her voice from yesterday, maybe, but I’m scrambling to put pieces together. Zeke knows Booker’s daughter?

  I still can’t believe Booker has a daughter.

  And I’m in the game. “Frankie, take a breath. What’s going on?”

  She seems to respond, her breaths evening out. “Zeke was shot.”

  “What? When?”

  “This morning. Early. He was…he was coming home and someone was waiting for him, they think. He was shot just as he was getting out of his car.”

  His Porsche.

  And a fist forms in my gut. Because you know what I said.

  He reminds me of me.

  And if he reminds me of me…maybe he reminds someone else of me, right?

  Maybe not, but I’ve lost my appetite. “We’re on our way.”

  The clutter is gone from my mind.

  I’m on the job.

  7

  This is personal. I know that sounds crazy, but fate and I are in a war, and I don’t know about you, but to me, it feels like fate is up on the scoreboard.

  Maybe it will win, but now I’m hot, laser focused and ready to launch myself back into the game.

  I’m standing in Zeke’s hospital room, my arms folded as he recounts his story to me and Eve. The morning has cleared to a blue sky, and crews are out on the streets cleaning up.

  We dropped Sams off at the house on the way to the hospital, and he’s going to meet the insurance investigator there, take a look at the foundation.

  It looked worse in the morning, a woman the day after, her makeup smudged, her dress askew, trying to hide in the morning light. The garage and half the house are blackened, the rest smoke damaged. The tree lays across it, broken into pieces, a wounded villain.

  Sorry, old tree. Somehow, I can’t escape the idea that this is my fault.

  Again.

  I’m hoping we don’t have to raze the house to the ground, but frankly, if that’s what we have to do to rebuild my life, I’m ready.

  Raze it all to the ground and start over.

  “So where were you so early in the morning?” I say to Zeke, not quite clear on that part. “The gym?”

  Frankie looks at me. Her eyes are puffy and red, like she’s been crying. Her brown hair is down and long and she’s wearing a pair of exercise pants, jogging shoes and a T-shirt.

  I’m a jerk for the way I treated her in my office, but I can’t exactly say why, so I smile at her.

  No wonder I recognized her. She has Booker’s dark, intelligent eyes, his nose, his wide mouth. Fact is, the reporter is a younger, female spitting image of him. She has his fiber, too, because her eyes hold no apology as she says, “My house.”

>   Oh, I see. She’s holding Zeke’s hand, her thumb running over his. It feels oddly familiar to see them together like this, and the strangest flash of memory kicks in.

  Me, at the hospital, Eve by my bedside, her hand in mine. And where and when it happened, I’m not sure, but I have a feeling it’s from my stab wound, back when I took down Ramses.

  Weird that those memories, the ones I don’t remember living, are embedded inside me, as if part of my soul.

  Meggie Fox called my time travel a type of chronothesis, a projection of myself back into my memories.

  It’s possible the new memories I created are merging with the old, maybe even overwriting them.

  I will refuse to panic, but even as I think it, I try to conjure up a memory of Ashley. My Ash, with the long blonde braids. She smiles back at me, her blue eyes bright and a wash of relief slips through me.

  We’re okay. She’s still there.

  “You see the person who shot you?” I ask Zeke, without comment on Frankie’s answer.

  Zeke looks rough. He’s been shot in the shoulder, the bullet breaking his collarbone, just missing his lung.

  Lucky.

  But when he fell, he broke his nose, and, like he’s the loser of a brawl, his nose is purple, his eyes puffy with blood.

  “Not really. It happened so fast. I had just parked my car and was walking behind it to my place when a car pulled up and someone just shot me. No hesitation, as if he knew what he was doing.”

  “You don’t remember—”

  “I was looking at my phone.”

  Right. No one looks out at the world anymore. A whole generation with their noses buried in the internet.

  “Okay, take a breath. I’m just trying to think of who might want to hurt you. What cases are you working?”

  He lifts his good shoulder, then winces. “The Jackson case, mostly. I’ve been working Hollie Larue’s murder—tracking down witnesses, talking to her friends.”

  “Anything else?” I ask.

  “Just…I guess looking into the bombing, you know.”

  Of my Porsche. “Malakov’s gang.”

  “You think this could be an attack?” Eve asks. She didn’t pack work clothes and is wearing a T-shirt and jeans. Her hair is up, however, her black-rimmed glasses perched on her nose.

  I’ve never seen them before—she had Lasik surgery years ago. I find the glasses quite fetching.

  Her gaze on me, not so much. “I don’t know, Eve.”

  She winds her hands around her waist. “Silas and his team are at the scene. We’ll know more when they’re finished.”

  There’s at least one more person they haven’t mentioned. “What about Ramses Vega?”

  Zeke shakes his head. “I’ve been rolling by his house every day, just like you asked. I think I would have recognized him.” He sighs. “Or maybe not. I just remember the shooter wore a baseball cap, and a pair of sunglasses, and he shot me with his left hand.”

  His left hand. That’s interesting.

  Maybe Eve thinks so too because she’s frowning. “I can check his files. Sometimes they list it, sometimes they don’t.”

  “I’ll make this easy and ask Mayor Vega.” I reach for my phone but Eve touches my arm.

  “Maybe let me. The last thing you need is for Vega to hate you more.”

  I sigh, but maybe she’s right.

  Besides, in my gut, I don’t think it was Vega, do you?

  Malakov’s gang, maybe, but even that doesn’t feel right.

  I know exactly what happened, and it fills me like a poison.

  “What about Fitzgerald?” I ask, and I keep my voice casual, not at all like a grenade.

  It doesn’t work. “You think Leo Fitzgerald could have done this?” Frankie says, her eyes widening. “Because Zeke got too close?”

  “It doesn’t fit his MO,” Eve says, but she looks at me and I wonder if she’s remembering what Gunter said. “He’s made this personal.”

  Maybe he thought Zeke was me. In fact, I’m nearly sure of it.

  “Why haven’t we caught this guy?” My voice comes out more like a growl and I walk to the window, staring out at the skyline. “How is it that Leo Fitzgerald has eluded us for over twenty years?”

  There’s silence behind me, and when I turn, no one is looking at me. “Really? With all we have on this guy? His address? His DNA? His MO. His tattoo?”

  I turn to Eve. “I even have a picture of the guy, from the photo you grabbed from Midtown Ink.”

  In case you’re wondering, Fitzgerald is over six feet, bearded, hair clipped short, a tattoo on his upper forearm. The tat is of two hands, gripping each other, wrapped in barbed wire that also encircles the upper arm. The word BRO is inked on a ribbon that winds through the art.

  We got his ink from the photo of a partial tattoo caught by a parking garage camera after we found victim twenty-two. It’s what I used to track down Leo, twenty-four years prior, in Montrose.

  Where we had our little scuffle.

  “Good memory,” Eve says.

  “Did we ever talk to his buddies? The guys from the Big Red One, first infantry? From Desert Storm?”

  “Yes. No one has seen him for years,” Zeke says.

  “And, we don’t have his address, Rem,” Eve says quietly.

  I stare at her. But maybe not—after all, the only address I remember is the one involved in Booker’s ambush.

  Which, in this timeline, never happened.

  Unfortunately, I didn’t memorize it, not realizing I needed it.

  Believing I could change time.

  I sigh. “What about his military records?”

  “His mother had a place here, but she sold it years ago.”

  Perfect.

  “So, the guy is in the wind, and we have nothing?”

  Eve lifts her shoulder.

  I meet her eyes. “Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but I need you to trust me.”

  She nods.

  “I need you to pull the files of the people who survived the CityPerk bombing back in 1997.”

  She frowns. “Rem, what do you mean survived? We all survived. You stopped it.”

  * * *

  “I meant witnessed the attempted attack.” I meet her gaze. “I realize it’s out of your purview, but I need help.”

  “Okay,” she says quietly.

  “I need to know if Leo Fitzgerald was one of the people in the coffee shop that day. If he was, the report should have a home address for him. We can start there.”

  She’s still frowning. “Is this one of your crazy hunches?”

  “It’s not crazy if it works.” I get up. “We’re going to build a fresh profile for this guy. We’re going to start by looking at every single victim. Figure out what they have in common. It’s not about motive, means, and opportunity anymore. We’re looking at what happened and asking why it happened this way. We’re going to get inside his head and figure out how this guy hunts.”

  My word hunt has shut down the room, but like I said, the clutter is gone.

  If I’m stuck here, I’m going to find Leo Fitzgerald in the here and now.

  I turn to Frankie. “I want you to write down everything I tell you. And then publish it in tomorrow’s paper.”

  “Is this an exclusive?”

  “From the chief of police, yes.”

  She is smiling and digs out her phone. “Can I tape you?”

  “You bet. Let’s start with this. There’s a killer out there. And he’s targeting women between the ages of eighteen and thirty, people who work in the service industry—waitresses, bartenders, working girls. Our best guess is that he waits for his victims after work, follows them and runs them down. Then he strangles them.”

  Frankie’s eyes are wide, and I realize I’ve scared her. So, I add, “I’m telling every woman who works in one of these professions to not travel alone, not close up late by themselves, to carry pepper spray and if you’re afraid, call the police and ask for an escort.”


  “What does he look like?”

  I give her the description I know.

  She looks at me. “Do you think this will help?”

  Zeke takes her hand. “It’s okay. Rem will capture him.” Then he grins at me.

  Eve’s right. It’s exactly how I used to look at John Booker.

  Frankie stops the recording. “You remind me a little of John when you get like this. He would get this look in his eye when he was onto something…” She rubs her thumb over the phone. “It’s one of my most vivid memories of him.”

  I can’t help it. “Frankie, I’m so sorry, I can’t remember. How old were you when John died?”

  “I was six.”

  Wow. But I’m still confused. “I don’t understand. Why do you call him John, and not—”

  “Dad?”

  I raise a shoulder, and I can feel Eve’s eyes on me, as if we’ve had this conversation, but I’m going to ignore her.

  “Because my dad was Henry Dale, the man who raised me. John Booker was…well, my mom and he probably should have never gotten married. They both admit that. But he was a good man. Supported me, came around a lot. I thought of him more as an uncle than a father. He loved me, though.”

  I wish with everything inside me, I could remember Frankie in John’s life. And how it’s possible he had a daughter I didn’t know about.

  See, he’s in the past, mucking it all up.

  “Did he…” It’s a long shot, I know, but, “Did John leave you his watch?”

  She frowns, then shakes her head. “I think he might have been buried with it.”

  The words are dropped so casually, but they have the effect of a bomb exploding in my brain. Booker was buried with the watch.

  I want to press my hand to my chest, to see if my heart is still beating.

  A knock sounds at the door and Burke pokes his head in. “Hey. I heard you were taking up bed space here,” he says to Zeke.

  Zeke grins, although it’s more of a twisted grimace given his injuries. Burke walks in and he’s carrying a cup of coffee. “We’re on our way home, but I thought I’d stop by.”

  “How’s Shelby?” Eve asks.

  “Tired, but good.”

  “And Daphne?”