Brooding City: Brooding City Series Book 1 (2 page)

“Where did you
go on Friday?”

Ellie’s voice startled Jeremy out of his daydreaming. It had rained for the better part of the past two days, and he was going stir-crazy in the house with only his kid sister around as company. She was on the cusp of being a teenager, yet Ellie still acted like a girl half her age. It could be cute and endearing sometimes, but only in small doses.

Everything in moderation
.

Jeremy rubbed at his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t play stupid,” she said, small hands on her hips. “You snuck out after Mom fell asleep. Where did you run off to?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, and you can’t prove otherwise.”

Ellie bit her lower lip and frowned at him. “I’m almost thirteen,” she said proudly. “You don’t have to treat me like a child.”

Ah, so today she’s being mature. I wonder how long that will last.
Jeremy sighed. “I’m not trying to patronize you. I just don’t want you tattling on me again to Mom or Dad.”

She moved a finger across her chest. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Stick a needle in your eye?”

“Hmm.” She considered it for a long moment. “No, not that far. I hate needles.”

Jeremy weighed his options. There was always the risk that Ellie would break her promise and run her mouth off like she usually did. However, if he kept her in the dark, she could simply run to their father and say that Jeremy was keeping a secret from her. An indirect tattle, but with the same end result. Telling her outright at least had the added benefit of some peace and quiet from her incessant questioning.

“I went to the Tower.”

Ellie wrinkled her nose. “That place is dirty and old. Why would you want to go there?”

Because being cooped up in here with you is driving me crazy.
“It’s the coolest thing we’ve seen since coming out here,” he said instead. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about what’s out there?”

“Mom said we’re supposed to stay close to the house.” She reported the cardinal rule with an adopted voice of authority. It was a voice he had heard before, and one which signaled that she might flip on her vow of secrecy.

“Look at me,” Jeremy said. “Do I look hurt? Everything is fine, I promise.”

She still appeared unconvinced.

Jeremy frowned and looked directly into her eyes. “If I promise not to go back there, will you promise not to tell Mom and Dad?”

Ellie chewed her lip for a few seconds before nodding.

“I promise to stay away from the Tower,” he said solemnly. He felt bad lying to his sister, but it was the only way to make her keep quiet. Besides, he was still mostly being honest with her. The Tower wasn’t dangerous, and it
was
the most interesting thing they had seen in the valley.

“Good,” Ellie said, nodding again. “Do you know when Mom is getting back today?”

“No idea.”

Even though the two of them were home for the summer, their parents still had busy work schedules that kept them in Odols. While his mother was able to return to the valley ranch most nights—whenever she wasn’t staying late to host some fundraiser she’d organized—Jeremy’s father typically stayed in their large city apartment except for the odd weekend visit. This hadn’t been one of those weekends.

Ellie hid a yawn behind her hand and stood unsteadily, her long, black hair wafting silkily in her wake. “I’m going to go take a nap.”

“Don’t let the Sleepers get you,” Jeremy teased, a grin tugging at his lips.

In an instant, Ellie became her much younger self. “I’ve been a good girl,” she said, her voice childish and sweet. “They won’t come for me.”

“Good girls keep promises.”

She nodded sleepily. “Cross my heart,” she repeated, “and hope to die.”

Jeremy watched her until she rounded the corner, then listened attentively. Once he heard her door shut, he sprung up from his seat by the window and retrieved a small pack that he had secreted away beneath the cushion. Inside was enough food for the trip to and from the Tower, plus an umbrella, in case the rain decided to start again. He wrote a note to Ellie, telling her that he had gone to roam around the orchards and read, and left it on the kitchen table for her to find.

Jeremy opened the door and squinted. The clouds had parted, and sunlight shone from a light-blue sky above. His mood was greatly improved by the change in weather, and he was upbeat about returning to the Tower during the full light of day. He set off boldly, eager to start the hike that would take several hours, and he followed the southward trail away from the ranch.

Driving in the
city was never enjoyable.

Traffic was a nightmare, any given hour of the day. Taxis were belligerent, swerving madly in and out of spaces just wide enough to squeeze by if they suspend any sense of self-preservation. Pedestrians walked out in the street whenever they liked, crosswalk or not, and the sidewalks were more like temporary auxiliary lanes for cars.

The OST was hardly a better option. Odols Shuttle Transit wound in a wagon wheel circuit beneath the city, leading to all the different sectors in the fastest way possible. It was the preferred mode of transportation for many in the city, which was precisely why it had become as dirty and crowded as the streets above.

Brennan, having worked in the city for years, was aware of all this. Most of his social life took place within one shuttle stop of the police headquarters. He lived in an apartment less than a block from the station, and the diner which he and Detective Bishop were now sitting in was one of his local favorites. The walk was a short but healthy addition to the day.

Especially for an aging detective subsisting on stale donuts and coffee.

The Box Car Diner had the typical morning crowd. Coffee drinkers at the counter chatting up the head waitress. A pair of blue-collar workers grabbing a quick breakfast before work. There was a family of four in the corner. The children eagerly scribbled on the backs of their menus with crayons.

Bishop was still irritated from before, though the walk had released some of her tension. Her need for food was also a mitigating factor, and Brennan knew it would soon be a non-issue. It was hard to be angry on a full stomach.

“How are you doing?”

Bishop looked up at him with tired eyes. “How do you mean?”

“I mean with everything that happened between you and Sam.”

“Sam and I aren’t anything anymore. I just wish he’d stay out of my life.”

“He’s my friend, Noel.” Brennan sighed. “Look, I’m not asking you two to get back together—”

“Lord knows that’ll never happen,” Bishop muttered.

“—but there must be some way you can bury the hatchet. Call a truce. What happened, happened, and we can’t go back and change it.”

“Nobody’s asking you to do anything, Brennan. You aren’t a part of this.”

He held his hands up. “Sorry, poor choice of words.
You
can’t change the past, is what I’m saying. But he’s my friend, and he used to mean something to you, too. And we both know he’s damn good at his job.”

“I’m damn good at
my
job, too,” she said, her voice hard. “And I don’t appreciate you treating me the same way he does. You’re my partner, Brennan. We’re supposed to trust each other, but that’s hard to do when you act like a jackass.”

“Bishop,” he said, stunned. “I was just joking, I didn’t mean—”

“What was in that folder he gave you?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

Bishop shifted and crossed her arms, her eyes resolute. “Well, your jokes aren’t funny, and I don’t want to talk about it, so we might as well work the case. What did he find out?”

Brennan looked at her for a moment, his own eyes hard. A few years his senior, Noel was a tough nut to crack. She was resilient, but some wounds took more time to heal, and adultery was one hell of a wound. Nothing he could say right then would sway her, and he knew that particular conversation was over. For now.

He took the manila folder from the seat and opened it on the table so Bishop could read. Her eyes scanned each page as she cycled through them, picking out relevant details.

“You had him look into Zachariah’s financial history? Why? We know what he makes, he’s just a part-time pharmacist.”

“Right,” Brennan said. “But did you look at where he was living? He had some things even I couldn’t afford.”

Bishop raised an eyebrow. “We don’t make much.”

“True enough. This kid is fresh out of college, though. He should be worrying about student loans and making enough money just to keep the heat on.”

“The neighborhood was pretty bad. Maybe he took a cheap home in exchange for having his luxuries inside?”

“That could—”

Their food arrived, and Brennan pushed the folder toward the window so the plates could be set down. Sausage links, hash browns, two buttermilk biscuits, a Belgian waffle, and a glass of O.J. for Brennan. Coffee and a plate of “short stack” pancakes were placed before Bishop. Brennan thought of making a height joke, but wisely reconsidered.

“That could be true,” he continued, cutting into his food. “What does it say about relatives?”

“Relatives?”

“He could be a trust fund baby,” he said, shoving a piece of sausage into his mouth.

“Your parents secretly run a trust fund, don’t they?” Bishop asked jokingly. She took a bite of her pancakes as she reached for the folder.

“Did everything come out all right here?” asked the waitress, suddenly reappearing. Brennan gave her what he meant to be an appreciative nod. “Great! I’ll check back with you in a bit.”

Papers rustled in Bishop’s hands as she looked past Zachariah’s financials and into his family history. “Says here that his parents are both living in Michigan, some small town in the middle of nowhere. They haven’t had contact in years, so it’s doubtful they’re the ones supporting him.”

Brennan grunted. It was puzzling, but it was also a dead end. “Let’s put that aside for now,” he said. “The motive: what was it? Cut a man up like that, that’s personal. Bad blood between Nettle and our killer, that’s for sure.”

“He didn’t even have time to stand,” Bishop added. “The killer planned this out.”

They both sat chewing their food noiselessly, thinking of the implications. It could have been a relationship gone wrong, like Bishop and McCarthy’s, with the girlfriend turning into some sort of femme fatale. Another possibility was that Zachariah had somehow gotten himself into trouble, maybe borrowed money from the wrong people to pay off his loans and couldn’t repay those debts. He did live in a rough neighborhood, after all. Or maybe they were completely off-base and it was a robbery gone wrong. The fact that Nettle had been caught off guard could just be a coincidence. The kinds of toys Zachariah had kept in that apartment were worth a small fortune. But none of it had gone missing, so—

“Might I interest either of you in some coffee?” asked a sweet voice. The waitress had returned.

Without raising an eye or turning her head, Bishop casually reached up and adjusted the strap of her shoulder holster. The butt of her gun just barely showed through the unzipped opening in her jacket. There was nothing overtly threatening in the gesture, but the waitress visibly gulped and took a step back.

“The bill is ready whenever you need it,” she said hesitantly. She backed away quickly. “Thanks for coming in.”

“Don’t you think that was a little cruel?” Brennan asked.

“No harm done,” Bishop murmured into her coffee. She looked toward the retreating waitress and smiled. It looked more like she was baring her teeth.

“You’re insane,” he told her, chuckling.

“We all have our flaws. So I’ve been thinking—and don’t you dare say ‘That’s a nice change’ or I will brain you,” she threatened as Brennan opened his mouth. “I’ve been thinking that maybe someone knew who would want to hurt Nettle. His parents are estranged, but somebody who worked with him at the pharmacy could know something.”

Brennan nodded. “Good thinking. Need me to come along?”

“No, I can handle it.” She looked up at Brennan, taking in his lined face and sunken eyes. “Maybe you should head back home, get a few hours of sleep,” she suggested. “You look like death.”

“Death wished it looked this good.” Brennan grinned, standing from the table.

“Oh, shut up. Go get the bill from our waitress.” She smiled fiercely. “I think I’ve frightened her.”

Jeremy regretted not
bringing a hat.

The storm clouds were a distant memory, and the sun beat down mercilessly upon his head. The blond atop his head reflected some of the light, and he was certainly better off than Ellie would have been with her curtains of raven-black hair, but his cheeks felt hot and his mouth had dried up entirely.

He had forgotten to change into pants before setting out for the Tower. While he was thankful for the breeze that blew against his bare legs, each step through the switchgrass left long, thin scratches on the exposed skin. Now, in addition to the accumulating cuts, Jeremy had to contend with impending dehydration.

The walk was longer than he realized, and he arrived at the Tower later than he would have liked. He jumped into and out of the moat with relative ease, his shoes breaking through the crust of dried mud at the bottom. He was grateful for the cool shelter provided by the shadowy interior of the largest building the fort had to offer. His heart pounded in his ears as he looked around the Tower from the inside for the first time.

The doorway opened into a large, circular chamber. As his eyes adjusted, Jeremy noticed that light actually filtered down into the room through the broken ceiling above. Dominating the center of the room was a massive stone table, square and imposing. It was a solid slab that merged seamlessly with the ground, as if it and the Tower had been hewn from the rock of the mountain itself.

Along one edge of the room was a short series of steps, also solid stone, which seemed to end abruptly as they met the wall. Jeremy walked closer and felt against the wall, looking for a pressure plate or hidden mechanism that might open a secret door, but his fingers only met cold, smooth stone. He flattened his palms against the wall and leaned his whole body into it, but the wall was unyielding. If there was a door, he couldn’t open it.

He turned away, dejected, and noticed a strange series of deep, rectangular furrows that ascended a narrow strip of the wall. It took him a moment to recognize that the width and spacing formed a ladder leading up to the next floor. He crossed the room to it. His fingers fit easily in the smooth, regular openings made for a man’s hands, and he climbed up and onto the most curious platform he had ever seen.

The light below had not, as he had thought, been filtering through breaks in the floor. The openings looked as regularly spaced and carved as the ladder had been and, taken altogether, the floor resembled a bicycle wheel, with a solid circular center. The ladder emerged between two of the wheel’s spokes.

At the end of each spoke was a tall, curved window, five in total, though he didn’t remember seeing the windows from outside. Each window had an embedded shape of stained glass, each one a unique image pulled from nature. Otherwise, the room was empty.

A light tremor passed through the stone, almost undetectable. Jeremy briefly considered leaving, worried that the building might come down around him as the other had, but the shaking stopped almost as soon as he felt it.

Jeremy tiptoed along his spoke until he had reached the center, and there he crouched, one knee resting against the stone. The building was old,
older
than old, and he couldn’t be sure that this floor was as secure as it seemed. His shins were caked with dust as he kneeled.

Patiently, he waited, and minutes crept by with nothing happening. The stone didn’t shift or crumble beneath him; nothing extraordinary unfolded. He sighed out a breath of relief. And disappointment.

What was I expecting?

“I should have climbed back down the ladder,” he said to no one, shaking his head. “Stupid.”

He stood again, feeling slightly foolish, and started walking back to the stone-etched ladder when a glimmer of light flashed in the corner of his eye. He glanced around, caught it again in his other eye, and turned to squarely face one of the windows—its stained-glass imprint looked like a puddle surrounded by sticks. Through the clear glass around it, light shimmered off something in the distance, and as he approached he could make out a ring of trees around a shimmering lake that looked almost black from so far away.

Something pulled at the edge of his awareness, grabbing for his attention, but he waved it off. It was almost mid-afternoon, and he could still make it home before sundown if he left now. Still, he could look out the other windows, just once, before he started the long walk home. He returned to the center and chose the next spoke to the right. Clockwise, he went to each window, and he saw in turn an orchard of fuzzy peach trees, a huge collection of flowers, and the familiar wild, open fields of the valley.

He walked confidently along the final spoke and looked out into a veritable blizzard of white flower petals. The ground was completely covered in them, and a flurry of the petals danced in the wind, obscuring much of the view.

No,
he thought,
that’s…
snow. There was
snow
, right here before his eyes.

He took a step back. This was summer; there was no snow in the valley.

Another step and, unaware of his surroundings, Jeremy’s foot slipped over the edge of the spoke and robbed him of his balance. He had enough time to realize that
his
orchards had pears, not peaches, before slamming his head against a neighboring spoke and plummeting to the stone floor below.