Bahan was quiet until she glanced up. “Sorry.” She gestured to the documents. “Guess I got caught up for a second.”
“I’ve opened a Pandora’s box for you, and McGee’s going to kick my ass when he finds out I did it when he wasn’t here.”
Jordan grinned and just to piss him off, clucked like a chicken. “Are you scared of Ty, Bahan?” she teased. “I had no idea.”
“I am
not
scared of him, but I don’t need your big ape of a boyfriend hacked off at me. I can’t very well shoot him, not without a crapload of paperwork.”
Jordan laughed. “He may be big, but he’s harmless.”
“To
you,
maybe. He’s obsessed with
you
, thinks
you
walk on water. I’m just the asshole that brought the folder that threw you into a tailspin.”
Insulted, she narrowed her eyes at him. “Thank you for your confidence in my mental stability.”
“I just think stepping back in time may not be as easy as you think.”
“I know.” She wanted to argue, say that she’d make it through this just fine. Yet truthfully, her stomach was already in knots. “You’re right. I’ve thought about little else since Bellows walked into my office last week and asked if my father could have been FBI. I’ve played the
what if
game a hundred or more times.”
She shrugged and picked up the picture of her father again. “It makes such perfect sense, you know. My dad was never a bad guy. Never abusive or mean. He loved us, I know he did. It pisses me off that I’m trained to look beyond the obvious lies on the surface, yet I was too messed up to dig deeper for my own dad. Part of me wants to hate myself for it, but I also know there’s a reason I blamed him. I mean, I asked questions. Even at ten years old, I had good bullshit radar. For some reason, everyone around me hid the truth. Now I need to know why.”
“Maybe
why
isn’t as important as knowing that your old man was a good guy. Couldn’t that be enough?”
She looked up at Bahan. This time she wanted—no, she
needed
—the truth. The real truth. “No, it isn’t enough. There was a very specific reason I was led to believe my dad was a drug dealer. I can’t take back all the years I hated him, but I can do this much for him.”
She flipped through a few more documents. “Who is this?”
Bahan took a mugshot from her hand. “He was the shooter.”
“No.” She took the photo back, studied it closer. “No, this isn’t him.”
“His name was Anton Linder. The reports state that the first responding officers caught this guy”—Bahan tapped the picture in her hand—“fleeing from your house. And there’s something else you should know. Linder had connections to a very powerful cartel. Care to take a guess as to which?”
No way. Jordan’s gaze locked on to Bahan’s. “Delago?”
“Bingo.”
Memories of her last case surfaced quickly, memories of being beaten nearly to death by a drug distributor for the Delago cartel. The low-grade churning in her gut kicked up another notch. “Jesus. Fate certainly has a way of fucking with you, doesn’t it?” She took a few deep breaths, determined to stay focused in front of Bahan. “I knew the Delago family was powerful and has been around for years, but . . .”
“But nothing. This is why I’d prefer you let me check into things before you go poking around. It’s going to take hours and hours to look through all the documents on that disk and piece everything together.” Bahan scrubbed his hands up and down his face. “I knew I shouldn’t have brought this to you today. Just
knew
I’d never be able to talk any sense into you.”
“I’m fine.” Bahan had a lot of power and connections; she couldn’t afford to lose his support now. “Look, I’m not stupid enough to think I can remain completely emotionless; it
was
my family. But I’ve got a handle on it and I won’t let my feelings interfere. I’ll treat this like any other case—gather facts and figure out what really happened. And whatever the truth turns out to be, I’m not going to let it affect my life right now.”
He studied her for a long moment, as if he didn’t believe anything she’d just said.
Finally, she pleaded her case one more time. “Believe it or not, the truth doesn’t make things harder. Knowing my dad was FBI, knowing he was doing the right thing . . . it helps. Someone murdered my family. That’s not ever going to change. But knowing who pulled the trigger, and understanding why . . . I think that’ll help, too.”
He nodded. “I want that closure for you, but only on one condition. If I say you’re done, you’re done.”
“Bossy, much?” Jordan smiled her agreement. Then she picked up the picture of the man identified as the shooter. “Let’s start here.” She shook her head. “This is not who shot my family.”
“According to the report, he is.” Bahan flipped through the stack of papers, pulled out a document, started giving Jordan a rundown. “The first cops to arrive saw that man, identified as Anton Linder, thirty-two, of St. Louis, run from your house, jump into a 1982 Ford Mercury, and flee the scene.”
Bahan handed her the report. “There were two cops. One got out of the cruiser and went into your house. The other followed the suspect a few miles until Linder crashed, killing himself. The gun used in the shootings was in the car with Linder. Ballistics matched. He had the murder weapon right next to him. His fingerprints were all over it.”
“I can’t help what the report says—something isn’t right.” With absolute certainty she knew Linder was
not
the man she had seen over and over in her dreams. “The man I saw was tall and thin, had long black hair, Native American features, and a big red scar that ran from his eye down to the bottom of his cheek. Time may dull a lot, but it’s never dulled what that son of a bitch looks like. I’d know him anywhere.”
Bahan leaned back in the chair and sighed. “I thought you said you didn’t actually see the shooter? That you were hiding in a closet while your mom, dad, and sister were killed?”
That was true. Technically, she didn’t see the shots fired on the night of the murders. But she’d seen the shooter very clearly in her dream. Every feature, every scar, every strand of hair, every cadence of his body. “I had a dream the night before the murders. That’s when I saw him.”
“You believe this”—Bahan held up the mugshot—“was
not
the guy who killed your family based on a dream you had over twenty years ago? You said you were going to try to be objective. Two different policemen stated that this guy ran from your house and jumped into a car. The bullets that killed your family match the gun they found sitting next to this guy. He was a local dealer working for the Delago family, notorious for being one of their lynch men. What conclusion would you draw from that?”
“It sounds like a slam dunk, I know. But no one besides me was there. They weren’t inside the house. They didn’t see.”
“Neither did you,” he accused. “You were hiding.”
This—the disbelief from others—was always going to accompany her gift. “How did I know the drug transfer was going to happen in Titus on our last case?”
He paused, conceding the point. “A dream. I get that.” Then he tilted his head back and shut his eyes briefly, as if channeling patience from some divine power. “I understand about your dreams, and I know how strongly you believe in them, but this is different.”
“Why? I was able to give you every last detail we needed to bust our last case wide open.”
Bahan said nothing.
“I wasn’t wrong then, and I don’t think I’m wrong now. Maybe there was more than one shooter. Maybe the guy I saw was there too and freaked when he heard sirens. He could have dropped the gun, and maybe the other guy grabbed it. I don’t know for sure, but I think these questions are worth asking.”
She fished through a few more documents. Found one from Saunders Funeral Home and Crematorium, which on the surface made sense.
Next she picked up a newspaper article about her family’s murder. It wove a bogus tale of a robbery gone wrong. So much for journalistic truth. She brought the picture next to the article closer to get a better look.
She recognized the man in the picture. Her dad’s brother Bill. Bill had refused to take her in after the murders, which was why
she
refused to acknowledge his existence to this day. He’d turned his back on her. The way she saw it, he hadn’t earned the right to be called uncle. Not then, and not now.
Even so, there was something other than her disdain for Bill that bugged her about the picture. “There shouldn’t be caskets if you cremate someone, right?”
Bahan shrugged. He was heavily engrossed in a different document. “I guess not. Probably depends on what the family wants. Why?”
“Because as fucked up as I was when all this was going on, I remember spreading my family’s ashes. Bill and I spread them in the lake my family loved to boat on. We didn’t have any other family. So what’s the deal with this funeral and the caskets? And listen to this, the article reads:
Robbery gone wrong in North St. Louis. Suspect dead.
“It wasn’t a robbery, it was a goddamned ambush. But this doesn’t say anything about the drug connection at all. Just that two adults and two children were murdered. But that’s not right. Only one child was killed. This doesn’t make any sense.”
Bahan’s knee was bobbing fast enough to shake all the papers on the table, he was so deeply in the zone. “I’ve got a bad feeling it makes perfect sense. I keep searching for a mention of you—what happened to you after the shooting, what was your statement—but there isn’t one. No mention of you surviving anywhere.”
Tossing down the document in his hand, Bahan pushed back from the table. “Let me ask you something. If you and I are brought in to clean up after something like this, what do we do with a traumatized little girl who may or may not have witnessed the violent murders of her family? How do we keep her safe from a drug cartel that’s going to want all loose ends dealt with?”
Jordan knew where he was going with his questions. “We make her disappear.” Jordan propped her elbows on the table, let her head rest in her hands, while her mind toyed with the idea that she’d been unwittingly put into some kind of witness protection program.
“They tried to change my name,” she finally murmured. The memory was vague, as most were from the year following her family’s death. Probably because they’d poked every anti-depressant and sleeping pill known to man down her throat. “They told me when you live with a foster family that you have to take the family name, but I never would.”
Bahan looked at her.
“My name was the only thing I had. I couldn’t give that up, too. Plus I have a birth certificate and a social security card. I think all the info is right.”
“Are they the same documents you’ve had since birth? Is the social security number you have now the same one you were born with? Or did it change about the time you were eleven?”
“I don’t know. How would I know that? I didn’t have my social security number memorized when I was ten.”
“Most ten-year-olds don’t.” Bahan sighed. “It looks to me like the authorities—probably the Feds your dad worked with—made a decision to let the world think you died that night, too. The shooter was dead. He wasn’t telling anyone he fucked up and only took out three people instead of four. It was a brilliant way to protect you, when you think about it.”
“So that’s why I went into foster care in Kansas City instead of St. Louis. They moved me to a different city, altered my documents, and bam, I’m a different Jordan Delany.”
“You’d have probably had a different name, too, if you hadn’t been such a little shit about it. It’s the best theory we’ve got.”
“So the funeral here was just for show? They buried four empty caskets just to protect me. That was a lot of trouble and expense to go through.”
Bahan went unusually silent. Which was never good. “Yeah,” he finally agreed. “Or maybe they actually did bury three people. And maybe the only empty casket was yours.”
Chapter 3
Ty and Isobel stepped into the foyer of Hailey King’s sorority house. Hailey’s two roommates were waiting with a police officer in the next room.
“You want to separate them?” Isobel asked.
“Yeah.” Ty glanced at the girls through the large archway. “You take the blonde somewhere else; I’ll interview the brunette here. Then we can compare notes.”
They walked into a large room that looked well-worn from years of parties. The two young women were huddled together on one of the three couches lining the walls.
Ty pulled an ottoman in front of them and sat. “Hi, ladies. I’m Officer Tyler McGee from the Longdale Police Department. This is Detective Isobel Riley from the Missouri Highway Patrol. We’re very sorry about your roommate. We’ll do everything in our power to catch whoever did this, but we need to ask you some questions.”
The girls nodded.
Ty glanced down at his notes. “Ashley, would you go with Detective Riley?” One girl stood and followed Isobel out of the room.
The other girl grabbed more tissues, ready to cry.
“It’s Gena, right?”
She nodded again.
“Hi, Gena. I know this is hard. Can you tell me what happened this morning?”
The girl blew her nose and then said, “Ashley and I had the alarm set for six. We were supposed to help out at a healthcare seminar today. It was for extra credit in one of our classes. Hailey was going too.”
She sniffled. “We’re all nursing students. When we got up, it didn’t look like Hailey had ever been home. She left some clothes and books on her bed last night when she left for the party. I didn’t think they’d been moved.” Gena shrugged, wiped her eyes again. “We figured she had too much to drink and just stayed at the frat house with David. We decided to go search for her so she didn’t get in trouble for being a no-show.”
“David?”
“David Benson is Hailey’s boyfriend. He’s a business student. They’ve been seeing each other for a while now.”
“Were they together last night?”
Gena nodded.
Ty noted the boy’s name. David Benson would need to be located. “How long?”
“Since we started school last August. They were pretty serious. She was nuts over him.”
“Was that normal? For Hailey to not come home?”
Tears rolled down Gena’s face. She shook her head. “No, not at all. I mean, she would come home late sometimes, way after Ash and I would be asleep. But she never spent the whole night with David. It’s kind of frowned upon. David has a roommate. It’s pretty tacky to hook up in a room when another guy is sleeping there. And Hailey was sort of . . . um . . . old-fashioned about those kind of things.”
“Old-fashioned meaning what?”
“Meaning she wouldn’t sleep around or hook up with random guys walking in and out of a frat room. She was just, sweet, you know? A good girl who got good grades and . . .”
Gena dropped her head in her hands and started sobbing. Ty sat quietly and let her cry. He knew what being on that side of the questions felt like.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, Gena. You’re doing a fantastic job. Do you need something to drink?”
Gena wiped the tears away with a tissue. “I’m okay.”
“Do you have any reason to believe her boyfriend would hurt her?”
“I can’t see it. David was always really protective of Hailey. Like I said, they were pretty crazy about each other. He walked her home every night. In fact, I looked out the window last night and saw him leaning against a tree watching the sorority house. I figured he was waiting for Hailey to get inside safely. I told Ashley I saw him, and that’s when we turned out the light. I just assumed Hailey was home safe.”
“You saw David outside the sorority house? What time was that?”
“I’m not sure exactly. One maybe. No, wait. Probably more one-thirty-ish. I’m not sure.”
“Are you positive it was him?”
“It’d be hard to confuse David with anyone else. He’s really tall and thin. And he’s got all this blond, bushy hair that sticks out from under that Cubs hat he always wears.” Gena shrugged. “Not too many guys look like David.”
“Did David ever seem overly protective? Jealous? Ever violent?”
“No. See, that’s why I don’t want to say stuff. He wasn’t like that at all. He was really cool about her hanging out with us.”
“Gena, you’re doing the right thing for Hailey. Everything you’re telling me helps me to catch who did this. I’m not looking for an easy person to blame. I’m looking for a killer. If you tell me Hailey’s boyfriend was a good guy who was concerned and understanding, that doesn’t paint him as someone who would hurt her. But I have to ask the questions, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you know where David is from? Where he grew up?”
Gena shook her head. “I know he has money. A lot of it. He gave Hailey a diamond necklace last week for their six-month anniversary. She hasn’t taken it off since.”
She didn’t have it on when they’d found her, Ty recalled. “Anyone else you know of who might have a personal grudge against her? Anyone bother her recently? Fight with her?”
The girl sat for a long moment without saying anything. Finally, she stared up at Ty. “She had a big fight with David last night.”
***
Ty stepped outside of Hailey King’s sorority house and waited for Isobel on the porch. Big houses with Greek letters lined a good portion of the street. In the distance, majestic old buildings made for a pretty campus as they spread over several city blocks.
His gloomy exhale hung in the cold morning air. It should have been a place where life was beginning, not ending.
He loved his job. Most days. Today wasn’t gonna be one of ’em. First he’d need to explain to a young woman’s family that their daughter had been murdered. Then shake up another family when he had to question the most logical suspect—Hailey’s boyfriend.
On top of it, he was tip-toeing through a sea of eggshells with Isobel, praying hard that the one night they’d had together wasn’t going to haunt the hell out of him. Technically, it had been more like ten minutes. Ten lousy minutes filled with a bad attitude, too much beer, and less than stellar sex.
And a whole bunch of remorse the second it was over.
He’d been well aware that Isobel was interested in more than a professional relationship. The problem was, he’d never been interested in having anything with her. He didn’t dislike her; she was cute and a pretty good cop. But whatever that spark was, the one you were supposed to feel when you sleep with someone, it had never been there.
Unfortunately, she’d unzipped his pants and rolled a condom on him before he was absolutely sure that he felt absolutely nothing. And that just seemed like piss-poor timing. His beer-hazed brain had reasoned that it might insult her more to stop than to politely part ways after.
In comparison, he remembered catching sight of Jordan for the first time—across a sea of drunks in a dirty, disgusting strip club—and feeling like someone had clamped jumper cables to his heart. Until then, he’d thought love at first sight was a damn dumb thing to believe in.
His stomach gave a queasy jerk. Probably the candy bar he had for breakfast. Or the guilty fear that somehow the ten minutes he spent with Isobel was going to wreak havoc with the lifetime he intended to spend with Jordan.
And his fear would come to fruition unless he could close this case in record time and keep the women from ever coming face to face.
“Done already?” Isobel asked, stepping out onto the porch of the sorority house.
“Been done for a few minutes. What took you so long?”
“I like to be thorough the first time around.”
“I was thorough.”
“I’ll bet you lunch that I got more info than you did.”
Ty nodded. “Okay. Shoot.”
Isobel proceeded to run down the same information he’d just gotten.
“That’s you’re thorough investigation? I got that much.”
Isobel held up a finger. “Excuse me, I’m not done. Hailey was at a mixer last night. It was Hailey’s sorority and her boyfriend’s, David Benson’s, frat house. Apparently they had a big fight.” She shot him a cocky grin.
“You’ve got nothing lunch worthy.” Ty laughed at her superior smile.
“Do you know why they were fighting?” she asked.
Ty folded his arms. Sighed. “No. But I intend to find out as soon as I can get to the boyfriend.”
“They fought because Hailey was a virgin. It was the six-month anniversary of their first kiss last night, and Hailey had told David she would sleep with him. Turns out she got cold feet because they were in a crowded frat house. But both of them had plenty to drink.”
“You got Ashley to spill all that?”
“It’s called being thorough.” Isobel’s smile was triumphant now. “Not only that, but David got a little hotheaded and stormed away. I guess they had words loud enough that several people heard. Then Ashley heard the story first-hand again when Hailey cried on her shoulder last night. And although Hailey was pissed because David went to the basement of the frat house and played poker with some buddies, basically ignoring her the rest of the night, she still stayed when Ashley and Gena left. I guess hoping to make up with David.”
“So we’ve got a wealthy, angry, drunk boyfriend who was promised sex but then got denied.” Ty crammed his hands into his coat pockets. “Okay, I guess that’s worthy of lunch. See if you can run down priors for David Benson. Gena said she saw him hanging around outside the sorority house last night right about the time Hailey was murdered. We need to know why. I’m going to make a few phone calls before we talk to him. I want to know where he’s from and where he went to high school. And if he so much as got into a fist fight in high school, I want to know about that, too. We’ll play it by ear from there.”
“Anything you say, slick.” Issy winked, and Ty’s stomach did the queasy-jerk one more time.
“Let’s head to the frat house and find Benson,” he said. “And get this case over with pronto,” he added when she was well out of earshot.
***
Ty followed Isobel’s car to David Benson’s frat house.
“Benson is squeaky clean as far as I can tell,” Isobel said as they compared notes and slowly strolled down the walk to the front door. “But do you know who his dad is?”
Ty glanced at Isobel. “Yeah. Doyle Benson. Real estate developer.”
“Fucking rich real estate developer. You better make damn sure you advise Benson of his rights before you question him.”
Ty stopped and turned toward her. “I’m not questioning anyone as a suspect yet. I’m only gathering info from witnesses.”
Isobel arched a brow. “You keep telling yourself that.”
“You want to walk away, not talk to him because his dad has money?” he asked.
“No, I want to make sure anything he says sticks. He could turn out to be more than a witness. It’s a gray area, and you know it.”
“All I know is that if I didn’t talk to the people who were with her last, I wouldn’t be doing my job.” Ty pounded a fist on the door of the frat house. “Nothing gray about it.”
A young guy—bleary-eyed and classically hung over—opened the door. Ty announced himself and Isobel, they flashed their badges, and Ty told the kid he needed to speak with David Benson.
Saturday morning in a frat house looked like someone had put a little C4 inside a keg the night before. But to their credit, guys were cleaning up. Probably so they could do it all over again tonight.
“Derek, is Benson in his room?” the young guy shouted.
“I’m not his fucking keeper—oh.” The kid who walked into the room flushed ten shades of red when he saw Ty with his badge.
“Keeper or not, one of you needs to find him. Or I’ll start a search inside your house, here, that will probably turn up a whole lot of trouble for every member of Phi Beta Dickheads, or whatever you call yourselves.”
Isobel snickered when the two guys scrambled up the stairs. “I remember that about you, your way with words.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve learned these young cocky guys speak only asshole. You’d do well to remember it, too.”
One of the frat guys returned. “We think he’s still in the basement. Probably asleep. They were playing poker until early this morning. It’s through that door.”
Ty nodded and then headed down the creaky wooden staircase with Isobel behind him. He flipped every light switch he came across.
“Turn the lights off, fucker, we’re trying to sleep.”
Ty wasn’t sure which one of the young guys spoke. He looked around, counted five hungover bodies splayed out on various pieces of old and nasty furniture. An open bag of marijuana sat in full view.
“Disgusting. It stinks down here,” Isobel murmured. “And it’s going to take us forever to wake these assholes up and figure out which one is Benson.”
“Nope, I don’t have that kind of time.” Ty decided to give them a wake-up call they would never forget. He pulled his gun from the holster. “Cover the stairs and aim at any asshole who moves. Make the show a good one.”