Detective Jack Stratton Box Set Page 6

  Jack unfolded the scrap of paper. On it was written in a delicate script: CHECK THE STOVE. TY FOR HELPING.

  No signature.

  He still didn’t remember her real name.

  Check the stove? What the hell does that mean?

  He floored it and broke the speed limit all the way home.

  7

  Perpetually Weird

  Jack stood in the hallway and let the door of his apartment swing open. He was relieved not to smell gas. Still, he wasn’t going to risk switching anything on. The hallway light and windows gave him enough light to see.

  And it was quite a scene. Someone had ransacked the apartment—or that’s what it looked like at first. Then he noticed a pattern to the destruction, particular items missing. Gina.

  She’d really worked the place over. The worst of it was in the bedroom. Pillows, sheets, and the comforter—gone. All the drawers pulled out and their contents strewn across the floor.

  Jack knew there would be a message in the bathroom. There always was. He was past the odd feeling of having been through this before, and had moved on to where the perpetually weird seemed normal. This was at least the third time a girl Jack knew he should’ve had nothing to do with had left him a massive red lipstick message scrawled across his bathroom mirror.

  YOU SUCK!!!

  She didn’t even have the imagination to make little smiley faces out of the dots on the exclamation marks like Erin had.

  Jack’s gun and important papers were in the safe, so he knew they were secure. He looked into the kitchen, across the broken plates that littered the floor. What the heck had happened to him? It was like his moral compass flipped a hundred and eighty degrees after he got back from the war. Drinking, smoking, girls he would have kept his distance from before… It wasn’t just about trying to kill the pain anymore, or trying to shut down the memories that wouldn’t stay dead. He knew what it really was—slow suicide.

  Suddenly he remembered Replacement’s note. The stove. He swallowed. What did she do?

  What remained of the shattered plates crunched under his feet as he approached the stove with almost the same trepidation he would have when clearing a room with SWAT.

  All the dials on the stove were turned off. He sniffed again but didn’t smell any gas. The black glass of the oven door seemed extra dark. He could see there was something inside. The light had never worked, so after a moment’s hesitation, he yanked open the door.

  Stuffed inside the oven was a large green trash bag. Jack pulled the bag out and set it on the counter. When he opened it, he laughed out loud; his pillow and the flowery, super-warm comforter.

  Jack smiled. He’d have to thank Replacement later.

  He laid out the bedding, but as much as he wanted to burrow inside and not come out for a hundred years, he had work to do. What he really wanted was a drink—or four—but instead he headed over to his computer and searched his emails. He didn’t generally hold onto his emails, so the one he was looking for was easy to find.

  Carlos Rodriguez. Jack had met him four months ago at the TEVOC training, and they’d gotten along. Carlos was on the police force in Sonoma, California. It was two towns over from Western Tech, but Jack knew Carlos would check to see if Michelle was there. As he finished typing the email, he thought of one detail he didn’t have, and he groaned as if someone had squeezed his heart. He put his head in his hands and rubbed his face.

  I don’t have a current picture of her. Some brother.

  He went to Facebook. His throat tightened when Michelle’s picture appeared. Gone was the awkward little girl who loved her mismatched socks. The beautiful woman who sat on the hood of a blue Civic had the same bright smile and the same dark-brown eyes, but that was where the physical similarities ended.

  She seemed confident and full of life.

  If Jack had to choose one word to describe Michelle, it would be happy. When she was growing up, he had thought she was cheerful all the time because she was a little kid. He stopped thinking that after she broke her leg. They were sledding, and Michelle hit a tree. At the hospital, Aunt Haddie was beside herself, and Chandler and Jack thought they’d get a big spanking. But Michelle was lit up like it had been the best day of her life.

  “Aunt Haddie, we had a great time sledding, except for my leg, but Chandler and Jack pulled me all the way downtown.” She beamed. “I got to ride in an ambulance. I’ve never been in a hospital, and the nurses are so pretty. Maybe I could…”

  And on and on she went. That was how Michelle truly was. Happy.

  He attached the picture and sent the email, but he hesitated before closing her page. She’d matured into a beautiful woman, and he’d missed seeing her grow up. He wanted to hug her. He wanted to ask her why she was so happy then. He wished…

  Want, wish… they’re about equal. They come to the same thing, though: they never happen.

  He left the computer on and headed to his bedroom. After a quick half-hour nap, he dressed and then headed out the door. “The glamorous life of a cop,” he muttered to himself as he pulled into the station parking lot.

  Part of him loved going to the new, sprawling two-story building with rows of police cars parked out front. Power surged through his muscles as he walked the halls. But there were times he couldn’t stand the place because of all the people whose lives broke apart inside its walls. Their eyes told their story: the life they’d known would never return. And then there were the victims, glancing up when he walked by, silently communicating their unbearable pain. Every one of those anguished looks had seared itself into his soul.

  He checked in, picked up his car, and went straight back out.

  Today was patrol day. A while back, Sheriff Collins had received a call from the county commissioner’s office asking how often a marked cruiser patrolled the homes at the county line. One call and now, every week, some lucky stiff had to drive in a gigantic circle around the outskirts of the whole county.

  Today Jack was the lucky stiff.

  Not what Jack was hoping for when he decided to become a policeman. He’d figured that after the Army, he’d be a cop for two years, then go for something more exciting, like the FBI or the CIA. He kept putting that next step off, but he didn’t skimp on getting all the training he could manage.

  In the Army, he’d taken specialized classes in everything from terrorism to profiling, high-speed pursuit to sniper training; he just couldn’t get enough. Same thing when he joined the police force. After 9/11, money poured in for police training. In fact, training was one of the reasons he’d transferred to Darrington. Jack had no idea how Sheriff Collins did it, but the police department’s training budget was a well that never dried up.

  Collins was initially hesitant to let Jack take so much training, said he wanted to give everyone else a chance. But it soon became clear that the only one who wanted that chance was Jack; the other cops here were either too busy or nowhere near as ambitious. When Collins realized that those funds would go to waste otherwise, he approved almost every course Jack wanted.

  The training made all the downtime bearable. Jack could learn how to wiretap, conduct electronic surveillance, survive in the wilderness, fly a drone, get TEVOC training… the list of classes went on and on. And to top it all off, he was paid to do it. Sometimes he felt like a thief.

  The driver in front of him slowed to a crawl, seeing the police car behind.

  This is gonna be a long shift.

  8

  Mommy

  Jack passed by Mrs. Stevens’s door on tiptoe. He made another mental note to pick her up an appeasement present, then headed upstairs. As he turned the corner of the stairs, he stopped dead. A light shone from under his door.

  His apartment door was solid wood, but there was a good half-inch gap underneath it. Gina always nagged him to get one of those door sock things because the apartment was drafty, but he was glad he hadn’t, because now he could see that someone was inside.

  He thought about who could
have a key to his apartment. It was a long list. He knew it was beyond stupid to hand out keys to his place, but girls seemed to relax if you gave them a key, and Jack wanted to keep the girls happy. He would have thought Gina was gone for good, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Shaking his head at his weakness, he unsnapped his holster and opened the door. No sound came from inside the apartment, but when he looked into the kitchen, he knew something was terribly wrong.

  It was clean.

  The list of people who’d come into his apartment and clean was short. In fact, only one name came to mind: Mom. She must have flown up from Florida to surprise him.

  “Mom?” he called as he trudged into the living room.

  “Surprise!” Replacement sang the word as she walked out of his bedroom, drying her hair with a towel. Holding on to the doorframe and arching her back, she struck a comically seductive pose and batted her eyes. “Not your mommy.”

  “Don’t do that.” He wasn’t up for this. “What’re you doing back here?” He emptied the contents of his pockets onto the counter.

  “Hey, I just cleaned that.” Replacement’s hands waved back and forth.

  “Good thing you’re not my mommy, then,” Jack shot back. “So, how did you get in?”

  “Key under the mat.” She rolled her eyes and made a face. “Pretty surprising for a cop. It’s the most obvious place to look.”

  Jack cursed under his breath. Gina must have put it there.

  This was getting a little old, coming home from a shift, finding Replacement walking around, fresh from the shower—okay, that part wasn’t so bad.

  She walked over to his desk in the corner of the living room, and he couldn’t help but notice the immaculate work surface, arranged neatly with his desktop computer, a laptop he didn’t recognize, a photograph, a stack of papers, and a notebook.

  “Thanks,” Jack said. “This place never looked so good.”

  Replacement grinned.

  The photo was of Michelle, smiling, her head tipped slightly to the side. She was standing on the steps of an imposing building, a book bag slung over her shoulder. He could see the pride in her eyes.

  “Jack.” Replacement’s hand was soft on his arm. He had started to grip the photo too hard, and it was crumpling in his hands. “I thought you might need a photo to show around.” There was concern in her voice and in her eyes. “It’s the most recent.”

  “Smart to bring the picture,” he muttered as he turned the photo over. It was printed on photo paper with a home printer. “Where’d you get it?”

  “Michelle emailed it to the nursing home Aunt Haddie is in.”

  “Aunt Haddie’s in a home?”

  Replacement paused. “She’s old, Jack. She started forgetting things. The doctors said it might be early Alzheimer’s. I think she’s just tired. Michelle got her into a nice place, Wells Meadow.”

  “Why didn’t—?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Aunt Haddie.” Replacement folded her arms across her chest.

  Jack hated to admit it, but he didn’t either. It hurt too much.

  “Do you have an electronic copy? I want to email it to a cop I know in California.”

  “She didn’t go out there,” Replacement protested.

  “Humor me, okay?”

  “Well, I scanned it and put it on your computer desktop. I printed some missing person flyers and passed them out, but you didn’t have a lot of paper.”

  Before he could even clear it with his brain, he was giving her a fist bump, the way he and Chandler used to celebrate a job well done. “Awesome,” he said awkwardly. “We can print some more.” Jack sat down and pulled up his emails. Maybe she wasn’t a total liability.

  Replacement walked into the kitchen to start the teakettle while Jack emailed this photo to Carlos, too. “We need to rule out the possibility that she went to California,” Jack called to her.

  Replacement appeared at the door to snap, “She didn’t. See? I just ruled it out.” But, sensing the annoyance barreling toward her from Jack’s direction, she quickly added, “You’re right, sorry.”

  “Can you go get us more paper for the flyers?” Jack asked.

  Replacement was silent. Her mouth opened, then closed. Finally she nodded. “Sure.”

  Jack turned back to the computer. Why would she be freaked out about getting paper?

  “You need money?” She didn’t say anything, so he had to continue on his hunch. He took some cash out of his wallet and put it in the pocket of her jacket, which was hanging on the back of Jack’s chair. The jacket looked too light for the weather. “Use this, okay?”

  “Don’t do that. I’m fine… I have money.” She rushed over.

  “Don’t argue with me about money. I’m Italian. It’s part of our heritage.”

  “Really?”

  Jack gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Actually, I have no idea what I am; I’m adopted. But I sort of look Italian and it sounds cool when I say it.” He made a tough-guy face. “Besides, I’m not asking, capisce?”

  “I thought you knew your parents. Aunt Haddie said you came to her when you were seven.”

  “I knew my birth mother. I have no idea about my… the… guy. She never talked about him.”

  “Are they alive?” Replacement asked.

  “They could be.”

  “They could be? You didn’t try to find them?”

  “What for? What would I ask them? ‘Hey, how come you threw me out like trash?’ I don’t want to know. I don’t care.”

  “Not even a little?”

  “Well, trying to figure out why my birth mother left me on my birthday… it made me a little crazy. So I stopped doing it.”

  Replacement’s mouth dropped open and her eyes rounded—like a mother when she tries to comfort a hurt kid. “On your birthday?”

  “Don’t be so dramatic.” With each question, she was moving closer, till he could smell her shampoo.

  He was never the one who initiated this conversation. Everybody seemed to think it would be good for him to get it out, talk about it—yeah, right. His skin crawled with her nearness and his discomfort, but he forced himself to go on. Maybe it would give her some comfort.

  “It wasn’t my real birthday. I don’t even know when that is. We never celebrated it or anything. I figured my birth mother regretted even having me, so why throw a party? My official birthday is the date they wrote on the form when I got to Aunt Haddie’s—the same day I got thrown away. My adoptive mom tries to make it nice, but to me, it’s kinda like celebrating trash day.”

  Like everyone when they compelled him to tell this story, Replacement looked like she had dived into waters way too deep.

  “What happened? I mean how did… uh… she do it?”

  “Remember, we’re supposed to be looking for Michelle,” he said gently, in a last-ditch effort to deflect the subject. He tried to keep his eyes on the computer, but Replacement kept watching him. She wasn’t backing off.

  “We were in a bus depot. She said we were going to Vegas. I had no clue where that was. She left me on a bench and said she was getting tickets. When she came back…”

  He looked off into the distance, trying to detach from the story.

  “She just stared at me for a while and didn’t hand me my ticket. She always looked at me weird anyway, like a mixture of love and hate. She’d left me alone before, and I was getting a bad feeling. And then she said something like, ‘You got needs, kid. School, friends, crap like that. I’m no good at being your mom. I can’t take care of you.’” Maybe the only time she ever even acknowledged that I was her son. “‘You’ll be okay.’ Then she turned around and went to the bus.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Flipped out. Ran after her, begged. She hit me. Not the first time.”

  “In the middle of a bus station?” Replacement’s eyes were huge.

  “Not exactly the middle. Sort of to the right—”

  She smacked his shoulder. “You know wha
t I mean. Keep going.” She sounded urgent, like she really wanted to know.

  He squinted, trying to see a detail that was just out of sight. “I didn’t know really know about drugs then, but there were times when she was… out of it, totally crazy. I thought that was one of those times.”

  He stared down at the floor. Replacement put a hand on his shoulder. “She wore these super-big heels, and she was wobbling. She hit me again, and she said, ‘You don’t know jack, kid.’ That was the last thing she ever said to me.”

  Replacement gave his shoulder a squeeze and let out a deep breath, saying only, “Wow.”

  A surprisingly comforting, if simple, response.

  Jack jumped up from the desk, shaking her hand off, as if his work was done now and he needed to get on to the next task, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

  Michelle. Find Michelle.

  But Replacement wasn’t done with him yet.

  “So she just up and left?”

  Jack nodded.

  “What did you do then?”

  “What every seven year old would do if they got dumped in a bus depot at night.”

  She waited.

  “I got caught stealing a handbag.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I stole it so I could get money for a ticket and follow her. It was all I could think of. But I got pinched, and then… police station, youth services, counselors, court, lawyer… I never had so much attention in my life. No one talks to a whore’s kid, but now everyone was asking me questions.”

  Jack raised his head. “Okay, enough. Really. It all ended well, you know, with Aunt Haddie and my folks… What about you?”

  “I… I don’t like to talk about it.” Replacement wrapped her arms around her chest and crossed her legs.

  “Oh, that’s real fair. I have to go through my worst nightmare minute by minute and you—”