Fated (9 page)

“I’ll pull Drake’s records at the station while you change, and then we’ll go see her, all right?”

“Sure.” He kept his eyes on the passing road, buildings, and strip malls, bleak and insignificant against the imposing Mountain background, until Freddie pulled into the station parking lot.

“Hart, Lesley!” The superintendent waved them over as soon as they set foot through the door. Hart began pulling tags off his suit as they walked past the rows of desks. A few more heads lifted in interest this time, scanning over the burn on his face. None of them acknowledged Freddie.

“How are you doing, Lieutenant?”

“Not bad, sir, all things considered.”

“Good. You can have one of our service cars while you’re here. Unless you prefer to drive your dad’s—”

“That’ll be great. Thank you, sir.” He kept his expression blank even though he didn’t look forward to driving through town in a police car.

Miller considered him for a moment in silence, then said, “I know you want to look into Ben Drake, but your focus has got to be on this car bomber.”

“What? That’s not why I’m here. And one can very well be tied in with the other.” Hart stared at Miller, who shook his head and glanced at his computer.

“Captain Johnson asked me to take you off duty entirely. I told him since you’re not officially on duty, that’s not something I can do. Unless he wants to come over here and strip you of your badge, or issue a warrant for your return before you’ve even buried your father, you’re here to stay. However,” Miller said, holding up a hand to silence Hart, “this car bomb is a big deal, and I need Freddie on it. I also can’t have you wandering around by yourself, sticking your nose in a case that isn’t in your jurisdiction.”

“Supe—” Freddie started, but Miller was having none of it.

“You know these deaths might never be solved. In fact, it’s very likely there’s not one killer behind all of them anyway.”

“But the marks—”

“Yes, the marks are weird, but they still don’t point in the direction of a murderer. That car bomb does.”

“A car bomb that exploded literally on the day I started looking into Drake’s coma. Someone was out to injure me, and they didn’t care about whoever else they took down.”

Miller shrugged. “Maybe the two aren’t linked, and maybe they are. Find the bomber, and then you’ll know. Forensics is making your car top priority, but I repeat: it might have nothing to do with Drake’s assault.”

“Too much coincidence.”

“Not enough proof, Hart.” Miller sighed, tilted his chair back, and eyed him up and down. “You want to use my office to change out of that teenage outfit and into your suit?”

He rolled his eyes. “This is not—Fine.”

Freddie laughed and turned to the door.

“Sir?” Hart quickly said before Miller could follow her out. “Can I ask… why doesn’t Freddie have a partner?”

Miller heaved a sigh that could’ve contained all his burdens, and he rubbed at his eyes.

“She had one. He got handsy. He’s now missing a testicle.”

Hart let out a low whistle. “Good for her. Where is he now?”

Miller pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Early retirement, and she had to fight with IA to even get that done.”

“What?”

“Yeah. There was the usual shit about how she only got the job because she was a woman and black on top of that. You know how it is.” Hart really didn’t. “Truth is she’s my best, and I made damn sure everyone knew it. Can’t make them like her, though.”

“I bet she doesn’t want to be liked by those dicks, then.”

Miller smiled, and it reminded him of the days he’d hung out here more than he had at home. “Damn straight.” Superintendent Miller quietly shut the door behind him when he left.

Hart shed his hoodie, T-shirt, and jeans, and pulled on a blue shirt and a dark gray pinstripe suit, leaving the tie off. Miller was right about one thing: he was here on his own time, so Hart would keep looking into the Tattoo Murders. The car bomb would be explained along the way.

He found Freddie in the station’s little kitchen, leaning her hip against the counter. “He’s kind of right, you know.” Freddie blew on her coffee, steam curling around her face. “That car bomb means an immediate threat.”

“It’s connected.” Hart eyed the doughnuts on the countertop. He usually didn’t mind giving in to the cop stereotype, but this morning his stomach churned around the toast he’d eaten hours before. He reached for a water bottle in the fridge instead. “The diseases disappearing, the marks, the bomb… I can’t explain any of it, but I’m sure they’ll all lead us in the same direction. So we can either sit here and kick our feet up while we wait for forensics, or we can do something useful.”

Freddie sipped the cup, made a face, and added more sugar. “Hey, did you hear me say we should listen to Supe?”

“So you think there is something connecting all this?”

“Yes. Something very weird.” She eyed Hart. “Like,
The X-Files
weird.”

“You believe in that stuff?”

“Maybe not aliens and shit, but—” She peered out of the kitchen door, then lowered her voice. “My mama was a medium.”

“What?” Hart nearly snorted water up his nose, and Freddie’s black eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry, that was rude.”

“Yes, it was. My mama was Haitian. She happened to read tarot cards and speak to the dead, and she happened to be very good at it. Do I believe in vampires and fairies? No. Do I believe there’s some inexplicable shit out there? Hell yeah.”

“Hmm.” Hart frowned at the cheap kitchen counter, the coffee stains that were there to stay. “I guess we should check if there have been more miracle healings like this. Until Drake popped up, it never occurred to me this might go beyond Riverside.”

“Not planning on following Supe’s orders, then?” Freddie watched him with keen eyes as she drank from her coffee again, smacking her lips with satisfaction. Apparently four sugars did the trick.

“Not really. You?”

“Can’t have you blundering about by yourself now, can I? Look what happened last time.” Freddie lifted a file from the counter and handed it to Hart. “Ben’s background, girlfriend’s address, and another similar medical mystery two years ago two towns over. Got all that while you were putting your prom dress on.”

Hart grinned. “You’re the best.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

“You gonna buy me a corsage next?”

“Only if you plan to put out. Do you want to go see if the ex-girlfriend is home right now?”

Hart checked his watch and winced. “I can’t. I have… an appointment.”

“Ah.” Freddie paused and then added, “Need me to drive you somewhere?”

“No, I’ll just grab one of the service cars.”

“All right. Gallucci at the front desk will hook you up. Meet here first thing tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

“Take care, Lieutenant.”

Hart nodded, threw his empty water bottle in the trash, and headed to the front desk.

O
VER
B
RIGHTLY
’
S
last waves of habitable topography, stretched the cemetery, its manicured lawns almost depressing in their greenness. Hart could find little comfort in the view his father’s grave would have. He’d loved wildflowers and the slow but inevitable advance of nature no matter what humankind did to halt it. There was nothing natural about the way daisies and clover were kept at a strict distance here. Jonathan Hart deserved to have his ashes strewn over the top of the Mountain, to be absorbed by the ground and the air and the trees.

He stared at the dark wound in the earth, a pit like a black maw where his father’s body would be lowered on Friday. He wished—fervently, and not for the first time as the funeral director went on about the prime location, as if the grave was real estate—that his father’s will had requested cremation. But he’d wanted to be laid to rest next to his wife, a privilege and inconvenience Hart would never go through. He read the dates on the gravestone, and underneath them it said:

Sabine Gainsburg-Hart

Wife, Mother, Irreplaceable.

Rest now.

Hart averted his eyes. Even twenty-four years later, he still couldn’t look at that gravestone without feeling like milk was curdling in his stomach. She was more than that, he’d wanted to tell his dad. She’d been unique and gifted and funny. She’d been a person before there were two men in her life. But what ten-year-old could articulate such thoughts?

“Are you sure you want to do this alone?”

“I’m sorry?” Hart blinked at the funeral director. Why they had to hold this conversation over an empty grave was beyond him. The man by his side was stocky and slightly plump, his glasses sliding off his sweaty nose every few seconds. Hart couldn’t blame him; the end of August in Brightly had always been brutal, and this year appeared to be no different. He wished he’d left his suit jacket in the borrowed police car.

All around them the air vibrated with the hum of cicadas. An electric, almost panic-stricken intensity filled the sound, as if they felt the end of their song nearing.

“Are you sure you want to put him to the grave by yourself? You might find comfort in surrounding yourself with those who come to mass.”

“I’m sure.” One of the most distressing events of his life had been standing around his mother’s grave in a thunderstorm, the hole in the ground slowly filling with water while the people gathered around added to the flood with their tears.
She’ll drown
, he’d thought.
Stop crying, all of you. She’ll drown.
Even though he’d been old enough to understand that death is death, he had been powerless. He might have been a child then, but he’d had an idea of how his mother would’ve wanted to be laid to rest, and no one had asked him. This time he had a semblance of control. Over everything but the burial site and death itself.

This time he wanted to be alone. He’d have no service either, if he didn’t think it would be a disservice to his father, and the friends and colleagues who had been so much more a part of his father’s past ten years than Hart had been. He’d let them have their moment in church, but if they wanted to visit a grave, they could see the perfect lawn, the perfect flowers, and the gleaming black gravestone once Hart was gone.

Only he would witness this gash in the earth and how it would be healed by adding his father’s bones to the dirt.

The man whose name Hart had already forgotten talked for a while longer, going over details he already knew, and eventually he left, a little bemused maybe by Hart’s off-kilter way of doing things. But then again, this man did business in grief. He’d probably seen it all.

So he wouldn’t have to look at the dank earth anymore—the smell rising from it reminding him of the faint basement scent that now hung around his father’s house—Hart knelt by his mother’s grave. For a moment his hands hovered over the smooth white marble, but there wasn’t so much as a wayward blade of grass to be found. Did it always gleam like this, Hart wondered. Did someone walk around and clean the graves after the cemetery closed, like a lonely ghost in the sunset, armed with a bucket and brush? Or was it just for the funeral this weekend?

It was hard to remember his mother’s face the way it would’ve been, animated and alive, rather than frozen in the flash of a camera. The sound of her voice had been long lost to him, and already Hart could feel the wheel of time churning over the tactile memories of his father. How long would it be before the sound of his voice, the scent of him, the feel of him, would be no more than an abstract idea?

Who was he kidding? Hart hadn’t allowed himself to yearn for those things in a decade, so why start now? With a shaky breath, Hart rose to his feet. There was no point to this.

Slowly he wandered through the graves, noticing that, yes, his mother’s must have been cleaned for the service this weekend. Other graves were still neat and tidy, but here and there a patch of moss had formed, staining the curves of words engraved in polished stones.

“Matthew Hollis,” he read. “Too well loved to ever be forgotten.” He’d died in the forties. Was anyone still around to remember him? “In loving memory, Bridget Kennedy. Rest in peace, Melody Prentiss. You will be missed.” Melody was a five-year-old buried nearly a year and a half ago. Her grave looked well maintained, with a picture of a teddy bear sitting in a frame.

An odd habit, if Hart thought about it, to preserve the memory of the dead like this, all gathered together, lying to rest next to strangers for eternity. Cemeteries weren’t for the dead. If anything, these inscriptions proved it. They were for those who were left behind.

Three rows down from his parent’s graves, there stood a small, almost impossibly white granite stone, cleaner than his mother’s.

Carly Albright

Taken from the world too soon.

Someone cared for the grave a lot; there wasn’t so much as a moss stain on the stone.

When Hart passed through the smooth iron gates of the cemetery, it was early afternoon. He sat in his car, debating whether or not to call Freddie and suggest they go see the ex-girlfriend, but his wrist hurt, he was hungry, and too hot in his suit. So he started the car and turned away from the station, toward the house that had been his home so long ago.

Despite it being cool inside, he threw open all the windows to chase away the dank smell he’d now forever associate with his father’s empty grave. He made a cup of coffee and a sandwich to go with his pain meds, and took it all into the living room. Despite the enormous amount of work to be done, he pulled off his jacket and threw it on the opposite chair where it half fell to the ground. He side-eyed it, left it where it was, and sank down into the large leather sofa. With his feet propped up on the coffee table, Hart rolled up his sleeves and took a bite from his sandwich. If he remembered correctly, his dad had cable. Maybe he could just grab an hour to himself and watch a game. He should take off his holster really; it dug into his side.

As he searched for the remote—which could be anywhere from the bedroom to the basement—Hart’s phone began to ring. Isaac’s guileless smile lit up the screen. Hart took a second to stare at it, remembering the Sunday morning Isaac had grabbed his phone and taken the photograph. Damn it if he didn’t miss him.