Time of Death

give you my boss’s direct line. His name is Gary Dettling. You can call him right away to verify my details. Thank you for the call.’

Ren grabbed her purse and ran. She shouted in to Gary to expect the call and that she would take care of the break-in herself. Or the strong wind. Or the stray cat.

When she pulled up outside Annie’s, it looked the same as it had when she left that morning. There were no windows open, the front door was locked. She opened it and walked inside. She called Misty’s name. There was no answer. She called again, still no answer. She ran up the stairs to her bedroom. Misty wasn’t there. Her heart started pounding. Why is this house so fucking big? She ran down the stairs and into the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. She heard a noise out the back. Oh shit. It was an enclosed yard. There was only one way in and out. She started to slide her gun from her inside jacket pocket, caught sight of a whirl of black and white through the glass.

Misty! Sweet Jesus. She pushed the gun back into its holster. And pulled the door open. Misty threw herself against her. Ren almost cried.

‘If anything ever happened to you, Misty Bryce,’ she said. She sat on the step and held Misty to her chest, rubbing her head, tickling her belly.

‘Who let you out here?’ she said.

Ren brought her back into the house. She went into the living room. A chill swept over her. Someone had been there. And they had left her a gift.

Unlike whoever had broken in the first time.

It was a DVD with a nice neat sticker that had her name on it. She put it into the player.

‘Loading’ flashed for too long on the top left corner of the screen before it went black. Stay black. Please stay black. Black has to be better than whatever I’m about to watch.

Ren had no idea what movie was going to light up her screen, what sound was going to fill the living room. She pulled Misty up beside her on the sofa and wrapped her arms around her. A face she knew filled the screen – an ugly face, an ugly man – number four on Denver’s Most Wanted. Javier Luis: a man whose rap sheet included first- degree murder, attempted first-degree murder, aggravated robbery; drugs; rape, assault on a minor…

In the mug shot on the wall at Safe Streets, Luis looked bad. On screen, he looked worse. And the picture was razor-sharp. He looked sixty years old. Meth.

Luis opened his mouth and flashed black and broken teeth. ‘From 1996 through 1998, I worked for Augusto Val Pando at his compound in New Mexico.’

So Augusto is being set up to take the fall.

Luis’ eyes shifted back and forth. ‘Towards the end,’ he said, ‘I was not happy with my position and I wanted to leave. But I was infectively incarcerated.’

Infectively – I love it. You were all infectively incarcerated, you fuckwit.

‘I wanted out,’ said Luis, ‘but I had no way of escaping.’

No shit.

‘What happened was, during this time, a woman who I thought to be a nanny to the Val Pandos’ son, her name was Remy Torres—’

Why is he talking about me? What the FUCK?

He continued. ‘Well, I was unaware at that time that Remy Torres was, in fact, FBI Special Agent Ren Bryce who currently works with the Rocky Mountain Safe Streets Task Force in Denver.’

What the FUCK IS THIS?

‘On the evening of December twenty-eighth, 1998—’

Ren hit Pause. December 28th? She stared at the screen. Oh God, no. She raised the remote control slowly and hit Play. It was as if she had also hit mute; all sound seemed to be sucked out of the air as the camera panned to the man on his right. Her eyes shot wide.

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.

44

Ren dropped the remote control. She ran to the bathroom and threw up. Until there was nothing left in her stomach. As she was walking back to the living room, pale and weak, she heard her cell phone ring. She couldn’t remember where she’d left it. It stopped ringing. The sound seemed to have come from the kitchen. The ringing started again, stopped, started again. Shit. She went in to get it. It was Colin.

‘Ren, where are you?’

‘Home. Why?’

‘Is everything OK at the house? Gary said you had to go—’

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Yes. Yes. It must have been a stray cat…’

‘OK, cool. I’m just pulling up outside. Have you eaten?’

‘Whoa, whoa,’ said Ren. ‘What? I can’t go out…I…’

‘Oh, I’m not asking you to dinner,’ said Colin. ‘I’m taking you to a crime scene. And, apparently, it’s not very pretty at all.’

Shit. Shit. Shit. ‘Yeah, well don’t worry about me throwing up.’

She heard the horn beep outside and down the phone line. ‘Give me two minutes,’ she said and hung up. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. She ran into the living room and turned off the TV and DVD player. She ran up the stairs and changed and brushed her teeth. She looked at herself in the mirror. She took a deep breath.

And for my next performance…

Colin’s car was moving as fast as it could along the icy streets. The wipers were shifting the heavy-falling snow across the windscreen, stopping briefly every couple of minutes, then jerking back to work. Excruciating. Ren felt suddenly trapped, walled in by the car, the sound of the wipers, the DVD, the irrational sensation of being taken from her home against her will. She slammed her hand down on the button to open the window. Flakes of snow started drifting into the car. Colin looked her way, but said nothing.

‘Sorry,’ said Ren. ‘I’m…hot.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

Colin had brought coffee the way she liked it: no additives. A kind gesture. She glanced at him. Strangely, alone with Colin Grabien, she was the least likely to fake good humor. He didn’t need a performance. She’d work up the energy to do that for the others.

They pulled up at the entrance to a warehouse in downtown Denver. Denver PD cruisers were scattered out front, alongside detectives’ and Safe Streets’ vehicles. Ren walked toward the building ahead of Colin, flashed her badge and walked into an almost-empty space, flooded with harsh light.

‘Take the second last door,’ said the uniform.

‘Thank you.’

Her heels were louder than she would have liked, echoing across the bare concrete, drawing attention she did not want. She kept her head down until she got to the door. The smell was already foul and she hadn’t even gone down the hallway where she could see the officers silhouetted in the fluorescent light from the crime scene.

‘Any ID yet?’ she said to the first uniform she met.

‘Does faceless dead man count?’

‘In some jurisdictions, possibly.’ Ren smiled grimly as she stepped past him. She nodded when she saw Gary and Cliff in the far corner. As she walked past more officers, a strange feeling started to crawl over her. To her left, she saw Glenn Buddy directing a group of his colleagues, but the feeling had nothing to do with him. It was an ominous sense of familiarity, something in the walls – a terrible color of watered-down yellow, a huge blank spot of