She looked out the window, heaving an irritated sigh. “You and your unending quest for complication. You make me so tired sometimes.”
He shrugged. He’d long since given up on trying to alter that part of his personality. A few minutes passed while she thought about it, long enough that he was tempted to get up and find something to do. Then Raina made a considering noise and tipped her head closer to the window. He followed her gaze and watched a tan sedan pull into the driveway. The man behind the wheel was barely visible from this angle, but Sullivan recognized the car.
The Devoted Uncle.
Sullivan pursed his lips. “Give me the Devoted Uncle. It’s not like I can screw that one up. If I can solve it, you split the subpoenas with me and give me half of the fun cases from now on. If I can’t solve it on my own, I’ll stop bitching for...six months.”
“A year. And that includes the bitching you do about cleaning the kitchen.”
“Fine.”
They shook on it, and he ran upstairs to change. His heart was already pounding, excitement racing through his veins at the very idea. Excitement and a good deal of relief. He needed this, both for the sake of his sanity and because it was the next step to the dream job.
Opening his own agency. Taking the cases that interested him, working through the riddles no one else could solve. A dozen interns on staff so he’d never have to serve another fucking subpoena again.
Not that he was going to tell Raina any of that. She was a cutthroat sort of dame, and if she knew he was planning to become a competitor someday, he wasn’t sure she’d comply with furthering his training at all.
When his phone buzzed, reminding him of the tornado that was his personal life, he hesitated, but eventually decided to ignore the text message for now.
He had a client to meet.
His job involved enough assholes that he’d learned a long time ago to keep spare clothes in the office. When he was wearing a fresh Henley, he checked his hair to make sure it wasn’t too messy. Most days he used a little gel to brush the dark strands straight back so they’d stay out of his face, and it’d held out fine against the coffee-throwing bastard. He looked as professional as a guy with the sides of his head buzzed could possibly look.
Back in Raina’s office, she was behind her desk and the client was making himself comfortable across from her.
Their longest-standing client, the Devoted Uncle was Nelson Klein, a local insurance adjuster who came in once a year like clockwork. He was solid in that bulky way that was almost as much fat as muscle, and his frizzy, blazing-red hair was going thin on top, something he combated with an unconvincing combover. He was always brisk, occasionally bossy, and frequently bad-tempered—none of which spoke clearly of grief, but then, it had been more than two decades since his sister had been murdered and his young niece had gone missing.
Sullivan wondered if it was habit alone that still had Klein running searches all these years later.
“I assure you, we take the search for Nathalie as seriously now as we did the first time we looked for her,” Raina was saying. “Sullivan’s appointment is not a sign of lack of interest or effort. On the contrary, he has more time to apply to her cause at the moment, and believe me when I say that he’s the best researcher I’ve ever had on staff.”
Sullivan reached out to shake hands with Klein, who got up slowly—he was busy giving Sullivan a sharp up-and-down, gaze lingering on the haircut. “The best, huh?”
“If there’s a way to find out what happened to her, Sullivan will find it.”
Klein’s grip was tight. “If you say so.”
Sullivan returned Klein’s gaze—the man’s eyes were small and brown and bloodshot—until Klein released him. Sullivan tugged out the small moleskin notebook he habitually kept in his back pocket and snagged a pen from Raina’s desk before sitting down. “Okay.” He thumbed to a fresh page. “Start at the beginning.”
* * *
“The girl’s dead,” Raina said, once the Devoted Uncle had gone. She was pulling up the case number in the database so he could look up the files she’d compounded over the years. “You know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Sullivan agreed. People didn’t go missing in suspicious circumstances for twenty years only to pop up out of nowhere one day, alive and kicking. Almost certainly, her body was in a shallow grave somewhere, and the chances of finding and identifying her at this point were minuscule.
It was, in all likelihood, an impossible puzzle to solve. He could barely stand still, he was so eager to get started.
“If you find anything, it’s going to be a corpse.” Raina’s expression was half concerned, half cold. She probably thought he’d get involved emotionally, only to break down when he realized that this case wouldn’t have a miraculous ending where the girl was reunited with her family and lived happily ever after.
Raina might not be wrong about that emotional involvement thing, but it wasn’t going to stop him, and he wasn’t walking in blind. Sullivan wished he could be shocked by the idea of a ten-year-old girl vanishing, but you couldn’t serve subpoenas for as long as he had and not learn that some people didn’t give two shits for their own kids, let alone someone else’s. Call him a cynic, but just once he’d like to come across a dad who paid more child support than he was ordered to by the courts. Just once.
“I’m aware.” He reached into his pocket for a piece of nicotine gum. He chewed with purposeful disinterest, trying to project hard-nosed-detective vibes, and she eventually scrawled the case number on a Post-It note.
“Cross your Ts, Sullivan. If you find evidence of
