Instead I sit down on the padded office chair Eve got me for Christmas and, with a breath, wiggle the mouse.
It’s still there, still waiting for me to end the sentence, the cursor blinking as if asking where I’ve been.
I’m mid-scene, my hero—a police Inspector (what else would I write about?) is dissecting the remains found at the scene of a bombing with the local crime scene investigator.
Okay, I admit it, I don’t have a lot of imagination, and yes, I pulled from what I know. Although I’m a lot less paunchy than my protagonist, and Eve probably wouldn’t approve of my portrayal of her character. More cleavage, a little more sass, although that’s not a complaint on the prototype.
Fiction, I’m discovering, is harder than writing true crime. For one, in true crime, there’s an ending, although not usually a happy one.
Apparently, a happy ending is some kind of requisite in fiction, an argument my agent and I keep circling.
I start at the top and begin to read.
Butcher found Gabby leaning over her microscope, her eye pressed to the lens, a dozen micro-slides lined up beside her.
“Any luck?”
“You’d better have coffee when you slink in this late,” she said, not looking up.
“Why aren’t you at home?” He didn’t mean his tone. It just wasn’t always easy to keep his thoughts straight around Gabby. She wore her dark hair back in a ponytail, no makeup. Pretty despite her shapeless medical garb.
“I found something.” She got up and went over to a table of twisted black wiring, plastic, and other bomb debris, all labeled. “The bomb was on a timer. I found the remnants of an alarm clock. It’s a simple design, but effective.”
Butcher took it apart. “He planted it, then walked away to watch.”
“Mmmhmm.”
The cursor blinks. Now what?
I know what did happen next. Next, his partner comes in and drags him away to shoot darts down at the Gold Nugget, missing a perfect opportunity to discuss with ahem, Gabby, not just the case but maybe add a little heat to the spark between them.
Geez, I was stupid back then.
“Rem?”
Although the voice is soft, I still jump, and then feel a little silly sitting here in my pajama bottoms, bare-chested, staring at my screen.
Eve shuffles in and sits down in my not-so-inspirational chair. Her auburn hair is down, curly, worry in her pretty hazel-green eyes. “The dream, again?”
I shrug.
“You have to let it go.”
“I did. I have. It’s just—” And then my eyes betray me because they fall on the file box. And the last—the very last—person I should tip off about Booker’s final gift to me is my wife. She’s like a bird dog when she scents a mystery and the fact that former Inspector John Booker would save—and send me—these files is like throwing a pheasant in front of a Labrador retriever.
Poor woman simply can’t help but pounce.
In a second, she has the top off and has pulled out the first couple files. “These are—wow.”
“I know,” I say, but I’m not going to touch them. Especially if I want to get any sleep in the near future.
“There are at least thirty cases in here.”
A tiny swell of relief hits me. So, Booker didn’t include all of my cold cases. “Which ones?” Okay, I confess, I’m just a little intrigued.
She has them piled on her lap, and is sorting through them, by dates. “There’s that case about the girl who was found in the alley outside Sunny’s.”
Right. I remembered her. A working girl, about nineteen, she’d died early in the morning, the last John’s payment still in her pocket.
“And the one about that waitress—strangled in a parking lot near Lulu’s diner.”
“Those are all in my early years of being an Inspector.” I slide down to the floor and notice her eyes darken as she picks up one of the thickest files. “What?”
“Nothing.”
Aw, c’mon. I wasn’t a detective for nothing. “Tell me.”
“It’s the coffee shops bombing file.” She makes a face.
I take a breath. Yeah, if John had collected my early career top hits then he would have surely included the coffee shop bombings. Plural. Three bombings, all within 48 hours of each other in the Minneapolis area. Twenty lives in total. Then they simply stopped. And are still unsolved, Melinda Jorgenson and her son’s murderer still at large.
No wonder I can’t sleep.
I reach for the file, but Eve pulls it away. “No. It’s no good sifting through it again. We went over every stitch of evidence. I spent hours and hours and hours…”
“I know,” I say. “I remember. You were obsessive, too.”
She sighs. “It was my first big case. My first real opportunity to show my dad…” And now she swallows, looks away and I want to get my hands around John Booker’s dead throat and squeeze. Because it wasn’t long after this that Eve’s father was killed by a drive-by shooter linked to one of his cases. And with him, her kid brother, Ash.
Bittersweet memories for all of us because it was her grief and desire for justice that drove her into my arms the first time.
She closes the file. Presses a hand on it.
Like always, I have to fix it. “I’ve always told you that was the moment I fell for you. I’ll never forget walking onto the scene and seeing you standing there. I’d heard about this whiz crime scene investigator, and there you were—”
“And I’d been warned by everyone—including my dad—to stay far away from the infamous lady-killer Rembrandt Stone.”
“There were no ladies slain on my watch.” But I’ve made her smile.
“Oh, you thought you were all that, though, Rem. You came striding into the crime scene, the cracker-jack detective, carrying a cup of coffee, as if you were there to watch us work, then you spilled it
