Page 122 of Blue Moon

He’d always been an advocate of the softly-softly approach, at least until it had cost him his life. I’d toughened up after his passing. Built a hard shell around myself and pushed everyone away. But ultimately, I just couldn’t get over the way the FBI had handled his death—the blame-shifting and the meaningless platitudes. Something inside me broke. Then I screwed up an op, quit the Bureau, ended a relationship that was way past its sell-by date, and applied for a job mucking out horses before Priest showed up on my doorstep and told me not to be so fucking stupid.

Now I had a new family, but I couldn’t forget my old one entirely.

Dad would have told me to knock on the door.

“Fine, we’ll do it Emmy’s way.”

She had the grace not to look smug. No, she just nodded once and said, “Good luck.”

On this job, we’d need it.

Human: one. Computer: nil. Thank fuck Dusk was with us because empathy wasn’t one of my strong points. I freely admitted that.

Nola Jiminez had opened the door of her walk-up apartment half a second after I knocked, phone in her hand. She’d been waiting, and her tear-streaked cheeks told me Emmy had been absolutely right. Unfortunately. It would have been easier if she was wrong because now we had a missing kid as well as a missing pop star.

“We should call the FBI,” I said. “This is their wheelhouse.”

“No police. No police!”

“The FBI isn’t a police force. It’s a national security?—”

Dusk shushed me with a hand. “Why don’t you want us to call the police?”

“H-h-he said not to. That things would be difficult for Kobie if I do.”

“Things would be difficult?”

“That’s what he said.”

“And what do you think he meant by it?”

She shuddered. “It was his tone of voice… He said he was looking after Kobie, but he needed me to do him a favour before Kobie came back home. And he warned me not to call the cops.” Nola choked out a sob. “So I did it. I did everything he asked. What else was I supposed to do?”

There was a seventy-five percent chance the boy was dead already, but I figured Dusk wouldn’t thank me for pointing that out. Priest didn’t say anything either. He was standing by the door of the tiny apartment, and between the earpiece and the camera disguised as a button on one of those Hawaiian shirts he always wore, I knew Emmy was in the room with us too. I’d once asked him why he chose the hideous shirts because he scrubbed up okay when he made the effort, and he’d told me that if the shirt was memorable, his face wasn’t.

And it worked. The man was a ghost. Even his many, many ex-wives couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. No, seriously. Last month, we’d run into lucky number seven at the Nebula, and there’d been no flicker of recognition whatsoever. Guess she’d spent more time looking at his dick.

“How did he get in touch with you?”

Luckily, Nola Jiminez was talking to us. We’d told her we were part of the security team from the hotel.

“He c-c-called me.”

Forget the gun, I should have brought tissues.

“Did you see the number on the screen?”

“It was Kobie’s phone.”

Kobie was six years old. When I was six, I’d had a pony and a healthy disrespect for mortality, not a phone. But if Nola left her kid alone regularly, then it made sense that she’d want to check in with him.

“Can you give us his number?”

She read it out in a shaky voice, and I sent it to Echo with a message: Track this.

“Let’s start at the beginning—tell us everything that happened,” Dusk said. “When did you realise Kobie was missing?”

“When I got the call. I was leaving work, and the phone rang as I got to the bus stop. There was a p-p-picture.”

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