“You’re gonna worry until all this is done. You’re gonna worry for a long time after it is, but just remember, Gage—”
I look up, so rarely does he say my name, and his eyes are full of sympathy.
“—if things turn out different from the way you want them to, it’s not your fault. I’ve brushed with that crowd, and it wasn’t for me. Zarah, she loves you, I can see it when she looks at you, but if she changes her mind about what you two have, it’s not you, and it’s not her. It’s the whole fucked up situation, you got me? There’s been a lot of talk about suicide and—”
Pop stops and looks away. I stare, my jaw dropping. Never in my whole life have I ever seen Pop cry. Not when I got shot, not when the truck exploded. Not ever. I’m sure he did, in private,but here he is, in the office, sniffling over old coffee. “—if she decides to move on, don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
“Dad—”
He chuckles and rubs his hands over his eyes. “Haven’t heard that in a coon’s age.”
“Because we’ve never had a ‘don’t kill yourself over a woman’ conversation. I would never do that. What Troy did...Christ, I don’t want to think about it. You and I are a team. We were before the Maddoxes, and if, like you say, Zarah decides what I am isn’t for her, we’ll still be after them, too. I won’t lie—I’ll need a couple of days and a few cases of beer to lick my wounds, but I’d be okay. I promise.”
“Good. Speaking of beer, you wanna grab a couple tonight? We can go to Old Jake’s and knock back a few.”
With the way he asks, he expects me to turn him down, but I say, “Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll have to drop Baby home first.”
Pop grins. “Nah, put her vest on her and bring her along. You got two ladies in your life, and you’ve been neglecting one.”
Baby pops her head up, her blue eyes sparkling. She knows we’re talking about her. Yeah, she’s my girl. I’m lucky the two loves of my life get along.
“I’ll blame you if we get into trouble.”
“Like she doesn’t get whatever she wants. She’ll have Jake eating out of her paw in no time. Now, what were you up to this morning?”
“Zane and I went to see Iona Belsely.”
Pop stands and shoves a pod into the Keurig to brew himself a fresh cup of coffee. “Who’s that again?”
“She was the director at Quiet Meadows. Zane got us in to talk to her.”
“About what?”
“About what she thought was going on in the basement of the facility, and why Ashton Black was so interested in what Dr. Pederson was doing.”
I tell Pop everything I know. Ingrid and the calls I made to track her down. Zarah’s flashback. Pop isn’t Zane, and without feeling like I’m betraying Zarah’s trust, I ask if he’s watched it yet. He shakes his head and I show him the clip that’s hiding in our email. I shove earbuds into his hand and turn away. I don’t want to listen to her screaming.
He goes white, just like I knew he would.
Satisfied I had a part in it, I explain that Zane finally fired Dr. Solis, and that Zarah isn’t seeing her anymore. I come back around to our meeting with Iona and her insistence she didn’t know anything about anything. “But she knew enough to be concerned about this,” I say, handing over the newspaper I copped off Iona’s desk on the way out the door. Zane didn’t care I took it. The information would have been easy to look up, but what the hell.
“A dead girl in the park?” Pop raises an eyebrow.
“That’s what I thought, too. The other girls didn’t pan out to anything and I don’t think this one will, either, but Iona speculated she’s dead because the care she was receiving from Dr. Pederson ‘ran out.’”
“Ran out? What do you mean?”
“That the drug’s effects he was treating her with wore off. That maybe after she stopped receiving therapy, she relapsed.”
Pop pauses. “I don’t know much about bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, either, but I think if someone is being treated for it, it wouldn’t take as long as a year and a half for them to go back to the way they were before medication.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Savannah Mesa was a rough one, and maybe this Stacy Birmingham partied too hard, too. It’s been known to happen.”
“Unfortunately.” Pop and I have been hired more times than I can count to find women addicted to drugs and bring them home to clean up. It never lasts very long and sometimes families can’t afford to pay us more than once. We always keep an eye out for the girls on the streets, free of charge, but we can’t save everyone.
“You and Zane getting along then? He listens to you.”