Page 64 of Brother's Keeper

I didn’t turn. Didn’t dare watch the old woman scrabble through her papers until I heard her announce. “Yep, that’s the one. Corbin Calloway.”

Relief escaped me like a puff of steam from a boiling kettle. Donovan’s name, yes, but not the one our parents had given him. Dead men needed aliases and so did abducted little boys. Donovan based his own new identity on the main character from a book series he’d been obsessed with at the time.

Glancing over my shoulder found the two women bent over a three-ring binder. The owner stabbed agnarled finger at an interior page, and Holland pushed up her sunglasses to squint at what must have been my brother’s handwriting.

The jukebox was free to play, and I found myself desperate for something to break the tension in the room. I picked “When the Music’s Over” from the song menu and settled in for eleven minutes of musical accompaniment.

When the first notes kicked in, Holland shot me a scathing glare. “Could you not?” she asked.

Shrugging, I gestured to the machine. What had been started couldn’t be stopped.

The investigator returned her attention to the business owner. “Do you happen to remember what the young man looked like?” Holland asked.

I could kill her. The owner. Make it look like a stroke or a fatal blood clot. Just let her keel over while Holland watched and I pretended to be surprised.

“I’ll do you one better,” the owner replied. “Got plenty of camera footage of him coming and going. Not in the Beamer, though. He drove a big brown car. Ford, I think?”

I turned fully.

The owner had pivoted to a desk on the wall, layered with outmoded computer equipment and a grid of tiny, black and white television monitors. Four cameras surveilling this whole place was a pittance of a security system, but the feed currently broadcasting from the entry gate was damning enough to make up for it.

If what she said about Donovan coming every day was true, there would have been ample opportunities toID his car and his face. And me, driving the same “big brown car” after the investigators did their best to send mine to the scrap heap.

The owner eyed me, her expression fraught with suspicion. “Might take me a bit, but I can pull up some shots for you,” she told Holland. “Maybe get his plates?”

“Well, aren’t you helpful?” I forced a saccharine smile.

Holland’s shades dropped onto the bridge of her nose. “Fitch, I’ve got this.”

I recalled her plea at Saturday night’s party, asking me to stop giving her a hard time at work. That, coupled with the knowledge that she’d been getting advice from her dad—Grimm—on how to manage me, worsened my already foul mood.

I didn’t revel in my role as a problem child. In fact, it grated on me. Grimm never missed a chance to tell me what a disaster I was. A fuck up. A failure. I didn’t want to become Holland’s bane, too.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said.

Dodging cardboard Elvis, I exited the building into the crisp, clean air outside. It was so crisp and clean that I decided to pollute it with another cigarette. This time, I smoked in plain sight, leaning against the side of Holland’s patrol car while glaring at the security camera mounted on the corner of the office’s roof.

Feed from that ancient thing was bound to be low-resolution and grainy. Hard to discern the face inside a car window, but the make and model of a car would be readily apparent, as would the letters and numbers on a license plate. Donovan’s Bronco would be easy to trackwith Felix on the case. If he could follow Yankee Doodle’s BMW to Lock n’ Roll, he could find the brown Ford SUV leaving the place less than fifteen minutes later when I drove it back to the jobsite where the councilman was last seen.

He might see it sitting in the Capitol parking garage during the weeks of the disappearances or spot it in recent days pulling into the lot by the houseboat docks. I’d driven it to crime scenes, the Lazy Daze Motel, the Bitters’ End, and the Blooming Orchid the night I kidnapped Lover Boy. That damn car was all Holland and her team needed to blow the case wide open. They would easily tie me to the crimes, and Donovan’s alias was only a thin wall between him and incrimination or at least guilt by association. All I could do was sit by and watch it happen.

Holland stepped out of the office building and approached, jingling her keys. “A real lead,” she said. “Finally.”

I threw down the half-spent cig and ground it out against the pavement.

The investigator unlocked the sedan and opened her door before pausing to meet my gaze across the low top of the car. “Thank you for excusing yourself,” she said. “That was better… I think.”

My lips formed a crooked smile. “Glad it was good for you.”

Once inside the vehicle, my thoughts raced the familiar track that ended with imprisonment and death.

Since signing on at the Capitol, nothing had gone according to plan. I agreed to work with Holland inexchange for Donovan’s safety and passage out of the city. Then came the plague, the kidnappings, and the missing persons investigation, and there had been no time to work toward my actual goal. The fact that I had failed to uphold my end of the bargain by getting the investigators even an inch closer to taking down the Bloody Hex was yet another shortfall.

Holland started the car and left it idling, too engrossed in typing from her notepad into her phone. I needed her with me, not against me, and if she learned the truth about how I’d been spending my energies as a Capitol consultant, our fragile alliance would be shattered.

“Did that name sound familiar to you?” she asked, jarring me from contemplation.

“What name?”

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