Page 536 of Cold Case, Warm Hearts

It’s dark, and the city is alive, lights splotching the pavement, the heat rising out of it from the day. A moon rose long ago, but a storm might be blowing in, the taste of it in the stir of the trees.

I’m tired. Bone weary, which is also weird because does that happen in a dream? The whole day has put me at odds with myself. I’m frayed and fighting a headache.

Burke’s grumbling doesn’t help. “Take me back to the station.”

“Fine by me,” I say and turn onto Minnehaha Avenue, heading east.

“I don’t get it. You practically ignore valuable questioning from potential leads, and now, what, you’re psychically trying to figure out where this guy—ifthis guy—is going to strike next?”

“I don’t expect you to understand.”

“Try and make me, pal, because I’m trying to be on your side here.”

That throws a little ice on my ire. But I have nothing for him because even in a dream, the truth sounds impossible.

We drive in silence.

“Okay, what’s eating you? You’re like a man possessed today, and it doesn’t add up. We’re all a little shaken, but…is this about what happened in Booker’s office?”

His question jerks me up, lands like a fist in my chest because I’veforgotten.

My brother.

It happened so many years ago, the grief has a thick scab over it now, but twenty years ago, the news knocked me sideways, blurred the two events—the bombing and my brother’s body recovery—together.

Now, it feels like an old, dried wound that I am reticent to pick at.

“A couple fisherman found a body of a kid in a lake near Waconia yesterday.”

Silence, then, “And Booker thinks it’s your brother?”

I nod.

He looks away, and releases a curse under his breath. Really, it’s how I should be feeling, but like I said, the old wound has scabbed over. I’ve done my grieving, although I suppose when it comes to grief, it just keeps circling back around because a heaviness builds in my throat.

“Sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“And there was that kid today, at the scene.”

David Jorgenson, which, for some reason, feels like a fresher wound, and the heaviness descends to my chest.

“Do your parents know?”

“I’m waiting for the DNA to come back before I talk to them, just, you know, to be sure.”

“I suppose, having some closure will help,” he says.

It will, and it does, but I just nod.

We pull up across the street from 5th Street Java and I stare at the stand-alone brick building. It has a green awning, the windows dark, the chalked specials on the window shrouded. Across the street, a twenty-four hour laundromat beams lights onto the pavement.

I roll down the window and turn off the car, trying to get a feel for the place.

“What are we doing, man?”

I sigh. And really, what does it matter? It’s just a dream. It’s not like Burke is going to wake up tomorrow and suddenly think,hey, remember when you went off your rocker twenty-four years ago, and claimed that you were in a dream and predicted a bombing?

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