Page 544 of Cold Case, Warm Hearts

Ramses and his mother head back to the car as Booker rounds on me. “Another instinct?”

“He was at both places,” I say. “C’mon, boss.”

Booker’s looking at me again as if trying to see through me. “You can do better than this,” he says finally and turns, heading back to the scene.

Burke however, lifts a shoulder, gives a half-grin. “He nearly took you.”

I shake my head, not ready to let this go. Because it’s a little weird to me that that Mariana ran an entire election campaign, her face plastered on signs and leaflets around my neighborhood for the better part of a year and not once did I see—or hear mention of—her immigrant son.

As if he simply didn’t exist.

That question is a burr under my skin all the way back to the scene. The crowd is dispersing, the fire trucks packing up, the fire fighters walking through the now charred, smoking house.

I spot Eve taping off the scene, and I want to go over to her, but maybe I don’t have time to smooth things over.

Because—I feel it in my gut, along with the realization that I’m in way over my head—this is real.

And I’m running out of time.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

This is not my reality. How can it be? That thought pulses with every heartbeat, slowly turning into a sledgehammer in my head.

I need coffee, and suggested it on the drive to the precinct, but Burke looked at me as if I’d declared I wanted to stroll naked down Nicollet Mall.

I’m currently drinking the sludge out of the green coffee pot on the side table. I’m effectively holding up the wall, my head leaned back, feeling like something that slept in an alley off Hennepin Avenue.

Booker has procured another whiteboard. Five new faces, two female employees, one male employee, a mechanic from the local body shop, and a Vietnamese woman who ran the Vo’s takeout (I know her son—he runs the place now and it serves excellent Goi Cuon). The music minister at the Presbyterian church on the corner is fighting for his life at HCMC ICU.

The victims were quickly identified by Mariana, a job I don’t envy.

I’m still niggling on the fact that Ramses has so totally fallen off the grid, in my world.

Myworld. That’s how I’m thinking, as if I’m a visitor here, the precinct not where I spent twenty meaningful years, Burke some cousin of the real Andrew, back in, well, my world.

And Eve. Eve is the younger, easier-going version of the woman I am really starting to miss. Not that I don’t like this Eve, but I need the Eve who can knock me back into play, unravel the knots in my brain.

I need answers, and not just about the second bombing, but…allthe answers.

It’s an action from Booker that gives me a lead. He is standing at the front of the room, listing the what-we-knows and results of yesterday’s bombing (pretty much what Eve suggested, a homemade bomb, although I know all that already) when I see him glance at the back. To the clock on the wall.

It’s a quick, almost nonchalant,practicedglance and it occurs to me…why isn’t he looking at his watch?

The watch I’m wearing, incidentally, which is still working, purring along as if it never had a glitch.

“I gotta run an errand,” I say to Burke. Although Booker has assigned us lead investigators on yesterday’s bombing, he’s clearly helming today’s update. We’ll spend the morning interviewing employees and creating files on the deceased.

Burke looks at me, frowns. “Anotherhunch?”

Touchy. “No.” I say, but yeah, that conversation is looming. I have to give him some reason for my soon-to-commence search for the location of bombing number three, a fact that still eludes me.

Not that I would remember well. Shortly after arriving at the third bombing scene, I got a call from dispatch and spent the rest of the day pacing the HCMC waiting area as my mother fought for her life.

That memory I remember with brutal clarity.

I guess a stroke is a natural reaction to hearing the long-dreaded news about your missing son, especially when one suffers from high blood pressure.

But if I’d been there that morning as my father headed out to the barn with the sunrise, when the sheriff showed up with the news, maybe the blow would have been softer.

---