Page 17 of Cyn
He shook his head. “Next time, maybe.”
“Probably better that way,” Six said. “We have some things to talk about with our girl, and while we’re predisposed to trust you because Old Joe sent you, we don’t actually trust you yet. If you know what I mean. No offense,” she added, clearly not caring one way or the other if he’d taken offense.
Joe’s gaze darted around the table, then he laughed. Yeah, he’d bet the hardest part of his job wasn’t going to be policing the town of Cos Cob, but it would be figuring out what he was supposed to do with—or for—these four women.
“I do, and no offense taken. I’ll leave you to it. Cyn,” he said. She looked up from where she sat. “I’ll call you tomorrow?” They had a few things to discuss about Meleak and McElroy. They hadn’t talked about either man during dinner, and while he’d been glad of that, he had a suspicion she’d learned something in the time between when he’d left her house that morning and when he’d returned to pick her up for dinner.
She nodded. “You know where to find me. Believe it or not, I have real work to do tomorrow. Classes start next week, and I have to put two syllabi together.”
He let his eyes drop to her lips and considered one more quick kiss, but then killed the idea. It was too soon for staking that kind of claim. A stolen kiss in a dark parking lot was one thing. A goodbye kiss in front of her friends—and the rest of the bar—was something else entirely.
He nodded, then tipped his head at the rest of the table before heading out. He wasn’t even halfway to the door before he heard Six start to interrogate Cyn about their date. He grinned and kept walking. He might want to hear what they had to say, but he didn’t need to. What he did need to do was get back to the station and start digging into Private James McElroy, something he hadn’t had a chance to get to during the day.
Twenty minutes later, he let himself into the darkened police station. At just after nine, there’d be two officers on duty and they’d both be out on patrol. Entering his office, he flicked on the desk lamp, then booted up his computer. Another ten minutes later, he had a cup of coffee in hand and was going through the report on McElroy’s death that he’d promised he’d get to Cyn. Not wanting to send it via email, he printed it out and left the papers on the printer behind him as he re-read it on his monitor.
During a training exercise, Private James McElroy had been shot in the upper thigh, severing an artery and killing him in minutes. The Army CID investigation resulted in a ruling that it had been an unprovoked, targeted attack by a person or persons unknown. Although the “targeted” label was a bit of a stretch, as the report implied that he wasn’t targeted specifically, but only because he was Army and happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The official file was signed by Major Macarthur Carver.
Closing the document, he opened one of the law enforcement databases and ran a search of James McElroy. They hadn’t bothered to run a background check on him since, for all intents and purposes, he’d been the victim of the crime. But with the knowledge that Meleak was involved, Joe had to wonder if McElroy was yet again in the wrong place at the wrong time and had only served Meleak’s purposes. Or, if there was something specific about McElroy that was important to Meleak in conveying whatever message he wanted to send Cyn.
The background on the private pulled up a relatively clean record; one speeding ticket when he was nineteen and one warning for discharging a rifle within a state park. The second entry piqued his interest, but that was quickly squelched after reading the report—McElroy and two of his friends had been out shooting clay pigeons and hadn’t realized they’d crossed over from private property outside town limits to the park land. Finding nothing more interesting in the police records, he closed the database down and went old-school—he Googled That Shit.
A few entries popped up, most about McElroy’s time in ROTC, including an interview the university paper had done with him and one of the other first year students a few years ago. There was, of course, also an article about his death. Noting that McElroy had gone to school at the same university where Cyn taught made Joe wonder if he’d ever taken one of her courses, but that was something he’d have to ask her tomorrow.
A few more links down, he saw a reference to McElroy’s Instagram account, and he opened that app on his phone and searched until he found it. The young man didn’t post much himself, but several people had posted about his death. Knowing it was a rabbit hole, he started clicking on the accounts of McElroy’s grieving friends. Two hours later, the only thing he’d learned was that McElroy’s friends were a pretty homogeneous group. Given where he’d grown up and where he’d gone to school, though, a lack of diversity wasn’t a huge surprise.
With a frustrated grunt, Joe finally logged off his computer and shut it down for the night. Flicking off the desk lamp, he remained in the dim light of his office with just the lights from Main Street reflecting through his second-floor windows. Leaning back in his chair, the old leather creaked, and the solitude of the hour and the history of this new place settled on his shoulders. He definitely needed to keep a bottle of whiskey—or bourbon—in his office. He’d had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner, but somehow, a finger or two of whiskey seemed to fit both the place and his mood.
His phone buzzed with a text, interrupting his unimportant thoughts. Picking up the device, he glanced at the unknown number. He almost ignored it, but then a second message came in. Unlocking his phone, he opened his texting app, read the message, then grinned. He should have known they’d all have his number and the first was a message from Devil; a to-the-point text telling him that if he was messing around with Cyn, she’d hide his body where no one would ever find it because “Cyn was a damn treasure.” Although he didn’t disagree with her opinion of Cyn, he made a mental note to remember that while she appeared very cool and collected, Devil was the bloodthirsty sort. Also, it didn’t escape his attention that the only reason Devil would have felt compelled to send such a message was if Cyn was genuinely interested in him.
The second message had him laughing, his voice echoing in the empty offices. It was a fifteen-second video clip of Six and Cyn singing karaoke to Don McLean’s “Everybody Loves Me, Baby.” That they both had good voices—and excellent moves—didn’t surprise him in the least.
“Roger that,” he wrote back. Then, after storing Devil’s number in his phone, he grabbed the papers he’d printed for Cyn and headed home. Somehow, tomorrow, he had to convince her to tell him not just what she’d discovered but also what was going on in her complex mind. Because he had little doubt that the key to it all was locked somewhere inside there.
* * *
It was close to four o’clock the next day when Joe was finally able to meet up with Cyn. He didn’t bother to hide his smile when he heard her small feet shuffling across the floor as she made her way to the front door to let him into her monstrosity of a house. That wasn’t exactly fair. The house was gorgeous and surrounded by beautiful nature on three sides and the ocean on the fourth. But it was about ten times the size of the average family home. At least.
She threw open the door and caught him eyeing the stone exterior. He didn’t know when the house had been built, but the style was definitely late-1800s, and it reminded him a little bit of The Breakers, one of the Newport mansions his mother had dragged him to as a kid.
“It was completed in 1902 by a family who made their money in lumber. It was loosely influenced by The Breakers in Newport, although it’s twenty thousand square feet smaller,” she said with a grin.
“Making it…?”
“About forty thousand square feet.” Her grin grew into a smile.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
She laughed. “Come in. It takes a lot to heat this place.”
He bustled in, shutting the door behind him. Although he didn’t know why he moved so fast. If Cyn could afford the house, then heating it would probably be the equivalent of a rounding error in her checkbook.
“Who needs a house this big?” he half-asked, half-mulled as he divested himself of his winter gear.
“Absolutely no one,” Cyn said, taking his hat, scarf, and coat and setting them on a table in the foyer. “No one on this planet needs a house this big. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love it.”
He wasn’t so sure about that. Not that he doubted her love for the place, but maybe her sanity for wanting to live here. Alone.
“Did you get your syllabi done today?” he asked, trailing her into the kitchen that sat in the back of the house.
