“Is our girl okay?”
Falco and Tori were close. That was something else Kerri appreciated about her partner. Tori’s father, Nick Jackman, had moved to New York and started a new family with his second wife—the woman with whom he’d cheated on Kerri. Tori had desperately needed someone to fill the void he’d left. Falco had stepped up to the plate. Kerri couldn’t ask for a better surrogate father for her daughter. Especially since she didn’t have the time or the inclination for any sort of relationship other than family and work.
Not that she would anyway. Allowing herself to trust someone that deeply ever again wasn’t very likely in the foreseeable future.
“She’s okay. We’ll talk about it later.”
“Got it.” He cleared his throat. “I know you have your hands full, but we have a development here.”
Kerri took a moment to reorient her thoughts. She rarely permitted her mind to shift so fully from a case. “You found a witness?”
“Nope, but I found Walsh’s cell phone. It was tucked into his sock like a backup piece.”
Smart guy. That said, sometimes intelligence wasn’t enough to keep you alive. “And?”
“The last call Walsh made was to a number I recognized.”
Kerri braked at an intersection and waited for her partner to say the rest.
“Cross,” Falco announced. “Our dead DDA spoke to Cross at ten o’clock last night.”
Sadie Cross. Now there was a surprising turn of events. Cross was a former BPD detective. She’d worked for the department for more than a dozen years, and then she’d walked away. Everyone said she hadn’t been the same since that last undercover operation. She’d gone missing for nearly a year and come back with no memory of what had happened to her during that time and very little recall of the events that had occurred while she was under deep cover for the four months prior to vanishing. Cross was an odd sort. She rubbed Kerri the wrong way.
But Kerri owed her.
Whatever Cross had to do with this double homicide, Kerri had no choice but to give the woman the benefit of the doubt. She damned sure had no right to cast the first stone.
“You talked to her already?”
“We should do this in person. I can go without you, if that would be better under the circumstances.”
“No. You’re right. We should talk to her together. I’ll pick you up.” Diana, Kerri’s sister, was always more than happy to spend time with Tori. Kerri glanced at her daughter. “I’ll drop Tori by Diana’s for a little while.”
Tori looked at her. She didn’t say a word, but the unspoken demand was written all over her face.
You’re going to leave your traumatized daughter to work on a case?
What kind of mother did that?
4
12:30 p.m.
Sadie’s Loft
Sixth Avenue, Twenty-Seventh Street
Birmingham
Sadie stared at the news flashing on the screen. There had been a double homicide at Leo’s. The victims’ names hadn’t been released yet. Sadie didn’t need anyone to tell her what had happened.
Walsh was dead.
He’d said they would talk this morning about what he’d learned in his meeting with Kurtz, but he hadn’t called. There was no need for her to try calling him. He was dead. She knew it. The only way he wouldn’t have called or shown up this morning was if he was dead.
“Son of a bitch!” She clicked the remote, turning the television screen to black.
She had told him. Damn it. She’d told him more than once. This thing he wanted to do was not a good idea. Not for someone like him. He didn’t know how to dive into the deep water like this without ending up shark bait. He didn’t have the experience. Just a lot of ambition and fearlessness.
Idiot.
Sadie closed her eyes and blocked the image of his face. Too damned young to die. He wasn’t even thirty. So damned determined to be the big hero.
“I’m the perfect example of how that shit works out,” she muttered.
Now the cops would be crawling all over her ass. She’d been extremely careful—as always. No phone calls unless they used burner phones. No emails or text messages. They’d met in private. No one could know she had spoken to him, and yet there would be no way to hide that fact after what he’d done.
He’d called her last night from his personal cell phone. She’d jumped his shit, but he’d been too excited to care. He was close, he’d said. Kurtz had agreed to talk with other small, independent business owners he’d suspected were dealing with the same concerns. More importantly, Kurtz had found a potential source they were going to confront.
Now Walsh was dead.
The investigating detectives would find the call. No matter if Walsh deleted the call and her number from his call log; they would find it in his phone records.
What she needed was a logical explanation for why he had called her. A call to a wrong number wouldn’t have lasted three minutes or so.
Damn it!
Sadie grabbed her smokes from the table and tapped one out. She tucked it into the corner of her mouth and flicked her lighter. Savoring a long drag, Sadie allowed the chemicals to fill her lungs with the comforting promise only nicotine could make. She didn’t worry about lung cancer. It wasn’t like she was going to have a long and prosperous life. It was a miracle she wasn’t already dead.
Plenty had tried to make her that way. Not that she cared. She didn’t. Another day lived was another day she had to find ways to distract herself from the bits and pieces of the past that haunted her. She wasn’t suicidal or anything. She just didn’t care. She was done.
Done. Done. Done.
Her father slipped into her thoughts, and she dismissed him. He’d given up on her long ago. They hadn’t spoken in what? A year? He’d likely be happy once she was out of the way. Then he wouldn’t have to be disappointed in her anymore. She couldn’t screw up her life any worse if she were dead. She could no longer embarrass him. His life would certainly be less complicated.
Are you married? No, no, I’m a widower. Any children? No, no children. My only daughter passed away.
How nice that would be for him. He wouldn’t have to explain who his daughter was. Where she lived. What she had done since quitting the Birmingham Police Department. The only question that might crop up was how she’d died. He wasn’t above making something up to cover that detail. Cancer like her poor mother? Hit and run? Robbery gone wrong?
But she wasn’t dead.
Truth was she didn’t really understand why. She should have died the day she vanished all those years ago or on any number of other occasions before and since. She’d taken a bullet more than once. Had multiple car accidents—usually while chasing bad guys. Somehow, she had survived them all.
“Your luck won’t hold out forever,” she muttered as she drew more smoke into her lungs. The upside was then she wouldn’t have to bother with all this.
The DIY route had never been an option. She might be a lot of things, but she wasn’t a quitter. In her opinion, going the suicide route was being a quitter. Taking the easy way out. Leaving the rest of the world to clean up your mess.
Nope. She wasn’t a quitter. Her plan was to piss off the whole world, and then maybe one of these days someone would do it for her.