“I can’t—” Her phone rang, one of those loud, old-fashioned rings that all old people have on their phones. She checked the screen. “Speak of the devil!” My heart skipped a beat. I had to resist wrestling it out of her hand and answering it myself. “He must be wondering how the showing went.” She looked at me pointedly, then pressed a button to silence the ring. The phone went dark. Damn it. “Hopefully I’ll have good news to call him back with. I’ll just let him know I’m still with you.” Back with the smile. She keyed in her passcode and sent a text, then returned her phone to the counter. “So what do you say?”
I say that the very guy I’m looking for just called you and I can do nothing about it. I say that this has been how my entire life has been going lately—so close, yet so far. I say that a killer could be out on that houseboat and she could just decide to set sail any day now and never come back. And I will be living the rest of my life looking over my shoulder and wondering what happened to my mother. I will spend the rest of my life wondering if my dad was in on her murder. I will never be at peace. Not for a single day. That’s what I say.
I say that if you would just give me five minutes alone with your phone, I would . . .
“Can we look at the backyard again?” I asked. I held up my own phone. “I want to take some pictures for my husband.”
“Sure,” she said, practically leaping out of her pumps to get to the back door. I followed her out, stopping to pretend to tie my shoe, setting my phone on the counter as I did so. I left it there as I stepped through the door behind her. “So, like I said before, you have a really big backyard here. Some shade in the south corner, which is good. The shed can stay or go, depending on what you want. Great neighbors on both sides. Feel free to take whatever photos you’d like.”
I reached into my pocket and let a surprised look fall over my face. I checked my other pockets, patting them briefly, and then chuckled and rolled my eyes. “I must have left my phone inside. I can’t believe I’m so absentminded. I’m just so excited about this. One second?”
She nodded and went over to a flowerpot, poking around at a half-dead stem inside.
I darted inside and went straight to her phone, praying the colors I’d seen when she keyed in her passcode were right. It was at an angle, and I wasn’t paying the closest attention in the world. But that was one of the great things about synesthesia—sometimes it did the paying attention for you.
Cornflower blue. Sea green. Silver. Brown.
I was in.
I was fucking in!
Now all I had to do was memorize his phone number and I would be good to go. I pressed her contacts icon. I didn’t need Chris after all. I was perfectly capable of getting shit done all on my—
I nearly dropped the phone.
Peter Fairchild. White, white, white. Bronze, melon, bronze, brown.
Easy number to memorize. It wasn’t the number that made my skin crawl, my throat dry, my breath catch.
It was the photo icon next to the number.
White-blond hair, blue eyes, super-tan skin.
Peter Fairchild was the white-blond-haired man.
25
I KNEW IT wasn’t going to go well when I showed up at Chris’s office early that evening, but I had to take my chances. Part of me—the part that knew him—told me he did care about finding Luna and helping me solve my mother’s case. I was going to have to trust that part of me when he was most likely going to be yelling at me to leave and take my drama with me.
Turned out, I was lucky to even catch him there at all. When he came out into the lobby to see me standing there, I could see his shoulders tense. I almost felt bad. Like maybe if I cared for him at all, I would just leave him alone.
But caring for people wasn’t in my repertoire. And neither was leaving people alone when I wanted something.
“Don’t get that look,” I said, brushing past him toward his office. “I’m here for a good reason.”
“I was just heading out,” he said to my back.
“I can ride along.”
“No, Nikki, you can’t.” He edged around me and stopped in his doorway, blocking me. “This is about a case that has nothing to do with you. Or me. Other than it’s my job to solve it.”
“Oh, come on. Are you ever going to forgive me? I’ve said I was sorry.”
“If you were really sorry, you would stop doing what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?” My voice had taken on a high, squeaky quality that I hated.
“We’ve been through this and through this and through this. I think you’re wasting your time. You aren’t going to find Luna. You aren’t going to find your mother’s murderer. You need to let go already and start to live your life. Stop living in the past. You can’t fix it. You can only learn from it.”
I cocked my hip to one side, pressing my fist into it. “Says the guy whose secret obsession with his own past almost got him killed. Maybe you should let it go and live your life.”
“And you really think Heriberto is going to let that happen?” he asked, voice low.
“And you really think Luna is?” I countered.
“Yes. Actually, I do. I think Luna is long gone. I think she probably hitched the first plane to Dubai, just like her parents would have done. I think she wants to forget that you ever existed. I think she wants everything that’s happened to just go away.”
“And I think I’m not okay with that. Peyton didn’t just go away. Dru didn’t just go away. They were killed. And as long as she is out there, I think I have to keep looking. For my sister. For my mom. And everything you just said tells me that you definitely aren’t remembering everything that happened.” I pressed my lips together, waiting, but he said nothing. I tried switching gears. “Besides, if I ride along with you, maybe I would decide I want to be a cop after all.” He rolled his eyes, the seriousness slowly sliding off him. All the opening I needed. I grabbed his arm. “You could change a life, Detective Martinez. Inspire a future officer of the law.” I saluted, grinning.
He held out for another long moment, and then let his arms drop. “Fine. Come with me. But you stay in the car unless I tell you to get out. You got that?”
“Aye, aye, Captain Control Freak.” I saluted again, but he’d already turned his back.
“SO WHO ARE we busting?” I asked as soon as we got into the car.
“First of all, I’m not busting anyone. I need to question someone about a murder that happened under an overpass two nights ago. Routine stuff. Secondly, we aren’t doing anything. I am asking questions; you’ll be in the car. Got it?”
“Sure, sure.”
We drove along for a few minutes. I watched out the window as we drove deeper into the rough side of the city. I wondered what it would be like to call these streets work. My job. A squad car my office. For the first time ever, I didn’t get a sick feeling at the idea of putting on a blue uniform. For the first time ever, it seemed like it could be a possibility. If I could pass the written exams, of course. Could it really be that hard?
I was probably still riding the high of figuring out who the white-blond man was.
“So to what do I owe the pleasure of having you on this ride-along?” he finally said, breaking the silence. Sarcastic. Still a little bitter.
“Don’t say it like that,” I said.
“So your presence in my office doesn’t have anything to do with what you found at the house you tried to get me to look at with you this morning?”
“You know, I think I liked it better when I was telling you to get off my ass all the time,” I said sourly. “You were way nicer then. Of course, that was before you got scrambled brains.” I knew, even as the words were leaving my mouth, that they were the wrong ones.
“Nice, Nikki. Really nice.”
“Sorry,” I said, sitting in a fern-colored awkwardness.
He let the heaviness hover for a minute while he turned into an even shadier area—one of those abandoned-looking streets that immediately took me back to the day we went to the Dom Distribution warehouse. My palms started sweating with the memory. “So what did you find?” he finally asked, quiet, contrite.
“The house is completely gutted. Nothing and no one to be found.”
“So you got nothing?”
“I did, actually. I hacked into the Realtor’s phone and got this.” I held up the palm of my hand, on which I had scribbled Peter Fairchild’s number the moment I’d gotten back in my car.