I. Could find. Her.
No. I had to find her. If I was ever going to get my life back—if I was ever going to be rid of Luna and Hollis Hell, I had to find her.
I had been waiting, fearing, cowering, for too long.
It was time to be done waiting, fearing, cowering. It was time to go on the offensive. Find Luna Fairchild and put an end to this once and for all.
But how, without Martinez? Having an unfinished police academy application did not make me a cop, by any stretch. And if Chris didn’t even remember what had gone down that night, how could he help me?
I raced up to my room and grabbed my cell phone.
It rang five times before he answered. I had started to worry that he wouldn’t answer at all. He was out of breath.
“Hello?”
“Hey,” I said. “It’s Nikki. Miss Kill. Whatever. Nikki.”
A couple of breaths. “You calling for career counseling? Because I don’t really think I’m qualified.”
A joke. I smiled. Maybe the old Chris was in there somewhere, after all. Beneath the anger and frustration and blank space. “Very funny. When does your comedy show go on tour?”
A couple more breaths.
“What are you doing, exactly?” I asked. “You’re all out of breath.”
“I’m at the gym, if you must know,” he said.
“Didn’t you just leave physical therapy? Aren’t there, like, limits to what you should be doing right now? Like maybe you should be working on your daytime TV and potato chip consumption. Or maybe learning to knit.”
“What do you want, Nikki?” And just like that, humor over. It wasn’t terribly unlike him to get tired of my shit and shut me down, but these days it just seemed to happen . . . faster.
“Are you back at work yet?”
“No. Why?”
“I just . . . need some help finding something.”
His voice got echoey, and I could hear water turn on in the background. “Finding what?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Luna Fairchild.”
There was a pause. I heard the water turn off, and the sound of a paper towel being ripped. Finally, softly, “Why?”
“I know you don’t remember,” I said. “But you trusted me. Like, really trusted me. I need you to just trust me now.”
A longer pause. “The last thing I remember about Luna Fairchild is that she was in juvenile detention. Now she’s not?”
“No, she’s definitely not.”
“It sounds like you know what happened.”
“Bill Hollis happened,” I said. But I didn’t know where to go from there. I didn’t want to be the one to tell Chris all the horror that had happened at Tesori Antico. Surely he would learn that when he got back to work. “I’ll give you the cheat-sheet version. Luna got out of juvie. She came after me. Well, they came after us. And we kind of went to them. But anyway, she got away again. She’s disappeared. Nobody’s heard anything from her, that I know of, since that night. But somebody helped her, and it’s a guy I know I’ve seen before. I just can’t figure out who he is or how he fits into this. And his license plate said VP. I’m thinking if we run that plate, maybe it can help us find Luna.”
There was another pause, during which I imagined him trying to arrange everything I’d just said into a picture that made sense. “And then what?”
My voice rose. “And then put her away. Isn’t that still your job?”
“Nikki, I’m not . . .” A long sigh. “Okay. Meet me at the station tomorrow morning. We’ll see what we can find out.”
3
IT DIDN’T MATTER how many times I’d been there; I would always feel like I was being stared at the moment I stepped foot into the police station. Like everyone thought I should be locked up but was slipping by because I had a friend to help me out.
They maybe wouldn’t be too far off from the truth.
The last time I’d been in the station was the night of the Tesori Antico incident, after I’d been told to leave the hospital and go give a statement. I was barely even coherent. Fortunately, Chris had called it in before he’d walked out of the antique shop, so they had a pretty good idea of how all those bodies ended up not breathing inside that store.
What they didn’t understand—and what I couldn’t help them with—was how their officer ended up mangled on the street. They were surprised to hear about the bullet holes in his car. Whatever he’d been mixed up in, he hadn’t even told his colleagues. He’d been doing something off the record, and it had ended up almost killing him. And none of us could help him, as he lay on the operating table getting screws put into his pelvis and getting his collarbone reset.
They hadn’t treated me like a criminal then, but I still felt like one. My hands had held the gun that killed Vanessa Hollis. I had taken a life, and I didn’t know how to feel about that, especially since I mostly felt relief.
I didn’t tell them about shooting Vanessa. Chris had taken the heat for it. For me.
And probably most of the officers I walked past suspected as much. And being the only one who knew for sure was making me crazy. I wished more than anything that Chris could remember. I wished I could tell him.
“He’s in his office, waiting for you,” the woman up front said, gesturing for me to head on back. This was the first time I’d walked through the station by myself. I tried to imagine doing it every day, on my way to my own desk, mulling over my own open cases. Yellow and brown pulsed in my temples, a relentless mix of determination and depression. Instant headache. No way could I work in this place. Never.
Martinez was standing behind his desk, sifting through a stack of papers. His cane was leaning against the wall, abandoned.
“Hey,” I said, knocking lightly on the door frame.
He looked up. “Oh, hey. You’re here. I was just trying to catch up.” He shook his head. “Don’t know if I ever will. Do you see this?” He gestured to the several piles of papers on his desk. Normally, his office was stark and overflowing with paperwork, but he’d seemed to know where everything was, even if it all looked like never-ending stacks of confusion to me. Having someone else dump a bunch of random things on his desk undoubtedly stressed him out.
“You’re not technically back on the clock, are you?” I said, stepping through the doorway. “You don’t have to catch up today.”
“It’s not going to get any better next week when I am back.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Next week?”
He nodded. “I’m getting around without the cane. And I’m sick of hanging out in my apartment. If I can sit on a couch, I can sit at my desk. As long as I can concentrate.” He narrowed his eyes at his computer, as if trying to remember what it was. Or maybe trying to remember what he’d been doing on it.
“Heriberto somebody,” I said.
He shifted his gaze to me, eyes still narrowed.
“You were investigating someone named Heriberto. I can’t remember his last name because words in other languages come to me in gr—” I caught myself again; felt my face flush. I tried out a shrug that felt fake as shit. I hoped it didn’t look as phony as it felt. “It was an unusual last name,” I said.
“Heriberto,” he repeated.
I pointed to the stack of files on top of his filing cabinet. I’d seen him set open cases there before. “Maybe he’s one of these?”
He shook his head. “I’ve been through those already.” He sank into his chair and held his head in his hands. “This is so frustrating. I can look through those files and remember the names on most of them. But what I can’t remember is exactly where I was in the investigations before . . .” He gestured weakly.
“You should have a partner,” I said. “I mean, besides yours truly. Because we seem to get into some real shit when we partner up.”
He turned his eyes to me. “I remember you getting into shit. Constant, unending shit. You telling me I got dragged into that nonsense with you?”
I pointed to my arm. “You have a scar there, right? That’s from getting dragged into nonsense with me.”