“Who?”
“She drove up from the city very early this morning. Wait here.”
Angie got up and walked a short way back down the pier. She raised her hand, calling the visitor over.
They watched as a car door opened up on the road. A squat figure exited slowly—a woman in a brown coat and wool hat. She was old, and she steadied herself with two sticks. Bending into the wind, she began to soldier slowly forward down the wooden dock like a crusty arthritic crab, her sticks like extra legs.
I’m Jasmine’s only remaining kin ... I just want some answers before I my lay grandchild’s remains properly, and finally, to rest.
“She’s your kin, Claire. Your great-grandmother. She’s a retired justice of the Supreme Court. Her name is Jilly Monaghan, and she wants to meet you.”
CHAPTER 49
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER30
Kjel Holgersen leaned back against his pillows. His neck was being held steady by a brace. Pain was a constant right now. And his brain was still thick and woozy from medication. Outside it was getting dark, late November rain streaming against the hospital window. December would dawn tomorrow. Then would come Christmas.
He checked the time. Visiting hours were almost over. No one was coming to see him. Why he’d even dared hope was beyond him. He reached for his iPad at the side of his bed and opened the cover. He pulled up a news site and began to read the stories developing around his and Pallorino’s discovery of a serial killer’s lair at the Nahamish. The media was hailing him as a hero.
He didn’t feel like one.
Nothing about his shithole life was heroic. Probably no one would miss him if he’d gone and died out there in the snow. Why he’d been given yet another chance was beyond him.
He shut the cover on his iPad and closed his eyes, thinking of those case files Leo had set to one side as being irrelevant, unsolvable, a waste of time. Maybe that’s why.
Because no one should be a waste of time.
He could still make a difference, like he’d made with Annelise Janssen in working with Pallorino to see that she finally came home.
Kjel made a mental note to look at those street kid files again, see what he might have missed the last time around. Because if Leo said they were worthless, Kjel figured they held something that warranted deeper investigation.Watch Detective Leo. Like a hawk.
With his eyes closed, he started to drift off to someplace warm, with a beach. A sparkling ocean. With drinks that came in colors like blue and orange and purple and were garnished with tropical flowers and little paper umbrellas.
“Holgersen?”
“A double,” he murmured, holding up two fingers. “Make mine a double.”
“Holgersen.” Someone was shaking his arm. He drifted groggily up from his tropical vacation. He opened his eyes.
“Jeezus, fuck,” he muttered when he saw who it was. “I thoughts you was my waitress. Where’s my drinks? What in the hells you doing here, Pallorino? You ... you look like shit.” He struggled to sit up higher, but pain stopped him dead. He breathed slowly, trying to moderate the pulsing in his nerve ends. Trying not to move his head.
“Speak for yourself, you ugly old mutt.” Angie Pallorino set a packet of nicotine gum on the table next to his bed. “Maddocks found that pack on your desk. Better check with your doc, though, before you go mixing nicotine into that cocktail of drugs they’re giving you.”
He grinned carefully and whispered, “Sweet mercies. You’s doing okay, then?”
She nodded. She looked super pale. She had bruises on her face and a line of tiny black stitches on her brow. And her nose was swollen. He struggled to hold in his emotions at the sight of her alive, struggled to rein in his affection for this hard-ass chick. Who was also so soft. Who he’d really kind of come to love. He’d heard how she’d rolled the car down the bank and gone into the river.
She touched his arm. “And you—how you feeling?”
He almost nodded, wincing again as his slightest movement caused him pain. “Good enough.” His voice would be a hoarse whisper for a while, the docs had said. “I’ll be back at the station in no time.”
She laughed. “Right. We’ll see about that. What do the doctors say?”
“They said the only other person they knows about who gots an arrow through the neck like this and narrowly survived because it missed everything important was some Russian dude, a father of two out for a walk in the park near a sports center in Moscow. Someone from the archery club there misfired, and he gots it in the neck. Outta the blue. Life is fucking weird.”
She held his gaze, her features turning serious. “Yeah,” she said. “It is. But mostly it’s better than the alternative.”
“Mostly.” Although Kjel wasn’t so certain about that.
