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1
Just try and outrun your demons, I dare you.
I sit in my daughter’s upstairs bedroom, in my half-remodeled craftsman, the morning bright against the window, holding a black teddy bear in my shaking hands. Gomer, a throwaway gift to my then four-year-old daughter, almost an afterthought I picked up from a drugstore as I raced home from work on a long-ago birthday.
A white star is embedded in the toy’s fur, and this version of Gomer still has both eyes. They stare at me, black, glassy.
Shocked.
It’s all wrong.
Please, God, let me wake up.
It’s a fear that stalks every man, at least the ones like me, middle-aged, married, a father of one, trying to frame his life into something that resembles success. A fear that, despite his heroic attempts, and as much as he tries to live in the light, his mistakes will find him.
And the price of those mistakes will cost him everything.
The voice that confirms it is seven years old, a deafening memory deep inside my head. “But daddy, you’re a detective. You know how to find things.”
Overnight my life has imploded.
My house is now a war zone, the product of fury and panic, the drawers opened, dumped out, my office bearing the wreckage of my disbelief. I spent the past hour digging through my belongings—our belongings—to find anything that might give me answers.
My seven-year-old daughter, Ashley, has vanished. No, that’s not accurate. She’s been murdered. Two years ago.
My beautiful wife, Eve, has left me. She wants a divorce from the man I’ve become.
A man I don’t know.
And I haven’t a clue how to get them back.
But I’ve jumped too far ahead. Ironically, I’ll have to rewind time, return to the moment when the demons knocked on my door in the form of my ex-partner, a box of cold cases and a gift—an old watch bequeathed by my boss, Chief of Police, John Booker.
No, maybe I’ll start later that night, when, after shaking awake from a nightmare, I stumbled downstairs to my office, the one with the less-than-inspirational leather chair my wife gave me when I left the force three years ago, and began to work on my unfinished novel.
Eve found me in the middle of the night as I sat there, barely dressed, trying to find words to add to my unfinished manuscript. She dragged out the cold cases and pulled the first one, the coffee-shop bombings of 1997, the one where we first met.
The catalyst for this entire nightmare.
That’s when I put on the watch.
I couldn’t believe Booker left me his prized possession. I don’t remember a day he didn’t wear it. An old watch with a worn leather wristband and a face like a vintage clock, the gears visible through the glass.
The hands didn’t move, stuck on the five and the three, even when I wound it. On the back two words etched into the steel: Be Stalwart.
I hope so, because this morning, when I realized what the watch had cost me, I threw it against the wall, snatched it off the floor and threw it again when it refused to work.
And you might think, calm down, Rembrandt, just get another watch.
But it’s this watch that has somehow loosed the demons.
And I must find a way to send them back.
Now, as I sit in the wreckage of my life, I wiggle the dial again, shaking the watch, pressing it to my head. Please, please—
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nbsp; I don’t really know what I’m asking for, because the truth is, well, unbelievable.
I dreamed—or did?—travel back in time. Solved the coffee shop bombing case. Then I woke up and everything…everything…
Oh, God—
“Rem?” A knock sounds on my open door—I didn’t close it after Eve left, just an hour ago after handing me divorce papers. I remember dropping the packet on my rush up the stairs to Ashley’s room to confirm Eve’s wretched words.
“Ashley was murdered, remember? Two years ago.”
I don’t remember much after that.
“Rembrandt?” The voice makes me look up and probably it’s a good thing the law just walked into the room because this is a crime scene.
My life has been stolen.
“Burke,” I say, and I’m not even a little embarrassed that I’ve been crying. That my house looks vandalized. That I want to shake him for answers.
Andrew Burke was my partner for the better part of twenty years. A tall, bald, dark-skinned detective of the Minneapolis Police department, he’s my best friend and sparring partner, even now.
Answers. He’ll help me find them—
“Don’t tell me you’re on a bender again.”
What?
Burke is wearing a suit, of course. I ditched mine after a few years on the job, but he always looked good in them. I was more of a sweater and jeans guy, and back then, I wore my hair long, with a hint of a beard, Don Johnson style. It was a thing. And Eve liked it.
Eve. The scene flashes through my mind again—Eve on the doorstep with her assistant, Silas. Eve handing me a manila envelope, Silas’s arm around her. My insane urge to sink my fist into his mouth. Then the words—oh, God, the words—She’s dead, Rem. She’s dead, and you can’t bring her back.
