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“I hope we can get some DNA off her.”
“Maybe, hopefully, she fought him,” I say. “Look under her fingernails.”
Eve gives me a look, but she’s smiling. “We’ll get him, Rem,” she says. “By the way, why did you want me to pull the DNA off the Delany case?”
I stare at her, a coil tightening around my chest.
The Delany case?
Eve is snapping on her gloves. “Although, admittedly, I realized we didn’t pull DNA the first time, so it’s a good thing. I’m running the match through the CODIS database just to see if we get a hit on Fitzgerald.”
Oh, right. Lauren Delany. The working girl killed outside Sonny’s bar. She had a twenty in her pocket. Did I identify her as a Jackson murder? The first go-round, she was just an unlucky girl who’d been picked up by the wrong John.
Until now, that John was unnamed. But now, it’s Leo Fitzgerald. The name is a recent acquisition to my memory, and it takes me just a moment to nail it. Leo Fitzgerald, the lead suspect in the Jackson murders. Former military, bomb-maker, and the man whose explosive ambush killed John Booker.
He’s been in the wind for three years.
He’s been the primary suspect since his DNA was found on his dead girlfriend, strangled, sexually assaulted and marked with the first of the Jackson bills. But that doesn’t happen for two more years…or rather two years after Lauren Delany’s case.
So what was I thinking?
Eve starts down the hill toward the activity, but I can’t help myself. “Hey—how’s your mom?”
She looked up at me. “She’s good, Rem, thanks. But you just saw her two days ago at my Dad’s memorial party.” She is frowning.
The Danny Mulligan annual birthday party, the precinct-wide bash Bets has every year to celebrate her husband’s life, even in death. So, I’m still invited to that? “Right. Yes, I just…I don’t know.” Two days ago, she lay bleeding in the sidewalk of Eve’s childhood home. Catch up, Rem!
I need an assistant, one of those people who reminds me where I am, and why. But the right words form in my soul. “It’s just been a long time since Danny’s death, and I…you just don’t get over losing someone you love, right?”
She gives me a smile, and it’s sweet. “Sometimes, Rem, you remind me of a guy I used to know.” She winks then and heads down the hill.
I can’t breathe.
It was real. What we had. I saw it flash in her eyes—me, holding her in my arms, her smiling up at me a second before she kisses me.
It was real.
So, then…I think my heart is seizing. I need to sit down—
“Boss, we found some clothes.” The words from Zeke shake me out of the spiral of despair and back to the investigation. “It looks like a t-shirt.”
Zeke is young, maybe mid-twenties, with a man-bun and built like a guy who works out after hours. He sort of reminds me of me, back when I lived for this job. He’s wearing a pair of dress pants, an untucked striped shirt, his sleeves rolled up, and purple evidence gloves. I really don’t know much about him, but I like him. He’s eager. And right now, he’s the closest thing to a friend that I have, so I’m on him like Velcro.
Someone needs to point me in the right direction.
Zeke is directing one of the CSIs to take a picture of the evidence he’s pointing to.
I take a breath, give one glance back at Eve, walk over and crouch next to him as he holds up the underbrush around the shirt. “What, the killer tosses this away as he’s fleeing?”
“Or maybe during the crime, and he didn’t have the time to find it?”
Zeke holds the shirt up. “Pillsbury Diner. It’s a place just across the street. Great burgers, live music.”
I know the place, and the thought sends a strange heat through me. A conversation is forming in the back of my head. I can’t quite make it out, but I will, give me, ahem, time. “Turn it over.”
Again, I’m not sure why, but something in my gut just knows…
He turns the shirt over.
