The cold case team were small, four detectives who pulled nine to fives due to family commitments. Their close rate was minor, and it was known by everyone in the precinct that if you didn’t have an active case, you came down here to grab a box and work on it until you found the piece that would unravel the entire thing.
Opening the door, I tried to block out the musty smell that accompanied the old boxes sitting in the corner of the room. Three of the team were behind computers, barely acknowledging me as I walked in.
The fourth member, Janie, was smiling when she saw me heading toward her.
“Well, I should have known a simple house fire couldn’t bring down the might of Kane Garrick.”
I smiled at her, happy to see her still here. She’d transferred to the cold case team when her husband had been shot in an active shooter situation a few years ago. Now a single mother, she knew she needed the stability of a nine to five.
“You know it,” I replied. “Got anything ready for me? I’m finally free of a case.”
“That won’t last and you know it,” she said. “You sure you don’t want to sit at your desk and twiddle your thumbs?”
“Hand it over.”
Janie chuckled as she reached over and grabbed the file on the top of the pile. “Oh boy, this one’s a doozy. Grab a trolley.”
Perfect.
I needed to be as busy as I could to forget Maurelle, for a few days at least. She’d been on my mind constantly, haunting my dreams while I had been forced on leave. There had been no trace left after I was hospitalised. Everything she had was in her husband’s name or her daughter’s, and I couldn’t seem to find where she had disappeared to.
She’d pop up again eventually. I knew it, but for now…I needed to get back to some form of normality.
And a tricky cold case file was exactly what I needed to get me back in the game. I took the file and looked down at the file name. Shooting down the hallway to the storage room where all of our cold case boxes were held, I grabbed a trolley on the wall and started the process of moving them upstairs.
Chapter Seven
Kane
Months later
“Why’d I need to come here?” I asked my cousin Brent as he led me into a bar just off from the hotel I was staying in.
“Come on,” he groaned. “You can’t come to Chicago and not indulge a little.”
My cousin had always been the party guy in our family. So much so that my father had forbidden me from hanging out with him, especially after my mother left. When he died a year ago, Brent reached out and we’d been trying to catch up ever since. My job kept me busy and so did his, so it had been slow to build a relationship again.
“Fine,” I said. “But I do have someone to visit tomorrow morning so we’ll keep it civil.”
Brent laughed. “You’re thinking of the old Brent. I’m more mature now.”
Somehow, that throaty laugh told me he wasn’t, but a drink wouldn’t go astray. The ride here had been torture, and a few drinks would help to ease my warring mind.
It had been months since my incident with Maurelle and yet I still dreamt about her, I still wondered how she had managed to erase her trail and disappear on me.
Brent found us a booth to sit at in the posh establishment and got up to get our drinks. I looked around the bar at the patrons and noticed how upper class this place was compared to what I was used to.
Give me my old dingy pub any day. Brent returned with our drinks and joined me in the booth.
“Here’s to family,” he said as he raised his glass. I chinked my glass against his, even though the notion of family was very different to his. We both drank the expensive whiskey and sat there in silence.
“How is everything?” I asked him.
“Good, good,” he replied. “My girlfriend just had my first child.”
“Congrats, Bren,” I said. “That’s amazing.”
“You have kids?” he asked me.
