Chapter 1
It’s the regrets that keep me awake.
The broken hearts, the lives ripped apart. The bitter finales.
The sense that, frankly, it’s not finished.
I’m not finished, no matter how much I try to lie to myself.
With every crime, a clock starts ticking. A forty-eight hour fuse that ignites, chewing away at the evidence. It begins with the victim and from that moment, time gnaws at every scrap of evidence. Eyewitness memories fade, clues are scattered to the wind by the daily congestion of life.
The colder the trail grows, the lower the likelihood of finding the perpetrators. This accounts for hundreds of thousands of cold cases in dusty file rooms and backup databases around the world.
It also accounts for the fist in my gut every time I have to face the bereaved with a despairing update. And, for too long, it accounted for the indentation in a stool down at the Gold Nugget where Jericho Bloom started pouring the minute I darkened the door.
Days past, but the cases still haunt me, some waking me in the still of night, Eve’s sleeping body like an anchor in the darkness, tethering me to the now. Sometimes she too, awakens, and knowing, finds me and urges the ghosts to quiet, tucking them back inside.
They never stay silent for long. The whispers always return.
What if?
What if I could go back to the moment, the beginning of the forty-eight hour window? What if I had been smarter or faster? Maybe everything would be different.
But you can’t change the past.
None of this is any consolation to the seven-year-old cherub standing in front of me.
“I’m sorry. Gomer’s been missing over a month.” I’m using my most stoic, former homicide Inspector voice, despite the pull of those big blue eyes staring at me. “I don’t have any leads—”
“But Daddy, you’re a detective.” My accuser has curly, golden blonde hair and the way she stares at me, hands on her hips, so much belief in her eyes, I am undone. “You know how to find things.”
Except for Eve, standing in the door frame, her arms folded over her chest, I would make a thousand promises, swear on my soul to unearth the ratty bear I gave Ashley three years ago. Just a gift shop souvenir, a desperation offering because, in the chaos of the moment I’d forgotten her birthday. Of course, out of all the things I gave her, this stupid bear has to be the one she cherishes.
Eve quirks an eyebrow. Her curly auburn hair is tied up, as tidy as she can make it, but corkscrews fall from behind her ears and for a moment, the swift memory of earlier this morning, the softness of her hair between my fingers, derails me.
“Please, Daddy. I miss him. It’s all I want for my birthday—Gomer back.”
Of course it is.
Ashley inherited her mother’s stubbornness, something that has probably kept her mom and me together, a chronic commitment-phobe, this long. She too raises an eyebrow, the expression of an only child who, more than likely, knows the power she has over me. The tiny scar just above her forehead where she ran into a pole at the park is just fading, but the memory of all that blood can still make me nauseous.
There is nothing I won’t do for her, and we all know that.
She’s wearing a dress—refuses anything else—and isn’t moved by the voices gathering in the back yard.
Answers. We all want them, and yes maybe Eve is right—Ash is too old to need a teddy bear. But I’m her father. “Okay, baby. I’ll find Gomer, I promise.”
I hear a huff in the corner, and I catch Eve rolling her eyes even as she turns away.
But I see the smirk, the I-knew-it grin.
Once a detective, always a detective, perhaps. Something I should probably get around to admitting.