Archer
ARCHER
I don’t know if the changing weather is meant to be a good omen—or a portentous warning—but snow turns to drenching rain overnight, and that rain transforms the ground to mud long before our medical examiners have a chance to even mention the pop-up gazebo they keep in the back of their van.
But Fletch and I wrestle with it now, extending the legs and clipping the pins into place. We expand the top, pinching fingers and grumbling about the fucking elements, and all the while, I keep Minka in sight as she and Aubree prepare for a dig.
Shovels. Picks. They sort their brushes and pans. Evidence bags are stacked according to size and probability of necessity, and buckets are added next.
A man could be forgiven for expecting the medical examiner’s office to use specialist tools on the job. The expensive apparatus no regular John or Jane Doe might own.
But that’s not my experience, as Minka pulls a soup ladle out of the bucket.
An actual soup ladle, like in every person’s kitchen drawer, second from the top. She adds a sponge—the kind we scrub dishes with—and a saw, the kind every dad has in his garage.
“You’re staring.” Fletch sets his gazebo leg in the mud and stomps a peg into the hole at the bottom to keep it in place. Already, his jeans are muddy, his shoulders are soaked, and despite the hat he pulled on before getting out of the car, rain still dribbles onto his cheeks and off the sharp edge of his jaw. “Why are you watching her so closely?”
“Because she’s getting sick.” I drag my bottom lip between my teeth, tilting my head to the side, and narrowing my eyes when she shivers under her OFFICE OF THE MEDICAL EXAMINER jacket, three sizes too big for her trim body. “Her eyes are still glassy, even after eleven hours straight. She slept like shit, rolling around and mumbling in her sleep, even though the infusion usually knocks her out. She’s cold, even under the jacket, and she thinks I haven’t noticed the way her cheeks are sunken today.” I grab a peg from my back pocket and slide it into the foot of the gazebo. “She’s gonna crash soon, and I don’t know if her body is waiting for closure on the New York case, or if she’ll drop before, which could potentially be way worse.”
“Dropping could be a good thing.” He pins the last leg—three to my one—and stands tall, setting his hands on his hips. “Put her to bed, feed her cold and flu meds, and force her to sleep for a week. By the time she wakes, maybe the New York thing will be resolved.”
I scoff. “Your naivete is showing. If she gets sick before she has closure, she’ll work herself to death anyway. She won’t take meds willingly, and shoving them down her throat is, technically , illegal. Something about violence in the home or something…”
He chuckles. “It’s only deemed illegal via a courtroom, so if it doesn’t make it all the way to trial…”
“You’re setting me up to fail.” Shaking my head, I peel my eyes from Minka and around to my partner. “She’ll gut me long before a judge sees the docket. You ready for this?” I glance toward the markers in the mud. The spot Theodore Bukowski bragged about to Tarran McDermott, that Tarran then went on to describe for us in surprising detail. “If she’s in there, we’re heading back up to the prison for a talk with Buke. And if she’s not…”
“Then McDermott either sent us up the river for funsies or he got the directions wrong. Or,” he adds with a smile, “we can’t read his drawing for shit. In which case, we might have to get him out of his cell for a day and have him bring us out. Which might’ve been his plan all along. He’s got a good long while left on his sentence. A pleasant hike in the woods could be the outing he was hoping for.”
He’s not wrong. Not really. And convicts have talked more shit than this for a chance of a few hours outside the four concrete walls they currently call home. But McDermott went to prison for his daughter; screwing with us means screwing with his visitation schedule.
“I don’t think he’s lying. He’s not from Copeland originally, which means he doesn’t know these woods like a native would. For him to describe the turns and markers and all that shit the way he did, means he got really fucking lucky, or he’s telling the truth the way Buke gave it.”
“Alright, Detectives.” Aubree bounces across and stops on my right, a small shovel gripped in her hands, booties wrapped around her shoes, and gloves keeping her safe from whatever we might find beneath the surface. “We’re ready to start. How deep did this guy say she probably is?”
“Five feet and a deer carcass.” Fletch peeks over to the markers again, his honeycomb eyes glittering under the spotlights set up amongst the trees. “He probably figured tossing a deer on top would deter anyone who thought to dig.”
“We’re not stopping till we have answers. Either we’re bringing her out of the ground, or we’re saying for sure she ain’t here.” I study Aubree’s plastic coverings and the pink highlights in her hair, peeking out from under the brim of her hat and the hood of her jacket. “What can we expect to find down there?”
“As in, decomp?” Her blue eyes swing to the markers. “We’ve had two winters and a summer since she went missing. The soil around here is typically acidic, and we’re at the bottom of a pretty big mountain, which brings the added complication of water run-off. Eighteen months? If she’s down there, I’d expect not much more than bones and cloth particles at this point. The deer might’ve slowed things down, since he added insulation from the varying temperatures between seasons. But his decomposition could have counteracted hers, which means we might be in for a whole ass mess. Was the deer literally thrown on top of her? Or was she covered up a bit, then the deer on top of that? Was she placed inside anything before burial? Was she wrapped in anything?”
“Sheets and a shower curtain,” Fletch answers, while my eyes wander back to Minka. My brows pinching tight when her phone rings and her hand whips around to free the device from her back pocket. She stands at the rear of the work van, the doors open, and a bunch of tools and shit splayed out for selection. Her back is to me, but I have a clear view as she brings the phone up, accepts the call, and answers with an easily distinguishable “ Hey, Pax .”
“Things go alright last night?” Aubree keeps her voice low, her gaze flickering to her boss, then back to me. “Did he intrude?”
“Yeah, he…” Frowning, I dig my hands into my pockets and stare down at her pixie-like face. “He was on the phone when I walked in. Is this something I need to be worried about?”
“He gives me the heebie-jeebies.” She shivers under her coat, her eyes shadowed under the brim of her hat, but when a sleek black SUV comes to a stop in the rain, the headlights on, although it’s still daytime, she relaxes and releases the tense lock of her jaw. Because her man—my brother—steps out of the back and shuts the door. He scans the scene laid out in front of him; our cruiser, the medical examiner van, the cameras set up on tripods—four of them—to catch every angle of our dig. He carefully examines the area to make certain he’s not stepping into official recordings, then he looks up and meets Aubree’s gaze.
A lift of his chin and her lips curl into a soft grin.
She’s whipped.
“Hey? Emeri?” I pinch the visor of her hat and force her eyes back to us. “Focus on me for a minute. Paxton?”
“Malones are always nagging me to pay attention to them.” And yet, she shuffles her feet and firms her lips into serious lines. “Paxton Gilbert is a man who, I gather, though I’ve obviously never met him, very much appreciates an intelligent woman who is easy on the eye. He knew her from New York and made damn sure to reach out this week, though she’s not officially part of the investigation. He didn’t have to call her. He wanted to. Sounds like he found his perfect excuse to reconnect.”
“I heard him on the phone last night.” I peek over my shoulder again and spy Minka sitting on the back lip of the van, her face in one hand and the phone pressed to her ear with the other. “Didn’t hit on her. It was all work.”
“They have a romantic past.” She drops her words like a dump truck slamming onto my head. Backing up, then slamming me a second time. “I feel like a total asshole telling you that.” She swallows when I swing my gaze back to her. “When clearly, she hadn’t told you herself. I’m not here to cause drama—you know that’s not me—but they have a past, and that past is weaving its way into a traumatic experience she spent her whole life dissociating from. That means he becomes a part of the trauma, and trauma bonds, as we know?—”
“Fuck over even the best people,” I snarl. “Is she talking to him about work, Aubree? Or is this a bond she can’t quite kick, and he’s all too willing to make himself available?”
She licks her bottom lip and startles when Tim steps up at her back, his chest touching her shoulder and his presence like a wall she gets to lean on. She gulps and glances up, holding his stare like it gives her strength. But then she brings her eyes down again, focusing on mine. “I don’t know. I just know she’s vulnerable right now. This case made her who she is today. Now this guy is back since Detective Lowe retired. If he doesn’t solve it, the communication can continue. And if he does, he gets to be the hero. It’s win-win for him, and the fact she takes his calls every time, though she does that for almost no one else, means his ego is stroked, and their memories are reignited.”
“This motherfucker wants my wife?”
“He just…” She shrugs and shakes her head. “I don’t know, Arch. This isn’t about what he wants. Because if that were the case, then you’d have an issue with, like, everyone on the planet. Your brothers flirt with her every damn day.” She gestures to Fletch. “He asked her to marry him.”
His eyes flare wide with panic. “I was just kidding. It was a joke!”
“Men like what they see,” Aubree continues gently. “She’s pretty, she’s smart. Her ancestry gives her an exotic flair rarely seen in one person. Add in that she’s confident and successful, and you’ve got a pressure cooker just waiting to burst. Men wanting her has never been an issue in the past because she has no interest in returning their flattery or entertaining anything more than a cool brush-off. ”
“So you being worried about this dude says what? That she is interested in entertaining him? That she wants him, too?” I grab her hat again when she attempts to glance down, yanking her up and forcing her eyes to mine. “Aubree?”
“I’m saying that she’s vulnerable.” She leans back, forcing my hand to drop away. “And I’m concerned that he might be charismatic enough to remind her of their shared history. If he gets past her boundaries, he may successfully blur some lines.”
“No.” Firm, Fletch shakes his head. “She’s the most loyal woman I’ve ever met. There are no lines to blur.”
“But every time he calls,” Aubree inserts, while back at the van, Minka stands again and turns to study her selection of tools. “She’s not Copeland City Chief Medical Examiner Minka Mayet anymore. She’s five-year-old New York Mayet. Or twenty-four-year-old Minka Mayet. You need to keep her here ,” she presses. “Accountable to the person she is today . Because trauma can fuck with even the most intelligent person, and if she gets caught up in who she was back then, that’s when a line might be crossed.”
“Fuckin’ great!” I spin from my team and meet Minka’s curious stare when she peers this way. The phone remains pressed to her cheek. Detective Gilbert’s voice, still whispering into her ear. And he’s already had her. In his bed. In his blood. He knows what it’s like to fly that close to the sun.
If she left me, crossed the country, married someone else, and still took my calls, there’s not a damn thing I wouldn’t say or do to tempt her back.
There’s no moral line I wouldn’t cross, no ‘ but she’s taken ’ stance I wouldn’t toss in the trash. There ain’t a damn thing I wouldn’t try to bring her back.
Detective Paxton Gilbert just zoomed his way to the very top of the list of men I trust the least.
His name sits amongst the likes of Timothy Malone the Second. Nathan Booth. Detective Beau Fox. Glenn Ferris, one of the motherfuckers who worked for my father and kicked the shit out of me all because he had permission and enjoyed hurting people who can’t fight back .
“We have a dig to complete, Chief!” Unable to pull my temper in, I sneer and stalk her way. “We’re on the clock and have a dead woman to dig up. So if you don’t fucking mind…”
Surprised by my mood, her brows furrow, and her eyes scan me up and down. But instead of acknowledging me with words, she gifts them to Pax . “I have to go. Thanks for the update.” Hanging up before he has time to respond, she lowers her hand and frowns. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Nothing!” Everything . “We have a job to do, and last I heard, you actually gave a shit about the dead. We have one in the ground right now, so I’d prefer your focus was where it needs to be.”
“My focus is always where it needs to be.” She strides forward, her stubborn jaw fixed and her eyes burning with impatience. “We have one body here,” she agrees with a barely there dip of her chin, “and seventeen more in New York. Eighteen, if Janiesa loses this round and ends up in a plastic bag. I assure you, my focus is always where required.” Finally, she slips her phone into her back pocket and leans around me to stare at the rest of our group. “Why’s he here?”
“Tim?” Aubree rests against his chest, though we know she’s on the job and probably shouldn’t. “He’s a little obsessed with me, and we’re digging, so I guess he felt bad that we were out here in the rain without him.”
“Let’s go.” I spin on my heels and hate myself for snapping at her. Good one, Arch. Piss her off and send her back to Pax in a bad mood. That’ll do it . “Let’s turn the recorders on,” I order Fletch. “Start the cameras. Tim,” I meet his eyes, “stay out of view if you insist on staying.” Then to Aubree, “We’re lucky Danika’s case is out of the news, and no one cared enough to follow us out here. It’s just us on scene today.”
Finally, I turn to Minka, her brow sitting high on her forehead, her arms folded firmly across her chest. “Let’s get to work. You taking lead?”