Archer
ARCHER
“ W e have to tell her parents.” I stop beside the car and keep my voice down, so we’re not overheard by the nearby media. Meanwhile, police cruisers litter the haunted house’s lawn, each with a different player sitting in the back.
No one except Connor Samuels is in cuffs, but everyone is cooperating and willing to head down to the station. So I meet Fletch’s eyes across the roof of the car and lower my voice. “We’ve got a ticking time bomb. Maybe her parents aren’t watching the news. Maybe they are. But for every minute they don’t know, we risk a complete explosion when they find out from the likes of Miranda London down at Gossip-TV. She’s here, and she knows we’re homicide.”
“We’ll swing by their house before the station.” He dangles the car keys from his pointer finger and opens the door. “The Wallaces live only ten minutes from here. Get in and we’ll?—”
“Naomi?” A woman’s panicked screech brings me around on a skid. My hand drops to the gun holstered on my hip, then a heaving cry splits the sky when Minka’s stretcher breaches the front door and emerges to dozens of camera flashes. Then I’m moving, bolting across the lawn to intercept the woman who makes a beeline for the doctors. “No!” The woman screams. “Naomi!”
Minka comes to a sharp halt, standing in front of the stretcher and using her own fucking body as a shield. Officers converge, and her soulful eyes move to mine while I sprint. Then Tim steps out of the house, like a ghost, and places himself between the growing crowd and the women he would trade his life for.
With the doctors guarded, I change my trajectory and aim for the howling woman instead, catching her when she collapses and holding her weight when, otherwise, she would crumble to the ground. “My baby!” she sobs, crushing her face to my chest and banging her fists. “My little girl.”
“Shit.” I wave Fletch closer, then help lower the woman to the damp grass. To her backside, so she can rest, if only for a moment. Then I circle my hand and have a wall of uniforms surrounding us to shield us from the media, and Minka from the grieving mother. “Mrs. Wallace?” I swallow and crouch low enough to be on her level. And while the poor woman wails her sorrow, I mentally rearrange my plans.
No need to go to her house anymore.
“What happened?” Snot and saliva and tears mix on her splotchy red face. Her color is concerning, so I look up at the first set of eyes that meet mine. “Get us a medic,” I order the uniformed officer. “We need observation.” Then I bring my focus back down again and swallow the devastation bubbling in the air between us. “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Wallace.”
“It’s Naomi?” Her words crackle and break. Her breath, hitching. Her eyes are swollen, almost shut. But she forces them open. She makes damn sure I look into them. “It’s really my baby?”
“My partner and I were on our way to speak to you.” I ensure my voice is low. Loud enough for her to hear. But not so loud that all of Copeland get the 4K playback on their home televisions. “I’m so sorry to inform you, your daughter was killed tonight.”
“No.” She collapses in on herself. Her chest caving and her shoulders drooping. “It must be a mistake. Not my…” She stumbles over her words. “Not my Naomi. She can’t?—”
“Can we get you somewhere more comfortable?” I try instead. “Your home. Or the hospital. Or?—”
“My baby is gone?” She moves through her stages of grief. First, denial. That vehement refusal to acknowledge what may be true. Then to bargaining. “Are you sure it’s not?—”
“We have visual confirmation from four separate people. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Wallace.”
“But she’s…” she hiccups. “And the baby is…” Her eyes widen, then well with fresh tears. “The baby?”
“Is gone too.” I drag her head down to rest between her knees when her red skin turns a deathly white. A paramedic emerges on my left, his dark pants offset by a reflective line near his ankle. “I’m worried about her blood pressure,” I tell him. “She was crimson a moment ago. Now she’s pale. I don’t know if she’s gonna have a heart attack or pass out or something in between.”
“My baby,” she cries, though I think she moves through to the acceptance and comatose state. The kind where she simply repeats, over and over, her new reality. “Naomi is gone.”
“She probably needs to be admitted for a few hours. Get her hooked up and monitored. She just found out her daughter and grandchild have passed. So?—”
“Yes, Detective.” The paramedic sets his med bag—not too dissimilar to Minka’s… kind of—on the grass. “Ma’am?” He takes out a mask first, plopping it over her face and ensuring she’s getting air, then he grabs her hand and strategically places his fingers over the pulse point in her wrist. “Ma’am? Can you hear me? My name is Chris, and I’m gonna help you, okay?”
“Her name is Patricia Wallace.” I keep hold of her too-thin frame, so he can work without having to catch her. “She’s… you’re forty-one, right, Mrs. Wallace? That’s what my records told me just before we were getting in the car to come see you.”
“My daughter. She’s…”
“She’s forty-one,” I confirm with a nod. “She works in audiology as a doctor’s assistant. She lives in a two story on Weston. Married, three children. Naomi was her oldest, and Naomi,” I tilt my head as Minka and Aubree hurriedly work the stretcher down the steps of the house. “It’s fresh. We were heading her way to inform her, but she turned up here and this is where we’re at.”
“Arch?”
“Yeah.” I move when a second paramedic stops on my right, then I trade positions with him and allow Mrs. Wallace to be held up by a fresh pair of hands. Free, I push up to stand and turn to Fletch, though my eyes follow the doctors as they load Naomi’s body into the van and the media lights up the nighttime sky with their incessant photographs and footage. “Well, that didn’t go well.” Snarling, I fold my arms and lean to keep Minka in my sight as she moves around the side of the van. “We fuckin’ blew it.”
“We’ll follow her up to the hospital. How’d she know it was her kid?”
My heart thunders when Minka disappears into the darkness. Her trim frame. Her brown locks. For every moment she stays in the shadows, my nerves stretch and strain.
“?”
“Yeah?” I swing my gaze back to him. “What?”
“How’d she know? Sure, the place is lit up and on the news. So if she saw it, she’s gonna panic. But there were countless others here tonight. It could have been anyone. A parent might come here screaming and crying and demanding to know where their kid is. But she knew , right away, that was her daughter in the bag. How’d she know?”
“Um…” I risk another look across to the van and breathe easier when Minka steps into the back to ride with her newest patient. Then Aubree slams the doors closed and taps the steel so the driver knows to start the engine. “Mother’s intuition, maybe? If something happened to Mia, you’d know, wouldn’t you? You don’t have to see inside the bag to be certain.”
“Maybe.” He brings his hand up and rolls his bottom lip between his thumb and finger. “Or maybe someone who knows what happened called her. That someone is gonna race up my list of persons of interest.”
“So we’ll ask her.” I glance back down at the trio not so far from my feet, the woman laid out on her back, but fortunately, still shielded by cops so the cameras don’t get to see. “They’re gonna transport her to the hospital, for sure. We’ll give her a minute to be seen.” But then a new thought hits me, so I move closer and tap the first guy’s shoulder. “Hey?” I stand over the small crowd and wait for him to look up. “Don’t drug her, okay? We need her lucid and able to talk.”
“She a suspect, Detective?”
“No.” She’s a victim. “But for us to find out who did this, we need her mentally able to answer questions. The longer that takes, the cooler our scene becomes.”
“My priority is with my patient, Detective. Not to your investigation.”
“Your patient would prefer I solve her daughter’s murder! Long term, your patient benefits from me being able to do my job. Help us both. Calm her down and make her comfortable. But I need you to not knock her out until we’ve had a chance to talk.”
“Dad’s at work,” Fletch murmurs, reading the screen of his phone and drawing me back around. “He has a second job at night to make ends meet. I’ve called the place and confirmed he’s there. He has no clue about his daughter yet. Unless,” he concedes on a gusty exhale, “the person who hypothetically called Mom also called him.” He spins on his heels, just two steps ahead of me, and takes off toward the car. “Let them get her into the hospital,” he calls out as I match his steps and follow. “Uniforms are gonna put our witnesses into separate rooms down at the station. Our next step is to get to Dad before we have a repeat of that bullshit that just happened.”
He reaches the car a beat before I do, swinging his door wide and dropping in so the vehicle bounces on its frame. Then he looks across, his honeycomb stare burning into mine as I slide in on the passenger side. “There’s no ideal way to be told your daughter was murdered. But finding out because some Nosey-Nelly called you so they could be first? Or seeing it on the news? Or hearing about it from fuck knows where? That would be way worse.”
He shoves the key into the ignition, starting the lights and sirens, since I guess we’re crossing the city hot. Then he reverses one handed while he uses the other to fix his seatbelt. “Mom is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, with a side of cardiac distress. We gotta get to Dad before our case continues to leak. Goddammit,” he growls, “I hate when the media gets to our crime scenes before we’ve told the families.”
“Do you wanna pass on this one?” I fix my seatbelt and hold the handle above my door, though my movements are easy. Calm. I trust his driving, even as wheels screech and the car skids around a corner. “Someone’s daughter has been murdered. You have a daughter. Sometimes these things hit close to home, even when we don’t want them to.”
“Mia’s fine. She’s safe.”
“Yeah, and it wasn’t that long ago we had a brush with something that could’ve been devastating. Your ex-wife is spiraling right now, back to her addicted ways. Your daughter has just started kindergarten. And your nanny isn’t feeling so great. Life is noisy right now. So if we need to pass on a case, that’s okay. I’ll support you if you think this one is gonna hurt your mental space.”
“Don’t bring Jada into this conversation.” He tears the car around another corner, righting the wheel even when our tires slide on a slightly wet road. “She’s worse now than she was before we put her in rehab last time. She’s setting her world on fire, and even with Mia in my home, under my protection, she’s still getting burned.”
“Which is why I said we could?—”
“My private life is a fucking inferno right now and, frankly, I’m pretty tired of dealing with it. So let me keep work and home separate for today. Give me this opportunity to escape into my job without you rubbing my ex-wife’s bullshit in my face.”
“Dude.” I tap his shoulder to get his attention. “I’m not rubbing anything anywhere. I’m trying to offer you a little grace. I’ll tell Lieutenant Fabian it’s on me. I’ll take the rap on the knuckles and claim I knew Naomi Wallace or something. He’ll reassign us, we’ll get a different case, and you’ll have one less thing you need to worry about. Most importantly, you won’t have to speed across the fucking city to tell a dad the very thing that makes up your every nightmare.”
“She’s already dead.” He licks his lips and sends us hurtling through a red light like he thinks we’re invincible. “Naomi’s already gone, Arch. Mia is safe. If we pass on Wallace now, her investigation loses steam and her killer walks free. Whoever that asshole is, who planted a real knife where a prop should have been, has pissed me off.”
“Ya think?” I drag my focus from the side of his face and watch the road instead. “You’re bringing a helluva bad mood along for the ride.”
“Fuck you.” He firms his lips, but at least his snarled words release a little of the tension bubbling in his veins. His tossed insults, like a pressure valve given a little mercy. “I don’t like killers in general. That’s a given. But this one didn’t even have the guts to do it on their own. They didn’t look into Naomi’s eyes and tell her why they wanted to hurt her. Instead, they hid. They made a seventeen-year-old, earning twelve bucks an hour, do it. And now his life is over too. Even if he gets lucky with a lenient judge, he’s never gonna heal from this.”
“Naomi’s killer is a chicken. They may as well have fed her poison and watched her eat it from across the restaurant. Same level of cowardice.”
He zooms through traffic, but holds my stare as we go. “Makes me wonder if our killer is a woman.”
“Because I said poison?”
“Because the hit was non-confrontational. No blood on her shoes. No weapon in her hands. It was vicious and nasty, which is usually indicative of a woman. A proxy was used, either because the killer knew she wasn’t strong enough to swing a knife and get the job done, or because they didn’t want to break their nails or look into Naomi’s eyes while she was dying. Pull a profiler in on this one, or a psych, and I bet my measly paycheck we land on female suspect. But not the mom.” He shakes his head and slows down in front of a massive grocery store amidst dozens of other big box stores where folks buy bulk items.
Who would buy twelve rolls of toilet paper for six bucks, when you can buy twelve hundred rolls for sixty and live lavishly for the next year?
He silences the sirens and shuts down the lights, because there are no media vans here. No crowd lining up to watch a man break down. No one besides our killer and those back at the house knows who, exactly, our victim is. Which means no one has raced us across the city to tell him, purely for the thrill of being the breaker of devastating news.
“Gordon Wallace works night fill. Stocking shelves after the evening rush. His shift began less than an hour ago.”
Curious, I meet my partner’s eyes. “So he wasn’t here when Naomi was murdered. But he wasn’t at home, either. He was driving and lacks an alibi.”
“Sounds to me like you’re about to start a fight.” He cuts the engine and takes the key from the ignition. Then pushing out of the car, he waits for me to do the same on my side and stares at me over the roof. “I’m not saying it’s impossible. His first-born, teen daughter is pregnant and fresh out of high school. She’s staying with the father of the baby, keeping it, and risking her future scholarship. For a family barely tiptoeing the line between poverty and not, that’s gotta be vexing for a man who has to work at night to make his mortgage payments.”
“Everything has changed for him in the past three weeks,” I add. “He’s found out his daughter is having sex. He probably knew before, but now he knows .”
“And now she’s becoming a mom, and she’s getting vocal about making a family with this other dude. Men have snapped over less. But if you go in there and start with that, we might walk away with a few extra bruises tonight.”
“I’m not here to make it worse.” I push away from the car and slam my door shut, then I head toward the hood and dig my hands into my pockets. “I’m just thinking out loud. With my partner.” I meet his eyes. “I recall a time we could discuss a case and it not become an argument.”
“We’re not arguing.” He follows me to the front of the car and hunches when an icy breeze crosses a half empty parking lot. “I’m pointing out that we have no proof to support your hypothesis.”
“And I’m pointing out that it’s possible, and that he lacks an alibi. Either way, we’ll know what’s up in a few minutes. But until then, it’s just me and you. We’re theorizing. And it’s apparent your ability to solve this case is being hampered by your private life.”
His jaw hardens every time I bring his family up. His junkie ex-wife who was clean for all of ten minutes, and his four-year-old daughter who is everything to him. Heart. Soul. Stars in the sky, and reason for waking up each day.
I toss them back into our conversation, time and time again, because it’s better for everyone—him, his family, and our vic—if he admits he can’t do the job earlier in an investigation. I’m not saying he can’t. And I’m not saying I won’t carry him when he needs help.
But I’m saying that, if he can’t do it, own it. Communicate, so we’re on the same page.
“I’m gonna run the case,” he rumbles, his voice tight and his face hard. “I’m gonna find out who killed Naomi and her unborn baby. And I’m gonna take care of Jada and Mia, too.”
“Busy guy.”
He grabs the heavy glass door at the front of a colossal warehouse store, and waves me forward so I go ahead of him. “I’ve been busier before. I’ve handled bigger, badder, in the past. Don’t doubt me now, Arch.”
“What happened between you and Fifi while we were on the boat?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” His snapped words draw the attention of every worker and shopper within a hundred-yard radius. Then he snarls on my right, biting out an angry, “Nothing happened between me and Seraphina. Nothing will ever happen between me and Seraphina, because I have a sick ex-wife who needs my help, a four-year-old daughter who can barely keep her eyes awake at the dinner table these days because she’s adapting to big school, and Seraphina is a prickly, stuck up, high maintenance, extremely beautiful and caring woman.” He flashes a predatory smile that promises he’s coming for my throat if I don’t stop. “We flirt sometimes. That’s it, that’s all we have the time for.”
“So I didn’t see you and her coming out of a room together during my honeymoon… alone?”
“No. You didn’t see that.” He turns to the expansive store and clocks the service desk on the left, then starting in that direction, he leaves me in his wake and bristles every step he takes. He’s an angry, repressed man, and soon, shit is gonna blow. “Hi there.” He gentles his voice and takes out his badge to show the high schooler working at the desk. “My name is Detective Charlie Fletcher. I was hoping you could direct me toward Gordon Wallace.” He grabs the little price-check microphone, snatching it away when the kid reaches for it. “ Discreetly . Please.”