Archer
ARCHER
“ T ell us everything that went down at the haunted house.” Fletch paces behind my chair. His eyes are on the boy, a grown man by legal standards, but still, a child not so long ago. “No one is in trouble yet, Mason. No one is being accused of anything. Even the kid with the knife is, in my opinion, a victim in all this. So we need you to explain it all to us. From the start of your night until now, talk it out so we can get a picture of what happened.”
“She didn’t…” Mason blubbers. Sobbing. He’s a complete mess, while right beside him, his highly paid, sharply dressed, lady-lawyer prepares to jump in at any moment to save her client from incriminating himself. “She didn’t wanna go,” he chokes out. “We do the stupid haunted house every single year, because our friends like it. But Naomi and I…” He fists a wad of tissues and mops at his face.
Already, the clock on the wall reads midnight. The bullpen outside our interview room is quiet. Occupied by the night-shift, but there’s a calmness that settles between the hours of twelve till six… until there’s not.
“Naomi and you, what?” Fletch prompts. “You have to explain it, Mason.”
“We don’t enjoy it. We don’t…” He shakes his head. “Brent and Kallie are into all that spooky stuff. They’re always at the midnight showings of horror movies. They take October every year and turn it into a whole holiday with free rein to torment everyone else. They like Halloween, so every year Naomi and I tag along, since it’s just one month a year. But a haunted house, to them, is just… it’s like kindergarten. Ya know? They’re desensitized by all the other scary stuff they watch.”
“But it’s not kindergarten for you, right? Haunted houses are creepy if you’re not into them.”
“Right.” He swipes tissues under his nose, then up to clean beneath his eyes. “Naomi’s been super tired the last few months. We thought she’d come down with something pretty nasty, because she was vomiting and sleeping. Vomiting and sleeping. That was her whole personality since, like…” He swallows and searches his mind. “July, I guess. We know, now, that she was pregnant. But we didn’t…” He shakes his head. “We didn’t know back then. So when she started feeling better a few weeks ago, we were all super relieved. Then we tested, and everything came up the way it did. Then October arrived, and since Naomi’s energy levels had come back to normal, Kallie and Brent were on us to stick with tradition.”
“So Naomi agreed to the haunted house,” Fletch inserts. “She hates it. But she did it.”
“Every single year,” he whimpers, dropping his head into his hands and scrubbing his nails through short hair. “It was just a normal night. We’ve done the haunted house every single year since middle school.”
“How did you feel about the pregnancy, Mason?” I sit forward in my seat and rest my elbows on the table between us. “Were you mad?”
“Don’t do that, Detective.” The lawyer lifts a brow, challenging me with a sharp tap of her fingernails against the laminate tabletop. “My client has generously elected to answer your questions to help your search for whoever hurt Naomi. He is not a suspect. Don’t make me end this interview and shut you out.”
“I’m just trying to understand how everyone felt about things.” I bring my attention back to Mason and study his red-rimmed eyes. “You’re eighteen. She’s eighteen. You both graduated high school right around the time she conceived that baby. Spent the summer hanging out. Preparing for college. You had big things coming your way. A baby is an unexpected wrench in otherwise perfect plans.”
“Naomi’s life was the one that would be affected most.” He sniffles, sucking a long line of snot back up into his nose. “I know it sounds lame, but it’s fact. She was the one who was carrying the baby. She’s the one who would work her butt off to maintain her GPA in class. And in the end, she was the one who would give birth and take care of the baby the most.”
“You didn’t plan on being an active parent?”
“I did. I would have done everything I could. But it’s no secret women are still a baby’s primary attachment. And I’m in college to play ball. Classes. Practice. The gym. It all adds up, so even if I plan to do my best, it doesn’t take an unaware jackass to know how things would have turned out. Naomi would have carried most of the load. We already talked about it, Detective.”
“You talked about how you’d leave the child-rearing to her?” Fletch presses. “And she was okay with it?”
“You’re twisting it up!” He slaps his hand to the table. But fresh tears fall, too. Sorrow, eating the man up and making him weak. “I was going to be a good dad! I was going to do way better than my father ever did.”
“Mason,” the lawyer grumbles, placing her hand on his forearm and eying him.
“I’m not saying mine is crap.” He shakes her hand off. “He worked hard to build everything we have. But the reality is, my mom did most of the kid stuff. I would’ve worked hard on the court, gotten drafted to the NBA, and I would’ve done everything I could to take care of my family.”
“But absent,” I clarify, “while Naomi raised the child?”
“I was gonna be there! We were gonna live off campus, together . So I could be there every single night. I would be with them, day after day, taking care of the things I could. I’m just trying to explain that, despite all my best efforts and plans, we were realistic enough to acknowledge it still would have been her who was studying while nursing a baby. It would have been her turning up to class on little sleep. Short of giving the baby up or having a nanny raise it, this would have been unavoidable.”
“A nanny?” Fletch steps back to rest against the wall, setting his hands behind his back and his left foot against the brickwork. “Naomi was attending Copeland U on an academic scholarship, Mason. Her family isn’t rolling in cash. Nannies cost money.”
“ My family has money,” he groans, rolling his head side to side as exhaustion competes with trauma and devastation. “My mom offered to help. And my dad offered money. They wanted us to get the best education we could.”
“And you didn’t accept?” I ask in disbelief. “You didn’t want it?”
“We didn’t have time to fully think it through. Naomi and I wanted to be active, present parents. We shared the same belief that we would do the work between us. That doesn’t mean we would completely refuse all help. But we knew we wanted to raise our baby together. We knew, when we came out the other side, successful, married, and happy, we could say we did it ourselves. These were ongoing discussions we’d been having with our parents over the last few weeks. We would have continued this discussion this weekend, when we had time to breathe, especially now that she’s practically halfway. But then we went to the stupid haunted house, and…”
He breaks down. His shoulders crumble and his chest caves in. Wracking sobs burst from the depths of his lungs and tears pour from his eyes. “This can’t be real, right?” He looks desperately at the lawyer. “She can’t really be gone. It’s a cruel joke and part of the Halloween shit we hate so much.”
“Let’s take a break.” I grab the recorder from the end of the table and hover my finger over the button that’ll switch it off. “Detective Malone. Detective Charlie Fletcher. We’re ending this interview at twelve-twelve, October fourteenth. And we’ll pick it up again in the morning.” Hitting the button and dropping the device back on the table, I wait for Mason to calm. For his tears to slow and his shoulders to still.
Then when he looks up, I try to muster a small, sympathetic smile.
“You made big plans for the future. And someone took those away from you.”
“It’s not fair,” he cries. Red in the face and splotchy from tears. “She was kind to everybody, Detective. She worked hard and studied harder. She was intent on escaping poverty, and she gave the things she did have to those she thought needed them more. I was going to marry her,” he whimpers. “And that had nothing to do with the baby. It wasn’t a shotgun situation where I felt I needed to do the right thing. I’ve loved her since I was six years old. And now she’s…” He drops his head and trembles. “She’s not supposed to be gone. Not like this.”
“ W ell that fucking sucked.” I leave the interview room ahead of Fletch and stride to our war room instead. Already, our whiteboard is up. Pictures are tacked to the wall, and lines are being drawn. Relationships. Parents, who were becoming grandparents. Siblings who were becoming uncles and aunties. Friends. Best friends. And possibly the most important relationship of all—besides the one between Naomi and her killer—was the one between Naomi and her boyfriend.
He was the father of her baby.
He was with her when she died.
He held her while she took her last breaths .
And he lawyered up faster than it took me to pour a cup of coffee.
“Naomi’s mother is still in observation down at the hospital,” Fletch murmurs, closing the door and yanking out a chair to drop into. “She’s not leaving until the morning, but she has officers on the door. Naomi’s dad is in the fucking bullpen, Arch.”
“He doesn’t wanna leave until we have answers.”
“Makes it easy for us to pull him in for an interview. But sitting with his back against the wall and hoping his daughter’s killer walks by will put him on a fast track to insanity.”
“Connor’s in a cage.” I look at the picture of the seventeen-year-old boy, innocent, and yet, not, and know he has a whole support network here ready to help. Parents. Lawyers. Even his employers, the owners of the haunted house. “We can’t release him yet. It’s impossible. But I really fuckin’ hope the prosecutor goes easy on him.”
“Mason’s parents are lawyering up, too. Which is expected, I suppose.” Fletch exhales a deep sigh and taps the table. “Dad’s a lawyer. Mom’s a socialite. They threw Ms. Hanes at Mason so fast, his head spun.”
“They seem like they want him to cooperate, though. They could’ve blocked us out entirely. But they’re not. But they let him speak. They just wanted to ensure Hanes was there to supervise.”
“Could imply innocence, I suppose.”
“Personally…?” I bring my hand up and tap Mason’s photograph. “I don’t think he did this. He seems legitimately destroyed over her death. And if he truly loved her the way he says he does, there’s no way he would have murdered her.”
“Even if a baby fucked up his chances of going pro?”
“But he already acknowledges that she’s the one who would carry the load. He doesn’t like admitting it, but self-awareness matters. That’s gotta count for something. They were being realistic about how hard the next few years were gonna be. Besides, she could still abort. If he truly felt a certain way about all this, abortion was still on the table. Or breaking up with her. He had options that didn’t include putting a knife in a teenager’s hand inside a creepy haunted house neither of them wanted to be in.”
He sits back in his chair, the creak of the wooden structure drawing my focus around. Then he runs a hand through his hair and sighs. “We have to find motive. Why’d they want her dead? Why in such a showy way? Why risk the teen realizing the knife wasn’t a prop? Why stabbing, when she could have so easily survived if the circumstances were different?”
“There’s a lot of room on this one for things to go wrong. Maybe they weren’t fully committed. Like a, ‘ If it works out, it works out, and if it doesn’t, then it’s meant to be, ’ kind of way. Whoever wanted her dead was flighty about it. Immature, even. Not all the way in, but not all the way out.”
“Had to have had access to the haunted house,” he murmurs. “To swap the prop and not be seen. Unless, of course, one would expect to see that person there.”
“So that brings us to Connor,” I muse. “The owners of the house. Prior paying customers. Perhaps a cleaning crew. Were the Halloween decorations put up by the owners or a decorating company?”
“All good questions.” He drops his hand and checks his watch, despite the clock on the wall. “You opposed to stopping for now and catching some shut eye? Mia’s at home with the babysitter, and I already missed bedtime routine. With Jada the way she is right now, I can’t…” He shakes his head. “I don’t want to risk anything.”
“It’s fine.” We’ve spent a decade running cases from start to finish, sleeping at the station, and working ourselves into exhaustion. But like Naomi and Mason, life changes and the direction we thought things were going changes, too.
With Fletch’s divorce, and his wife subsequently giving in to addiction, means having a four-year-old at home makes it impossible to work around the clock. And likewise for me, marriage means my priorities have changed.
We still give our all to our cases. But outside of standard hours, we have families to consider.
I don’t need to relieve a babysitter or have someone at home to watch over Minka. But if she goes unchecked, she’ll work herself to collapse, sleeping at the morgue and killing herself over whoever is on her table on any given day.
Add in the fact that Naomi was a kid herself… and then the inclusion of an unborn fetus, and Chief Medical Examiner Minka Mayet is certain to make herself sick unless I step in and ensure she rests.
“Let’s pack it up.” I dig a hand into my pocket and take out my phone, but I don’t unlock the screen just yet. I don’t read the messages. The emails. The reports flooding my device. Or, equally as time consuming, my brothers demanding attention from the other side of the country. “This case is personal as hell, Fletch.” I step around the table and pause only long enough for him to drag himself out of the chair. “Whoever wanted Naomi dead, that was about Naomi specifically. So taking a night to rest won’t mean we have more bodies to deal with tomorrow.”
“Thank fuck,” he grumbles, following me into the bullpen and keeping his head down as Mr. Wallace’s fiery gaze swings our way. “I could go the rest of my life never looking into a grieving father’s eyes, knowing his daughter was murdered today. This one fucking blows.”
I lower my gaze, and together, we make a beeline for the escalators that’ll take us to the ground floor. “I feel bad that he’s gonna sit here all night.”
“He was told to go home to his family.” Fletch steps onto the steel tread a single beat ahead of me. “We interviewed him. We moved on to Mason. We’ll talk to Connor tomorrow, once he’s had time to calm down. Wallace knows we’re not gonna update him on the sly, so I don’t know what he thinks he’ll achieve being here. Though I gotta admit,” he looks back at me, a small, somewhat relieved smile gently curling his lips. “At least he’s not at the George Stanley harassing Dr. Delicious.”
“That would be way worse.” I draw a deep breath and watch as cops come and go. As some head up, with perps in cuffs. Some without. Uniforms and plain clothes. Male and female. “It’s nighttime,” I acknowledge. “Which means the morgue is locked, anyway. Maybe he considered going there but couldn’t get in.”
“Which is why having the place secured after hours is a genius move.” He steps off the bottom and heads toward the heavy glass and wood doors at the front of the precinct. “Six a.m. alarms?”
We could.
We could get back to this as soon as the sun comes up. But really, there’s not a great deal of reason to do so. Most folks aren’t taking visitors that early anyway, not unless we have a warrant, and the only professional I wanna talk to about my case sleeps in my bed.
“Let’s do nine,” I decide. “Mia deserves to be taken to school by her daddy, especially after you had to leave last night. And I can get the skinny on the autopsy when I wake up anyway.”
His lips quirk into a goofy grin. “You think she’s sleeping on the couch at the morgue?”
“I fucking hope not.” And yet, I squeeze the phone in my hand and prepare to make some calls on my walk home. Stepping out of the building and stopping on the sidewalk, we pause, because Fletch has to walk one way, and me, the other. “If she’s still in her office, I’m about to throw down and remind her it’s infusion night. If she’s at home, she’s gonna be out cold and fully medicated. But she’ll wake tomorrow, bursting with energy and ready to report on Naomi’s autopsy. You and Moo can join us for breakfast before school, if you wanna be there for it. Or I can update you after. ”
“We might swing by.” He turns on his heels, angling toward home. “Unless something comes up, we’ll drop in around seven-thirty or so. Enough time to eat before we head off to school.”
“Good.” I turn my way and drag the phone from my pocket. Dialing the George Stanley, I lift my free hand in a wave goodbye. “We’ll be ready for you. Might even have coffee for you.”
He chuckles as the line connects. So I bring my focus back to whoever answers.
“This is Doctor Patten. Doctor Mayet isn’t in right now, but considering you’ve called her private line, I kinda figure this is someone who doesn’t enjoy answering machines.”
God bless Doctor Patten . “It’s Detective Malone.”
“Color me surprised,” she drawls. “She’s not here.”
“She’s not asleep on the couch? Or in one of the body fridges?”
She snorts. “Not on the couch, and the fridge would be a poor choice, especially with the weather turning chilly these past few days. Fortunately, I personally saw her and Doctor Emeri leave here a few hours ago. You’ve lost your wife, Detective?”
“I haven’t lost her. I’m just looking for her. It’s different.”
“Uh huh. Well, might I suggest you search for her inside her home? Which, according to marital law, is also your home. That ought to simplify things.”
Smartass .
“I’ve been working, Doctor Patten. The same case your chief has been working. There’s a reason I’m looking for her in the middle of the night.”
“And I’m helpfully informing you where she might be.” She smiles. Somehow, I know her lips curl higher. “Sorry, Detective. Midnight makes folks a little more sarcastic than usual. She’s not here.”
“Fine. Thanks.” I kill our call and try Cato next. He’s our current freeloader, college kid, basketball player—just like Mason and Brent—and if he’s doing the right thing, he’ll be at the apartment right now, watching over my wife and keeping our home safe. Dialing the second number, I bring the phone to my ear and pray he doesn’t answer if he’s out somewhere else, balls deep in some chick who deserves better.
It’s happened before.
“Yeah?” He answers quickly, the sounds of a basketball game on the television in the background telling me exactly what I need to know. “You coming home soon, or am I the man of this house now? ”
I roll my eyes and slow at the end of the block. I look left and right, before striding across. “She home?”
“Yep.”
“Asleep?”
“With her head in my lap like the good girl she is.”
I hold my breath and bare my teeth. It’s the only defense I have against an annoying little brother who lacks self-preservation skills. “Cato…”
He laughs. “She’s asleep on the couch, right beside me. She’s curled up into a teeny, tiny ball. Her head is on her arm, her arm is on the pillow, and her needle is still on the coffee table like we’re living in a crack house. She meant to get up and put it all away, but she laid down for a sec and next thing you know…” He shrugs, so the rustle of his shirt plays through the phone. “I’ve been studying, because I’m a reformed man now. And after I put my textbooks away, I’ve been watching game day highlights. Anything else, Dear Parole Officer?”
I let silence hang for a moment as I stalk along the street and catch sight of the neon sign outside Tim’s bar. It’s a beacon that guides us home, day after day. A spotlight we can always see, no matter how stormy things get.
Like Minka, I’m not all that keen to move away and take up residence in a mafia mansion that once acted as a home base for my bastard father.
Someday. Eventually.
But we’re not rushing.
“?”
“She’s okay, right?”
“Minka?”
“Yeah. She’s not supposed to work late on infusion night. She’s especially not supposed to run cases like this one on infusion night. It takes up too much.”
“Of her time?”
“Of her soul,” I sigh. “She wears it on her sleeve and gives pieces of it away to everyone who comes near. She saves none for her own mental health.”
“You’re so fuckin’ whipped,” he chuckles, changing the tone of our conversation to something far less serious. “Jesus Christ, . She’s fine. She came home, slapped me up the side of the head for having my feet on her textbooks, which were on the table, by the way. The table is a communal space, so that was actually not cool of her. If she wants her dead-people books to be safe, she should put them away.”
“Or you could just be a decent human being while staying in someone else’s home. Not putting your feet on people’s things is like, the bare minimum of effort. Better yet, you could move out to the house and have the whole place to yourself.”
“I’ll move there when you move there,” he teases. “Why would I leave the warm welcoming atmosphere Doctor Mayet provides daily? She enjoys fighting with me. It’s actually a form of flirting.”
“If you so say.” I stride past the bar and glance to my right when a patron steps out and, for a moment, the door swings wide. I catch a glimpse of Tim behind the bar. Daisy, the cute blonde bartender, flipping bottles and serving folks right beside him. And then I notice the thick crowd of drinkers who make up a large proportion of this side of the city’s first responders. “You heading to bed anytime soon?”
“I was waiting for you to get home.” He yawns, finally allowing himself to appear like the normal, functional member of society who is in school all day, on the basketball courts all afternoon, and then staying up late to monitor his sister-in-law until I get home from work at night. “I get the feeling neither of you would like me to pick her up while she sleeps. And I didn’t wanna leave her alone on the couch. She’s beyond walking to the bed herself. So I just figured…”
“You did good.” I continue past the bar and push through the heavy glass door guarding our shitty apartment building, where the stairwell is freezing in the winter and boiling in the summer. Our apartment still has roof damage from a storm that occurred almost a year ago, and we have to climb four flights of stairs at the end of every long day just to get there.
But still… we’re not leaving for a while yet. And even when we do, I get the feeling Minka will want to bring her homely landlord who is older than Jesus and droopier than a basset hound.
He’s the building’s father figure, ensuring his little lambs are tucked up safe at night. And that thought, as I pass his door and start up the stairs, makes me realize I could have skipped calling the George Stanely and Cato for an update on my wife’s whereabouts.
Steve would know all.
“I’m twenty seconds away.” I finally bring my focus back to my brother. “Then I’m taking my ass to bed. What time do you have to be out in the morning?”
“My first class is at eleven.” He yawns again and closes a textbook with a noisy slam. Probably the economics kind, and not the dead-body kind. “I can sleep in, and probably even get an hour in at the Condor stadium before I have to be in class. ”
“You realize you don’t have free access to the Condor’s courts, right? They’re part of the NBA. You can’t just waltz in and?—”
“You realize I don’t give a fuck about your opinion on the matter? And that Felix has invested enough money into the team to ensure Whittaker doesn’t toss me on my ass every time I wanna throw a ball around.”
I firm my lips and turn at the third-floor landing. “I’m just saying… if it was me, I’d prefer to know I made it on my own hard work. Not because Big Brother Lix paved the way with bricks of gold.”
“Yeah, but that’s pride talking.” He moves across the apartment, then the telltale snick of my locks plays through our call and my own ears at the same time. I emerge at the top of stairs and lower the phone as my little brother—six foot, two inches tall at only eighteen years old—opens the door. His hair is longer than mine, dangling over his brow. And he’s thinner than me by a fair bit because his metabolism is too fast for his own good, leaving the future NBA star on the scrawny side.
He kills our call and waits at the door with a smirk. “You’re home late, Mr. Malone.”
“Because I have a dead body, a kid in a Ghostface costume, and a whole bunch of people leaning on me to solve a murder witnessed by too many, including, but not limited to, a home security system and footage that’s been promised to be delivered tomorrow morning. Furthermore,” I stride into the apartment, making a beeline for the couch.
The lights are out, so the only illumination comes from the hallway and the television set playing an old Knicks championship game.
Cato follows me into the apartment and closes the door at his back. “Furthermore, what?”
“I have a wife who works until she drops and medicates way later than she’s supposed to. An ideal evening would include dinner at a reasonable hour, medication, a movie, and bed by nine.” I spy the Factor bottles on the table, empty and lid-less. Minka’s rainbow tourniquet sits beside those, and just as Cato described, a needle and tape beside that.
Without context, it could all appear kinda confronting. But this is my life now, and she owns every part of my heart. So I grab the bottles and needle, collecting the tape and Band-Aid wrapper, and turning to the kitchen, I deposit everything where it belongs. I toss the tourniquet into the tub atop the fridge, and the needle into the container under the sink. I toss the wrappings and tissue into the trash, then finally, I turn back to my brother and incline my chin. “Thanks for keeping an eye on her tonight. ”
He leans against the couch and folds his arms. “Not really a hardship. I kinda have a crush on her.”
I roll my eyes and wipe my hands on my jeans. Then I start toward the pair. “Kill the crush. Find someone your own age. Or better yet, focus on your studies and the game. You can get a girlfriend once school is done.” I move around the couch and scoop my wife into my arms. She’s toasty warm and entirely too languid as I bring her to my chest and rest her cheek over my heart. Six months ago, she’d have woken from my actions. Startled and angry because she was caught with her eyes closed. But now she trusts. Now, she allows me to see this one vulnerability.
Turning, I move toward the hall and say a silent thanks for the fact that her shoes are already off, and her clothes are not those she wore to the office. Rather, she changed into a slouchy tank and skintight yoga pants at some point tonight.
“I wanna talk to you in the morning, okay?” I stop at the mouth of the hall and glance back as my brother clears his studying mess away and begins preparing his bed for the night.
As in, the couch.
“I have some questions that might help me with my current case.”
He picks up the pillow Minka was using— his pillow —and gives it a bit of a shake to plump it up once more. But he looks across at me and smirks. “I have an alibi. Lix taught me to always have one, even when I’m the one killing folks.”
“Lix was a terrible parental figure and we both know it.” I turn again and start away, careful not to bang Minka’s feet on the framework. “Don’t leave before I have a chance to talk to you. Besides, Moo is coming over for breakfast.”
“That stinky, booger eating, annoying little brat? That Moo?”
I snort and continue into our room. Because we both know Cato Malone is the world’s softest uncle and adores the shit out of a little girl who stole his heart.
“I don’t want her here! I don’t even like her.”
“Liar.” I kick our door closed and allow my eyes a moment to adjust to the new darkness. Thankfully, the blinds are open and Tim’s neon light illuminates half of our bedroom.
“?” Minka’s sleepy, soft voice makes my heart swell. But I don’t give her a chance to wake up and screw her night over. So I move to the bed and gently lay her in the middle. I’m careful not to jostle her, and when she curls in on herself, I drag the blankets up and give her something to cuddle into.
I’ve become accustomed to coming straight home and dropping into bed.
I’ll shower in the morning.
I’ll brush my teeth twice as vigorously to make up for my negligence tonight.
And I’ll throw my clothes into the hamper… tomorrow.
For right now, I unbuckle my belt and unsnap my jeans. I push the zipper down, and right after it, the thick denim that keeps me warm on the cooler nights as we zoom through the Fall. I drag my shirt up and drop it to the floor. And finally, in just my boxer shorts, I pull the blankets aside and climb into bed behind my wife.
Turning on my side and draping my arm over her chest, I drag her in until she becomes my little spoon and the scent of her shampoo trickles into my nose and down to fill my lungs.
I’ll wake up again in six hours, and if I’m lucky, she’ll still be asleep then, to make up for the rest she should have prioritized earlier tonight.
“Goodnight, Minnnka.” I press a kiss to the ball of her shoulder and grin when she releases a soft, whimsical sigh, even in her sleep. “I love you more than you’ll ever know.”