Chapter 19
Nineteen
Gabriel
Working the midnight shift was my least favourite thing in the world. For some reason, in Dallas, criminals preferred the daytime hours. Where I was at in my career, I wasn’t chasing around the petty thief or train gropers anymore.
When I worked the late shift, I was supposed to research any cases I had open, listen for any huge emergencies, and most boring of all, get caught up on paperwork. I’d much rather be with Caleb or Aria. I had better things (and people) I could be doing.
My phone rang in my pocket and I sighed, feeling like I might get a modicum of entertainment during my shift, and pulled it out. I noticed that it was Ronan, and became immediately suspicious. Why would he be calling me so late?
“Hello?” I answered.
“Hey,” Ronan greeted, “I’ve got bad news.” His voice was shaky and low; he sounded like he was panicking.
“Okay?” I responded. “What’s wrong?”
Ronan was always a bit of a wild card. Unbeknownst to any of the other guys in the group, Ronan and I had a floss-thin thread tying us together.
One day, not long after Noah conceptualised putting together a club, of sorts, for he, Ethan, Julian, and I to bond together as single fathers, the captain of my department showed up with Ronan in tow.
He brought him to me and introduced us, telling us that we had being single parents in common, and he was hoping I could look after Ronan as a personal favour to him.
It seemed very odd to me, and despite the fact that everyone assumed I was your run-of-the-mill meathead, I was quite observant and intelligent.
My boss wouldn’t delineate any additional information about Ronan to me, not even tell me where he was from.
Ronan had only personally told us that he was from the Midwest and had lived in the South as well.
We knew nothing of his recent past and only got details about his childhood when really pressed, and even those details were vague.
He’d mentioned in passing that Finn’s mother was no longer in the picture, but never if it was a divorce, or separation, or one-night-stand gone wrong. We knew very little about him.
“Can you come to my place? I have the other guys on the way over, apart from Noah who is going to watch the kids,” Ronan explained.
“You know how you always thought there was something I wasn’t telling you? You were right.”
“I fucking knew it!” I barked, and the other few cops hanging around the squad room stopped what they were doing and looked at me.
“What is it?” I asked, quieter.
“I’ll explain everything when you get here. It’s an emergency, so please find any excuse you can think of and come now.” The resonance in Ronan’s voice was frightening.
“We may have lost Aria.”
My heart thudded. What the hell did that mean? What happened to Aria?
“I’m on my way.” If it was about Aria, there wasn’t a moment to waste. I hung up my phone and looked over at my captain attempting to slurp a cup of coffee for energy, but mostly failing and dozing off. I grabbed my phone, keys, and wallet and approached him.
“Captain.”
He sat up, snorted, and rubbed his eyes. “Stone. What’s up?”
I decided to roll the dice and play on the odd circumstance with Ronan and the fact that my captain knew more than he let me know. “You remember Ronan.”
He sat up a little straighter.
“Yes. How are you two getting on?”
“Great. We’re pretty close these days; one of the five guys I hang out with, and we all support each other as single fathers,” I explained.
The captain sat back a little bit. “Oh, good. So everything’s okay?”
I tilted my head.
“Well, he just called me and told me that he’s pretty sick and needs someone to take care of his kid. None of the other guys are available because it’s so late, and he’s hoping I can go and help out.” I raised an eyebrow.
“He’s never been sick since we met. I don’t really know much about him at all still, do you?”
The captain was quiet for a really long time, and then he looked up at me. “If he’s sick and his kid needs you, you should go help.” He waved his hand off, not answering the latter of my questions.
“Go. It’s not like there’s much going on here anyway.”
I didn’t mind that he didn’t give me an answer to my curiosity. It was mostly a diversion tactic anyway.
“Thanks, Cap. I’ll see you later.”
“See ya,” he said.
I quickly left the department and made my way to Ronan’s house where I could see most of the other guys’ vehicles were parked out front, excluding Noah’s.
I let myself inside, and everyone was sitting in the den, each working on their own drink of choice. I noticed, to the right of the door, there was a huge, gaping hole in the drywall. I entered the den and everyone had a tension hanging about them.
“Hey, what the hell happened here?” I said.
Ronan walked over to me and shoved a glass of scotch into my hands. “Thank you for coming so quickly. Please find a spot to sit, and I’ll explain now that we’re all here.”
I did as I was told, picking a spot on one of the couches next to Liam, and knocked back my entire glass. Ronan stood in the entryway to the den where we could all see him.
“Well, I guess I’ll just start,” Ronan said.
“First of all, I must apologise. I haven’t been totally honest with you all, and I feel horrible because you’ve all been open books to me.
You’ve shared parts of your lives with me that were very personal and intimate, and I fear that most of what I’ve told you about myself and my son has been vague at best.”
“What’s going on, Ronan?” Ethan asked.
“Well, that’s the first, and probably most important thing.” He took a deep breath. “My name is not Ronan.”
The room became eerily still and silent. No one moved, no one drank, no one breathed.
“Uh,” I said, raising my hand.
“What the fuck does that mean?”
Ronan, or at least the man I would continue to know as Ronan despite new information, bowed his head.
“My name is Adam Rowland. I was born in Denver, Massachusetts, and lived most recently in Florida before I came here.
My son’s name is Finn, though Finn Rowland, not Finn Vale, and he is six, but his birthday is in August, not May as we have previously celebrated.”
“Why are you just now telling us this?” Julian asked. “And what does it have to do with losing Aria?”
“My ex-wife was a beautiful woman by the name of Eva,” Ronan continued.
“I was a Navy SEAL and an FBI agent and spent many hours away from home. As a result, she developed severe depression and social anxiety and took her own life by way of drug overdose.
I came home to find her dead on our bed, and before I could call the police and report it, her brother, a man who always hated me, found me and began to make claims that I had killed her.”
“Good god,” Liam commented.“I hired the best lawyers I could, presented all the evidence that was insurmountable, and proved beyond a doubt that her death was self-inflicted.
I was found innocent of her death by a jury of my peers, and I believed that would be it, but Eva’s brother continued to accuse me of the crime.
The community leaned more towards him and made my life a living hell, claiming I’d gotten away with murder, and things started to get really awful for Finn and me.
Eventually, I had to travel a route akin to the witness protection program, taking on a new persona and moving to a new city, just to keep us safe. Your boss was designated to see to it that I was merged into the community safely,” he said, looking at me.
He took a deep breath, and I noticed his eyes glance towards the hole in the wall outside the den.
“But, it would seem I didn’t escape my past as much as I believed I had. We’ve been here five years successfully, but today someone delivered an anonymous package to Aria containing pictures of me standing over Eva’s dead body.
She believes I committed that murder as well. She left, and I haven’t been able to get ahold of her since.”
I sat staring at Ronan, or Adam. It was a lot of information that I felt like should have been communicated to us much sooner, but I could tell he was telling the truth.
A man can lie about his name, age, childhood, and past, but he cannot truly hide who he is. I’d spent enough time with Ronan to know exactly what the man was about; we’d been naked in the same room, for god’s sake.
He wasn’t the kind of man that would hurt anyone, and looking at the pain in his face, I could see that he had been haunted by the notion that anyone would think he would, most of all Aria.
He looked at me. “I need you to go to her place and check on her. She wasn’t in a good place when she left, and I’m concerned for her. She won’t answer my calls, and given the circumstances, I can’t blame her.”
“And that?” Liam interjected, motioning towards the wall.
“She kept calling me all the same, horrible things the people back in Florida would call me, and I lost my cool a little bit. I honestly think it was a bout of PTSD.
I punched the wall to just let some of my frustration out, but it freaked Aria out, and she ran,” Ronan said.
“I hate myself for it. That I caused her any fear.” He dropped his head.
“I doubt I’ll ever forgive myself.”
I stood up. “Just relax. I’ll go to her apartment, I’m sure she’s there, and I will explain everything.” I put a hand on Ronan’s shoulder.
“We believe you, right?”
The guys all nodded and agreed immediately.
“He couldn’t hurt a fly,” Ethan said.
“Well, maybe just a fly,” Julian added.
“He’s bad in bed,” Liam said in a high-pitched voice, under his breath as though it wasn’t him.
Ronan cracked the first smile he had since we all arrived. He set a hand on top of mine.
“Thank you.”
“I’ll check Aria’s place and then call Noah and get him up to speed,” I said. “You need to go back to sleep, you look dead,” I told Ronan.
“You three, go home. We’ll reconvene tomorrow, and I’m sure everything will be fine.”
I wasn’t as certain as I sounded, but there was a need for leadership for the moment, and with Noah not there and Ronan a wreck, it seemed the task had fallen to me. We dispersed and I immediately made my way to Aria’s apartment. I used my copy of her apartment key and let myself in.
“Aria?” I walked through her apartment, making a mental note to immediately start trying to upgrade her hodgepodge furniture any chance a birthday or holiday would allow. Christmas was on the horizon and seeing her place made me want to just get her a whole new apartment.
“Aria?”
It wasn’t a large place, and it became evident fairly quickly that she wasn’t there. Between the travel to Ronan’s, having a conversation with him, and remobilising, the sun was peeking out into the sky, and morning was upon me.
I could see that some of the items in the apartment had been rather hastily handled, and I came across the pictures of Ronan that had been sent to Aria anonymously. I
took out a pair of latex gloves I always had on me just in case, and I pocketed the envelope that had Aria’s address written on the front and the pictures.
Whether from the sample of the handwriting or fingerprints on the pictures, there had to be a way to determine who sent her the items. I took one final glance around the apartment and then made my way out.
She clearly wasn’t there, and we were probably going to have to dip into our bag of resources to find out where she was.
“Are you a friend of Aria’s?” I looked over my shoulder, and there was a young woman with a backpack locking the door to her own apartment.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Have you seen her?”
“I heard her fumbling around really early this morning, and when I came to check on her, she looked like she’d seen a ghost. I asked if everything was okay, and she said she was just really stressed out and had to get out of town.
She packed a bag in about three minutes while I was standing there, asked me to keep an eye on her place, and left,” the woman explained.
“It was really weird. Is everything okay?”
I couldn’t blame Aria for her reaction, but I wish she’d just waited a moment before resorting to such a severe course of action. “It is. She’s actually my children’s nanny, and I just think we overwhelmed her. Thank you for caring for her. I’ll find her and bring her home.”
“Okay,” the woman said.
“I gotta go, but this is my apartment, so just let me know if I can help.”
“Thanks,” I responded, and the woman started off down the hallway. I waited a little bit and then made my own way back out of the apartment and down to my car.
Once inside, I called Noah.
“Yo.”
“What the fuck? I’ve been trying to get ahold of someone for hours and no one is responding to me,” Noah hissed.
“Yeah, look, I don’t have time to give you the whole documentary right now, but Ronan is actually in witness protection.
He was accused of doing some horrible stuff, that he obviously didn’t do, but someone with it out for him sent some of the photos from the crime scene to Aria and she freaked out and disappeared.
I’m in front of her apartment now, and she isn’t here and her neighbour said she left in a panic this morning. No idea where she went,” I explained.
“I’m going to work with Liam to see if we can figure out where these pictures came from, but I may need you to worry about the kids. We’re also going to have to figure out what to tell them about where Aria has gone. They’re going to freak out when she doesn’t pick them up.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Noah said.
“We need to go into damage control mode. I’ll deal with the kids and hold down the fort, and you and Liam get started on figuring out who sent her the photos and where she’s gone to. I’ll get Ethan and Julian on Ronan duty to keep him from going off the deep end.”
Noah was truly the leader we needed.
“Sounds good. I’ll call Liam. Keep us posted.”
“I will, you too,” Noah said, and then the line went dead.
I sent Liam a text telling him to meet me back at my office. We were going to need to exercise our channels to investigate the strange goings-on with Aria and the package.
The phone dinged and I smiled at the message on the screen.
‘We will use the law as long as it works for us, and as soon as it doesn’t, we’ll deliver this mystery man the justice he deserves by any means necessary.’
I typed a response. ‘You read my mind. If I have my way, I’ll stick my gun in this guy’s mouth myself.’