Chapter 5 #2
“Dad’s rich and snobby, Mom’s easily scandalized, and I’ve disappointed them to the point of disinheritance.
” Trick rolled his eyes at me like this was a normal problem to have.
“Don’t let her deceive you, though. Kenna’s no better than me when it comes to scandalous behavior.
She’s just good at pretending to be what our parents expect her to be, and she doesn’t like it when my activities put her perfect little facade in jeopardy.
What’s worse, she’s a private investigator which means she’s way too good at figuring out what I’ve been up to. ”
“She’s a P.I.?” I asked, my voice rising in alarm as I glanced back at the door like she might walk back through those doors with ASAC Shepherd behind her, an accusatory finger pointed in my direction. “I thought she was a bartender.”
“Of the many occupations Kenna flits between, P.I. is the one she comes back to most often,” Trick told me, passing the blue lagoon to the customer sitting at the bar. “But she doesn’t have any reason to suspect anything about you and she’ll be gone again by the end of the week.”
“If you say so,” I frowned, glancing over at the door once more.
It remained closed, and as orders came in, I quickly lost myself in the job and easily forgot to worry about Kenna, ASAC Shepherd, or the FBI.
It wasn’t until we’d shut the place down for the night at two a.m. that it occurred to me that Trick’s judgement of his sister’s ability to figure me out might not be something to rely on.
“Hey, Trick?” I asked, as I moved the chairs onto the tables so he could sweep underneath them. He hummed an acknowledgment but was still halfway in his own thoughts as he worked. “When you say your sister’s good at figuring out what you’re up to, does that include your criminal activities?”
“What?” he replied, head snapping up as his brown eyes met mine.
“You said Kenna was good at figuring out what you’re up to, and as far as I can tell what you’re up to is forgery,” I said. “If she knows about that, it’s only a short leap to realizing what you did for me.”
“Oh,” his shoulders relaxed and I narrowed my eyes at him.
If forgery wasn’t the criminal activity that raised his guard, I couldn’t help but wonder what else he was into.
I wasn’t in any place to judge or to go digging, though.
He tilted his head and considered my question for a moment.
“If she was going to be in town longer, or if it was any other week, maybe. But Kenna’s got a lot on her mind with the memorial, and Lexi Tate’s case officially being marked cold.
She probably only came in here to distract herself from that. ”
“Facing a case going cold isn’t easy,” I said, remembering the day my own mother’s murder had been marked cold. The accusations and threats I’d thrown around the Newark PD precinct that day nearly landed me in a cell of my own.
“You have a lot of experience with cold cases?” Trick asked as he swept the last of the crumbs out from under the back booth.
The question hit me harder than I expected, reminding me that Trick didn’t actually know me all that well.
He knew Hale, the skittish ex-FBI agent who had been framed for murder, but he knew next to nothing of my life before.
As we slipped out the back door and Trick locked it behind us for the night, I told him the simplest truth; “They were my specialty.”
The projector clicked to the next slide, and a collective gasp ran through the room.
Tucked away at the back, in the farthest right row of seats in one of Penn State’s lecture halls, I watched as several of my peers grimaced, gagged, or blatantly turned away from the sight of the head wound that the guest lecturer—Special Agent Monica Park—had displayed on the screen at the front of the room.
I tilted my head, noting the distinctive half-moon shape of the wound in the picture.
As I wrote down a handful of theories on the murder weapon I idly wondered how any of the students showing disgust expected to navigate a future in criminal justice.
If they couldn’t handle seeing a representation of blunt-force trauma in an image, they certainly wouldn’t be able to face an actual corpse.
Then, I grimaced at my own gruesome thoughts.
This was an optional lecture I reminded myself. Half these students probably aren’t criminal justice majors and only came out of curiosity.
SSA Park waved in the direction of the projector screen, and I tuned her out as she explained how the shape of the wound gave insight into the weapon.
She held the attention of two dozen students who were scattered throughout the room, most of them sitting front and center.
Normally, that’s where I would be too, but I’d been running late and hadn’t wanted to interrupt her opening remarks.
Besides, it wasn’t like I was learning anything new at this point anyway.
An unruly lock of hair fell out of my messy bun, and I brushed it out of my eyes as I glanced down at the notebook page in front of me.
While the agent continued to point out the clues I’d already picked up on, I finished a doodle of a flower that took up half of the page, darkening the center even more.
The projector clicked again, and I glanced up to discover an older picture of the victim on display. The man was standing upright and smiling, arms wrapped around his wife, a young girl sitting in front of them with a stuffed animal in her arms.
He was happy, healthy, whole.
I felt a twinge of guilt at how little I’d been paying attention.
That man had been someone’s husband and father before he was murdered and here I was drawing pretty flowers in the space where I was meant to be taking notes.
The guilt didn’t last long though, because the truth was that after three years of studying criminology and five researching how to solve cold cases, Scott Evan’s murder did not reveal any new information even after it was solved. At least, not for me.
“Thirty years ago,” Park said, her tone lowering as the final slide faded to black, “before social media and twenty-four-hour news, information spread slower. Our witness was only fifteen—and like most teenagers, she wasn’t paying attention to local crime stories.
The case went cold, the press moved on, and decades passed before we got a break.
That’s the truth of most cold cases: the clues are out there, but connecting them takes time, determination, and luck. ”
She glanced at the clock. “I see a few hands, but that’s all the time we have. Thank you for coming, and if you have any questions about a future with the FBI, feel free to email them to me.”
Chairs scraped against the floor as students packed up.
I stayed seated, slouched low, watching as they filed out.
It only took a couple minutes for the lecture hall to empty out, but even once the others were gone I couldn’t find it in myself to get up and leave.
It had taken a lot of energy to get out of bed this morning and decide to attend today, and as I sat there watching the special agent gather her things, I wished I’d known what a waste of time it was going to be.
I could have caught up on sleep or studied for my probability mid-term.
Instead, I’d listened to this woman talk for two hours about how cold cases had been solved in the past and learned nothing that I didn’t already know.
Watching her shuffle her papers and gather her bag provided no further insight, but I figured if there was anything interesting she had to offer on the subject, she would have included it in her lecture.
Glancing down at my notes again, and the large sketch I’d drawn of an anemone while my mind had wandered, I frowned, a wave of frustration and disappointment welling inside of me.
I had hoped that this lecture would be different, that it would capture my interest and keep me engaged, but it had followed the same predictable pattern as every other discussion, lecture, and assignment I had attended this semester.
The basics were all there, the building blocks that any good investigator would need to solve a crime, but that was it.
There was nothing new, no groundbreaking techniques or special insights.
Nothing to help me solve my case.
Heaving a sigh, I flipped the notebook closed and tucked it inside my book bag.
Yanking my scrunchie out of my hair, I ran my hands through it and massaged my scalp to relieve some of the tension that had gathered there.
Shaking out my strawberry-blonde locks, I pushed them back out of my eyes and lifted my head only to come face to face with SSA Park.
“Christ,” I yelped and jolted back. Considering I was still sitting down there wasn’t far for me to go.
“Sorry! Didn’t mean to startle you,” Park said, throwing her hands up to placate me. Her sleek black ponytail bobbed back and forth as she stepped back to give me space.
“Warn a girl next time,” I breathed out, trying to calm myself. I pressed a hand to my chest, willing my pulse to slow. Up close, she looked every bit the agent—crisp white blouse, dark slacks, shoes that apparently didn’t make a sound. “Sorry, can I help you?”
“I was wondering that same thing, actually,” SSA Park told me, her hands dropping to her sides. “I noticed you looked a little upset during the lecture?”
“So did half the class.” I shrugged, moving to stand up and grab my bag. It wasn’t this woman’s fault that I’d hit a dead end in my passion for the subject and my own investigation. This was an FBI agent with years of experience; she didn’t need me telling her how lackluster her lecture had been.
“Yes, but they were upset by pictures of a dead man,’ SSA Park countered. “You, on the other hand, were entirely unaffected by that.”