Chapter 84
Daniel was trying not to watch her. He hadn’t seen Heather since that night.
She looked rough. No denying that. But there was still that strange sense of dignity about her that had always set him on edge.
Since the moment they’d met. Now she was just sort of holding herself there, almost wilting, with his closest friend on earth sitting next to her.
Hovering over her. As if Mac had the right. “What did you find, Heather?”
“Getting right to it, McKellen?”
She said things to deliberately get beneath his skin at times. He had figured that out. Now, he thought he knew why. He scared her. He was still reconciling himself to that. That was the last thing he had ever wanted to do. “I am seriously exhausted—and I think you probably have me beat.”
“You are right about that. You doing…better?”
“I’m in one piece, at least. A little more battered than I was a month ago.”
“Me, too.” Heather pulled in a deep breath, as Hope wrapped her hand around her older sister’s. “Nine years ago. Nick, Curtis, Miguel, and I worked for a unit called Advanced Response & Tactical Services, based out of Austin. ARTS was a bit different than your normal unit. There were eight of us.”
Daniel’s attention narrowed. He had heard rumors of that unit before. ARTS was supposed to have been fictional. Only a select handful had even the rank within the TSP to know if it existed. Daniel hadn’t been one of them. “ARTS.”
“Special task force put in place by the previous governor,” Miguel said.
He was hovering near Hope’s end of the couch now.
“Deane…cut funding about six years ago. We’ve never fully understood why.
ARTS was highly effective at getting in and getting out.
It is one reason why I went into Rapid Response. ”
“We were already doing our own version of Rapid Response by then, as well. Unofficially. ARTS did a lot of things unofficially,” Heather added.
“The funding cut was out of nowhere. And we had less than three days to…funnel…our open cases to other units. We were never given a full explanation about why it was cut. Then we were transferred out immediately.”
“I will find out,” Daniel said. It wasn’t a myth. And that meant there was someone still hiding things from Major Crimes. “Does Marshall know?”
“I don’t…know,” Miguel said. “It has never come up.”
“We were only carrying maybe four cases at a time, anyway,” Heather said.
“They required more attention than most. I tended to run…command. Strategy. Or if a woman was needed to make contact with people we encountered, then I was the face. I was the only woman in the unit. Miguel and Curtis were most often pounding the pavement. My brother-in-law, he would work auxiliary. But Nick’s strengths were more psychological analysis and he would take the evidence and somehow form a narrative. He was really good at it, too.”
“I didn’t know this. Does Joy?” Hope asked.
Heather just nodded. “You were so young…Bonnie knew, and Norm and Marcia. Joy. That’s it. We just weren’t supposed to talk about ARTS, Hope. And by the time you were old enough, it was over. And we had been sworn to secrecy about its very existence. It became…myth.”
“Great. You are Mythical as well as Scary and Horrible and Beautiful and Super, Auntie Heather,” Murdoch said.
“I take it you found something?” Daniel asked. “That’s relevant to now?”
“I…there was a case. A young woman was found dead, behind a gas station on the north side of Wichita Falls. We…operated out of Austin, but we were sent statewide, as needed. Mig, Nick and I…were sent. We were using Bonnie’s place as our home base, since it was so close.
Her throat was slit and it was…a hard case for Nick and me.
The woman looked very much like my niece Summer.
She was eighteen, Summer was seventeen. And she just…
stuck with me. She was wearing a hairband when she was found.
Summer had the same hair band. The same hair. It stayed with me.”
She was getting winded. She looked at Miguel. He picked up for her. “I hadn’t met Summer at the time, but I knew the case was bothering Heather and Nick, so I volunteered to work point. I don’t know where Hope was at the time?”
“Joy and Mom had taken Hope and the rest of the younger kids to a skateboarding competition in Norman, at the university. It was Hope’s first regional win.
They made a family event of it.” She looked back at Daniel.
“So we worked…the case. Until…I found a few leads, and Mig and Nick were heading in that direction.”
“Just like that, as soon as we started asking questions—obstacles were thrown into the path. And the case went cold. We worked it for a few years, worked ARTS for a few more. But ARTS was plagued by…problems, after that.”
“Problems centered around me. I was the one to find the list. I was the one to start asking the first questions. And I…” She looked at Daniel, a flat expression in her beautiful eyes that told him he wasn’t going to like what she said next.
“I was the one who first put Dan McKellen on the list. Once we started looking at him and his…friends…our entire unit was destroyed.”
“My father. He…killed this girl?” Daniel despised his father. More than words could say. His father was dirty—he was damned near convinced of it—but an actual murderer? No. He couldn’t see his father actually killing anyone. “You think he did?”
“I don’t…know. I never was able to confirm it was…him.” There was something she wasn’t telling him. Daniel knew it with one look.
“Tell me. I won’t…break.”
“We…our leads…it was a son of someone connected to your father. Or his friends. And…we always wondered—“ Heather said. She stopped to take in a deep breath. He hadn’t forgotten what she had gone through. “We always wondered—“
“If it was me. I get it. You thought it was…me.”
“I did. Mig didn’t. Nick was undecided. That was just the way it was.”
And she had worked for him for six weeks—thinking he could have been a killer.
Hell, did he honestly blame her?