Chapter Thirty

 

Josh Meadows is sitting on the comfiest sofa in the house. There are three, around the entire house, and this is the good one.

The sofas around the house are among the best he's sat on, and this is the best of the three. Which, in effect, makes it the nicest sofa he's sat on altogether.

Which isn't remotely the problem. The problem is that he's alone. It should feel normal. He should be able to look down at the manila envelopes on the coffee table in front of him—the ones that he was still supposed to get back to Jeffries on—and get to whatever work he was still hoping to be able to do.

He shouldn't have been off work in the first place. He should have had better control of himself.

But now that he's in this situation, sitting alone on a sofa at home at eleven thirty in the morning feels like the last in a very long list of things he shouldn't be doing today.

Why had she said yes? It was a foolish question, of course. He knew exactly why she'd said yes, and he wouldn't have told her she was wrong if she'd asked him for permission to say it.

She'd said yes because it meant making all of her problems, all the little threats that had built up over the past months, it made them all just… go away. There's very little more powerful than the promise of all of your troubles disappearing. Very little, indeed.

Anna found a way out. All it meant was giving up whatever independence she'd found. All it meant was marching back into the lion's den, knowing full well what she was getting herself into.

All it meant was taking a big risk. But it was a big risk with a much bigger reward, and the reward was paid up-front. As long as things didn't go too far off the rails…

Well, life as someone's trophy wife might not have been the most glamorous thing in the world by any means. But that doesn't mean that she's doing wrong by herself. It's totally natural, for a woman that looks like that.

And as trophy wives go, it's not that unusual. Most of them aren't happy. But hey. Maybe he'll get her treatment for it, eventually.

Josh can't afford to worry about her future. He doesn't have the time. He needs to get back to the work of catching bad guys. People who committed real, provable crimes. People who can be brought in. Not people who are above the law like Mitch Queen.

He should be working on those things. But it's not going that well, because for all that he can't afford to worry about Anna Witt, the sad, anxious girl who showed about every sign of abuse that he could think of off the top of his head, he was sick with worry about her.

Was she at least alright? Not hurt? Mitch Queen might be able to stop bullying the girl for a few days, at least. Maybe long enough to get to the wedding. Hopefully.

Long enough for his father to get picked back up. Long enough for everything in his life to fall back into place.

Josh looks down at the pile of cases. There's not a lack of evidence, per se. There's plenty of evidence. Someone broke in to the bank. That's a job in and of itself. They'd taken things from several safety deposit boxes. Several.

The contents of those boxes, as usual, is unknown.

There's plenty of evidence that someone broke in. There's a big god damn hole where the safety deposit boxes used to be, for example. And there's an open vault door.

Those things don't just open on their own. Safety deposit boxes don't just walk out.

But the job was done at night. The night guard didn't see anything out of the ordinary. For all anyone knows, maybe he was looking at Playboys when he was on the job. Too focused on texting his wife instead of watching the building. Who knows.

Second, the video feeds show a single man come in, drop a bag, and then head over. Video feeds all cut around the same time, about thirty seconds after he walks back under the frame of the lobby camera.

Nothing really points to anyone. Which is why the papers are sitting there, right this second, on Detective Meadows' coffee table. Because the guy in charge, he's not sure what to figure.

The men in the photos are not particular-looking men. They're wearing heavy black coats that terminate at the mid-hip. Probably pea-coats, like the British navy used to wear back in the day. Warm. Very warm for August.

They've got masks on. Nothing that would stand out. Nothing unique. Black masks. Ski masks. The eyes are blacked out somehow. The camera feed is too poor to make it out. For all that they know, it could be that the fellow is just dark-skinned, but for a very brief glimpse of the man's arm.

His coat, as it turns out, is not exceptionally well-fitting for a man with such long arms, and so for a brief moment his wrist is visible between his gloves and his sleeve, and it's light-skinned.

Hence, the skin around his eyes has been blacked over with something. Grease paint, probably. Grease paint available just about anywhere. Costume shops all around the country carry the stuff year-round.

For a well-planned job this size, a year of preparation wouldn't be outside possibility. Most criminals don't have that kind of patience, but most criminals don't plan well in the first place.

By and large, it's why they're criminals.

If they, for some reason, couldn't bear to go into a party supply store, though, they could get something like this almost anywhere around Halloween. Which is to say, almost totally untraceable.

The bag is a standard duffel bag. Looks like canvas.

Josh looks it over. Someone must have thought long and hard about this job, which begs several questions. The most important of them, though, is… if they've planned this out enough to avoid being seen, to cut the camera feeds, all that…

Would they have taken the contents of roughly a dozen random safety deposit boxes? Why fourteen? Why not thirteen or fifteen? Why not twelve?

Is it a matter of timing things? Do they know specifically at what time the security guard calls up his booty call every Friday night and gets his jollies off in the parking lot, and specifically at what time he finishes?

That could excuse it, maybe. But it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense. None of it does.

Josh leans his head back and takes a breath. He looks down at the notepad beside him. He was right. He'd have regretted leaving it at the office. Worst case scenario, he ends up with two notepads. Never sure which one to use in the moment.

He flips back a page, to the speech he'd been writing out. It sounded vaguely apologetic. That was probably good enough, in the end, right? It was hard to say with any certainty. But it was even harder to say how anyone expected a better apology.

After all, Mitchell Queen should be happy that it doesn't open 'When I first met Mitch Queen, I knew with absolute clarity that he was a son-of-a-bitch and a bully, and I knew that he'd driven every person who was ever close to him away—some of them with his bad attitude, and for those who stayed, by telling them he didn't want them around.'

But he wouldn't be happy with that. Nobody would. Even Josh would probably be unsatisfied reading it out. It lacked a certain sense of gravity when he just laid it all out like that.

No, he needed to get his job back. Queen wasn't worth it. He'd be outed by some tabloid sooner or later. They'd get themselves a picture of Anna Witt, who would be Anna Queen by then no doubt, with a big god damn wallop on her eye.

Then they'd post it around, it would be the talk of the town for a couple of days, and it would die down. Well, if she went back to him, she knew what she was getting herself into.

She knew what was going to happen. None of this would be a surprise to her when it finally did happen. Josh Meadows had a promising career ahead of himself, if he managed to keep his nose clean and keep himself under control.

As long as he left Mitch Queen and his fiancée alone, there wouldn't be any trouble.

His throat felt tight, but that wasn't because of Anna. It wasn't because of her that his stomach churned, that his heart felt like it was racing.

His throat just felt strange because he was… because…

Josh Meadows, who might still be a Detective after he makes this televised apology, takes another drink. It doesn't matter why he's panicked, it doesn't matter why he's upset.

What matters is that he looks at these case files, and he writes his apology, and he forgets about anything that resembles a pretty, sad-eyed girl with a missing daughter.

That was a different life and a different time, and he's past it now. As long as he remembers that, he'll be just fine.