I KNEW IT wasn’t going to go well when I showed up at Chris’s office early that evening, but I had to take my chances. Part of me—the part that knew him—told me he did care about finding Luna and helping me solve my mother’s case. I was going to have to trust that part of me when he was most likely going to be yelling at me to leave and take my drama with me.
Turned out, I was lucky to even catch him there at all. When he came out into the lobby to see me standing there, I could see his shoulders tense. I almost felt bad. Like maybe if I cared for him at all, I would just leave him alone.
But caring for people wasn’t in my repertoire. And neither was leaving people alone when I wanted something.
“Don’t get that look,” I said, brushing past him toward his office. “I’m here for a good reason.”
“I was just heading out,” he said to my back.
“I can ride along.”
“No, Nikki, you can’t.” He edged around me and stopped in his doorway, blocking me. “This is about a case that has nothing to do with you. Or me. Other than it’s my job to solve it.”
“Oh, come on. Are you ever going to forgive me? I’ve said I was sorry.”
“If you were really sorry, you would stop doing what you’re doing.”
“What am I doing?” My voice had taken on a high, squeaky quality that I hated.
“We’ve been through this and through this and through this. I think you’re wasting your time. You aren’t going to find Luna. You aren’t going to find your mother’s murderer. You need to let go already and start to live your life. Stop living in the past. You can’t fix it. You can only learn from it.”
I cocked my hip to one side, pressing my fist into it. “Says the guy whose secret obsession with his own past almost got him killed. Maybe you should let it go and live your life.”
“And you really think Heriberto is going to let that happen?” he asked, voice low.
“And you really think Luna is?” I countered.
“Yes. Actually, I do. I think Luna is long gone. I think she probably hitched the first plane to Dubai, just like her parents would have done. I think she wants to forget that you ever existed. I think she wants everything that’s happened to just go away.”
“And I think I’m not okay with that. Peyton didn’t just go away. Dru didn’t just go away. They were killed. And as long as she is out there, I think I have to keep looking. For my sister. For my mom. And everything you just said tells me that you definitely aren’t remembering everything that happened.” I pressed my lips together, waiting, but he said nothing. I tried switching gears. “Besides, if I ride along with you, maybe I would decide I want to be a cop after all.” He rolled his eyes, the seriousness slowly sliding off him. All the opening I needed. I grabbed his arm. “You could change a life, Detective Martinez. Inspire a future officer of the law.” I saluted, grinning.
He held out for another long moment, and then let his arms drop. “Fine. Come with me. But you stay in the car unless I tell you to get out. You got that?”
“Aye, aye, Captain Control Freak.” I saluted again, but he’d already turned his back.
“SO WHO ARE we busting?” I asked as soon as we got into the car.
“First of all, I’m not busting anyone. I need to question someone about a murder that happened under an overpass two nights ago. Routine stuff. Secondly, we aren’t doing anything. I am asking questions; you’ll be in the car. Got it?”
“Sure, sure.”
We drove along for a few minutes. I watched out the window as we drove deeper into the rough side of the city. I wondered what it would be like to call these streets work. My job. A squad car my office. For the first time ever, I didn’t get a sick feeling at the idea of putting on a blue uniform. For the first time ever, it seemed like it could be a possibility. If I could pass the written exams, of course. Could it really be that hard?
I was probably still riding the high of figuring out who the white-blond man was.
“So to what do I owe the pleasure of having you on this ride-along?” he finally said, breaking the silence. Sarcastic. Still a little bitter.
“Don’t say it like that,” I said.
“So your presence in my office doesn’t have anything to do with what you found at the house you tried to get me to look at with you this morning?”
“You know, I think I liked it better when I was telling you to get off my ass all the time,” I said sourly. “You were way nicer then. Of course, that was before you got scrambled brains.” I knew, even as the words were leaving my mouth, that they were the wrong ones.
“Nice, Nikki. Really nice.”
“Sorry,” I said, sitting in a fern-colored awkwardness.
He let the heaviness hover for a minute while he turned into an even shadier area—one of those abandoned-looking streets that immediately took me back to the day we went to the Dom Distribution warehouse. My palms started sweating with the memory. “So what did you find?” he finally asked, quiet, contrite.
“The house is completely gutted. Nothing and no one to be found.”
“So you got nothing?”
“I did, actually. I hacked into the Realtor’s phone and got this.” I held up the palm of my hand, on which I had scribbled Peter Fairchild’s number the moment I’d gotten back in my car.
“You hacked . . . never mind. Whose is it?”
“Peter Fairchild. Luna’s dad. Also, it turns out, her getaway driver. The thing is, I’ve seen him before. I know who he is, where he works, everything.” Well, not quite everything. I still didn’t know what exactly he had to do with my parents. Why he was hanging around in the background of their photos.
Chris raised his eyebrows. “And?”
“And he’s the director of that movie over at Pear Magic.”
“Interesting.”
I nodded. “It gets even better. He was the guy who pretended to be an agent. I’m convinced Jetta was Luna in disguise. He’s trying to hide her. He sold his house to buy a yacht.”
Chris turned into a parking lot and came to a stop. An empty, rusted grocery cart was overturned at the nose of our car. “A yacht,” he repeated once he’d turned off the car.
“A houseboat,” I said, emphasizing the word house. “Right after Luna mysteriously disappeared. Coincidence?”
“You think Luna is living on the yacht.”
“Can you think of a more Luna place to hide?”
I had only just then noticed a knot of people nearby, tucked up high under an overpass, clustered on a single filthy blanket. They were watching us carefully. Chris caught me looking.
“Is this who you’re questioning?” I asked.
He nodded. “Here’s the thing. When a homeless person goes missing, nobody even realizes it, right? They’re invisible to the rest of the world.”
“Sad thought.”
“True thought. But the thing is, they actually are missed. Their circle of friends misses them. And those friends also might know more than they even realize they know. They just don’t bother to come to us with the information. They figure it’s pointless.”
“Because they’re invisible,” I said.
“Yep,” he said to the window. “Our job is to see them anyway. To remember that no invisible person is really invisible.”
Made total sense to me, but I wondered how many cops would look at it that way. How many would think to talk to the other homeless about their murdered friend? Maybe all of them, I didn’t know. But for some reason I guessed not. For some reason, I guessed that was one of the things that made Chris special.
The sun was starting to make me sweat along the hairline.
“It’s also my job to convince them that I’m not going to bust them. That I’m going to leave them just invisible enough to get away with whatever drugs and stolen shit they’ve got going on over there.”
“So it’s better for me to stay in the car,” I said. “I get it.”
“Exactly. That was why I didn’t think you should come in the first place. This isn’t a spectator sport, as much as TV would like us to think it is.”
“Fine, whatever, I’ll wait.” I snapped down the visor. “But you know how fast I get restless—” I stopped. When I’d pulled down the visor, something had fallen into my lap with a clink. I picked it up.
A key.
A single key on a ring, a number etched onto a tab that also hung from the ring.
Brown, silver, bronze.
“One forty-nine,” I said. I held the key up questioningly, expecting Chris to yank it away from me, too, and chastise me for not minding my own business.
But his face was frozen. He looked almost pasty. His eyes bored into the metal of the ring; his mouth hung open just slightly.
“What?” I asked. I glanced at the key and back at him again. “What’s one forty-nine? An address?”
“A locker,” he said. His voice was rough, as if it came from somewhere far away. “I’m almost positive I remember a locker.”
I squinted at him, confused. “Like, a gym locker?”
He finally moved, his hand closing around the key and tugging it from me. “A storage locker,” he said. “Holy shit, Nikki, I know where Heriberto’s drugs are.”