"But you're not the marrying type?"
"Something like that."
"So you'll see this Mariah when you go home for the party?"
Absolutely. Ryan's parents adored her as if she was one of their own children.
"Yes, but it's not the big deal that Liza makes it out to be. It was all a long time ago. I doubt Mariah even thinks about me anymore."
"No shrine to her first love?" Luke chuckled.
"Hardly. She's not the shrine type."
"What about you? You don't spend evenings paging through your old yearbook thinking about what might have been?"
"I don't even know where my yearbooks are. Mariah's a wonderful person but she and I never could have made it work. We're far too different."
"I guess Liza is destined to be disappointed then."
"I guess she is. She's a big girl. She'll get over it. I'm not ever getting back together with Mariah."
Luke didn't reply to Ryan's declaration, instead parking the car in front of a bungalow on a residential street. They were supposed to try and speak to a witness from a cold case they were both working on. The murder had happened twenty years ago and this witness had been able to give a vague description to the cops but the killer had never been found. They were hoping that the witness might be able to tell them more information than was in the case file. As with so many cold cases, the notes and some of the other reports had been lost or misplaced.
Darren Campo was the man they were looking for and hopefully he lived here. According to their research, he lived at this address with a girlfriend. He worked nights as a security guard and according to the girlfriend he would be willing to talk to them after his shift. If they'd time this correctly, Campo would have returned home about thirty minutes ago.
Luke knocked and the door swung open revealing a middle-aged woman around forty or so. Ryan was bad at guessing ages. She might be younger but she had that world-weary expression that said that she hadn't had a good night's sleep worry-free in a long time.
"You must be the detectives that called yesterday."
Ryan pulled out a business card from his breast pocket. "Investigators, actually. We're helping the police with a cold case. I'm Ryan Beck and this is my associate Luke Brewster. Is your partner home? We'd like to talk to him."
She accepted the card and stepped back. "He is. He just got home and he's in the kitchen eating breakfast. I'll tell him you're here."
They waited in the foyer for the woman to return. She was only gone for a few moments and then she was back beckoning them to move farther into the house.
"He’s right this way. Come on in."
They followed her to the kitchen at the back of the house but no one was there. On the small table there was a half-eaten plate of food. The coffee was still steaming in the cup. The woman frowned and looked around.
"He was just here a moment ago..."
Ryan had an inkling. "Ma'am, when we called yesterday did you tell him that we were coming?"
She shook her head. "No, I didn't think he'd mind."
The sound of an engine firing up had Ryan and Luke heading back to the front door. A sedan shot out of the driveway and into the street, tires squealing.
"Shit," Ryan mumbled under his breath. "Let's go."
Luke was already on his way with Ryan on his heels. They jumped into their car and then remembered that they weren't cops anymore. They couldn't go on a high-speed chase. Ryan could only call it in to the local cops.
They were dead in the water.
"Fuck," Luke said. "Just...fuck."
That pretty much summed up the situation.
"I have a feeling that Darren Campo might not be the innocent witness and bystander that we thought he was," Ryan observed. "In a way, we got lucky. If his girlfriend had told him last night that we were coming here he'd probably be out of the state by now."
They might have broken open the case.
"Let's call the local police and then get back to the office," Luke said. "We need to let Reed know what's going on."
Ryan also needed to ask for some time off for his mother's birthday party. He didn't want to go but this was one family obligation he couldn't say no to.
And not one good thing was going to come from it.
2
Ryan was sitting at his desk a few hours later when his boss Logan Wright stuck his head out of his office.
"Beck, do you have a minute?"
Closing the file he'd been perusing, Ryan picked up his can of soda. "Sure thing. I'll be right there."
Luke looked up from his laptop. "When you're done, do you want to get some lunch? Chris and Knox said that they're thinking of that barbecue place that has the great garlic toast."
"Sounds good. I'm starving. I doubt this will take long."
Logan wasn't a long-winded sort of person. Ryan would probably be in and out fairly quickly. The door to the office was open so he stepped in and settled into the chair across from his boss's desk. To his surprise, Logan stood up and closed the door behind them. Was this something that the rest of the office couldn't hear? Shit, was he being fired?
"I closed the door because I didn't want anyone to interrupt us," Logan said, reading Ryan's mind. His boss was spooky like that, always two steps ahead of anyone else. He could only hope to be half the lawman someday that Logan Wright was. "I'm sure you haven't heard yet because there hasn't been an announcement to the public, but a body was found in Chicago. An old building was being torn down and that's when they found it. The identification process took a little while due to decomposition but it's done now - Bradley Harrington, twenty-one years old."
Ryan was thirty-four but with one mention of that name he was a teenager again. He and Brad had grown up together, their families life-long friends. At the end, they hadn't been best buddies but they'd run in the same crowd, going to the same parties, and hanging out at the same places.
"Brad? Are they...sure?"
It seemed impossible. It had been thirteen years ago.
"They're sure," Logan replied, handing over a manila file folder. "The identification details are in here along with the information about the area where they found the body."
Numbly, Ryan accepted the file but didn't open it. He was still stunned, to be honest. After so many years, he'd been sure that they would never find out what happened to Brad.
"You knew Bradley Harrington," Logan said when Ryan didn't respond. "You were friends?"
"Kind of. We were good friends when we were kids but you know how it is as you get older. We went to different colleges and sort of grew apart. We had the same friend group, though, so during holidays and summers we would all get together." Ryan shook his head. "Sorry about this. I'm just...blown away. It's been years and we never heard anything else after about six months from when he disappeared."
"What do you remember about the case?"
That it had almost been too bizarre to be real. Even now it sounded like something out of a movie or book.
"We were all partying that night, bar hopping and generally being wild-ass kids. We'd all finished our junior year and we hadn't been home long. A few weeks? I remember thinking that I shouldn't stay out too late because I had a flight out of O'Hare at noon the next day. We all did, actually. We were going to celebrate the end of the school year with a vacation in Hawaii."