Dead Center (The Rookie Club Book 1) (40 page)

Jamie wasn't the only one breaking new ground. Tony had been out of rehab for three weeks and was still sober. He went to his AA meetings religiously, sometimes every day. Z was settling in to his second foster home. The first one hadn't gone too well. Tony didn't think this one would, either. But Tony picked him up every weekend for an overnight at Jamie's. Tonight—the game. Last week, Tony and Z had rented
Men in Black
I and II and they'd done a doubleheader that would have been torture for anyone who had taste in movies. Thankfully, Jamie wasn't one of them.

Tony was also teaching Z how to use the computer. They'd started by searching for Z's name and found Zephenaya, spelled Zephaniah, was a book in the Bible. Tony said that was news to him. To Jamie, too, though they'd both been raised Catholic.

The three of them sat by the computer and looked up the book of Zephaniah. Tony read from Zephaniah 1:3, where God preached to the people to have patience and mercy. God promised that the wicked would be punished for their sins and revenge would come to them.

Z had listened intently and made Tony repeat it.

Then he had looked up, his small brow furrowed, and asked, "Does that mean God will punish whoever hurt Shawna?"

She'd seen Tony's eyes grow glassy, had to glance away herself.

Tony wrapped an arm around Z. "I think it does." Jamie and Tony had told Zephenaya that the bad man was gone; that he couldn't hurt anyone ever again. Now, as Tony held Z, he met Jamie's gaze over the boy's head and she'd considered how hard it was to answer a child's questions. Maybe her father and Pat hadn't done such a bad job after all.

After that night, Tony had decided to pay for weekly grief counseling for Z. Tony still worried that Z didn't talk enough about Shawna. Jamie assured him that sometimes it took decades to work through that kind of grief. She thought Z had a big head start with Tony on his side.

Tony was also pushing to get approval to become Z's foster father. Though Jamie moved a little slower on the idea, she was amazingly open for someone who was certain that she would never have a family.

Jamie still spoke to Mackenzie and Hailey every few days. Hailey was already in the middle of a new high-profile murder case, thanks to her father-in-law, and Mackenzie had gotten her cast off and was back to her beat. The rookie had her name down on the lists for Sex Crimes and Homicide, though she was years away from being eligible for either.

Jamie had heard through the grapevine that while she was recovering, Scott Scanlan had been dismissed from the department. In the course of the investigation, he had confessed to logging into Jamie's chat room using her ID. He wouldn't be tried for any of his crimes, but he was no longer a cop, probably wouldn't be one again. That was enough.

According to the rumors, he'd also moved out of state. Tonight's tickets had been a gift from Deputy Chief Scanlan. She'd been getting a number of things from Deputy Chief Scanlan recently. He'd paid her vet bill and sent a three-hundred-dollar gift certificate to a restaurant called Boulevard, where she'd taken Z and Tony. They had eaten expensive food, declined the wine list and cocktails, and decided next time they'd rather go to Chevy's at Embarcadero. Three weeks later Scanlan had sent another restaurant gift certificate, and she'd sent it back. He'd sent tickets to the game instead.

Jamie knew there were strings attached. Deputy Chief Scanlan wanted to be sure she didn't talk to the media. That wasn't her style, but she hadn't told the deputy chief that. Not yet. He could sweat a little. Lord knows, she had.

She spotted Tony and Z hiking back up the stairs. Tony held a big tub of popcorn and another soda. She wondered if any of them would sleep tonight and figured it didn't matter much. There was always tomorrow.

Both boys were grinning when they reached her.

"What did you guys do?" she asked.

Tony nodded to Z. "Show her."

Z pulled his hand out from behind his back and handed her a bouquet of pink and blue cotton candy.

"I thought they didn't have cotton candy," she said. "Where'd you get this?"

Z smiled proudly. "We bribed it off a vendor who had some in the back."

She smiled. "You're a tricky one, aren't you?"

Z nodded very seriously. Then he slid into his seat and turned to her. "Since I was so tricky, you gonna share it with me, right?"

Jamie laughed out loud. "Maybe a little," she said, winking.

"Half," Z said.

"Thirds," Tony cut in, leaning in with his hand out.

Jamie ripped it open and they all tore at it, shoving big strands of blue and pink fluff into their mouths. This was one of the good things, she thought.

She met Tony's gaze over Z's head and he winked, the gums around his front teeth blue. He nodded as though he understood.

Maybe he did. Maybe better than anyone, Tony understood.

She thought she did—better now than ever before.

The End

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ONE CLEAN SHOT

The Rookie Club

Book Two

Excerpt from

One Clean Shot

The Rookie Club

Book Two

by

Danielle Girard

Award-winning Author

Hailey Wyatt had never had a case that haunted her, until now. Her husband had been dead for eleven months when Hailey Wyatt and her partner, Hal, got a court order allowing them to move forward on the case that had been at a standstill for the past fourteen months. A wealthy San Francisco couple had been found dead in the wife's minivan—defense wounds on her, lacerations on him that were consistent with a letter opener she kept in the car. COD on her was strangulation, exsanguination for him. Crime Scene Unit, CSU, had ruled out other blood types, but the vehicle had contained no fewer than thirty unidentifiable prints and a dozen hair samples that didn't belong to the victims or their kids.

Hailey had ruled it double-homicide, "murder by spouse" as the department dubbed it when husband and wife both ended up dead, no clear suicide between them. It was the right call, based on practical assumptions and it was all supposed to come out right. But it hadn't. Abby and Hank Dennig had no more killed each other than John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

A week after the case was closed, a sheriff up near Sacramento linked a suspected-suicide to the Dennigs murders via a partial fingerprint on a small, round anti-N.R.A. button. The partial would have been sufficient evidence for a warrant except that the print matched a man named Nicholas Fredricks and Fredricks had the best alibi there was—he'd been dead for three years.

Hailey was exhausted. Though the court approval to disinter the body of Nicholas Fredricks was good news in the double-homicide, it had come on the Monday after a weekend consumed by the nastiest domestic homicide the department had seen since before her rookie days. Hailey had yet to spend more than an hour at home since Friday morning. Worse, her mother-in-law was taking Hailey's two daughters to Cirque de Soleil that night so she couldn't even be with her girls.

Outside her in-laws' house, Hailey took two long off her Albuterol inhaler and mounted the steps to the front door. Her father-in-law was seated in the kitchen, eating a sandwich on a paper plate, drinking Cabernet Sauvignon from a crystal glass. A senator, Jim looked as awkward eating off a paper plate as Hailey usually felt with china and crystal. He caught her look and smiled. "I know. Quite a combination, isn't it?"

Hailey sniffed the air. "Tuna?"

He nodded. "A terrible waste of a good vintage, but I was starving."

"You want me to make something?"

"No. This is fine. There's more in the fridge if you want some."

"Thanks." Hailey made herself a sandwich while Jim finished his.

"Wine?" he asked when Hailey had set the plate down.

"I think I'll pass."

"There's beer in there. The kind you guys like," he added and Hailey felt the room shrink at the mention of her dead husband.

When the doorbell rang, it felt like a welcome distraction. She crossed to the refrigerator for a beer and reached the table just as her phone rang. "Wyatt."