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As much as he didn’t want Tanner Brooks to be dead, he had been sure that Tanner’s leg sat in the ME’s office. And if it wasn’t his, then...
His heart thumped against his ribs, the bile rising in his throat. Maybe he was just hungry — he hadn’t eaten all day — but he knew that the painful burning in his chest would be hanging around for a while yet. He needed to make sure that they shuffled resources to investigate the severed leg. Who could it possibly even belong to?
Tommy slammed the door back and stepped into the precinct, only to immediately be met by three teenagers standing from chairs along the wall. They appeared eager to see him, but he didn’t recognize them. Not at first.
“Detective Wallace!” one of two boys exclaimed. “We need your help!”
There were uniforms at the desk, and a number of detectives ready to help out the local tourists. Tommy didn’t have time for this.
“Talk to the desk officer. He’ll help you out,” Tommy suggested.
Grabowski, a pudgy young officer, pitched in from the desk. “Wouldn’t talk to me, Detective. Said they’d wait for you.”
Tommy sighed, resigning himself to surveying the three kids before him. Two boys. Fit. Looked like jocks maybe. And a girl. Pretty. Dark hair. Her hand was intertwined with one of the boys. Tommy’s mind unexpectedly pictured them in less clothes, as a reminder of where he’d last seen them. A push-up bra accentuated the girl’s form-hugging shirt, but during their last encounter those curves had been hidden under an oversized t-shirt.
The investigation into Hannah Huang seemed so distant and unimportant now that Tommy couldn’t remember the last time he’d thought about it. He’d filed it away in his head as completed, really, sure that she had skipped town and headed back to Dallas. Emma Chu had woken up, though he still needed to get over to visit her. Hannah Huang just didn’t matter to his investigation anymore.
The boy not attached to the girl spoke: “Justin hasn’t come back. Since that night. With Hannah.”
Tommy flipped through names in his head trying to put it all back together. Brady. This kid’s name was Brady. And Justin had been out with Hannah the night before she checked out of the motel.
Still not convinced that he needed to deal with this, Tommy suggested, “Did you try calling him?”
Brady sighed. “Of course we did. Goes straight to voicemail. That would only happen if his phone died. Why wouldn’t he charge his phone?”
“Fill out a missing persons report with Grabowski over there. We’ll look into it first chance we get.”
“Come on, Detective. Help us out. You were worried about Hannah before. And Justin was with her,” Brady begged.
Tommy felt a twinge of obligation, but he refused to give into it. As much as he might like to take on every case, he knew that he didn’t have the bandwidth. Not now, especially. He would just have to tell Brady more firmly that—
The logo on Brady’s shirt caught Tommy’s eye for the first time, sending his heart down into his stomach. His mind focused into gruesome clarity. From the front of the ratty old shirt, a tiger roared above a banner.
State Champs.
Dammit.
“All right. Come with me,” Tommy said as he pushed past the trio towards his glass-lined office.
Once he ushered them into the tiny room, he excused himself to steal a chair from next door. He slid it in next to the two already in front of his desk and motioned for them to sit down, then closed the door and took his own seat.
“Tell me about your shirt,” Tommy said.
Brady looked down in surprise. “What’s that have to do with anything?”
Tommy folded his hands in front of him and just stared into Brady eyes, summoning as much intimidation as he could to force him to just answer. Brady’s shoulders slumped as he silently retracted the question.
“We all got one last year. After we won state,” Brady explained.
“Who’s we?” Tommy asked.
“The whole team. Me. Justin. Frankie.” Brady motioned to the kid beside him.
“What about tattoos? Did you commemorate the occasion with a tattoo?”
Brady seemed to push down the confusion before standing up and lifting his leg to prop his dirty shoe up on Tommy’s desk. In the moment, Tommy didn’t mind.
“Yeah, some of us,” Brady said.
An exact match. It could have been Brady’s leg on that cold metal table, and Tommy wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. How? Who? The questions swirled around in Tommy’s head, each one trying to connect to an answer that he didn’t have. To hell with the kraken. Now he had real work to do.
And his number one suspect had to be Brady.
He was the last person to have seen both Justin and Hannah alive. Tommy leaned back in his chair and tried to catch his breath, to clear his mind and reset. Could Justin be alive somewhere, without a leg? And where was Hannah? He shuddered to think of both dead and dismembered, their body parts floating in the warm waters of Cape Madre.
“I don’t understand, Detective. What does my tattoo have to do with anything?” Brady asked.
Tommy stood and answered, “Stay right here. I’ll be back in a coupla minutes, okay?”
The confusion evident on all three of the kids’ faces told Tommy that none of them had anything to do with any of this, but he still had to stick to the rules. Play things by the book.
And that started with interrogations.
***
Nothing.
Brady and his band of misfits were innocent. Tommy would’ve staked his career on it. The good news was that he finally got some help. Another detective had been assigned to the case and would start first thing in the morning. The coast guard would also start a search to look for the rest of Justin’s body.
It didn’t bring much solace. Tommy wanted to believe that Justin’s murder and the mysterious kraken had nothing to do with one another, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were more intimately connected than just the leg ending up in the kraken’s tentacles.
Tommy’s stomach rumbled. Still nothing to eat, and now dinnertime approached. He needed more than food, though. He needed refuge. A place to unwind and get his bearings.
He stood from his desk and cracked his back before slipping on his suit jacket. Nothing more to do today. As he rounded the corner out of his office, he stopped suddenly at a group of people headed his way. Grabowski, the desk officer, stood at the head of them.
Dammit. One more thing that he’d let slip through the cracks.
Tommy held in the overwhelming urge to sigh. “Mr. Chu. Mrs. Chu. Emma.”
He offered his hand to Emma, since he hadn’t formally met her before. She shook his hand limply, offering a shy smile. She wore a shirt that he recognized from the hospital gift shop, evidence that her luggage had been taken away when Hannah left town. Or worse.
“Thanks Grabowski. I got it from here,” Tommy said.
Grabowski scurried away and Tommy ushered the family into his office, taking the time to get them situated before sitting down behind his desk. He studied each of their faces. Mr. and Mrs. Chu seemed considerably less stressed compared to the last time he’d seen them. Emma looked rested, alert, and a little bit embarrassed.
“I’m so sorry,” Tommy started. “I meant to get down to the hospital this morning, but it’s been a crazy day.”
“Not a problem, Detective,” Mr. Chu responded. “You just mentioned that you wanted to talk to Emma before we left town, and since she’s been discharged, we’ll be leaving in short order.”
Tommy nodded. “I understand. Thanks for coming down.”
Whatever had happened to Emma seemed of little consequence in light of recent developments, but Tommy knew he needed to at least try to hunt down all the leads. Maybe whatever happened to Justin and Hannah somehow related to Emma’s attack. And, though he refused to believe it, a small voice at the corner of his mind insisted that Emma would go crazy when she woke up.
Like Joe.
“What happened out there, Emma?” he asked.
Emma shifted in her chair and tucked a strand of dark black hair behind her ear. “I was swimming with Hannah, but she saw somebody on the beach she wanted to talk to, so she went back in. I didn’t mind. The water was nice.”
Anticipating tears, Tommy pushed a box of tissues towards Emma’s side of the desk. She took one preemptively.
“Next thing I know, I feel something around my waist. It happened fast. Then I was under water. I tried fighting it off, but it just squeezed tighter. It hurt. And then, I just woke up in a hospital bed.”
No tears yet. Her account seemed anti-climactic, not really telling him anything he couldn’t have already surmised.
“So, you don’t know who rescued you?” Tommy asked.
Emma shook her head.
“What do you think did this to you?” Tommy motioned to her stomach as he said it.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. An octopus? A squid?”
Without him asking, she slid the cheap t-shirt up to reveal the bruises on her stomach. Along with the incisions from her surgeries, Tommy could see the clear circular patterns of the kraken’s tentacles. Certainly, there could be no question as to what happened to her.
Mrs. Chu swatted at her daughter’s hand. “Emma. Cover yourself.”
Emma rolled her dark brown eyes and gave Tommy a smirk. He lifted one corner of his mouth to return the sentiment, but quickly returned to the stoic cop-face expected of him.
Tommy leaned forward to indicate a switch in topics. “You came here with a friend? Hannah Huang?”
Emma nodded. “Yeah. That’s right. Did you talk to her? We went to the hotel, but she already checked out.”
“I didn’t, no. Did you try getting in touch with her, by chance?”
“With what? I didn’t have my cell phone in the water with me. I assume Hannah has it.” Emma looked sheepishly to the ground. “We weren’t supposed to be here. I guess she just freaked out? Took all our stuff back to school.”
Tommy exhaled sharply. Certainly, that had been his theory as well, but current evidence suggested something much more sinister. He didn’t want to alarm Emma and her family, but he also didn’t know how to get the information he needed without doing so.
“Do you know someone named Justin? Stayed in the room next to you?”
Emma darted her eyes sideways before answering. “Um, yeah. He and Hannah were hanging out a lot.”
Tommy didn’t like this dynamic. “Mr. Chu, Mrs. Chu. I know this is going to sound weird, but could I talk to your daughter alone, please? You can wait outside. There are some chairs there.”
Mrs. Chu shook her head. “Emma doesn’t have any secrets from us.”
She most certainly did, but Tommy didn’t want to argue that. “I understand, Mrs. Chu. It’s just procedure.”
It wasn’t really. Not at this stage. Emma Chu didn’t have to even be here if she didn’t want to. Tommy gambled that the Chu family wouldn’t press the issue.
Mr. Chu patted his wife on the arm, staring into her eyes and giving a curt nod. Without any more words, they shuffled out of Tommy’s office. Once the door closed behind them, Emma practically melted in the chair, taking on an entirely new and relaxed persona.
“Thank you,” she said, her dark eyes now glittering in the fluorescent light.
Tommy repeated his question. “Tell me about Justin. For real.”
“Yeah. He’d been hanging out with us. Him and his friend, Brady. Hannah was really into them.”
“Both?” Tommy asked.
“Yeah,” Emma replied. “Why do you ask? What do Justin and Brady have to do with anything?”
Tommy took a deep breath, weighing his possible replies. He preferred to keep her in the dark until he knew for certain that Hannah Huang was dead. Emma had spent the last few days in a hospital bed and most certainly couldn’t be considered a suspect in Justin’s murder.
“Brady and his friends reported Justin missing,” Tommy said.
Emma didn’t look particularly concerned. “Maybe Hannah chose him over Brady? She was totally boy crazy.”
Maybe. But none of that mattered. None of this seemed to matter. Tommy’s stomach protested again, as he felt irritation tug at his mind. He couldn’t do it anymore. Not today.
“Emma,” he said. “Thanks for talking to me. I can’t give you all the details right now, and I can’t make you do it, but I would really appreciate it if you’d stay in town for a few days. I might need to ask you some more questions.”
Emma sighed. “But I’m so tired, Detective. I just wanna get home and get back to normal. As far away from the ocean as I can get.”
Tommy puzzled over her reply and realized that he had steeled himself against the possibility that she might have an overwhelming urge to hunt down the kraken. But of course she didn’t want to do that. No sane person would. Which, of course, left him only with the conclusion that Joe hadn’t been sane.
Tommy nodded. “Of course. But this is important. I need to make sure Justin and Hannah are safe, and you might be the key to figuring that out.”
Though she looked put out and annoyed, she nodded. “I get it. Just tell my parents that you’re making me, yeah?”
“No problem. Thanks for the help.”
Emma popped out of her chair and left Tommy to the silence of his office. Though he was no closer to solving Justin’s mysterious disappearance, he at least felt relief at the fact that Emma seemed fine, and appropriately horrified of the water and the monster that had almost killed her.
He forced himself up, talked briefly with Emma’s parents, then locked up his office. His mind swam with everything he’d learned over the course of the day. So much information. So little of it useful. Not for the first time, Tommy questioned his fitness as a detective.
As he slid into his car, food became his only goal. Hot, greasy, artery-clogging food.