Chapter Eighteen

“That was exciting,” Cookie said as he sat in the passenger’s seat of her car, peeling pistachios and dropping the salty shells into the cup holder.

Jamie stared at him, making note of the mess he was making in her front seat. “Are you going to clean that up?” She glanced down at the discarded halves with a smirk on her face. “And how can you eat right now after what just happened?”

Cookie shrugged. “You know me. I can always eat, and all that running made me hungry. I need real food now. How about tacos? Tacos are good.”

“My car still smells like jalapeno poppers. Tacos are a no-go.” The two had driven around for a while, making sure no one had followed them from the marina. Confident that they had left their trouble at the dock, Jamie pulled into her regular space behind Hemingway’s. “We can have Marty make us something while we take a look at the journal and figure out what to do next.”

Jamie and Cookie took the side door into Hemingway’s and moved toward a corner booth they called the conference table. Marty tried to keep it open as much as possible since it doubled as a meeting area and makeshift office for the duo. Unfortunately, his way of keeping it open was to leave dirty beer glasses on the table. Jamie wrinkled her nose at the cloudy pilsner glasses housing small amounts of stale beer and God only knew what else. She pushed everything to one corner.

They slid into the booth, and Jamie put the bag next to her on the seat. Marty threw them a nod across the room, and Cookie gave him a signal for a round of drinks. He yelled to Marty, “And some food, por favor!” Cookie would be hungry at his own funeral.

Jamie pulled out the journal she’d taken from Marcus’s boat. She scooted closer to Cookie so that he would be able to better read the journal alongside her. She tended to read more quickly than him, so she waited for his nod of approval to turn the page.

“A lot of this is just rambling,” she said. “What happened each day, ideas for photography shoots…”

“It’s a snapshot into her life, what was important to her, right?” Cookie asked. “You know that sometimes the little things lead us to the big things.”

They continued reading together, and Jamie felt her heart rate quicken each time she saw her name written. “Listen to this. She wrote that Brian said I couldn’t be trusted because I walked out on the family. Maybe she wanted to talk to me about her trouble, and they told her not to?”

“You can bring it up at the next family reunion,” Cookie riffed. “But it won’t make you popular.”

Jamie wrinkled her nose. “I lost that popularity contest a long time ago. You know, Brian hasn’t called once to ask how things are going. You think that’s weird?”

“Honey, your entire family is weird. I don’t think there’s anything that’s out of bounds where they’re concerned.”

“Good point.”

They continued flipping the pages. Cookie pointed to a paragraph decorated by doodles of flowers and other scribbles. Jamie went back to the page she remembered reading on the boat. They had a second name.

“Here it is,” she said. “See this name? Ritchie? Isn’t that Elena’s brother’s name? The one in the cell phone? Clearly, she had something going on with him.”

Cookie agreed. “Definitely need to do some work to figure out why Kristen had his number in a burner phone. It’s not like we can just call the number and ask him.”

Cookie reached over to flip a few pages forward. Jamie shot him the stink eye in jest, but he ignored her as he always did. “Check this out. It’s like some random notes about where some people are eating dinner or walking their dogs, almost like—”

“A surveillance journal?”

He smiled, tapping his finger on the open page. “Yeah, like she was passing the time and just writing whatever she saw. Like she’s bored to death.”

Jamie nudged Cookie with her elbow. “Listen to this. One of the things she writes about is how she feels like she’s being pushed to do things she doesn’t want to do. You think she means Brian? Or could it be Marcus?”

Cookie shrugged, keeping his attention focused on the notes. “Brian might have been involved. Did she have any other family that she was close to?”

“Not that I know of.”

Cookie returned to skimming the pages. “You know, she writes about different places and gives pretty sharp detail, but it’s all kind of rambling. Also lots of abbreviations—no idea what it means. I’m thinking that maybe the places she was writing about involve jobs she was working. Maybe we can check a few places and see what turns up. She has some initials and numbers here. It means something, but I don’t know what.”

Jamie also found more guarded musings about whether to stay in the family business or leave for something else. It sounded as though someone was putting a great deal of pressure on Kristen to take on work that she really didn’t want to do, although she never wrote exactly what the work entailed.

The next page contained several rows of numbers, each row with three sets of numbers. Jamie stared at the numbers for several moments, prompting Cookie to ask, “What is it?”

“You see these numbers?”

“Yep, lots of numbers. Looks like a code of some sort. You know what they mean?”

Jamie ran her finger over the page. “This is a book cypher. Pretty basic.”

“And you know this because…”

“I know this because I taught it to her. Just for fun, really, because she wanted to know how to hide information in case she ever needed a reason.”

Cookie leaned closer and studied the numbers. “So, this means that we need the key text, and we don’t have it.”

She nodded. “There’s another book out there that unlocks this code.” Jamie thought about her time on the boat. “I didn’t see another book anywhere, not in the bedroom, in the drawers…”

“Maybe she gave it to someone else for safekeeping.”

That made sense. She had trusted Connie with the key to the boat drawer, but who would she have trusted with the second half of this puzzle? It would have had to be someone she could trust, but Jamie had yet to find many people who fit in that category.

Cookie continued looking at the numbers on the page. “We’ll figure this out, don’t worry.” He signaled to the journal. “Keep going, let’s see what else is here.”

She flipped to the end of the journal and noticed a small notation on the back cover in the same handwriting. It simply said John Constantine. She showed it to Cookie. “I saw this name in Marcus Holliday’s office. It’s a comic book character. What do you think it means? I can’t believe that it’s a coincidence. Not with the whole Natasha Irons identity on FriendConnect.”

“Here we go, my hungry friends.” Marty brought the pair two draft beers and a huge basket of fried cod and French fries, then bussed the table of the stale beer glasses. Following close behind him was Deuce, the scent of food too much for him to resist. He wobbled along, prancing as much as a bulldog could muster. Cookie’s face lit up as soon as he laid eyes on dinner, while Jamie was happy to see her pooch.

She leaned down to pet him. “Are you having fun with Uncle Marty?” She scratched his jowls and petted his head. “Don’t eat too much fried food. It’s not good for you.” That statement most likely went in one doggie ear and out the other. She looked up at Marty. “Thanks for keeping him today.”

Mary winked at the dog. “I should be paying you. Deuce is great with the ladies and great for tips. And I promise he’s been outside a lot today. The waitresses love taking him for walks.”

Even being raised in a bar, her pooch had had a far better upbringing than Jamie had.

“You’re my man, Marty,” Cookie said as he quickly claimed a handful of fries and put them in his mouth. Jamie reached for the beer and took a sip then pulled a fry from Cookie’s plate. She reached down and gave it to Deuce, who chomped at the food, barely missing her fingers.

Marty looked down at Deuce. “Don’t let her buy your love so cheaply, Deuce.”

Jamie shot Marty the stink eye and returned her affections to her dog, petting his head and feeding him more bar food.

Cookie chided her. “You just said not to eat too much fried food, and now you’re giving him fries?”

“One fry,” she corrected.

Cookie stuffed several more fries in his mouth. “I’m just sayin’.”

Marty made a nod toward the journal. “Got another job, eh?”

She nodded. “Something like that.”

Marty had a clear “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy at Hemingway’s. While he heard everything, he pretended to be dumb as a box of rocks if a delicate subject came up. It was just good business.

Marty left them to their food and speculation. Cookie seemed more interested in the former at the moment.

Jamie nudged him. “Cookie, take a breath. And leave some for me.” She took a long draw from her beer. “Damn, I hate sharing food with you.”

“I don’t share,” he replied.

“Exactly.”

They made short work of the meal and left nothing but crumbs and two empty beer glasses. Jamie was ready to get back on the trail. “Let’s move. We need to figure out the John Constantine thing and why he’s in Kristen’s journal.”

Cookie wiped his mouth with a napkin, crumpled it, and tossed it on the plate. “Are you going to call Brian with an update?”

She thought for a moment. “Yes, but I need to figure out my angle. He’s obviously hiding some things, even after I told him he had to be completely straight with me if I helped him find Kristen. I want to make sure I leverage the information I have in the right way.”

Cookie wiped the salt off his hands then reached around Jamie’s shoulder to give her a squeeze. “Sorry your family is so screwed up. I can’t imagine not being able to trust your own parents.”

She felt a pang of sadness but quickly pushed it down. “Well, I’ve got my own family—I have you, Erin, Marty, and Deuce. I’m good.”

He nodded. “And you can borrow my mom anytime. If you need some motherly advice, a good meal, whatever, she’ll take care of you.”

“I know she would. And hey, if you ever need a crazy woman to sell your car out from under you, you can borrow my mom.”

“Seems like a fair trade,” Cookie deadpanned. He pulled a five-dollar bill out of his wallet and left it on the table for the waitress. “Let’s get out of here.”

The two went upstairs to Jamie’s loft to get back to work. They needed to find John Constantine, figure out what role Ritchie had played in Kristen’s life, and deduce who had the missing text that would crack the numeric code in her journal. Kristen’s life may have been a mystery, but Jamie was determined to make sure her death wouldn’t be.

She owed her niece that much.