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Back at the house, Ann burst inside and slammed the door. She leaned against it. Maggie’s breath still tickled her ear.
I’ve been waiting for you.
Ann changed into her cold-weather running clothes and followed the road out of town. She focused on her panting breaths and footfalls to no avail.
Maggie was definitely the girl from the vision. Ann picked up speed. Maggie’s breath in her ear had made the mark on her chest tingle. She shook her head to rid it of the memory and kicked into a full sprint.
A mile down the road, she passed Harmony Storage. She glanced at the main office. A person inside waved at her. She waved back, then halted. The yellow key tag with Harmony Storage had been sitting on the kitchen counter at her dad’s house when she arrived. She thought it had fallen off the bulletin board, but maybe he left it there on purpose. She sprinted back to the house, gasping for air in the high altitude.
The key with A257 scrawled on the Harmony Storage tag sat right on top in the junk drawer she’d thrown it in.
On the short drive back to the storage place, the memory of the fight she and her father had the morning she’d left for the police academy swirled around in her head. He wanted her to stay in Harmony, follow in his footsteps, become his deputy, and eventually run for sheriff. Ann wanted so much more than that. She’d set her sights higher. They parted angry. She hadn’t seen him since.
Ann pulled into the lot. She drove past the office and up and down the lanes until she found A257 in the back corner.
It was a smaller unit with a regular door instead of the typical, garage-style roll-up. She took a deep breath and stuck the key in the knob. With a little bit of jiggling, she got it unlocked and went inside.
Ann clicked on the light and surveyed the stacks of boxes. Years’ worth of dust covered everything except a trail of footprints leading toward the back. Some kind of work boot, by the pattern of the tread. The tracks couldn’t be more than a month or two old, based on the amount of dust.
She followed them to an unmarked box and flipped open the lid. Mom’s angels, half-wrapped in newspaper, filled the box. She unwrapped a few and considered taking them home. Dad kept them on the mantle Ann’s entire childhood to keep Mom’s presence in the house. She was six when her mom died in a hit-and-run.
The key was a clue. Along with the missing angels. He’d expected her to put the two together. So much for being a great detective.
Ann closed the box and turned it around. Her dad’s tidy but looping handwriting on the backside read, “Tchotchkes.” Ann let out a snort. Her mom called all of her knickknacks by that name. There were a lot of boxes to go through, and Ann had no idea what she was even looking for. Something, anything, to give her an inkling of what happened to him.
After three and a half hours of searching through mostly unlabeled and mildewed boxes—at some point there must have been a leak—she found what she was hoping for in the one directly under the tchotchkes. Another mental smack.
Come on, Detective Logan.
She pulled a leather-bound journal filled with pages of her dad’s handwriting out of the box. The stiff, warped pages crinkled under her fingers. Water damage had smeared or dissolved most of the writing.
The vanishing lines of writing turned to illustrations of what appeared to be reliquaries, but a lot of the words were indiscernible. The last drawing talked about how the necklaces—oh, necklaces, not reliquaries—were used as identifiers among the P-something. She flipped the page. They used ultra-violet lights. Something about how the necklace glowed under UV light. Silvery-blue.
Like my veins.
How could veins be inside a necklace? The necklace looked like it could hold something, and whatever that something was, glowed. She rubbed her arm for a second, thinking hard when it came to her. It wasn’t her veins that glowed. It was what was inside them. It was her blood.
Normal blood appeared dark, almost black, under UV light unless sprayed with a solution like Luminal. So, a P-something’s blood must glow, like hers did. But naturally.
She flipped ahead a few more pages toward the back where the writing became even more illegible. One page had SUMMON THE ANGEL written over and over again. A small key was taped to the opposing page along with a collection of signatures. Ann peeled the tape and put the key in her pocket. Then, she perused the names, but—of the ones she could decipher—she didn’t recognize any of them. With the journal in hand, she left the storage unit, got in her truck, and drove to the little office just inside the gate.
An old man, the one who’d waved at her, glanced up. He had a pair of glasses perched on the end of his nose. “Hiya,” he said with a smile. “What can I do you for?”
“I was wondering if you have any kind of record of who comes and goes around here. Or security tapes. Something like that.”
“Oh, dear. Has someone broken into your unit?”
Ann shook her head, then reconsidered. “Kind of. They didn’t steal anything, but they put a box in there. It had to be someone my father knew.”
“Number?” he asked.
“A257.”
“Let me see here.” He opened a filing cabinet and flipped through some folders. “Bram Logan, A257—here we are.” He stood and peered over his glasses. “You don’t look like Bram Logan.” He clicked his tongue and slapped the counter. “You must be Ann! Last time I saw you, you must have been in pigtails. Now you’re catchin’ killers and saving the world.” He grinned. “One town at a time, eh?”
“Yep,” Ann said.
“What did you need? Oh, yes. Some kind of record or security footage.” He shrugged. “We don’t have either.”
She should have known. They didn’t even have a computer. No electronic records of any kind.
“You wouldn’t happen to know when my dad was here last, would you?”
He looked at the upper corner of the room. “I think I remember him driving by a few months ago. Didn’t stop in to say hello like he usually does, I don’t think. Memory’s going, you know. Old age and all.” He laughed like it wasn’t a joke the elderly used all the time. “Coulda been him.”
Though it wouldn’t explain why a box of her mom’s stuff was inside, she asked, “Who had the unit before my dad? Maybe they still have access.”
The old man opened the file and flipped through it.
“Oh... the people who had it before your dad don’t have it anymore because they died.” He shook his head. “Death. And taxes.”
“Do you keep record of maybe other people who have keys?”
He shook his head. “All we keep track of is who’s rentin’ which unit. What they do with their keys is their business.”
Ann’s shoulders slumped. She gave the guy a brief smile. “Well, thank you. He must have stashed it there before he left town last time—or something.”
“You drive safe out there. Looks like we’re finally gettin’ that snow storm the weather lady’s been yappin’ about.”
Ann drove through flurrying snow. Back at the house, she grabbed a beer from the fridge, popped off the cap, and chugged over half of it before coming up for air. She sipped the rest of it while flipping through the journal again but didn’t find anything new. The little key was her only hope, and she had no idea what it opened.
Ann finished off beer number one and grabbed another. She sat on the couch and leaned back. She wanted this to be her safe place. Sure, she came here to investigate her dad, but she also came to get away from her life’s bull shit. Recoup. Recover. Get back in the game. She tried to see herself from the viewpoint of everyone who heard only the media’s version of the story, but all she came up with was that her supposed courage led to a dangerous decision and the loss of two innocent lives.
An inventory of events from the night followed. The knife, the blood, the gunshots. How her legs shook so hard from the surge of adrenaline she could hardly stand.
Condition black—not able to do anything about the Salida Stabber’s knife sticking out of the victim’s chest. It pulsed as the girl’s heart beat its dying rhythm. The life leaving her eyes.
The victim’s eyes were brown with flecks of gold, fringed with thick black lashes. They locked Ann in their fear-filled gaze while the seven-year-old gasped for air that wouldn’t fill her punctured lung. Ann would never forget those eyes.
She would never forget the way the blood spread across Bruce’s white shirt or the way he looked at her with a combination of surprise and sadness.
Or was it regret?
The hot, prickly sensation in her eyes should have meant tears, but no tears came. Fine with her. Tears meant feeling. She took a long pull off her beer and let the numbness coat her emotions. But the sensation wouldn’t subside.
The phone rang, and her beer bottle slipped from her hand. It hit the coffee table and toppled to the floor. A puddle of amber liquid foamed across the hardwood.
“Shit.” Ann dashed to the kitchen and grabbed a towel and the cordless phone. “Hello?” She knelt to wipe up the mess.
Static and emptiness on the other end. A heavy breath. She sat back on her heels.
“Real funny, perv.”
“Hello?” a man’s voice came through the static.
“Dad?” She dropped the towel and gripped the phone with both hands.
“It’s Asim Raghib.” The voice was slightly accented. Ann slouched. She didn’t know any Asim Raghib.
“What can I do for you?” Ann continued wiping up the mess. “If you’re selling something, I don’t want it.”
“I knew your father,” the man said. Ann froze. Knew your father. “It is a danger for me to call you. I have information for you.” He paused. “Ann Logan.”
He knew her name. He knew to call her at her dad’s house. Just like the Stabber knew to call her at home that night to taunt her. Ann hung up the phone and tossed the cordless handset onto the couch. She wiped her hands on her pants.
For all she knew this was the guy who cut off her dad’s finger. Or—because of his use of the past tense—much worse.