Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest

10.

The next day, Leda gripped a mug of hot chai so that her hands would have something to do other than shake from a combination of nerves and a slight hangover. Niki sat beside her in the small, narrow coffee shop around the corner from the travel agency office, serving as emotional support while Grady Merritt settled into his seat across from them both. He placed a to-go cup of coffee down on the table.

“Thanks for coming,” Niki said, since Leda didn’t.

Then Leda added suddenly, “Yes! I’m so sorry, and I appreciate you coming all the way out here again.”

“No problem. I’m just glad to see that you’re all right. You really had me worried yesterday.”

“I know, and that was entirely on me. I owe you an explanation, and I intend to give you one. But first I have to give you a little background,” she said carefully. She hadn’t yet decided how much she was going to tell him about Tod.

Niki already knew. “She’s going to give you a lot of background. All of it, I bet.”

Her shoulders drooped. “Come on, Nik.”

“Do you want me to get the ball rolling?”

“No!” Leda insisted, and sat up to full attention. “No, of course not. It’s not your story to tell.”

“It’s kind of my story.”

“Okay, but only kind of.”

When Niki nodded to accept this compromise, Leda began to talk.

“So… five years ago, I met the love of my life.”

Niki jumped in. “He thought he saw an otter off the side of the pier, and when he leaned over to look, he lost his glasses.”

“He couldn’t see very well without them, and he was new to the city, and he needed help. I helped him call an Uber to get home. When I put him into the car, he slipped me a business card with his number.”

“And the rest was history!”

But Leda shook her head at Niki. “No, it wasn’t history. That’s what people say when somebody gets a happy ending, and we didn’t.” She sniffled, but it might’ve just been the wildfire smoke that was hanging over the city. Usually it cleared out by fall. Sometimes it stuck around. “We got almost two whole years together, and I got an engagement ring in a box that I now keep in a drawer, because I don’t have the heart to wear it.”

“Why’s that?” Grady asked, a polite prompt, since she appeared to need one.

“Because one day, Tod went missing. Eventually they found his body in the back seat of his car. It had run off the road, and it sank in a culvert.”

“It was completely submerged,” Niki added. “Some kid with a drone spotted it and called the cops.”

“Right. He’d been underwater for… for a while. Like, a few days, I mean.”

Grady nodded, gently sympathetic. “Did you have to identify him?”

“No, his mom did that. She came in from Spokane, and she… I think she saw him through a video monitor. I don’t think they let her see him in person. They did a DNA test and everything, since he was pretty waterlogged. His mom said he didn’t even look like a person, much less her son.”

Leda’s voice caught, and Niki picked up the thread. “After that, Leda and his parents cleaned out his apartment. About six months later, his mom died.”

“Yeah, and I haven’t heard from his dad since Tod’s birthday, a year after. We’d tried to stay in touch, but you know how it goes.” She took a deep breath to make up for all the shallow ones. “At any rate, Tod’s gone and nobody knows what happened to him.”

“Was it some kind of freak accident, or not an accident at all?” Grady asked.

Leda grunted down into the chai and took a big swig before answering. She’d been quietly hoping Niki might jump in again, but no such luck. She had to do the hardest part herself. “It was pretty freaky, but it wasn’t an accident. Tod was shot through the stomach, and then he drowned.”

“Shot? In the back seat of his own car?”

“They think he was shot outside the car, then stuffed inside it, then the car was pushed into the water,” she said. “But it gets even weirder. A few days later, while the cops were dredging the culvert and the streams that fed it… they found a woman’s body. She was shot, too. With the same gun, or that’s what they learned when ballistics came back.”

“Wait a minute… wait. Hang on.” Grady tapped one finger against the edge of his cup. “This rings a bell. You said this was about, what? Three or four years ago?” When the women nodded, he said, “Okay, I didn’t come to homicide for another year after that, but I do remember hearing about it.”

Leda asked, “So you didn’t work the case at all? Not even in a supporting role?” She and Niki exchanged a look.

“No, back then I was still doing car thefts and break-ins.”

Niki shrugged. “Must be some other connection, then.”

“Wait, what do you mean, connection?” Grady asked.

Leda pushed her chai away. She didn’t want it. “When you and I were parting company yesterday, and you shook my hand… I got a flash. It was so bright I couldn’t see anything at all for a few seconds. Sometimes it happens like that, like an ocular migraine. Not usually so hard and sudden, though. Then I saw Tod, underwater in the back of the car. His eyes were open, but he was dead. He still looked like himself, at least.”

“If she’d seen him all grody and decomposed, she’d still be holed up in her house, drinking,” Niki explained solemnly.

“I didn’t mean to shriek at you, and I’m sorry I didn’t stick around to explain myself. I was really thrown for a loop, and I needed to… to collect myself. Now you’re all caught up, and now you understand why I fled the scene of the crime. I mean, the crime scene you took me to visit—not the one I caused. Since I didn’t cause any. As I’ve established.”

“I guess?” he replied without conviction. “Except, why did you flash on your dead boyfriend when you shook my hand? It wasn’t the first time we’d touched; I shook your hand at the office the other day, too.”

Niki said, “We don’t know. We thought you’d maybe worked the case and that was the connection that set her off.”

“No, I never had anything to do with it. Who was the detective, do you remember his name?”

“Whiteside,” Leda said confidently. “He was old and mean.”

Niki disagreed. “He wasn’t mean. You were just mad because he didn’t solve Tod’s murder.”

“And he didn’t exactly hustle to do so, now did he?”

Grady held up his hands. “Wait a minute, Jim Whiteside? He was a friend of my dad’s, back in the day. Jim’s all right, but I’ll grant you—‘hustle’ was never a big part of his vocabulary.”

“I think he retired a little while ago,” Leda said grumpily.

“Couple of years ago,” Grady supplied. “He lives out in Lake City with, like, a thousand little dogs.”

Niki jacked up an eyebrow. “Really?”

“Half a dozen, at least. Dachshunds. Yippy ones. They’re cute, but it’s basically an army of short things with sharp teeth that reach halfway up to your knees. They’re not even his late wife’s—they’re his. It always blew my mind. At any rate, I can run past his house and have a word with him, if you want. Maybe he’ll be game to talk about an old case with another old cop.”

“You’d do that? For me?” Leda asked, her eyes as big and wet as a dog staring through a meat-shop window.

“For you, sure. But for me, too. I want to know why the Powers That Be think I’m connected to your old case.”

Niki nodded. “It could always be something else. It could be a sign that you’re supposed to help Leda find out what happened to Tod, with your fresh eyes and your younger-dude hustle. Hell, for all we know, you could be the murderer.”

Leda gasped. “Nik!”

But Grady only laughed. “I’m not too worried about that.” Thoughtfully, he concluded, “Then again, it might not be anything like that at all.”

“Then what do you suggest?” Leda asked. The look on his face said he was still thinking. So did his tapping fingers, drumming a little tune on the paper coffee cup.

He quit running his fingers. “Here’s a thought: What if this isn’t about me personally? What if your flash was prompted by the work we did, on the case at the Shoreline hotel? The first time we shook hands we’d only just met—and it was a neutral location, your office. The second time, we were standing at a crime scene.”

“Keep talking,” Niki urged.

“That’s it,” he admitted with a shrug. “That’s all I’ve got. Playing by the rules you’ve given me, there’s a chance that I’m not the one connected to Tod’s murder. It could be this other case.”

Leda bobbed her head, thinking. “The cases do have some similarities.”

Grady Merritt eyed Niki cautiously. “We should probably keep the details to ourselves,” he said.

Niki cackled. “Oh, honey. She told me everything as soon as I got a half bottle of wine in her. There’s a key to the Leda brain vault, and it’s about twelve percent alcohol.”

Grady rolled his eyes and clutched his coffee. Leda apologized, immediately and profusely—but he cut her off. “No, stop it. This is my fault for looping you into the case in the first place. All I can do is ask you not to blab any further, please?”

Leda mimed locking her mouth and throwing away the key.

Niki mimed tipping back a glass, then waved her hands to show she was kidding. “Don’t worry! Anything you can tell her, you can tell me—and it won’t leave our cone of silence. If anything, you should think of me as her backup brain.”

“External hard drive?” he tried.

“Right! Except better. I’ll stop her from telling anybody else. I’m an external hard drive that comes with insurance. It also comes with Mace, and I’m not afraid to use it.”

Grady’s slowly shaking head suggested that he wasn’t in love with the idea, but he was resigned to it. “You understand that we could all get in a lot of trouble if word gets around that we’re looking into these cases together. Don’t you?”

It was a grim prediction, but Leda lit up like Christmas. “We’re looking into these cases together?”

“Sort of. Between us, we might be able to scare up information that might not have been… let’s say ‘readily available’ in the immediate aftermath of the murders.”

“And the Seattle Police Department won’t be super thrilled with this?” Leda asked, but it wasn’t really a question.

“No, they will not,” Grady admitted with another shake of his head. “I’ll even have to leave my partner out of it.”

“You have a partner?”

“Sure I have a partner,” he told her. “I’ve left him out of everything so far; I can leave him out of whatever else happens. We’ve only been working together for a few weeks, and he’s got his own problems—namely a new baby at home. We don’t hang out much, outside of work. As long as I keep all extracurricular investigating to my personal time, he shouldn’t hear anything about it. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“I like the cut of your jib, Detective,” Niki said.

“I just want to solve some crimes, and I think you… you two”—he adjusted on the fly—“can help me do it. Leda already gave me a hint I’m planning to chase for the hotel killings; all I have to do is take a step back, you know? Look at the big picture. If I step back far enough, maybe I’ll see how the cases are connected.”

“If they’re connected,” Leda said carefully. “We’re still shooting in the dark here.”

Grady shrugged. “Then we’ll shoot in the dark, and maybe we’ll hit something. Give me a day or two to chase down the new lead, and I’ll report back.”

“You mean the silver fox, right? You’re going to talk to him?” Leda asked.

“The alleged silver fox. Right.”

“Cool. Can I come, too?”

“What? No.”

“Why not?” she demanded. “I can’t help you if I can’t see what you’re doing.”

“It’s police business.”

“It’s my business now. If the hotel case is connected to Tod’s case, you have to keep me involved. I deserve to know. I have a right to know.”

Grady picked up his coffee cup and took a long swill of the cooling brew. “First of all, that’s not strictly true. And second, there’s always a chance that you won’t like the answers, if you find them. You’re aware of this, right?”

“Yeah, I can’t possibly hate the answers even more than I already do—and Tod needs justice.”

“You need justice,” he corrected her.

She didn’t like it, but she couldn’t argue. “Fine. I need justice. If I can get some by tagging along with you, then that’s what I plan to do. Like it or not, you’re stuck with me. With us.”

Grady Merritt smiled and downed the last sip of his coffee, then tossed the empty cup into the nearest trash can via a tidy three-point shot. “Okay, ladies. But if we’re going to do this together, we need to establish some ground rules.”

“Like what?” Niki wanted to know.

“Like if I share information with you, you can’t go running off doing your own investigating without me. And sometimes, I’ll have to give you a hard no when it comes to police-work ride-alongs. I don’t want to lose my job, and I don’t want you to get arrested for interfering with a case. If we do this together, we do it together. But I’m the one calling the shots.”

Leda sulked. “Just because you’re the cop.”

“Yes, because I’m the cop. My badge can open doors, and your psychic powers can open… I don’t know, windows or whatever. But the whole world believes in my badge, and maybe a handful of people believe in your psychic powers. Is that fair? No. I won’t tell you how to do whatever it is you do. You have to loop me in, though. If you get a big hit, you call me before you go free-diving in any culverts, or breaking into any buildings, or stalking any suspects. Can you live with that?”

Leda wasn’t 100 percent thrilled, but she understood. Furthermore, she was prepared to disregard him if the situation called for it. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. “I direct you to the clues, and you protect me from the consequences of sharing them. That’s… fair.”

He held out his hand. “Shake on it?”

She held hers out more slowly. “Shake on it.”

They did. This time, absolutely nothing happened.