Cast the First Stone by David Warren (booksvooks txt) 📕

I frown.

“Another teenager was gunned down today, in the Phillips neighborhood.”

Oh no. When she meets my eyes, I see compassion. Okay, so the timing sucks and the Somali brotherhood was getting bolder by the day. “How old?”

“Fourteen.”

I bite back a swear word because Eve has rules, but yeah, there’s a darkness that stirs inside me when a kid gets killed.

She runs her hands down her face. “That’s the third girl in three weeks.”

I knew that, but hearing it from Eve, the fatigue in her voice, sets a fire deep inside.

Come back, and let’s solve them together.

“Listen, Batman, you’re off watch. I can handle it.” Eve says as she gets up. “I’m going for a run. Make sure Ash doesn’t watch any television. I don’t want her seeing the news.”

I carry my plate to the sink, run water. Dots bead up around the temporary patch I made in the seal around the faucet.

Ashley is sprawled on the sofa, playing some pony video game so I head into my office and sit down at the computer. What kind of idiot promises his agent he’ll have something decent in five days?

I pull out the watch, still in my jeans and set it on the desk, then open the screen, and stare at the words.

Nothing.

Eve’s footfalls land on the stairs and I hear the front door opening.

“Be careful!” I say, but it closes before I finish. It’s daylight, the sun up for at least another hour. And, if I know Eve, she has her phone, her pepper spray and like I said, she grew up with brothers. She knows how to handle herself.

Still, I watch her through my window, her lithe body running down the sidewalk until she disappears from view. Turning back to the computer, my gaze falls on the file box, the lid askew.

Even if I can’t go back and solve the cases, maybe they can give me writing inspiration. Yeah, I know, but desperate men reach for desperate options.

Mine includes opening up the bottom drawer of my desk and pulling out the mostly full bottle of Macallan twenty-one-year-old fine oak single malt whiskey.

Don’t judge me. The bottle’s been here for three years, and it’s only four fingers down. I empty another finger into a high ball and shoot it down.

Not a hint of muse stirs inside me so I go over to the file box, paw through the files and find the first one. The coffee shop bombings.

Bring the file back over to my desk. Open it. There, on the front page is my typed summary of the first bombing.

7:06 a.m., Monday morning, at a Daily Grind. Seven lives lost. The store was located just off Franklin Avenue, over the highway from the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis.

The first case John mentored me on. I’d forgotten that, how he showed up on the scene and assigned the case directly to me, a young Inspector.

The memory makes me reach over and pick up the watch. I put it on, adjusting the band to fit, and it’s oddly warm, as if he just took it off. The fit is right, though, settling in to the groove between my hand and my wrist bone.

Too bad it doesn’t work. Almost on impulse, I reach over and twist the dial, like I’d seen John do countless times.

It ticks. Just a heartbeat, soft, as if coming to life. I press it to my ear.

Another tick.

I stare at it, and the second hand moves.

Tick.

Weirdly, the other hands begin to spin. As if possessed of their own power, they turn, counterclockwise, winding backwards in time.

The hour hand settles on seven.

The minute hand lodges just beyond the five.

7:06.

In the distance, an engine roars. I look up, searching for the sound as it grows, sweeps over the room. It’s darkening as if a storm cloud has moved in, and as if in evidence, thunder rolls.

I get up and move toward the door. “Ashley!”

I’m not sure what I trip on, but the floor rushes up at me. Something beyond me shatters. Instinctively, I want to duck, but I don’t know where the sound issues from. “Ashley—!”

Then it all vanishes. The sound, the darkness, the engine—a hiccup of utter silence, of white, as if I’ve blinked, except my eyes are open.

I’m standing in a cafe. No, a coffee shop—the deep, earthy scent of freshly ground beans, the churning sound of the grinder, and conversation rising all around me.

I can’t place it, but in my bones I know this place. It’s an eclectic shop, with a tin ceiling, vintage couches, a brick wall with a graffiti menu, and giant hanging chandeliers.

Eve buys her coffee here. I know this in my gut, and the name of the place is starting to form in my disbelieving brain. The Cuppa…

“Sheesh, Rem. Give the ladies a break.”

I spin at the voice. Too fast, because the coffee I now realize I’m holding in my hands slams right into—

Oh God, what is happening? Because I’ve just doused Andrew Burke with some version of a latte, given the color soiling his shirt.

“You’ve got to be kidding me!” Burke says and I can’t get my eyes off him because he has hair. And he’s slimmer, by about twenty pounds, wiry, and wearing a hint of a soul patch, a dusting of black fuzz.

I mocked it until he shaved it off.

Now it’s like a tether, reeling me in.

I scrape up words, anything that might sound coherent when the radio at his belt crackles and a voice scratches through the line.

I don’t catch it all, but one code sears into my brain.

10-80.

Explosion.

Just off Franklin.

It’s only when Burke grabs my jacket—I’m wearing a freakin’ suit—and pulls me toward the door that the recognition locks in.

I’m in 1997, and somehow my nightmares have found me.

Chapter 5

Eve Mulligan did not want to live in a war zone one more minute. The chaos of remodeling—the current casualty being the plumbing—just might drive her to murder.

Or at least bodily harm, directed at her younger