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

CSI barely had the evidence bagged from the first, only a few of the families notified when the second happened—tomorrow morning, early.

I can’t remember exactly where. I know it’s in the Uptown area, but it’s not a Daily Grind.

I’m wracking my brain for the place when I spot John Booker.

The sight of him turns my mouth dry. He’s exactly how I remember. And he’s heading my direction.

It’s always been my contention that Booker was born a century too late. He reminds me more of a gunslinger than a detective, the way he sizes up a man before he speaks. He doesn’t look like a cowboy, not dressed in his uniform; it’s more the sense of him, the aura of the long arm of the law reaching out to strangle the truth from you.

He’s tall, solidly built, keeps a regular appointment with his barber for his graying brown hair, stands six foot four, and although no man has ever scared me, a stare from John Booker’s gray eyes comes close.

He finds me and I am shaken with a strange rush of emotion. Wow, I miss him.

“You’re lead on this, Rem.”

This ancient, pivotal conversation is slowly coming back to me. I try and act surprised. “Why?”

“Because you’re ready—you and Burke. Run your investigation by me and I’ll give you my input, but we gotta find whoever did this, and fast before the city freaks out.”

Not to mention, stop the next one. I’m seriously debating adding that, but I’m not sure if that will emerge quite the way I intend it.

I might get a look from John like I did from Eve. The one that suggests I didn’t make a stellar first impression.

But, yes, this time, we’ll catch him. I make that promise to myself and, in an amended version, to John who nods and walks back to the horror.

I take a breath, keenly aware that I’m back to the beginning.

And this time, at least in my dreams, everything will be different.

Chapter 7

I can’t shake this eerie voodoo. It isn’t quite like déjà vu, but close enough, the hiccup inside that says you’ve said that, seen that, heard that, done that before. And you have, it’s just…

I just burned my mouth on the bitter, too hot coffee.

You don’t dream that, do you? The fatness of your tongue as it absorbs the heat?

Or the way it burns my hand as I jerk back, the liquid sloshing over the edge of my Styrofoam cup.

Burke looks over at me, frowns. We’re standing in the community room of the shiny new 3rd Precinct, with the bullet proof, floor to ceiling windows that overlook 31st Street. Our usual haunt, located downtown in the ancient City Hall building, is under renovation. Along one wall of the community room, I’ve pinned all the faces of the deceased, some of them already identified. Seven total. Two of them are men, who carried their identification with them. The rest are women. And one toddler. I grit my teeth.

Melinda Jorgensen is the third picture in, on the top row. She hasn’t yet been named, and it’s a gut punch to see the word “unidentified” next to her picture. Down below, on the bottom is her towheaded son, and with everything inside me I want to unpin him, place him next to his mother.

Weird, I know.

Everything about this is weird, though, right? In the gathering crowd, I recognize faces, men I haven’t worked with in years. Including Jim Williams, the beat cop who I lost—will lose?—my job over in about seventeen years. And in the far corner, in the back, Inspector Danny Mulligan, who’s come over from downtown to help us sort this out.

It’s exactly like seeing a ghost. Danny, Eve’s dad, along with her brother, Ash, were murdered just a few weeks after we met. A Fourth of July shooting that forever shut down that holiday for us. We never shoot off fireworks, never barbecue hot dogs.

I caught Danny’s gaze on me today as I walked in, as if sizing me up. I don’t remember that from before, but maybe I’m not as shook up this time around.

Or maybe I just know that all this chatter won’t matter. Not unless it leads to a perp in the next sixteen hours.

We’ve interviewed twelve witnesses, just Burke and I, and I’ve outsourced the rest of the interviews to others in my department. None of the witnesses, so far, saw anything unusual, but this is before the if-you-see-something, say-something era, so no one is actually looking.

Wow, we thought we were safe back then. Or now. Whatever.

I’m standing off to the side, holding up a wall with my shoulder while the fire chief gives us an update. On the overhead is a diagram of the attack, and Dayton is drawing on the view film, indicating the preliminary scene reports.

“The arson investigators will confirm, but we believe the blast came from inside the shop.” He points to the layout of the store. “Given the damage to the front of the store, the bomb was probably placed near the brewed coffee machines.”

He draws a line across one side of the store. “There was a row of help-yourself coffee thermoses here, with overflow under the counter. The current theory is that one of those might have been a decoy.”

“And housed the bomb?” Burke asks. “So, how did the bomber get it there?”

“Could have been someone who works there,” says Danny from the back where he’s standing, his arms folded and hands tucked under his armpits. He’s radiating a sort of fury fed by the energy in the room. We’re all angry, and getting more so with every victim identification. “Maybe a disgruntled employee?”

“We’re running down the backgrounds of all the current employees, but it would need to be someone who knew explosives, like a Gulf War veteran, perhaps?” Booker interjects this from his position near the windows.

We tracked down every surviving employee over the course of the year after the final bombing—no one had the background that Booker