Crimes of Memory (A Detective Jackson Mystery) (5 page)

The officer looked Sheppard up and down. He was probably trying to guess the suspect’s weight.

Jackson turned to Evans. “Let the owners know the office is clear and they can download the security video for us. I’m going back to see what the ME has.”

The report was disappointing. All Gunderson would say was that Cooper had likely been killed between six and seven, just prior to sunset, and that the stab wound appeared to have been made by someone most likely right-handed.

“There isn’t much blood,” the ME added. “It’ll be interesting to see what his toxicology report says.”

“You think he was intoxicated?”

“Maybe. Or he went into shock and died almost instantly.”

Jackson remembered the ink. “What do you think of the tattoo on his left hand? Do you recognize it?”

Gunderson, on his knees next to the corpse, lifted the hand. “I think it’s a prison tattoo. The clover or club represents bad luck.”

Jackson wanted to search the criminal database, but he’d left his new tablet computer in the car. He’d get to it soon enough. He stood from his squat and realized his legs were tired and his hands were cold. A cup of hot coffee was imperative because this night
was far from over. He looked around at the nearby businesses. Except for the tavern, they were dark. But there was a doughnut shop down the road. He would send Evans for coffee. She’d roll her eyes, then be glad for the caffeine.

“Let’s wrap him up, Joe.” Gunderson nodded at the evidence tech, who trotted to the van and came back with a black plastic body bag and gurney. They worked the corpse into the bag, while Jackson took a moment to strategize the next steps of the investigation. “Help us get him loaded,” Gunderson said.

The three men lifted the dead man onto the gurney and slid him into the van. Jackson didn’t mind assisting, but it was a little weird. Before the recession, five detectives would have been at the scene, along with three people from the crime lab, and three or four uniformed officers. He hadn’t liked coordinating with that many people, but this other extreme was worse.

As the ME’s van pulled away, Jackson and Joe stepped back into unit C13. They hadn’t finished searching or fingerprinting before Todd Sheppard’s cries had distracted them. Jackson spotted a laptop propped against the wall behind the folding chair. He picked it up and flipped it open.

Joe looked over. “What’s a homeless guy doing with a laptop?”

“Entertaining himself in this dark box he called home.” Jackson tried not to assume the device was stolen. “Todd Sheppard, the big guy who found the body, said Cooper had a job and was saving for an apartment.”

Jackson slipped down into the camping chair, relieved to be off his feet. The laptop screen glowed in the shadows that fell outside the tripod lights. He opened a browser to see what websites the victim had visited.

The top four were Facebook. Jackson clicked open a bookmark and saw that Craig Cooper had his own page. The victim didn’t have a home or a car, but he had a Facebook page. Jackson
still marveled at how social networking had changed the culture and often made his job easier. With only fifteen friends, Cooper’s information was easy to scan through. None of the names meant anything to him except Jane Niven, Cooper’s sister. Jackson needed to contact her and let her know her brother was dead and to find out what she knew. He looked at his watch:
12:42
. Could anything be gained by waking the sister at this hour? He decided to wait until morning. As he was about to close the computer, thinking he would search more thoroughly later, Jackson changed his mind and opened the message icon.

The top text was from Jane and it had been sent two days before:
I’ve done everything I can do. I don’t know where he is. Leave me alone about it.

What the hell did that mean? No signature, but it was Facebook, which provided a picture of the sender. Jackson slipped out Cooper’s wallet and compared photos. She was the same woman, twenty years apart. Had Cooper’s sister killed him? Should he head over there now?

Instinct told him it wasn’t necessary, but he knew it was more likely his exhausted bones complaining. Jackson decided to grab a couple hours of sleep and see Jane first thing in the morning. On his walk to the car, he questioned his decision. Was he willing to wait because Cooper was a homeless man who’d likely been in prison recently? If the victim had been an innocent young girl, would he be sucking down coffee and knocking on doors?

He didn’t know, but it made him think about Katie being locked in the Serbu detention center instead of being home in her bed. Anguish washed over his exhausted frame.

He climbed into his car and sent Katie a text:
I love you. I’ll see you at your hearing tomorrow.
A moment later, he realized they’d probably taken her phone when they booked her in.

In the morning, he would call the juvenile court and find out the time of the proceeding. For now, he texted Evans:
Let’s meet back at the crime scene at nine and look at everything in the daylight.

CHAPTER 4

Tuesday, March 12, 7:05 p.m.

Jamie Dallas smiled at the man next to her, trying to decide if she would hook up with him. The upside was the potential to find out about his involvement in an eco-terrorist attack and, more important, maybe learn what the group planned next. The downside? If they busted him and he told her supervisors they’d had sex, she might get fired. She couldn’t let that happen. Being an FBI agent suited her restless, needy personality like no other job could. She loved being Agent Dallas, or just Dallas, as her coworkers called her.

“Want another beer?” Adam Greene ran his fingers through hers in a provocative way.

Her body responded with a surge of pleasure, making the decision harder. She didn’t want any emotional attachment to someone she might have to arrest and send to prison. And that was why she was here, in Tony’s Tavern, drinking with this man.

“Sure.” Dallas massaged Adam’s fingers in an equally sexy way. She needed to get inside his home for a look around, even if they didn’t end up having sex. With his curly hair and thin frame, Adam wasn’t her usual type, but he was open, charming, and funny in a refreshing way. “No, make that a shot of tequila.” A little more social lubricant seemed appropriate. But not enough to get drunk. A fine line.

“It’s going to be that kind of night?” Adam raised his eyebrows.

“Why not?”

When Dallas had joined the FBI four years ago, she’d never envisioned herself in this position. But undercover work was the ultimate adrenaline high, and it had become her specialty. When she’d read the memo asking for a young, single agent willing to transfer, her whole body had responded with anticipation. The only downer had been the location: Eugene, Oregon. But the quest—infiltrate an eco-terrorist group—had been too compelling to ignore. She’d beat out three other agents who wanted the assignment. Dallas knew her gender, long hair, and good looks had given her an edge, but she still had to deliver.

After the bartender brought their drinks, Adam asked, “What are you doing this weekend, Fiona?”

Fiona B. Ingram
. She loved her alias. “Nothing special. There’s not much happening until April.”

“We could hike the butte.”

“It’ll be muddy.” Dallas gave him a seductive smile. “But that could be fun.”

He leaned forward and whispered in her ear. “I like a woman who isn’t afraid to get dirty.”

She racked her brain for a comeback, and a man tapped Adam on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

The man had shaggy ash-blond hair, sharp features, and was in his late twenties. Dallas recognized him from the profile
photos. His name was Chris Noonaz, but everyone called him Cricket. He was the leader of an environmental group called Love the Earth. He’d been her original target, but he had a girlfriend and was harder to approach.

Adam kissed her cheek. “I’ve gotta talk to some people for a while, but I’ll be back.”

“Don’t make me wait too long.” Dallas poured on the charm, coming short of licking her lips.

As soon as Adam’s back was turned, she pulled out her smartphone, keeping it hidden in her palm, and clicked into camera mode. She glanced up to see Adam and Cricket sit down at a table in the corner with two other guys. One was thirty or so, a big guy with a full beard and collar-length hair, and the other looked fresh out of high school. If not for his short mohawk and unshaved face, he would have seemed too young for someone plotting an act of vandalism, sabotage, or arson.

Dallas slid off the barstool and headed across the tavern. When she passed their table, she snapped a couple of pictures without turning her head, hoping her aim was accurate. The noise of the bar chatter drowned out the faint click of the camera. She would have loved to be sitting close enough to eavesdrop, but she had to be careful and move slowly to earn their trust. Cricket had seemed wary of her when she first talked to him at a Love the Earth meeting at Cozmic Pizza last month, so she’d focused on Adam instead.

She’d overheard that the group’s inner core met at Tony’s Tavern, so Dallas had started hanging out there. The place was old and funky, a renovated turn-of-the-century house, gutted to become a tavern with a kitchen. But in Oregon, all establishments that served alcohol were required to serve food. Another quirky little law, like the one that didn’t allow people to pump their own gas. But overall, Eugene wasn’t a bad place to hang out if you liked
earthy people and microbrew beer. As long as she had her Kindle Fire and a connection to the internet, Dallas could be content almost anywhere… for a while.

In the bathroom, Dallas checked herself in the mirror, with mixed feelings. Who wouldn’t want to have watermelon-pink lips, bright blue eyes, and blond hair? But she had dyed her long tresses for other assignments and discovered that people took her more seriously as a brunette. She wondered if her cheerleader looks kept her from getting certain UC jobs, and she considered cutting her hair. But she would wait until she saw the next undercover posting and found out what the role required.

The activist meeting lasted twenty minutes, and at one point Cricket and Adam argued loudly. Even if Dallas had been a lip-reader, with people milling around the conversation would have been difficult to follow. Finally, Dallas went out for a walk to stimulate her system and keep from getting too inebriated.

The central Eugene neighborhood was dark, damp, and quiet except for the rock music at Sam Bond’s Garage down the street. Dallas was tempted to step in and dance for a while, but that seemed a little off task. Despite the alcohol and potential intimate encounter, she was working, as she had been for six weeks—and would continue to be for another couple of months, or longer, if needed.

When she came back into the bar, her stool was taken, but Adam was standing nearby, looking disappointed. His face brightened when he saw her. “Hey, gorgeous. Thanks for waiting.”

“I almost didn’t. That looked like a pretty serious meeting.”

“Not really. We’re just making plans for Earth Day, which is coming up next month.”

“A celebration?”

“Of sorts. Let’s get out of here.”

“Ready.” Dallas hoped he would tell her more later. She’d done her homework and knew enough about Earth Day and other environmental events to sound like an activist rather than just an average citizen who recycled and drove a fuel-efficient car and thought that was enough.

The sight of the dark parking lot gave her second thoughts. Would he want to take one car? What if he got aggressive with her when she said no at the last minute? Dallas turned toward her car. “Maybe I’d better go home.”

He pushed her up against her leased Prius, grabbed her by the back of her head, and kissed her hard. His intensity set off little fireworks in her torso and she was back in. Who knew the Earth-loving hippie types had it in them? After a make-out session that left her looking around to see if anyone had reported them for public indecency, Dallas agreed to follow him to his place.

On the drive over, Dallas changed her mind again, hating the prospect of lying to her supervisors if asked about her relationship with Adam. So when they got to his place, she made a trip to the bathroom, then told him she’d started her period and couldn’t have sex. He had smoked a bowl while she was out of the room and seemed disappointed but okay with her change of heart. She considered giving him a hand job, but worried the bureau would still consider that sex. Should she ask Agent River what was allowed, or was it better to just not talk about it? This was her third undercover assignment but the first time the issue of sex had come up. Hopefully, it wouldn’t be the last. She loved undercover work and felt perfectly suited to it.

As a child, she’d lived out of an overnight bag, staying with her grandmother for a couple nights, then off to her aunt’s house for a while, then back to her worthless drug-and-alcohol-abusing parents. After a week of watching them drink and fight, she’d call
one of her relatives, pack her bag, and they’d come pick her up. She’d learned to love being anywhere but home and always looked forward to her next excursion. Sweet Aunt Lynn had enrolled her in dance classes, piano lessons, summer day camps, and eventually acting lessons, which she’d loved most of all. Dallas knew, even then, that the point had been to keep her busy and happy, so she didn’t think about her crappy home life, but all of those skills had prepared her for undercover work. She could become anybody and fake her way through anything.