NOT EDITED

Chapter Twelve

4:50 PM; DAVID QUINN’S APARTMENT, PARKING GARAGE

After his thrilling encounter with Jamal, David had driven around for a little while to completely cool down. He hadn’t exactly been in a temper tantrum, throwing punches and breaking things kind of place, but there had still been enough emotion on his face that Bo would have clocked it and asked what happened at the station the very second he stepped into his living room. So he had gone for a drive, and when driving hadn’t helped, he had gotten junk fast food and sat in the parking garage across the street from his apartment building. At the very least, if Bo decided to try and pull a magical escape from the apartment, David would see it happen.

A little tink on his window drew David’s attention away from the apartment. A second tink. This time, he watched a tiny pebble fall to the ground. Well, if that wasn’t Bo’s stalker—bodyguard, Jamal’s thug, whatever he wanted to call himself—then he’d be undeniably surprised.

David pushed open the door. “What?”

“Can we chat?”

“Come around to the passenger side.”

The man came out of the shadows between two cars, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt instead of the suit he’d been wearing when David had seen him in Jamal’s office. He rounded David’s car and climbed into the passenger side. “Thank you.”

“Sure.” David cleared his throat. “Jensen, is it?”

“Yes.” Jensen held out a hand. “Jensen Taylor.”

David let out a breath before shaking his hand. He’d already agreed to hide the bodyguard bullshit from Bo. Might as well befriend the fucker too. In for a penny, in for a pound. “David Quinn.”

Jensen smiled. “I know.” He pulled his hand back to his lap, green-eyed gaze shifting to the apartment building. “How is he?”

“Good, I guess. He’s been doing casework by himself. I’m sure Jamal told you that.”

“I haven’t talked to Mister Pitman today.”

“Really?”

Jensen nodded. “I’m a little… irritated with him.”

“Welcome to the fucking club.”

Jensen snorted. “Thank you. I’m thinking that it may be a good angle to befriend Mister Austen with.”

“Bo respects Jamal. Up until all of… this, he heavily sought out Jamal’s approval. Everything he did with the Kathy-Dallas shit was because he knew finding them would get him a ‘good job’ from Jamal. The only days he was even mildly happy during that time were the days Jamal stopped drinking long enough to tell him he did a good job.”

“Why?”

“God, I wish I knew. But ultimately, that’s not the important part. I just don’t know that you’ll bond over hating Jamal, so it seemed worth disclosing.”

“Well, I appreciate it. I know you aren’t completely on board with all of this. I’m still pretty wishy-washy on it, but…”

“But it’s your job.”

Jensen nodded. “Yeah.”

“Look, if there’s any chance this plan might help Bo in the slightest, I’ll do my best to let it play out. He’s the closest thing I’ve got to family these days. I can’t lose him. He just… doesn’t always know that people feel that way about him, or that they actually mean it when they say it. He’s been told so many times over that people only like him because they can use him for something that it’s just become a permanent truth in his head, even when it’s the biggest pile of horseshit out there. And since it’s the truth in his head, knowing that everyone only pretends to like him to take advantage of him is… It wears on you. Thinking your family only pretends to love you because your smarts can be used to their advantage, that the coworkers that are nice to you are only that way because you do the job faster and better than other people, that if you dropped dead tomorrow, they wouldn’t miss you, they’d just miss how much easier you made their job. And he’s been stuck there for a long, long time.”

“Which… is why he’s working this case? To pretend people like him one last time?” Jensen asked.

“I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me if that was the driving force behind it.” David leaned his head back against the seat, closing his eyes. “What other plans do you have? For bonding, I mean.”

“My mother was murdered when I was young.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” A pause. “Do they know who did it?”

“No.”

“That might be a good angle. He’ll drop just about everything for a victim of a crime, dead or alive. Your mom’s a victim, and so are you. You were… you were following him because you’d read so much about him, heard that he was the best of the best. If anyone could find your mom’s killer and give her justice—I’d use that word, justice—it’d be him. You want his help, desperately, but you were too scared to approach him. You didn’t know how. You… you tried private detectives before, and they took your money and ran. You had talked to the detectives who worked the case, but they didn’t care.” David cleared his throat. “If he believes you’ve been taken advantage of at every step of the justice system, he’ll let you into his life. It’s just… who he is.”

“Do you think he’ll read the crime scene report? Her case file, I mean.”

“More than likely. If it’s been uploaded to the station’s database, he can hack it from his laptop. That’s about his only requirement right now, not having to go into the station.”

“There, uh, there would probably be a hiccup in that story if he reads the case file.”

“Why?”

Jensen cleared his throat. “Kathy was the detective on the case.”

David’s brow furrowed before he opened his eyes and turned toward Jensen, but the man would no longer meet his gaze. “Kathy Baker?”

“Yes.”

“Kathy Baker worked that case and left it unsolved without making it her crusade? Without demanding Jamal find the killer and give her the credit?”

Jensen offered a small shrug. “I dunno.”

“What else do you know about Kathy and that case?”

Jensen shifted in his seat, lifting his shoulders rather than answering.

“How close are you to Kathy?”

“I dunno.”

“I have no fucking problem blowing up this whole damn plan if you aren’t straight with me, Taylor.”

Jensen cleared his throat. “She… adopted me.”

“Jesus Christ. She’s your mother?”

“Well, I-I was mostly raised by the Taylors. Kathy just came by sometimes to chat and make sure I was doing okay and stuff. She wasn’t there twenty-four-seven or anything.”

“Uh-huh. How do you feel about Kathy? You think she’s some amazing person?”

“She saved me.”

“Did she? Or did she just take the credit for it?”

Jensen finally met his gaze. “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

David scoffed. “How the hell did Jamal think you were the right person for this fucking job? Bo is not Kathy’s friend. She is not his friend. She’s a narcissistic piece of shit who pushed Bo down at every single Goddamn turn. If you like her in any capacity, you can’t be there for him. Full stop.”

“She’s not the evil monster you people make her out to be. She saved me.”

“Did she, or did she take the credit for it?” David asked again.

“I’ll figure out the plan on my own. Thanks,” Jensen said, shoving open the door.

David leaned across to grab the door as soon as Jensen got out, preventing him from slamming it. “I’m telling Jamal you are not the man for this job. You cannot be a Kathy Baker stan and help Bo come out of the hell she helped put him in.”

“Did she, or do you just give her the credit for it?” Jensen asked.

David narrowed his eyes. “Go visit your mommy at the prison and ask her how she feels about Bo. Watch her face. Her eyes. She can say whatever the hell she wants, but her eyes give her away every damn time.”

5:31 PM; DAVID QUINN’S APARTMENT, LIVING ROOM

Bo lifted his head as he heard the front door open. “I was beginning to think you were never coming back. I was thinking of invoking squatter’s rights soon.”

“Sorry about that. Got a little caught up, is all.” Bo heard him moving around in the kitchen. “I picked up something for supper. Doc said you should probably eat bland foods for now, so we’re both having some plain chicken breast, white rice, and honey carrots. I hope that’s okay.”

“That’s perfect. You’re an excellent nurse, David. And apparently a home chef.”

David chuckled. “I’m glad to help. Just… just happy to have you around.” He cleared his throat. “You, uh, you get any sleep while I was gone?”

“I was looking at traffic cameras. The section of road the bodies were dumped on isn’t in the view of any cameras, so I checked the main roads leading toward where the victims were found, as well as the stop light cameras that cover the sections of road before the dumping grounds.”

“Did you find anything?”

“Nothing particularly interesting. I’ve checked the days both victims were found, and I haven’t seen the same vehicle appear around the assumed time of the dumping on both days.”

“Could have two vehicles.”

“That’s where my mind went, as well. I’m planning on trying to rig up an algorithm to rifle through the drivers at the stop light cameras. It’s likely to pick out several wrong faces, but it may get us a few that are at least similar to each other, and once I go through those, we may be able to find two faces heading toward the stretch of highway on the right days, at the right time. If we can find someone who was there both days, both times, we can check the license plates of the presumed two vehicles and trace them to a name. If they aren’t stolen, they’re both likely to be registered to one person or to two people in the same household. We get a face, we get a name, we get an address, we get an interview.”

“That sounds like… a lot of work for a guy who just had his spleen removed.”

“It’s the strenuous activity and heavy lifting I’m not supposed to do. Seated on my ass with a laptop is fine.”

“It sounds strenuous.”

“It’s not strenuous on the incision. That’s the important part.”

David finally came into the living room, stopping behind the couch to lay a hand on Bo’s head. “But is it strenuous here?” he asked.

“I’m okay, David.”

“Are you?” David shook his head. “I-I don’t mean that in a bad way. You seem great. And I’m so fucking happy to see you seeming great. B-but I just need to know that this isn’t…”

“I’m not going anywhere right now, Dave. You’re stuck with me for a while.”

“Good,” David whispered. He leaned down to rest his forehead against the top of Bo’s head. “You are my only family, Bo. I need you in this world. In my life. I cannot put another brother in the fucking ground.”

Bo closed his eyes. After the Kathy-Dallas case finally ended, Bo had done his best to cut David off, bit by bit, to save him from this specific brand of heartache, pain, and grief. He had never wanted to hurt David, just as he hadn’t wanted to hurt Bridget or his parents. Or even Jacob Mason in Clinstone. But the ones he’d tried to cut out in L.A. had all wormed their way back in, one way or another. Especially David, who had already been handed a shitty deck of cards in his life. Orphaned in his late teens, losing his brother in his early twenties. Bo wished he had known those things before allowing himself to befriend David all those years ago. He never would have let the man be subjected to him if he’d known the loss David had already experienced in life.

But it was a little too late now.

Bo reached up to lay a hand on the back of David’s head, the best he could do to offer comfort. “I won’t…” He swallowed. “I won’t let you put another brother in the ground.”

“You promise?”

Bo’s teeth sank into the scar inside his bottom lip, a gift from a much younger Bo Austen in his post-training-wheel days, trying so hard to prove he was just like the other kids who did stupid things in stupid places and ended up with stupid injuries. He had long since given up on that charade.

“I promise.”

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