CHAPTER 1
There is one truth that holds across countries, across cultures, across time: getting a phone call at two in the morning is sure to make blood race, breaths catch, heartbeats speed up.
Jazz Ramsey’s sure did.
At the first sounds of her ringtone, she rolled over, certain she was dreaming. But when the noise didn’t stop, she sprang up in bed.
“Nick!” Alarmed, she automatically reached to her right to shake him before she remembered Nick wasn’t sleeping next to her like he had been for the last three months. He was part of a gang task force now, out of town a lot, working long hours.
A dangerous job.
Before the thought could upend her, Jazz reached over to the bedside table and turned on the light.
Yeah, like its soft glow might actually help ease the worry that suddenly battered her brain.
She grabbed her phone from the table and squinted sleep-heavy eyes at the screen.
Not Nick’s number.
And no name on the caller ID.
“Wrong number,” she told herself. A spam caller with a poor sense of time and no consideration for people who had to be at work in just a few hours. She should ignore the call. She should go back to sleep.
But if it was one of the other cops Nick was working with …
She took a deep breath, answered.
“Jazz?”
A woman’s voice, not official sounding, and some of the tension inside Jazz uncurled.
She ran her tongue over her lips. “Yes, it’s me.”
“No, I’m me.” The words were slurred. The voice faded in and out as if the woman on the other end of the phone could barely keep her eyes open. “This is me, Jazz, and I need … I need you.”
Kim.
Jazz closed her eyes and whispered a prayer of thanksgiving. It wasn’t an emergency call. Nick was all right.
As long as she was communicating with the Almighty, she added an entreaty. If she was going to talk to Nick’s mother, she needed all the divine intervention—not to mention patience—that heaven could spare.
“Kim, it’s the middle of the night.”
“Here, too. Jazz? Are you there?”
Jazz mumbled a curse. Before Nick left town two weeks earlier, he’d asked her to check on his mom now and then. So far, Jazz had decided “then” would work just fine. She hadn’t dropped in to see Kim. She hadn’t called. It’s not like she’d been avoiding Kim, but …
Who was she kidding?
Jazz gave her pillow a punch.
Of course she’d been avoiding Kim.
And who could blame her?
Kim was a raging alcoholic and a lousy mother. Sure, Jazz knew alcoholism was a disease; she listened when Nick told her Kim was fighting as hard as she could, when he confessed he hoped someday his mother would enter rehab and turn her life around. That didn’t make it any easier for Jazz to sympathize with the woman who just a few years earlier had drained Nick’s bank account before he realized what she was up to, the mother who never bothered to show up for his high school graduation.
Kim Kolesov was not exactly the stuff BFFs are made of.
“Tomorrow’s a workday.” Jazz treaded the dangerous waters between keeping that promise to Nick and saying something she’d regret. “Maybe I can stop by and see you after I leave school.”
“No. No. You have to come. Now.”
She rolled her eyes, waiting for that patience she so badly needed to drop down from on high. When it didn’t, Jazz spoke through gritted teeth. “I was out all day training Wally,” she told Kim. “I’m bone-tired. And it’s so late and—”
“You have to come, Jazz. Now. It’s Nick. Nick, he’s … he’s dead in my backyard.”
* * *
Somehow, Jazz managed to pull on clothes and scoop her shoulder-length brown hair into a ponytail. She apologized to Wally, her seven-month-old Airedale, for leaving him in his crate, and raced out the door at the same time she called Nick.
“Come on, answer!” Her hands trembling, her breaths coming in short, quick gasps, Jazz unlocked her SUV and hopped in. When the ringing on the other end of the line stopped and the automated voicemail recording began, she hung up and tried again.
She got nothing for her efforts but that endless ring, that canned voice.
And another whopping dose of worry.
It’s Nick. He’s dead in my backyard.
As much as she told herself it wasn’t possible, that Nick was out of town, that his mother didn’t know what she was talking about, Kim’s words played over in Jazz’s head when she wheeled out of the driveway and onto the street. Jazz’s house was in Cleveland’s upscale hip and trendy Tremont neighborhood. Kim lived in a part of the city too down on its luck to be upscale, too down-to-earth to be hip, too hard-nosed to be trendy. In good weather, in light traffic, the drive from one neighborhood to the other should have taken twelve minutes.
Jazz made it in nine.
She parked in front of Kim’s white bungalow, grabbed a flashlight from the glove box, and hopped out of the car. Here, just like in Tremont, the houses were set one on top of the other, the lawns the size of postage stamps. But in Tremont, young professionals had moved in and transformed both the houses and the neighborhood vibe. Restaurants and clubs flourished. Folks from the suburbs came to shop and party. Here and on the streets surrounding Kim’s, there was no need for valet parking, no music flowing from doorways. There wasn’t much of anything going on in the middle of the night. Just like there wasn’t much of anything happening any other time of the day.
In the quiet, it was impossible for Jazz to miss the sounds of her own rough breathing, the slam of each heartbeat when she raced down the driveway and into the backyard.
It was early September and the leaves on the maple tree in Kim’s yard threw deep shadows from the garage in front of Jazz to the empty flower beds along the back of the house. She flicked on her light and skewed it across the yard.
Nothing in the beds next to the back porch.
Nothing beneath the tree.
Just to be certain, she opened the garage door and looked in there, too.
It was empty.
Nick was not dead in Kim’s backyard.
At the same time a sob of relief escaped Jazz, a healthy dose of anger shot through her. Pounding on Kim’s back door wasn’t the perfect solution to getting rid of it, but it was a start.
“Kim!” She didn’t stop pounding until she heard the scuffle of footsteps from inside. “It’s Jazz. Let me in.”
When the door finally opened a crack, a shaft of light penetrated the backyard darkness, blocked now and again when the woman inside swayed. Kim was in her fifties. She looked older. But then, too much booze and too many cigarettes will do that. Her skin was dull and wrinkled. Her shoulder-length light-colored hair was thin and brittle. Her eyes, the same glorious blue as Nick’s, were dull. They were swollen and rimmed with red, too, and her cheeks were streaked with tears. “Did you…” She craned her neck to look past Jazz and her voice broke over a sob. “Did they come with you? Are they here to…? They’re going to take me away, right?”
Maybe that patience Jazz had been praying for finally showed up. It explained why she was able to keep her voice level, her temper in check. “There’s no one here but me,” she told Kim. “You called me. About Nick.”
“Nick isn’t home.” Kim sobbed. “Too bad. Nick would know what to do.”
It was hard for Jazz to get the words out, but she had to get the story straight. “You told me Nick was dead in your backyard.”
“No. No. No.” When Kim shook her head, her hair twitched around her shoulders and her voice squeezed. “I never said Nick. It was that … that other man.”
Jazz wrapped her fingers tight around her Rayovac and, to prove her point, angled the light back and forth across the yard. “Not Nick and not any other man. There’s nobody in your backyard, Kim. Not alive or dead. See?” She slanted the light over the grass, across the flower beds, even up in the tree. “There’s no one. Not anywhere.”
Kim was a few inches taller than Jazz’s five feet two and her face was thin. She was dressed in denim shorts and a green T-shirt that drooped on her scrawny shoulders. She had on the same sparkling beaded earrings that she’d been wearing every time Jazz had seen her lately. They definitely did not jibe with her outfit. They were crystals, and the beads caught the light and winked at Jazz like sunlight glinting off a mirror. Kim’s feet were bare and her hair was a mess. When she stepped onto the porch, the smell of strong, cheap bourbon came outside with her.
“Give me that.” She yanked the flashlight from Jazz’s hand and went down the stairs. The light joggled across the back walk, grass, and garage with each uncertain step she took.
Watching her lurch around the yard, Jazz knew she should just turn around and leave. But there was that promise she’d made to Nick, and there was common sense, besides. If someone didn’t watch out for her, Kim was going to take a header onto the sidewalk. The last thing Jazz needed was to have Kim, bloody and injured and alone, on her conscience.
“See, Kim.” Jazz joined her on the grass, talking to her with the rock-steady voice she usually reserved for one of the cadaver dogs she trained. “There’s no one around. Just you and me. There’s no body in your backyard.”
“Well, there has to be a body. Don’t you get it?” Her voice tight with desperation, Kim wrapped her hand around Jazz’s arm. “He has to be here. I saw him. And I’m…” Her voice rose with panic. “I’m the one who killed him.”
Copyright © 2021 by Connie Laux
