She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,122

fold with the headline Decorated Officer / 21 Others Dead. A dozen empty Iron City bottles littered the floor around the table.

Stack shuffled past her. “The coffee I promised is upstairs.”

He was halfway up the steps before he realized she wasn’t following. He offered a wry smile. “I’m too old and tired to try anything funny, and with three exes running around out there, my finances are maxed. No room in the budget for a fourth. What I need to show you, it ain’t exactly portable.”

Without waiting for a response, he continued up the steps and disappeared onto the second floor.

Brier trusted this guy, and she trusted Brier. Fogel clucked her tongue, weighed her options, then followed after him.

The stairs opened onto a narrow hallway with a bathroom at one end, a bedroom at the other, and a third room between them both. The door to the third room was open, the light on. Stack’s shadow stood patiently against the far wall.

Fogel went to the open doorway and gasped.

Stack took another sip of his beer and wiped his mouth. “Wife number two used this space as a sewing room, but she was never very good at it. All the drapes in this house are uneven, and I’ve got a stack of shirts boxed away in my closet somewhere that were far better off before she tried to replace missing buttons. I swear, she’d use half a spool on a single button and create this mound of thread, never got the color even remotely close, neither. She didn’t know how to tie them off properly, so after a few hours, things would start to come undone and I’d be walking around with thread trailing behind me. The guys at the precinct used to say I looked like a parade float, complete with streamers. Back at the beginning, when I still loved her, I’d wear them. A couple years in and I started keeping spare shirts in my car. By year three, I gave up the ghost altogether and boxed them. She did a number on this sweater—”

“How did you…” Fogel’s voice trailed off.

“The Wall of Weird Faustino put together at the pen was for quick reference at the precinct. This is where he really worked, where we really worked. I started collecting copies of evidence here back in my day. Then when he took over the case, he kept everything current. Anything new came in, we made sure a copy found its way here. Copies only, mind you. Neither of us were trying to hoard evidence. We wanted a quiet place to work the case. Can’t wheel that board out at the precinct without creating a big stink—there’s nobody to bug us here.” Stack reached into his pocket. “Faust had a key, probably still has a key. I made one for you after you came by last year, figured you’d be back.”

Fogel took the key from his outstretched hand and studied the room.

The back wall was identical to the Wall of Weird, only larger. The photographs of all the victims and crime scenes were spaced further apart, with hundreds of index cards tacked in the spaces between. Red yarn connected some of the images, yellow connected others. On the wall to the left stood file boxes, dozens of them. Some were labeled with the names of victims, others had addresses, three said Duncan Bellino. A folding card table sat in the center of the room with two chairs. On top of the table sat two boxes. One had Nettleton written across the front in black, blocky letters, the other had Thatch. On the floor was a third box, this one labeled Black GTO Guy.

Stack nodded at the boxes. “Faustino and me didn’t come up with much on the guy in the car, but what we do have is in that box. For the past few weeks, we’ve been digging into Thatch’s parents. The Nettleton box has the letter, not much else. Now we can tie it to the house in Dormont, that crime scene. That’s something, for sure. The plan was to find the link between the two families, see where that takes us. If you’re in for the long haul, I could really use your help here. You’ve got access to resources I can’t touch anymore, department databases and the like.”

“I’ll stay, if you take a shower,” Fogel said.

“Been meaning to do that anyway.”

“And if you lay off the beer.”

Stack raised the bottle in his hand to his lips and