Missing You(21)

“The best.”

“So let me do what I do. That’s how I help. That’s how I stay centered. That’s how I contribute to society.”

Kat suddenly felt overwhelmed. They’d been friends a long time ago. Good friends. Close friends. They would sit in the library and talk about anything. The hours would fly by—he had been that kind of friend.

She had talked to Aqua about Jeff after their first date. He got it. He saw it right away. Aqua and Jeff had become close too. They became roommates, moving into off-campus housing, though Jeff ended up spending most nights at Kat’s. Looking at the bewildered look on Aqua’s face right now, she realized yet again how much she had lost. She had lost her dad. Obvious. She had lost her fiancé. Also obvious. But maybe—not so obvious—she had lost something else, something real and deep, when Aqua came apart.

“God, I miss you,” she said.

Aqua started picking up his pace. “This doesn’t help anything.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I have to go. I have things to do.”

She put her hand on his arm to slow him down. “Will you look at this first?”

He frowned, not slowing down much. She handed him the printouts from Jeff’s YouAreJustMyType profile.

“What is this?” Aqua asked.

“You tell me.”

He didn’t like it. She could see that. This whole break in his routine was agitating him. She didn’t mean to do that. She knew there was a danger in upsetting him.

“Aqua? Just take a look, okay?”

He did. He looked at the sheets of paper. She tried to read him. His expression remained perturbed, but she thought she saw something light up in his eyes.

“Aqua?”

There was fear in his voice. “Why are you showing these to me?”

“Does he look like someone you know?”

“No,” he said.

She felt her heart crash. Then Aqua started to hurry away.

“It doesn’t look like Jeff, Kat. It is Jeff.”





Chapter 9


Kat had just hung up the phone, replaying Monte Leburne’s words in her head for the umpteenth time, when the computer dinged as “YouAreJustMyType Instant Message!” popped up on her screen.

The instant message request was, she could see from the tiny profile picture, from Jeff. For a moment, she just sat there, almost afraid to move or click the READ button because this contact, this connection seemed so fragile and tenuous that any sudden act on her part could snap this thinnest of a frayed thread.

The heart icon next to his profile picture had a question mark on it, awaiting her approval to commence the conversation. For the past three hours, Kat had been working on her father’s case. The file told her nothing new and yet held all the old problems. Henry Donovan had been shot in the chest at close range with a small Smith & Wesson. This too had always bothered her. Wouldn’t you go for the head shot? Wouldn’t you come up behind him and put the gun against the back of his head and pull the trigger twice? That had been Monte Leburne’s MO. Why change it here? Why fire into the chest?

It didn’t mesh.

Neither had something Monte Leburne said to Nurse Steiner when she asked who killed Henry Donovan: “How should I know? They visited me. Day after I got arrested. They told me to take the money and the fall.”

Obvious question: Who were “they”?

But perhaps Monte had given her the answer. “They” had visited him in prison. Not only had they visited him, they had visited him the day after he got arrested.

Hmm.

Kat had grabbed the phone and called an old friend of hers, Chris Harrop, who worked for the Department of Corrections.

“Kat, nice to hear from you. What’s up?”

“I need a favor,” Kat said.

“What a surprise. I figured you were calling me for sweaty hot sex.”

“My loss, Chris. Can you get me a visitor log for a prisoner?”

“Shouldn’t be an issue,” Harrop said. “Who’s the prisoner and where is he doing time?”

“Monte Leburne. He was up at Clinton.”

“For what date?”

“Um, well, it was March twenty-seventh.”

“Okay, let me get on it.”

“Eighteen years ago.”

“Pardon?”

“I need his visitor log. From eighteen years ago.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, it’ll take some time,” Harrop said. “The computerization started in 2004. I think the old records are in storage in Albany. How important is this to you?”

“Hot-sweaty-sex important,” Kat said.

“On it.”

It was when she had hung up the phone that the YouAreJustMy Type instant message balloon had popped up. With a shaking hand, she clicked the question mark, said yes, and then, after a small delay, Jeff’s words appeared: Hey, Kat, I got your message. How are you?

Her heart stopped.

Kat read the instant message from Jeff two more times, maybe three. It was hard to know. She saw the beating heart next to his name—he was online, right now, waiting for her response. Her fingertips found the keyboard.