The Little Grave (Detective Amanda Steele)

“Courtney Barrett.”

“Do you know where we could reach her now?”

“Don’t. Sorry.”

“No, you’ve been a big help,” she assured him.

“Anything I can do to help Chief Steele’s daughter,” Jerrod said as she got up.

She stopped at that, cringing. She considered her next words. “Thank you for your time, help, and discretion,” she said, and she and Trent saw themselves out.

Back in the car, she stared at Jerrod’s front door. Go back five and a half years and Palmer had lived right there. He would have stood on that porch, walked through that door, made memories and lived a life there. She clenched her fists. He could have made a child there.

Trent looked over at her in the passenger seat. “If Palmer owed Mr. Rhodes three months’ back rent, why was he carrying around twenty-five K?”

“Thought the same thing. I think it’s safe to conclude that the money wasn’t really Palmer’s. Maybe his girlfriend can help us figure out who it really belonged to.”

Fourteen

The address on file for Courtney Barrett was in Dumfries and, after a few knocks, either no one was home or no one was answering. “We’ll have to try again later,” Amanda said.

“And now what? We still have a little time to pass before the autopsy.”

The clock read just after nine AM. It would take place thirty minutes away at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Manassas. They could go back to the station and dig into the cold cases, but she was fiercely craving a coffee after spending the last twenty minutes or so smelling Jerrod Rhodes’s. “Let’s head toward Manassas. Better early than late, and we can get a coffee, something to eat.”

“A Jabba. And I was thinking you’d never say it.” He smiled.

“A Jabba?” She hooked a brow.

He laughed. “Coffee. Blame my little sister.”

“I didn’t know you had siblings.”

Trent smiled. “It’s not like you asked.”

“Okay, I deserved that.” She managed a small laugh, but like any expression of mirth these days, it felt shallow and void of true emotion.

“Not that you’d have a reason to ask or know. But, yeah, I have two sisters. One younger, one older. I’m the middle child.”

“As I put together from ‘one younger, one older.’ But how did Jabba become your term for coffee?”

“Wendy was seven, and I was fourteen when I started drinking coffee.”

There was quite a gap between the siblings. There was a fourteen-year span between all her siblings, but the largest existed between her and her older brother Kyle, who was four years older. “You started drinking coffee at fourteen? And I thought I had an addiction.”

“I think all cops are coffee addicts.”

She bobbed her head. “I can get behind that. Go on.”

“She was seven, as I said, but already a movie lover with an affinity for sci-fi. She loved the old Star Wars movies and watched them repeatedly—back to back.”

“Ah, Jabba the Hut, and sorry to hear that… about the back-to-back thing.” It was bad enough that Kevin had insisted they watch the original three movies once a year at Christmas.

Trent smirked. “It’s not that they’re bad movies, and they have quite a following, but over and over? Anyway, one day Wendy tattled on me to our parents and said, ‘Trent drinks Jabba.’” He laughed. “My parents figured out what she meant was java, not Jabba, and grounded my butt for a week.”

“Sounds like you have strict parents. And you could have done a lot worse than drink coffee.” She wasn’t going to dredge up all the things she’d done behind her parents’ backs. Sneaking out of the house to meet up with a boy, drinking in the woods, tipping cows in farmers’ fields—not an urban legend but also not the nicest thing to do upon reflection—and those acts of tomfoolery and defiance just scraped the

surface.