The Fix Is In (Torus Intercession 4)

He was kidding, and I knew that, so I smiled at him. “Sir, I say this with no disrespect, but you couldn’t pay me enough to live in this soggy little town. Does the sun ever come out? Does it ever stop raining?” It had, in fact, begun to drizzle.

“For real, this is some bullshit,” Rais agreed, not enjoying the rain any more than me.

Brasher grinned at us before he bent and put cuffs on Dennis, who had finally started coughing and refilling his lungs. “It’s lovely here in the summer. How do you think everything stays so green?”

I grunted, and he chuckled as he dragged Dennis to his feet.

“Here you go, sir,” the female officer said, passing Rais a tablet in a waterproof case before she took control of Dennis. “That’s the last information we have on your guy.”

“Thank you, Deputy Chief Ramirez,” he said in that flirty way he had.

She nodded but didn’t smile, instead looked to her boss.

“Secure Dennis, and then join us. How far out are Woosley and Tan?”

“Minutes,” she apprised him, turning to take Dennis to her boss’ rig to join his buddy.

“What is that?” I asked Rais as he turned the tablet so I could see a full color picture of Benji’s ghost looking very much alive. “That didn’t take long.”

“Nope,” Rais agreed, turning it back around so he could scroll up and read. “Turns out your boy’s boy is––”

“Really?”

“I’m reading,” he muttered under his breath.

“Go on.”

“The ghost’s name is Caleb Harrison,” he informed me, “and he’s a missing clinical psychology doctoral student from Eastern Kentucky University. Apparently, he drove out to Seaside from Richmond, Kentucky, at some point during the summer.”

“He was in Seaside?”

“Yeah. He has friends from when he was an undergrad who live there, and they let him crash at their place while they were in Malta—still are, from what it says—for some archaeological something-something-in-Maltese.”

“Something in Maltese?”

“It’s long,” he grumbled, turning the tablet to me for a moment, pointing at words on the screen I could barely see, much less try and pronounce. “And it doesn’t matter beyond giving them an alibi for whatever happened to Caleb, and for not reporting him missing, since Doug and Rebecca were, and remain… out of the country.”

“Shit.”

“Look,” Rais ordered, having found a better picture. “No doubt about it, that is definitely the guy in Benji’s photo.”

There could be no mistake. “So what, Gage had this information the whole time?”

“It was there in the missing-persons database,” Brasher informed me. “If only Gage had looked. It took Rodriguez less than five minutes to find it.”

“Who reported him missing if his friends didn’t do it?” I asked Rais. “His family?”

“That’s where it gets weird,” he apprised me. “There’s no record of who reported him missing, just that someone did.”

“Well that’s fuckin’ great,” I groaned.

“The worst part is,” Rais began, “if Gage had done his job when Benji first reported, maybe Harrison wouldn’t be missing at the moment.” He glanced at Brasher. “This is gonna be shitshow for you man, because you’re the one here now.”

“You have no idea. I’m sure I’ll be cleaning up Gage’s messes for the next year, if not longer,” Brasher said tiredly. “But at the moment,” he muttered, pointing over his left shoulder, “could you tell me why we have two men in custody?”

I gave him the rundown, and when Ramirez joined us after the other two officers arrived, Woosley and Tan, who, like Ramirez, had asked to transfer with their boss—apparently, they liked him—the four of us returned to the apartment.

Benji, Sian, and Delly were thrilled to meet Brasher and Ramirez. Saffron and Tara both latched on to the chief, and he assured them they would investigate until they knew everything that had occurred in their apartment and the rest of the building. Most importantly, he would, he told them, punish the two men to the fullest extent of the law.

The man inspired trust in the people who worked for him, as well as in the people he served. When he spoke to the two women, he looked them in the eye, and his words had weight. There was a quality in him that reminded me of my boss, and because of that, I too was impressed.

After he spoke, there was lots of nodding. They both wanted to hug him, then me, and while Ramirez returned outside to give instructions to Woosley and Tan, Brasher got out his notebook—he was old-school—and began gathering information from Tara and Saffron. Rais and I used the flashlights on our phones to check for cameras in the apartment, and while it would, of course, be swept by Ramirez when she returned, in the interim, I could at least report to the two women that there didn’t seem to be any. Dennis didn’t look like a high-tech kind of guy; he was more of a “sneaking in and out” kind of guy.