Cavanaugh Vanguard. Marie Ferrarella
changed hands and the hotel was to be demolished to make way for a brand-new, state-of-the-art residential development.
After a run of bad luck and investments that hadn’t panned out, Warren Preston was counting on this development to put his construction company back on the map—and in the running for more construction bids farther down south.
That was why everything had to go smoothly with this job.
“Javi, I’m late for a meeting. Can’t this wait?” Preston asked impatiently. With one foot still in his truck, Preston was ready to take off the second his foreman backed off.
“I don’t think so, sir,” Javier answered.
The foreman’s stance and his body language made clear that he was waiting to reenter the building he’d just vacated—but only with his boss in tow.
“What’s with the long face, Javi?” Preston asked, resigned to the fact that he would be late for his meeting. Leaving his vehicle, Preston closed the door. “Buck up—this is the first day of a brand-new project. Everything’s still fresh and new. Hell, man, you look like somebody died.”
“That’s just it, boss,” Javier answered solemnly. “I think somebody did.”
Bushy eyebrows drew together above small brown eyes, looking for all the world like two caterpillars awkwardly attempting to rise up as Preston glared at the man who had worked for him for over fifteen years.
“What the hell are you talking about, Hernandez?” he demanded. “Who died?”
Rather than answer, Javier was beckoning for his boss to follow him.
Taller than Preston and leaner than his boss by half his weight, Javier had a lengthy stride that put more and more distance between his boss and him. Clearly agitated, Javier seemed to be restraining himself from breaking into a run.
Hernandez insisted, “You have to see this for yourself.”
“See what?” Preston snapped, trying to catch up with the younger man. “I don’t have time for guessing games, Hernandez,” he warned.
“It’s not a game, boss,” the foreman assured Preston. “I only wish it was.”
He brought the construction company owner into the rear of the hotel that had been designed to emulate an elegant Southern mansion.
The dining room had been considered exceptionally stylish and upscale in its day, but time and the elements that had seeped into the structure had not been kind. The expensive wallpaper that had graced the walls had long since begun peeling.
Standing in the doorway, Preston fisted his hands at his ample waist as he irritably scanned the area. Daylight was coming in through the hole where the wrecking ball had made first contact.
“Okay, so what’s this big emergency?” Preston demanded.
“Right there, sir.”
Javier pointed to the reason he had urgently called for both workers and machinery to come to an absolute grinding halt. To the right of where the wrecking ball had left its first startling imprint, knocking down part of a wall, what looked like a skeletal hand reached up out of the gaping hole.
Major crimes detective Jackson Muldare had just exited the southbound 5 freeway when he felt the inside pocket of his sports jacket vibrating.
Again.
He didn’t need to pull his cell phone out to know who was calling. It was either his superior, Lieutenant Jonathan Cohen, or the lead homicide detective he was going to be working with at the latest crime scene. Either one of them undoubtedly had the same question for him: Why wasn’t he there already?
There was a simple answer for that, but not one he was willing to go into right now.
Just as he was leaving his apartment, he’d got the call to head out to the Old Aurora Hotel. Although he’d said he’d be there, his first destination of the morning wasn’t the site of the old hotel, or even the police precinct. Instead, he’d headed to the Safe Haven Rehab Center. Not because he wanted to but because he had to.
A police detective’s salary—at least an honest one’s—only stretched so far, and he had already paid the monthly fee for his father’s room at Happy Pines, the board and care facility where his father had been living these last three years. Jackson was consequently late with his payment to Safe Haven, the rehab center where Jimmy was currently staying.
He made it to the center with his check by the skin of his teeth. Though sympathetic, Alice Harris, the administrator who was in charge of the center’s business office, had told him that if he hadn’t come through with the payment by the end of this business day, Jackson’s younger brother would have found himself back out on the street.
Jackson had paid the woman, telling her solemnly that it wouldn’t happen again. He’d left quickly before his temper got the better of him and he said something he couldn’t take back. He was well aware that Ms. Harris and the center held all the cards, forcing him to keep his thoughts to himself. He was doing his best, but the money he earned only stretched so far, and on occasion, he came up short.
There were times, Jackson thought as he turned on the siren and flashing lights that allowed him to cut through the city’s traffic, when he found himself almost regretting that he’d turned his back on a life of crime.
Almost.
In his teens, the guys he hung around with in his old Oakland neighborhood had all dropped out of school and declared that staying on the straight and narrow was only for gutless losers. The thinking back then was that guys with guts could find all sorts of ways of gaming the system, lining their pockets with money and achieving the good life at the expense of others.
More than a few of his so-called friends ridiculed him for his choice to actually work for the money he brought home. But crime had never been an option for him. Jackson had people to take care of.
His mother had walked out on the family when he was ten, and his father, Ethan, although a kindhearted, loving man, had also been a functioning alcoholic who anesthetized his sense of failure with any bottle of alcohol he could get his hands on. He wasn’t choosy. Anything would do. Eventually, Ethan Muldare ceased functioning and just devoted himself exclusively to drinking.
The burden of providing for his family and keeping them together had fallen to Jackson by the time he turned fifteen.
Fourteen years later, he was still shouldering that burden. For the last three years he’d been paying for his father’s tiny room at the board and care residential facility. All those years of drinking had taken their toll on his father’s health as well as on the man’s mental faculties.
And because their mother had taken off and their father had turned to alcohol for solace, his younger brother, Jimmy, had sought relief in drugs by the time he was thirteen.
There were days when Jackson found it hard to keep it all together and keep going. Those were the days when he seriously entertained the idea of getting in his car and just driving as far away from his life as he possibly could.
But that was just the problem. No matter where he went, he always took himself and his sense of responsibility with him.
What that meant was that he had no choice but to do what he did. Someone had to pay the bills and to set an example, such as it was, for Jimmy. On good days Jackson still nursed the minuscule hope that eventually Jimmy would come around and realize that numbing his mind and his soul with drugs was just not the answer.
If anything, it was a death sentence.
Jackson supposed, at bottom, there was just the tiniest bit of an optimist within him.
He felt his phone vibrating again.
Jackson resisted the temptation