The Family Man by AJ Rose

Author:AJ Rose [Rose, AJ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-03-07T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter

Eleven

Being with a man was a revelation, but Tracey didn’t get to bask in it long. The disappointment from Jon strong-arming him back to some ill-defined emotional safety was front and center. He showered and ordered a burger and toasted raviolis—those things were pretty good. While he ate, he tried to lose himself in the novel Jon had given him. After reading the same three sentences repeatedly and forgetting the name of the victim, he gave up. He wiped his fingers on a linen napkin before grabbing the files from Judge Winston’s docket.

They’d been working virtually non-stop since arriving in St. Louis, but this puzzle would whirl around in Tracey’s brain until it was solved. A night off sounded nice, but Tracey couldn’t, in good conscience, relax while the Family Man was loose.

Great, now I’m calling him that.

Work would distract him from Jon. He completely understood the arrangement’s necessity, but the emotional distance part had him spinning. He wasn’t exactly wired for one-night stands. Never had been.

Friend with benefits, then. I haven’t tried that.

Resolved, he moved to more pressing things. Like the courthouse files.

He jerked awake at two in the morning, his cheek stuck to an open file. The TV’s earlier baseball game had been replaced by an infomercial. Cutting off the obnoxiously loud hosts mid-sentence was satisfying.

After squinting at his phone for the time, he checked his email, which yielded no forensics nor anything about the dash cam footage. He didn’t know how long it would take to enhance the video for clues, but it was the middle of the night. Nothing would come in for hours yet.

Standing, he rubbed his face, then stretched and gingerly prodded a kink in his neck. The adjoining door kept drawing his attention. Was Jon sleeping peacefully tonight? He’d been as excited as Tracey about the dash cam development, so maybe that energy would keep the nightmares away.

As a precaution, Tracey unlocked and cracked his adjoining door, a silent invitation if Jon needed him. Then he went into the bathroom, splashed water on his face and emptied his bladder. Leaving the bathroom light on, he pulled the door closed to allow a sliver of light for Jon to see by. Then he crawled into bed. Tomorrow was a new day.

A new day that sucked. IT had gone over every inch of the dash cam footage, yielding only one digit of the license plate. The camera was an older model, with limited pixels that only blurred the plate and the magnetic sign when zooming in. The make, model, and color of the suspect's vehicle was the only useful knowledge they got.

Tracey refused to hope for another crime scene, so he scoured what they had: interview transcripts and court files. They’d logged almost all of Judge Winston’s cases and had expanded the data being input to the database. Jon had added the state’s DMV database, looking for owners of trucks that matched what they knew. That list was in the thousands even after narrowing the search radius to 150 miles.

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