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  “Fuck that!” Earl’s accomplice screamed out, raising his gun.

  With that distraction and without thinking first, Brice opened fire on both of them. He watched Earl fold to the ground like a deflated balloon.

  “Damn, B-boy, you was my brother from another mother,” Earl rasped before throngs of police officers descended upon the scene in response to the 10-13 that Brice had previously called over the radio.

  Brice found out a few hours later that he had “heroically” taken the suspects down. He had not planned for Earl to find out his secret like that. Brice was determined to take his promotion to detective and fuck the wheels off of it to move up the ranks. The further removed he was from the streets, the easier it would be to live with the choice he’d made during the robbery.

  So, Brice’s first day as a detective was both sad and proud for him. He looked at his new gold badge again and again. He even breathed on it and rubbed it on his shirt to get it to shine. Brice was enamored with himself, and he liked the sound of his new title, Detective Brice Simpson.

  That first day, he’d placed his belt badge back on his brand-new Armani suit pants, stretched his arms out, and looked around the bustling detective squad room of the Brooklyn North Task Force. He tapped his fingers on his new desk—an old, gray, rickety holdover from the 70s. He had finally made it. As a patrol cop, the only thing Brice had was a tiny steel locker sandwiched between slews of other lockers in his precinct, but street patrols and uniforms were a thing of the past. Brice was a detective, and he had a chip on his shoulder the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.

  Brice looked around the room at the WANTED posters. Being only twenty-eight years old at the time and from Brooklyn himself, he recognized more than a few faces on the posters. He probably knew where to find the suspects, too.

  “Hey, Simpson, you think the good commissioner promoted you to sit there and look at the manicure Kim Ling gave you?” Detective Sergeant Carruthers yelled out as he walked toward Brice. His joke garnered snickers from the rest of the squad.

  Brice felt his cheeks flame over. He opened his mouth to pipe up, but he didn’t get the chance.

  “Save it. Here you go, some work. I know you’re not used to it, but up here, we work,” Sergeant Carruthers said, slamming a stack of case files on Brice’s desk.

  “I ain’t never scared,” Brice came back jokingly, letting out a short, nervous chuckle.

  Looking down at the files, he saw a big red sticker labeled: COLD CASE fiLES.

  “Aww, shit,” he cursed, flipping through the stack. He looked up and saw that the other detectives were staring and laughing at him. Brice’s insides churned.

  “The new guy gets the dogs. You know, the shit nobody else wants. We don’t care how much cops and robbers you played as a street cop. Solve those sons of bitches and you really earn this promotion,” Sergeant Carruthers said, popping his suspenders that looked stretched to the limit over his huge gut.

  Brice reluctantly flipped through several of the cold case files. Many of the cases were related to indigent people found dead under bridges and in abandoned buildings. Some were of known gang members found dead in project elevators and stairwells, and others of dead crackheads. But one case stood out from all the rest. A fourteen-year-old girl had been found bludgeoned to death in a dumpster behind a Brooklyn bodega.

  Brice opened the folder, and on the inside cover were several crime scene photographs. Brice winced and almost gagged, thinking of the pain the girl must have endured. He could hardly make out the girl’s face in the pictures. Her head, from the neck up, resembled a blob—a red clump of flesh with no definition. Brice wasn’t able to distinguish her eyes or nose. Her hair was matted with blood. Whoever had murdered her left her butt naked. She’d been beaten all over her body and then dumped atop bags of trash, an indistinguishable mass of flesh and blood. Bugs had already started eating away at the flesh by the time the pictures were taken.

  Brice shuffled the photos and looked at the girl after she had been cleaned up by the medical examiner. Although her face was completely disfigured, Brice was able to tell that she was just a baby, her breasts barely developed, her fingers small and slender like delicate straws. The medical examiner had ruled the cause of death as a brain hemorrhage.

  Who would beat such a young girl so unmercifully? he thought with his fingers closing tightly around the file.

  He meticulously reviewed each piece of paper and flipped through all the notes. A handwritten Post-It note had been left in the file, where someone had scribbled: Runaway prostitute got herself killed. Case closed. Brice squinted his eyes into little slits and feverishly turned the pages to find out which detective had been assigned the case.

  “D’Giulio,” Brice mumbled under his breath. “It fucking figures. A white prick. If she was a white runaway, would he have come to the same conclusion?” Brice asked himself under his breath. It was apparent that the detective who had been assigned the case didn’t bother to fully investigate before deeming it a cold case.

  Eager to get his career off to a good start, Brice glanced at the address where the body had been found. He grabbed his gun out of his desk drawer and put it in his shoulder holster.

  “I’ll be back!” he yelled to no one in particular.

  Little did Brice know back then that the cold case would be the real start of his career as a detective and also the beginning of a series of events that had changed his and his sister’s lives forever.

  * * *

  “Well, let’s change the subject,” Brice said to his sister, finally snapping out of his reverie. He’d let the long stretches of memory interrupt their date long enough. His therapist had tried to help him control the nightmares and flashbacks. It didn’t always work out so well. He’d been doing much better with it than in the past, but he still wasn’t free of what he believed was karma for what he’d done as a kid.

  “Yes, thank you,” Ciara said, her words coming out on a long sigh.

  Brice opened his hands as if to say, Well, talk.

  Ciara picked up her water again. “I’m dropping out of college,” she said as she put the glass down. She looked at Brice and quickly averted her eyes.

  Brice’s nostrils flared, and he immediately knitted his fingers together to keep them from curling into fists on their own. It was a method his therapist had recommended.

  “Say what?” They were the only words Brice could muster at the moment.

  “I’m leaving college because school is just not for me, Brice. I’m twenty years old now. I have the right. I will not have my feet held to the fire for the rest of my life for something that happened when I was sixteen. It was a childish mistake back then, and I’ve moved past it, even if you and Mommy haven’t,” she said flatly but with enough feeling that the words felt like ice cold water had been thrown in Brice’s face.

  He balked a little, taken aback all over again. This time, instead of getting angry right away, Brice cleared his throat—another therapy-taught method to slow down his racing brain and to keep him from saying something he’d later regret. Brice still couldn’t help his rocking jaw, though.

  “So, how will you take care of yourself in the future if you don’t go to college?” he asked levelly. “You know the job situation all over the United States... no education, no life.”

  “Well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” Ciara said tentatively, gnawing on her bottom lip like she always did when she knew she was about to piss her brother off.

  Brice raised his eyebrows as if to ask, Really? He just knew his sister must be losing her damn mind if she thought he was going to take care of her financially as an adult. He’d done enough for her in the absence of what her own father could do.

  Brice had grown up in the Kingsborough projects in Brooklyn. As a child, he had watched helplessly as his alcoholic stepfather beat his mother. Each time Brice had tried to help her, he’d end up beaten up so badly that he’d have to miss school the following day. Brice took to
the streets and started acting out as a way to vent his frustration with his home life, but when Ciara was born, one look at her and Brice vowed to always take care of her. Up until this moment, Brice had lived up to his end of the promise, although his sister never made it easy.

  “It’s not what you think,” Ciara clarified as she watched Brice’s facial expressions display ten different emotions at once. “I not going to sit around doing nothing, Brice. I’m going to move to Vietnam and teach over there,” she announced, smiling as if she’d just said something good. “It’s such a good opportunity to give back and do some good for the world.”

  Brice felt like five bombs had gone off in his ears. He instinctively put his fingers to his temples and moved them in a circular motion. Speechlessness was something that didn’t happen to Brice too often, but right then, Brice couldn’t find one word. Ciara had put Brice and his mother through enough, but this would take the whole entire cake. He swallowed hard, still at a loss for words.

  Just then, his work cell phone vibrated next to him on the table. It was his lieutenant.

  “I have to take this,” Brice huffed, shooting up from his chair, completely relieved for the distraction. Work had saved the day once again.

  “Of course you do,” Ciara mumbled, shaking her head. “Nothing has changed.”

  Chapter 2

  Brice

  Brice rushed to his black Suburban and sped down to Brooklyn Hospital. There would be no stopping for lights or stop signs that day. Not after the call he’d just received.

  When Brice pulled up to the scene, his eyes grew wide. He didn’t think so many vehicles could even fit on the already crammed Brooklyn block.

  “Damn, this can’t be a regular crime scene. What the hell is going on?” Brice asked himself out loud, his eyes wide with questions. The crime scene was lit up like Times Square. There was a festival of lights in front of him, no less than six regular patrol cars with blue-and-white wig-wags flashing, the Crime Scene Unit van, and the city medical examiner’s vehicle were also parked in front of the hospital.

  Brice wasn’t new to anything he was seeing, but something felt different about the scene. He could tell by the number of cars that this crime scene had been pushed up to important.

  “Hey, Simp. Female DOA, no valuables missing, except they took her identification out of the wallet. No witnesses. Scouring the area for surveillance footage... so far, nothing. Best guess is we will take a few pictures, show them around inside to ID her. We got uniforms fanned out all over the other floors and inside the hospital. Oh, and we got a full, perfectly intact shoe print in a small spot of oil on the parking lot floor. Crime Scene doing a cast of that,” the patrol sergeant reported to Brice, who wrote feverishly on his little black notepad.

  Brice took a deep breath, flexed his neck, and then walked over to the sheet that covered the body. The top half of the sheet was soaked through with dark red blood. He lifted the left corner and took a peek. He dropped the sheet back over the body.

  “How soon are they going to be able to identify?” Brice asked stoically. He’d seen a lot of dead bodies, but this one was particularly sad. The woman looked like she could be someone’s wife or mother, and Brice would bet his life that she was.

  Brice and walked over to where Michelle Grafton and Lucille Teller were standing huddled together. Michelle acknowledged Brice first.

  “Hey, Simpson. Pretty sad, wouldn’t you say?” Michelle asked. “A beautiful woman. Not too old, either. Nothing really amiss. Weird.”

  Brice shook his head at her. They’d known one another for years now. She had been Brooklyn’s chief medical examiner for nearly ten years. She had testified at several high-profile trials, and she was the best at determining causes of death. She had been a godsend to the homicide squad.

  “Is it me, or does it seem personal?” Brice asked, rubbing his chin. “We got people fanned out in the hospital trying to make an ID. How long before you can make a positive one from the remains?” he continued, asking more questions before he got the answer to the first one.

  “Probably going to be at least twenty-four hours, unless we come up with her actual ID and can ID her from there,” Lucille interjected. Lucille wasn’t a big fan of Brice. In fact, she and Brice had had their fair share of ups and downs. Lucille was, by all means, a forensic genius, but she didn’t believe in letting detectives rush her or dictate how she conducted her examinations. Lucille also didn’t believe in letting Michelle play boss to her either, although Michelle was technically her boss.

  “I’ll see how fast I can get something. Let’s see what kind of missing persons come in within the next few hours. Judging from the rings and nice clothing, she had a few bucks. Whoever did this wasn’t out to rob her. That rock alone would’ve made a thief very happy,” Michelle told Brice. She was simply repeating the things Lucille had just told her, but Michelle knew that Lucille was going to keep the information to herself, so she took the liberty of sharing. Michelle saw Brice as a collegial friend, unlike Lucille, who viewed Brice as a big pain in her ass.

  “But why take the time to take all of her identification?” Brice asked.

  “That’s a good question, Simpson. I guess you’ll be the one figuring it all out,” Lucille answered. “This one is all yours, right?”

  * * *

  Brice got the call a few hours after he left the crime scene. The woman had been identified as Desiree Turner, a nurse at Brooklyn Hospital. Brice turned to his computer and punched in the name. He squinted at the screen when the woman’s list of known associates and family members popped up. Brice sighed and pushed back in his seat.

  “Big K,” he whispered. “Kevin fucking Turner. I remember you. How could I forget your reign over Brooklyn back then?” Brice mumbled.

  He punched a few more keys and moved closer to the screen to make sure he was reading it correctly. “So, they let you out after all that time. I thought they gave your ass life,” Brice grumbled.

  Once again, his street ties related back to his work. It was inevitable for Brice, who thought of himself as a simple Brooklyn kid turned cop. Brice wasn’t called the hood detective for nothing. He’d always kept one foot in the hood and one step ahead of criminals. He was known on the streets as Simp, and on any given day, a person wouldn’t be able to decipher a difference between Brice the detective and the local corner boy. It always worked to his advantage. Brice had the swagger of a rapper and the smarts of a genius. He had always been into fashion, so to say he was a snazzy dresser like most Brooklyn dudes was an understatement. He definitely didn’t subscribe to the NYPD detective–obligatory sand-colored trench coat, dress shirt, slacks, and a tie. Never. Not for Brice. He wore his name brand jeans, whichever sneaker was out, or Timbs in the winter. Brice wasn’t about to give up his street cred for the job.

  Brice reviewed some more information and found out that his victim was the wife of former drug kingpin Kevin “Big K” Turner, who had recently been released from prison after serving sixteen years. Brice rubbed his chin and squinted his eyes.

  “So, she survived amongst his enemies the entire time he was locked up, and as soon as he gets home, she’s shot dead with no apparent motive,” he mumbled as he flipped to the next screen on his computer and compared the information to a file he’d pulled from the archives.

  “Hey, Cuomo. Come with me somewhere,” Brice yelled out to an older white detective that he sometimes took in the field with him to give him an edge in the hood. One thing about the bad guys in the hood—they never really fucked with white cops, especially the fat, balding, older ones.

  Chapter 3

  Cheyenne

  When the landline phone in her apartment rang in the middle of the night, Cheyenne immediately knew something was wrong. Her mother was the only person who called her at the apartment she shared with a roommate in Austin, Texas. Anyone else contacted Cheyenne on her cell phone, which hardly rang during those days.

  “Cheyenne,” Amber, Cheyenne’s room
mate, called out in the darkness of her bedroom.

  “Hmm,” Cheyenne moaned, although she was awake from the phone ringing anyway. She was cranky because she had already been tossing and turning, feeling like something was off. She’d chalked it up to pre-test jitters. They had an early start the next day with their first round of exams upon them, so Cheyenne had written off the feeling that had kept her up tossing and turning most of the night. Neither she nor Amber wanted to be up that late.

  “The phone is for you. It’s your father,” Amber grumbled, annoyed.

  Cheyenne flung her blanket off, wishing that they had spent the few extra dollars on a cordless phone instead of the stupid landline that plugged into the wall.

  “Thanks,” she groaned out as she brushed past Amber, stomping her way to the living room. Cheyenne’s heart-rate sped up. Her father never called her, much less this time of the night. Within a millisecond, no less than five hundred thoughts shot through her mind.

  “Hello?” Cheyenne huffed into the receiver, squeezing it so tight her knuckles paled. It was her father, for sure. Her heart stopped beating for a few seconds, and her legs had suddenly gone weak. He was practically screaming into the phone, his words a garble of highs and lows.

  “Daddy? I can’t understand you. What are you saying?” Cheyenne asked urgently. She was definitely jolted into full wakefulness now. Something was wrong, that much she knew. Her father continued sobbing into the phone. Cheyenne’s body went ice cold, and her teeth began to chatter. She had never heard her father cry in her life. Even when he’d been snatched away from their family and locked up like an animal, he hadn’t shed a tear.

  “What? What are you saying? Something happened to who?” Cheyenne asked, her voice going so high-pitched it hurt her own ears.

  Amber was standing in front of Cheyenne now with wide eyes. She was moving her lips to silently ask Cheyenne if everything was okay. Cheyenne put her hand up in a halting motion to Amber.