Page 125 of The Birthday List (Maysen Jar 1)

“What are the chances?” I muttered. Coincidences. They really were our thing.

“What?” Cole asked.

I shut the folder. “You’re never going to believe what I did this afternoon.”

“You’re shitting me,” Matt said, sitting on the edge of my desk.

“How fucking crazy is that?”

Matt shook his head, letting everything I told him sink in. “Holy fucking shit.”

Holy fucking shit. Those had been my exact words to Poppy last night.

I was sick over what had happened to Tuesday Hastings. Her dad, Aaron Denison, was a meth junkie. His name was on the drug task force’s watch list, but since he wasn’t a major player, we hadn’t brought him in. Instead, we’d been spending our time going after dealers like Aaron’s friend, Tommy Bennett.

Tommy was one sick fucker. His specialty was getting young kids hooked so they’d help him sell drugs to their naïve friends, but unfortunately, we’d been having hell proving it. We hadn’t even been able to bring him in for using—as far as we knew, he never touched the products he was selling. He got off on selling drugs to ruin the lives of others.

I cringed, thinking about the kind of pleasure he’d taken from Tuesday. And here Poppy had inadvertently gifted Jamie’s truck to Tuesday. Kennedy Hastings’s daughter. “We’ve got to get guys like Aaron and Tommy off the streets.”

Matt nodded. “Too bad the daughter wouldn’t tell Poppy if Tommy had assaulted her.”

“I know,” I sighed, “but it’s given me a whole lot of motivation to bust his ass. We might not get him on sexual assault, but distribution to minors will set him up with a nice, long prison sentence.”

And as soon as we put Tommy away, I was going after Aaron.

I hadn’t kept tabs on Tuesday Hastings—or Poppy—these last five years. But when Poppy had asked me to check on her, I’d gotten curious too. Over the last month, I’d researched Tuesday, starting with her school. Things had looked promising at first. She was a straight-A student. She had perfect attendance and her teachers seemed to love her. Everything pointed to a smart, well-adjusted teenager.

Things had looked so good I hadn’t rushed to investigate her home life.

Now, I regretted waiting so long.

Just yesterday, I’d learned that Tuesday had been placed with Aaron after Kennedy had been murdered. Kennedy had never married Aaron and had held sole custody of Tuesday—not even giving her daughter her father’s last name. But after the murders, Aaron had been next in line for custody. At the time, he hadn’t been a known drug abuser.

Either he’d hidden it well back then, or he’d gotten hooked on drugs while his daughter had shared his home.

“The timing of all this is the really crazy part,” I told Matt. “I called social services yesterday when I saw Aaron’s name pop up as Tuesday’s guardian. I told them that he was a known meth addict and it would be worth making a visit.”

Matt chuckled. “But Poppy came to the rescue first.”

“That she did.”

Tuesday was Oregon-bound to live with Kennedy’s mother, who would get the custody of her granddaughter she probably should have had all along. And I had come to the station this morning with a fire in my veins to put Tommy Bennett and Aaron Denison in jail so they could never hurt her again.

“Tommy is getting bumped up as target number one for the task force.”

Matt nodded. “Agreed. He’s got to go down.”

“We’ll make a plan when we meet with the rest of the team later.” With a nod toward his desk, I changed subjects to the murder case. “The DMV just got back to me with registration info from that new set of plates we sent in. I put the list of names on your desk.”

“Nice.” Matt stood and went to his desk, opening up the folder I’d set there earlier. “God, I hope we find a lead here.”

“Me too.”

The months I’d spent working on the liquor store murder had worn me down. I hated that all we had to go on were old videos. I hated that, after all this time, we’d made so little progress. But mostly, I hated that I didn’t have anything to give Poppy. I couldn’t tell her we’d found Jamie’s killer, but I also couldn’t tell her that the case was cold.

The stagnancy—the helplessness—was gnawing at me.

But at least it wouldn’t last forever. Matt and I were on our last-ditch effort to track down a lead.