Whatever Remains Read Free Page A

hold of him, he wasn’t sure he could be objective when he arrived at the house on Iris Lane.
                  Instead – prepubescent boys singing shrilly about love they could only pretend to understand in the background – he went back to the statistics. They were comforting.
                  Unlike a few choice members of the Homicide unit, Ben had never viewed his job as something finite. There was no clock-in/clock-out; no deserved “me” time, as someone had put it in the break room one day. There were murders, and there were solves, and the cases that unfolded in between were liquid: he worked them, as hard as he could, to the best of his ability, until he had grounds for an arrest, and if that involved all-nighters and bad takeout pizza for three straight months, so be it. He was a perfectionist. He was maybe a little OCD. And he didn’t believe in shutting off his phone or taking two-week vacations just to “get away from it all.” His phone was always on and he was always ready to drop whatever meager scraps of a personal life he had left when a detective was needed on a scene. He’d heard the other guys say – behind his back – that he was long overdue for a meltdown or a burnout. He was a Marine – neither of those things was coming. And his on-the-job attitude was something he was trying to pass along to his new partner.
                  Not always with success.
                  Trey Kaiden rented a room in an old farmhouse owned by two of his high school friends on the other side of the mountain from their newest crime scene. Ben tried to forgive his frat boy lifestyle – he was only twenty-seven and the economic downswing had left all of them scrambling for lodging – but he had certain expectations. When he swung into the crowded gravel drive – Hondas and Toyotas were clustered together under a stand of trees and covered in bird droppings – and didn’t see his partner ready and waiting for him, it sent a surge of annoyance through him. It didn’t help that he was already keyed up about Iris Lane.
                  He blew the horn twice. A moment later, the front door slammed open and Trey jogged down the end of the porch, struggling into a windbreaker, sneakers unlaced.
                  “Jesus,” Ben said to himself.
                  He wasn’t a bad kid: attractive in an easy sort of way, friendly, non-confrontational. He looked like he’d been a popped-collar prep at one point, and had decided to go for “cool” now that he was on the force and didn’t want to be ribbed by the other guys. Women – witnesses and suspects alike – responded well to him, and most men couldn’t find anything too coppish about him that set off their alarm bells. Ben wasn’t sure he’d ever make a great detective, but in Cobb County, he didn’t think that was ever going to be an issue.
                  “I gave you a twenty minute heads up,” he said by way of greeting as Trey fell into the passenger seat and pulled the door shut. “And you didn’t have your shoes tied? You have to be ready faster than that.”
                  “Yeah.” Trey pitched forward in the seat to lace his Nikes as Ben threw the Charger in reverse. “Sorry about that. I had a date.”
                  It wasn’t even nine and the date had already progressed to the state of undress: had to give the guy credit for that.
                  “What’s with this?” Trey gestured toward the radio; he chuckled. “Research for the next time you try to pick up an eighteen-year-old?”
                  Ben toed the gas and heard the thump of the kid’s head hitting the glove box.
                  Trey didn’t respond – he was smart enough to never be indignant – but sat back, changed the station back to classic rock (the Stones were done and Free was on) and asked, “So