Читать книгу Vengeance Passed On - Macy Gray - Страница 5

Chapter 1

As Jaxon Bartleight was attempting to read the daily newspaper, he couldn’t help but ask himself what he was doing. Throwing the newspaper aside, he picked up the top file. “I’ve looked over this damn file hundreds of times and still can’t seem to find the missing link on this case.”

Jaxon finally got up and threw the newspaper in the recycle bin, then refilled his coffee cup. There was no way he could just set the file aside. “I must be slipping in my later years and should probably consider retiring and enjoying my remaining years doing what I truly enjoy—fishing, reading, and traveling around the world. Well, at least, fishing and reading.”

The cabin near the lake was paid in full and stocked with every amenity he needed for a full and fun retirement. He had been an officer in Denver for twenty-six years. He knew he could retire, and there were some cohorts who couldn’t wait for him to do so. He had an attitude that enjoyed conflict and working alone, but he was a really good officer. No one could say otherwise. He had a way of seeing a case and a suspect, or the eyes of an outstanding criminal, and finding the piece of the puzzle that others missed. Never having married (though he came close once) or had children, he spent his life focusing on the job. Jaxon didn’t have much of a social life and spent much of his free time focusing on his house, his cabin, or his job-related items. He tried counseling once, when the department required it, but they wanted him to find a side activity away from the department, which is why he bought a cabin on a lake where he could fish all he wanted. Needless to say, it didn’t help, since he would simply take a file with him to the cabin to work on after he was done fishing or while he was sitting in the boat watching a bobber bouncing up and down with the flow of the water, sometimes going under, then suddenly resurfacing. Counseling advice followed (at least, Jaxon thought so).

But Jaxon also knows he won’t be able to retire while this case is still unsolved because he couldn’t mentally handle leaving a job unfinished. Jaxon is a fifty-eight-year-old Caucasian single man, athletically built, with salt-and-pepper hair, visually resting on more salt than pepper. His father was a captain when Jaxon was growing up, and he had dreamed since he was a little boy of following in his father’s footsteps. Starting with the blue uniform, steel-toed shoes, light-blue shirt, and snazzy blue hat. The pants were solid dark blue, while the shirt was a nice shade of light blue. His badge was worn on the left side of his shirt, with the patch on the sleeve denoting what precinct he was affiliated with. The nice dark-blue hat with the gold trim made the entire ensemble come together. He wanted to look that good from head to toe.

Jaxon remembered being taught by his father to never wear a white shirt because it can reflect in the dark, which gives his enemy better odds of winning a fight. He never imagined when he was young that he would switch to a desk job where he would work on independent cases like cold-case files, wear jeans, and not have to hand out tickets. He would read the newspaper when he was younger but only the crimes that had occurred overnight. He loved the TV cop shows and had a child’s badge and gun that his father gave him when he was eight.

His mother had left when Jaxon was three. All he remembered was yelling between his parents and then nothing. He knew that his father treated his mother badly often, but he never laid a hand on Jaxon or mistreated him in any way. Someday, he’ll have the courage to search her out to ask the burning question, “Why did you abandon us?” And it was not the “us” Jaxon wanted an answer to; it was the “me” part. Or maybe it was better to just not know and speculate, with outlandish fantasies, how she must have been kidnapped and refused to tell where her family was so was never allowed to leave her captors.

His dad wanted to live vicariously through Jaxon and encouraged him to lean toward law enforcement. Jaxon worked at the main Denver police office, focusing on finding missing criminals that had been tagged as cold cases with outstanding warrants, even if they may be less than a year old. His career began as a beat cop but slowly moved to some undercover work, and ultimately, where he is today. He had a natural hard side to him that made him able to relate to people but not necessarily empathize with them. So now cold cases. Usually, these were files that other officers had been unable to solve, so they ended up in the pile for someone else to deal with, namely Jaxon and his partner, Peter Galbreth.

Peter was Jaxon’s eighth partner in the last ten years. He always treated his partners very rudely and liked to leave them out of the loop, so they always wound up requesting a change from the captain. But Peter was different. He had a mild temperament and had been able to sidestep Jaxon’s idiosyncrasies, so he had lasted. Peter was a young (twenty-six years old) redhead Irish officer who was top of his class at the police academy, married for only a couple years to his wife, Julie, who was pregnant with their first. His main focus was always his family and work was just that—work. Jaxon was his first partner, so he didn’t even know how a partner should act, however, he did know Jaxon’s reputation as a great investigator and figured he could learn the ins and outs of investigating from him, thus, preparing him for later years, possibly in another department, or even as captain. He loved his job from day one, even with a tough partner. He also wore jeans every day, however, unlike Jaxon, Peter wore button-up shirts instead of T-shirts.

Jaxon had always had a knack for finding these missing criminals, easier than most of the other officers, mainly because he had a great mind for details and piecing together all the parts to make a mental picture of a case just like a jigsaw puzzle. He just couldn’t bring himself to ever acknowledge defeat and hand the file over to someone else. Definitely not how he planned to finish the final case of his career before retirement.

However, this recent case involving Johnny Markus was beginning to make Jaxon feel like he had lost his observatory skills. This was always his knack because he could see how things should be, and that allowed him to notice what was out of place, even when very minor. Johnny was a notorious thief who spent years getting away after holding up numerous banks, liquor stores, and any other small shops he felt he could slip in and out of easily. His last robbery though pushed him to the top of the pile when he murdered someone. The bank teller had snuck her hand onto the silent alarm, not realizing that Johnny noticed the sleight of hand. He spent all of three seconds deciding she needed to die.

This was where Peter and Jaxon came into the picture. Other teams of officers had made attempts to apprehend Johnny after every job he perpetrated. But each team that failed simply passed the file to another team, who again failed. The cycle kept repeating until it came to the last resort—Peter and Jaxon—where it would be solved or remain permanently in a stack that no one would ever touch again.