The corpse of Octavio Morales, with its mask of beatific agony, had put me in mind of some martyred Spanish saint, but Joe Thomson’s puckered wince is more pedestrian, the look of a man who’s just smashed his thumb with a hammer, or remembered an errand he’d promised then failed to perform. Rimmed in black, the contact wound over his right ear raised a blood stamp roughly conforming to the muzzle of a sig Sauer P229, the same as the service pistol he still clutches in his right hand. The cavernous exit, blasting out the top left side of the head, sprayed wet tissue over the interior windows, the projectile embedding itself in the door pillar. We have a neat, self-contained scene, one that tells a straightforward, though tragic story.
“What were you thinking?” I ask under my breath, peering at him, willing the lips to move, but of course that’s not going to happen. To my shame, in spite of the spectacle of a man’s death – a man I had met and spoken with, a man whose life I knew a little about – my thoughts are entirely focused on the loss Thomson’s death represents to me. No shooters named in the Morales case, no damning testimony against Reg Keller or Tony Salazar. The fact that my captain sees this as an avenue toward redemption doesn’t comfort me much, since I’d been planning to return in triumph, thoroughly vindicated, and not as a kneeling supplicant.
The smell of burnt gunpowder is still strong, in spite of the open driver’s side door and the post-rain mist. My nostrils twitch, and the sound of the revolver going off in my lap fills my head. A sympathetic ache in my thigh reminds me, that could be you. I step back, glancing at the droplets clinging like dew to the exterior of Thomson’s vehicle, a several-year-old blue gmc Yukon.
“Good to see you again, sir.”
At my elbow, an eager kid in the garb of a crime-scene investigator smiles at me, giving no sign of being affected by the scene. I nod.
“Remember me?” he says. “Edgar Castro. We talked about that other case…?”
“Right. Castro. I remember. Let’s get to work here, okay?”
Overhead, a muddy gray sky threatens a repeat of the shower I drove over in. In spite of the sticky air, the first responder, a squared-away young patrolman named Nguyen, still wears a dripping poncho over his uniform. After Castro’s eagerness, I appreciate the businesslike demeanor of Nguyen. I take him to one side and let him rattle off his satisfyingly precise report. He responded to a call from dispatch at 6:04 a.m., arriving at the scene seven minutes later, where he secured the victim’s vehicle and did a preliminary interview of the security guard who called in the shooting.
“His name is Wendell Cropper,” he says, nodding toward a uniformed security guard having a smoke just outside the perimeter tape. “First thing out of his mouth is, he used to be on hpd back in the mid-nineties, which is funny because he should have known better than to disturb the scene.”
“What did he do?”
Nguyen makes a pistol out of his fingers. “He opened the door and uncocked the pistol, then pushed the victim’s finger out of the trigger guard. Said he was afraid it might go off again. Then he shut the door and called us.”
“The car door was unlocked?”
Nguyen nods.
“Okay, I want to have a talk with Mr. Cropper.”
The security guard flicks his cigarette away at my approach. I lift the tape, letting him duck underneath. He’s about my age, mid-forties, with a lean, smooth face and thick black eyebrows knitted together in the middle. Pale skin, but a charcoal shadow of beard in need of shaving. His uniform consists of fatigue pants and a short-sleeved shirt with epaulets and his name embroidered over the pocket.
“What exactly is it that you secure?” I ask.
He points with two fingers, like he’s still holding the cigarette between them, sweeping a row of gray corrugated buildings behind the tall hurricane fence.
“I got these warehouses here, and then some others a street over, which is where my security office is. About four in the morning, while I was doing a foot patrol, I heard what sounded like a gunshot off in the distance. I couldn’t tell where it come from, so I just noted the time – 4:14 a.m. – and went on with my route.”
“You didn’t call it in?”
“I wasn’t a hundred percent sure,” he says. “Plus, I know you boys got better ways to occupy your time than hunting down random gunshots in the night.” He alternates between crossing his arms and resting his hands on his hips, unable to find a comfortable posture. “In hindsight, I guess that’s what I should’ve done, but the rain started up and, honestly, I started second-guessing myself.”
An hour later, though, he’d hopped behind the wheel of his truck and done another circuit, finding Thomson’s Yukon.
“From the exhaust I could tell the engine was running, so I got out and walked up alongside. Soon as I flashed my light on the window, I knew something was wrong.” He gives an exaggerated gulp. “All that blood and brain on the glass.”
He’s apologetic about interfering, but says he’d heard a story before he left the police department of somebody taking a bullet at a crime scene because a cocked pistol hadn’t been rendered safe. He reached in without thinking and uncocked Thomson’s gun.
“Why’d you leave HPD, Mr. Cropper?”
The question prompts some thinking on his part, but after I remind him how easily these things can be checked, he admits the department cut him loose.
“I had a whole series of problems,” he says with a bashful smile completely at odds with his rough appearance. “The main thing was, I didn’t like all the reports, so I’d kinda forget to do them, you know? This work here, it’s much more suited to my temperament.” He pronounces the word as temper mint. “I don’t mind the hours or the solitude.”
When police officers daydream about bagging the job for some high-paying private sector security gig, this isn’t what they typically have in mind. Consulting on matters of security is where the money is. Actually securing things? Not so lucrative. Cropper’s a type I’ve encountered before, desperate to be part of the real action in spite of his reluctance to admit disappointment with the turn his career’s taken. In that light, his behavior makes sense. He didn’t think we’d be irritated at his tampering with the suicide weapon so much as grateful that he’d prevented the dead man’s punching an officer’s ticket from the grave.
As I’m conducting the preliminary interviews, detectives start trickling onto the scene. Mack Ordway rambles up with grim-faced determination, followed by Hedges and Bascombe, who apparently shared a car. Aguilar arrives with a few others, and a while later, bringing up the rear, Lorenz reports in. He walks toward Bascombe, but when he gets close, the lieutenant moves my way.
“You up to this, March?” he asks.
“A suicide? I think so. Don’t forget, I’ve had a lot of experience.”
He nods. “Then maybe it’s time to get the canvass going. Put some of these detectives to work.”
Across the street from the warehouses, a scrawny hedge of pines screens a residential neighborhood lit by amber streetlights, the mist forming haloes around their bulbs. I gather up the detectives, give them a rundown on the situation, and make the canvass assignments. As I speak, eyes cut frequently to Bascombe as if saying, Is this for real? We’re taking orders from this guy? The lieutenant ignores them. Before we break up, Hedges offers a few words.
“I don’t have to tell you men, but this was one of our own. Let’s get the job done, all right? Quick and thorough.”
The sky rumbles and we all gaze upward, as if it might have something to say. It doesn’t, so the team breaks up, heading into the gray morning on a perfunctory hunt.
Edgar Castro comes up to me, a plastic evidence bag dangling from his hand. Inside, a mobile phone buzzes silently, the screen illuminated. The name on the display reads stef. Bascombe reaches for the bag, quizzing me with a raised brow.
“The wife,” I say.
He draws his hand back. “Ah. We better get the notification taken care of.”
“You want to come along?”
From the way he recoiled from the ringing phone, I already know the answer. But Bascombe surprises me by saying yes. He notifies the captain, then motions to my car. “You drive.”
Stephanie Thomson comes to the door with dried mascara on her cheeks, wearing an oversized men’s button-up shirt and a pair of loose-fitting cotton shorts. She’s younger than I expected, more Cavallo’s generation than mine and Thomson’s, pretty but with the lined, hollow-cheeked look that comes from hard drinking. Her nose and the rim of her eyes shine pink. In her tight-packed fist, a puff of damp Kleenex juts from between the knuckles. Bascombe shows his badge and makes the introductions, setting off more tears.
“It’s all right,” I say, putting an arm over her shoulders, guiding her to a brown recliner in the apartment’s open living room. Of course it’s not all right. It’s terrible and will only get worse. But I speak the words out of reflex, prompted by emotional muscle memory. When people cry, you tell them not to. The first impulse is to take the pain away, because if you don’t, how can you give any comfort?
Bascombe crouches wide-legged at the edge of the sofa, leaning toward her with his hands intensely clasped. He looks like he’s about to break the news, but no words come out of his mouth. I kneel beside the recliner, taking her hand.
“I have something to tell you, Stephanie – ”
“Is it Joe?” she asks, nodding her head over and over. “It’s Joe, isn’t it? I’ve been trying to call him all night, and he never answers. I knew something was wrong, I just knew. Is he…?”
“He’s dead,” I say. No use in dragging it out. “His body was discovered earlier this morning. He was sitting behind the wheel of his vehicle, pulled over on the side of the road. He had his pistol in his hand, and a gunshot wound to the head.”
Her tear ducts open up, expelling a river of glistening salt, an impossible current pulsing out in silence. Shaking from the shoulders down through to the knees, an involuntary tremor, reminding me of a marble column under earthquake pressure, the dusty cracking that presages impending collapse.
“He shot himself,” she says, nodding violently, so certain. “He did that to himself.”
“We’re still conducting our investigation, but – ”
“How could he…?” Her mouth widens, like she’s trying to swallow something too large. “He did that to himself?”
Suddenly she’s slamming her fists against the armrests, kicking her legs, screaming in unintelligible, angry spasms. Bascombe springs forward, pinning her arms like he thinks she’s having a seizure. I stand back and let him do it. After a few moments she goes limp in his arms and starts crying again. I go into the kitchen and look for a glass, pouring water I found in the refrigerator door. When I return, putting the glass on the table beside her, she’s clotting her tears with a fistful of tissue. Bascombe is back on the couch, looking ready to pounce at a moment’s notice.
“I know this is hard, but I do need to ask some questions. And we’d like to take a look around, too, if that’s all right. It’s standard in a case like this.”
“Did he leave a note?” she asks, her voice weak.
“Not that we know of. I was thinking he might have left you a voicemail message?”
She shakes her head. “I’ve been checking my cell and the home number, thinking maybe… but there’s nothing.”
I hand her the water glass, which she examines with a bleak stare. Instead of hammering her with questions right away, I ask permission to take a look around. She consents with a flick of the hand. The lieutenant sticks to the couch, motioning me to go ahead. As I walk down the hallway toward the bedroom, I can hear him speaking softly to her.
The apartment is small but quite nice, recent construction with a hardwood entry, slate-colored tile on the kitchen floor, granite counters and stainless sinks, completely at odds with the couple’s furniture, which I’m guessing is a mix of family hand-me-downs and big-box economy buys selected with an eye to comfort, not looks. The kind of place Charlotte would turn her nose up at, but exactly what I’d expect, given what I know about the Thomsons’ history. I’m guessing this is where Stephanie landed after the divorce, and Joe moved some of his things in when they remarried.
At the back of the hallway there’s a bedroom and bath on one side and a small home office on the other. I step into the office, noting a dusty-screened computer and a stack of printouts which turn out to be real estate listings annotated in loopy, feminine handwriting. In the corner, a half-open closet door beckons. Behind a series of Men’s Wearhouse suits, mostly black and blue solids, I find several rifle cases. Inside one, a padded plastic case, I find a bolt-action hunting rifle with a scope. The next contains a flat-top AR-15 carbine with a telescoping stock and a nice acog sight on the rail. The third case is a short nylon number with narrow pouches on the side for extra magazines. About the right size for a swat-style 9mm submachine gun, but I can tell from its slack droop that the case is empty. I unzip it anyway just to be sure.
Across the hall, I note the rumpled bedcovers, the framed wedding and honeymoon photos on the dresser – dating back maybe five years at most, making the original marriage more recent than I’d supposed – and a tangle of dirty clothes on the floor. On Thomson’s nightstand, there’s a stack of paperback books, including a new-looking copy of The Kingwood Killing with a bookmark halfway through. Inside the cover, a receipt from Murder by the Book, a local independent on Bissonnet specializing in all books crime-related, dated last Saturday, the day after I joined the Morales investigation. So Thomson was doing his homework. Inside the nightstand drawer, a loaded.357 Magnum snub nose, one of those weightless titanium numbers that’s easy to carry and excruciating to shoot, fitted with a Crimson Trace laser grip.
As I close the drawer, Bascombe leans into the bedroom, waving his phone. “Can you sit with her, March? I’ve got to take this outside.”
He exits the apartment, leaving me alone with Stephanie Thomson. She slumps sideways in the recliner, exhausted, quiet apart from the occasional sniffle. I know from experience she’s not done crying. It’ll come in waves, interrupted by surprising, clearheaded stillness, a constant ebb and flow between mind and heart.
“Has Joe been depressed recently?” I ask.
“Not the past couple of days. But before that, yeah. For the past week, it was like living with the old Joe. The bad one. We only got back together a few months ago, and he seemed like a changed man – the one I married, instead of the one I divorced.”
“He’d taken up art, I hear.”
She gives me a long look. “He’d taken up something, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
She shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“Please,” I say. “The more information I have about his state of mind, the better.”
She wipes her eyes, gives her nose a hard rub, sitting up straight in the recliner. “Then here’s the story, for better or worse. Just recently something changed, and the old Joe was back. He said he wasn’t drinking, but I knew better. He has this duffel bag he carries his gear in, and I looked inside and found something.”
“What was that?”
“A soft white cellophane-wrapped package. I don’t know what it was, but it looked like drugs to me. Cocaine, whatever. I don’t have any firsthand experience of that stuff. But I figured he was using again.”
“Did you confront him?”
“Not about that.”
“But you did confront him about something?”
She nods, then coughs back a fresh flow of tears. “You mentioned the art. Well, it was a therapist who put him up to that, before we got back together, and he really took it seriously. Rented a studio at this place over in Montrose, and he’d spend hours over there, sometimes all night, working on his sculpture.” Her mouth wrinkles at the corner. “I know nothing about art of course, but it wasn’t anything I’d call artistic, just globs of clay and all these faces that looked like they could’ve been made by a kid. I mean, the man can’t draw a picture to save his life, so I don’t know what kind of artist he could really be.” She pauses, thinking over the words. “But it made him happy, so…”
“You were saying you’d confronted him?”
Again with the nods. “Like I said, he reverted back to his old self, and the way he was when I left him, and that first time the problem wasn’t just the substance abuse. It was the other women. Don’t get me wrong, when I married him I already knew he was a bit of a stray dog, you know? But that was then. I expected him to put that stuff behind him, and when he didn’t, that was it for me. I couldn’t trust him. So my first thought when all this happened was, he’s seeing somebody. And there’s this cute little thing down at the studio, the girl who rented the space across from his.”
“You thought they were having an affair?”
“An affair?” She smiles at the quaint term. “You could say that, I guess. But when I brought it up, he denied everything. He said it was just trouble at work. And I… it sounds crazy, but I wanted to believe him. I wanted more than anything to be wrong because what we had, I didn’t want to lose it again. You can’t possibly understand how special he was to me, all the plans we had, the way we could be together.”
She doesn’t cry or convulse with grief. She’s talking about him now like he’s ancient history, like the news of his death came to her years before.
“You said the past couple of days, things were back to normal?”
“Yeah,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself. She looks down, noticing the shirt she’s wearing, pulling the fabric up for inspection. She sniffs the sleeve, then lets out a small but terrible sigh, smelling his scent and realizing how soon it will fade.
The conventional wisdom is, when a suicide makes his final decision, a sense of peace follows. He loses interest in the everyday world, and as a result becomes capable of beautiful gestures. Taciturn men suddenly confess to acquaintances how much their casual encounters have really meant over the years. Treasured objects are given away as the suicide divests himself of things which now mean nothing.
Stephanie Thomson’s description of her husband’s rebound doesn’t quite fit the pattern. After a dry spell, they’d been “intimate” again – her word – and he’d apologized for being distant. Things would be better from now on, he said. They were even looking for a house.
“But I knew it couldn’t last.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“I got a phone call,” she says. “A really strange one, out of the blue. Some guy acting all friendly, asking questions about Joe, saying he wanted to get in touch with him. It was trouble, I could feel it. There was something creepy about him.”
“Did he give you a name?”
She shrugs. “If he did, I don’t remember. I got scared, though, thinking maybe it was connected to the drugs in his bag or something.”
The truth dawns on me. “This call, did you tell Joe about it?”
“No,” she says. “I called Tony and he said he would take care of everything. He told me not to worry.”
“Tony?” My pulse races. “You mean Antonio Salazar?”
She nods calmly, the most natural thing in the world. “They work together on the same squad. They’ve been friends for years. Tony’s always looked after Joe. Even in the bad days, he tried to get me to stick it out for Joe’s sake, that’s the kind of friend he is. This… this is going to just devastate him.”
I sit back on the couch, suddenly weary. So the day after I visit Salazar’s office, hoping to touch base with Thomson, Stephanie calls Salazar, telling him about my conversation with her. The next day, some random Latino banger dangling information on my case tries to punch holes in me. And early the next morning, Joe Thomson is dead, apparently by his own hand.
She sits there glumly in her chair, shaking her head at the pain her husband’s death will cause Tony Salazar, and I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake her. I want to slap the frown off her face. You did this. It was you. He’s dead because of you. But I might as well slap myself. It’s not Stephanie Thomson’s fault. What she did made perfect sense, just trying to protect her man against himself. I’m the idiot. Yet again. If I’d just been patient, everything would have turned out right. If I’d let Thomson come to me, given him time to be discreet. Instead, desperate to make something happen, I’d blundered into the lair of Keller and Salazar, fatally tipping my hand.
I hadn’t just missed my last chance. I’d gotten him killed.
Stephanie hands over the keys to Thomson’s studio, along with the address and a hand-drawn map, just as her sister arrives, prompting a new outpouring of grief. I find Bascombe outside on the landing, sheltering from a percussive bout of rain.
“Give me sunshine any day,” he says.
In the car, I can tell he’s got something on his mind, but asking what would be the equivalent of sticking my finger in a trap. No thanks. I’d like to go straight over to the studio – given how clean the apartment was, I can’t help thinking the studio is where Thomson kept his personal files, and maybe that duffel bag his wife mentioned – only the first order of business is unloading the lieutenant. I don’t want him over my shoulder for every step of the investigation.
At this point, Thomson’s suicide looks perfectly straightforward. If I suggest otherwise to Bascombe or anyone else before I can actually prove it, the only thing I can be sure of is my removal from the case. Once I’m alone, the first order of business will be a call to Wilcox. The longer I can keep him quiet, the more likely it’ll be to make headway.
“So what did she have to say?” Bascombe asks.
I give him a rundown, omitting my call and the note now residing in my pocket. I also downplay the studio, omitting reference to the keys now in my possession.
“He had cocaine in his bag?”
“It might have been coke. She couldn’t be sure.”
“How much?”
“One package, she said.”
The news makes him restless. He shifts in the seat, fiddles with the air-conditioning vents, raps his knuckles in rhythm against the window. Whatever information he’s holding, it’s clearly dying to get out.
“What?” I ask, knowing I’ll regret it.
He jumps on the question. “That call I just took? That was from a friend of mine over in IAD. You know what he told me?”
My heart takes a break, leaving the blood to settle in my veins. Yes, I know what he told you. He said I’d been wrangling for a deal, using my ex-partner as a go-between, trying to get a blanket immunity to open Thomson’s lips. He said whatever was going on here, I’m hip-deep in it and the first thing for the lieutenant to do is pull me off the case.
But Bascombe volunteers nothing. He wants me to earn it.
“What did he tell you, sir?”
“That our victim has been the subject of a number of internal investigations, including an incident a couple of years ago when some evidence went missing from a drug bust. He was dirty, in other words. And when I told the captain, he called up Thomson’s boss, Big Reg Keller, and you know what he said?”
“Tell me.”
“He said the other officers in the unit had been concerned about Thomson. He was a loose cannon apparently, and was suspected of having a substance problem.”
Sure he was. Keller is wasting no time insulating himself, doing the necessary damage control, just as Salazar had done when he called me after my own shooting, making sure I couldn’t connect the dots between my request for help and the subsequent attack.
“Does that sit right with you?” Bascombe asks.
“Sit right? In what sense?”
“In the sense that when a brother officer eats his gun, you don’t trash his memory.”
“The blue wall of silence, you mean?”
“Common decency. What good does it do anybody for them to say he had a drug problem, or was a dirty cop or whatever? Whether it’s true or not, the man’s dead. He shot himself, right? So if he deserves anything, it’s pity. Instead, his own people are throwing him under the bus, when they ought to be sticking up for him.”
This isn’t what I expected from Bascombe, not by a long shot. The problem is, when you’ve singled someone out as a nemesis, it’s hard to get an accurate read on character. The lieutenant, since I know he’s never much cared for me, has always lacked psychological depth. He’s a one-note, a foot soldier in the anti-March crusade, without any nuance necessary. Suddenly I find myself agreeing with his instinct, if not his reasoning. Like Wilcox, whose move to Internal Affairs simply externalized a cherished principle, I think the dirty cops should go down. But then I know firsthand what it’s like to suffer for their benefit. If a cop snorts white lady from the evidence locker, plants a drop piece on an unarmed suspect, or takes money on the side for looking the other way, I don’t think a self-inflicted bullet to the brain should whitewash the record.
Call me naive, but I still subscribe to the “few bad apples” theory. We might be cut from the same cloth as the people we lock up, we might have a tendency to jackknife our relationships or channel the violent impulses that go hand in hand with what we witness into unprofitable avenues, but for the most part, we’re clean. Not squeaky clean, because no one is, but relatively unspotted. Because we didn’t get into this for the cheap thrill of packing a gun, or to work out our inferiority complexes, or because we couldn’t find a better line of work. Carter Robb has it right, in a way. We could have kept things safe, chosen decent occupations that make for polite dinner conversation, better pay and better hours and a far reduced probability of being shot or beat down. But we didn’t choose to be the safe guys. We chose to be the good guys, hard as that is when the world is bad.
And maybe Thomson was bad; maybe he was the sort like Wilcox said who should have been screened out by the personality tests. Even so, the man had changed. He’d changed enough to get his wife back. Enough to turn on his former friends. He’d changed enough that they had to put a bullet in him, which in my book made him one of us, not them.
The dates aren’t lost on me, either. The change in Thomson, his dark relapse, dates back a week or so, roughly the same time as the Octavio Morales death. That’s what shook Thomson up. That’s what made him seek me out. Something happened in that house. Either he was there or he found out about it secondhand. Whatever it was, he couldn’t live with it. Thinking of that girl tied to the bed, her blood on the sheets, her body now missing, I can imagine what was eating away at him, because it’s eating away at me, too.
Does Bascombe see any of this? Is he giving me some kind of unspoken license? That’s what I can’t figure out.
“What are you saying?” I ask him. “That I should take a harder look at his unit?”
He shakes his head, waves a dismissive hand, his eyes scrunching up at the excess of my misreading. “No, man, that’s not what I’m saying. But if you ask me, when you talk to his colleagues – as you no doubt will under the circumstances – nobody on my squad is gonna be upset if you omit the common courtesies, if you know what I mean.”
“Yessir,” I say, almost liking the guy. “I think I do.”
Bridger waits for me back at the scene, standing aloof from the circle of detectives who’ve gathered post-canvass to compare notes. In my absence, he’s gotten Thomson’s body bagged and on the stretcher, ready for transport. As I slip under the perimeter tape, all eyes turn. I can see from the glum expression on Ordway’s face and the way Aguilar keeps checking his watch that the canvass hasn’t gone well, so I skip it for now and head straight to the pathologist.
“I’ll have the details once the autopsy’s done,” Bridger says, “but my preliminary conclusion, big surprise, is that he died from a gunshot wound to the head.”
“Self-inflicted?”
A cautious nod. “Seems consistent. Clearly a contact wound. Your forensics people can connect the dots once they check the bullet recovered in the door pillar against the ballistics of his side arm. What I see here is consistent with the time the security guard claims to have heard the shot, but if that changes, I’ll let you know.”
“We’ll need a really thorough tox screen. Alcohol, drugs. Cocaine has been mentioned as a possibility, so I’d like to check for that.”
He gives me a perfunctory nod, not needing to be told how to do the job. I tell him anyway, just to be thorough. Then, after getting him to commit to a quick autopsy, I let him get on with it, turning my attention to the impatient detectives.
“Nobody saw anything,” Ordway says with a shrug.
Lorenz adjusts the sunglasses on the bridge of his nose. “They didn’t hear nothing, either. No gunshot, no nothing. So no help fixing the time.”
I glance through the tree line at the gray fences and low black roofs. Given the distance and the early morning storm, it’s not surprising we don’t have any witnesses from the neighborhood. Still, it was worth a shot.
“Here’s what I’m wondering,” Ordway says, picking up on the conversation I’d interrupted with my arrival. “Why’d he choose this exact spot to punch out? Say you were gearing up for your final sayonara – is this where you’d do it?”
Aguilar rubs his nose. “I’d do it in the bathtub.”
“The bathtub?” Lorenz says, looking over his sunglasses. “Seriously? Then don’t expect us to respond to that scene – ”
“What?”
“- unless you promise to keep your clothes on.”
Ordway chuckles. “Me? I’ve actually given this some thought, boys. At my age, you do. When my time comes, I’m taking the elevator to the top of the Transco Tower – ”
“It’s not called that anymore,” Lorenz says.
“The Transco Tower,” Ordway insists. “And when I get there, I’m gonna leap off into the air and see if I can land right in the middle of the Water Wall, right there on the steps where they take all the wedding pictures. Splat.” He smacks his hands together and gives us a demented grin. “People would be talking about that forever.”
Aguilar scrunches his nose up in thought. “From the Tower to the Water Wall? I don’t think you could make it that far, not as fat as you are.”
“But if I did,” Ordway says, “people would talk about it.”
I put a hand on his shoulder. “As interesting as this is, guys, there’s only one death we need to worry about here – ”
“No, but think of it,” Ordway says. “Why did he do it here? There’s gotta be a reason. It could be anything, I guess. Maybe he grew up in one of those houses over there, or maybe he was on his way somewhere important and decided to pull over and get it done with.”
Lorenz gives a dismissive snort. “Or it has nothing to do with the place. He’s drinking, he’s depressed, whatever, and so he’s just driving around aimlessly. What matters isn’t where he’s going on the road; it’s where he’s going in his head. And when he gets there” – he points a finger at his temple, cocks his thumb back – “pop. End of story.”
I leave them to theorize in peace.
The captain has long since departed the scene, so I offer Bascombe, who’s conferring with the crime-scene technicians, a ride back downtown. He declines, saying he’ll tag along with one of the guys and leave me to it. I’m relieved. I need some time alone to think through my plan of attack. Since they were close colleagues, I’ll have to talk with both Keller and Salazar, but before I do that, I want some kind of leverage. Otherwise they’re going to give me the same story they previewed for the captain.
There are only two places I think of to get what I need. Bridger’s autopsy findings, which at the most optimistic estimate won’t be available until late in the day, and Thomson’s art studio. If he had anything worth hiding, maybe that’s where he’d have left it. The keys rattle in my pocket, begging to be used.
And then Brad Templeton calls. I’d forgotten all about my commitment to him, and my first impulse is to dodge. But the man’s a bloodhound in his own right, and it’s just possible I can put him to work. Like I said, I don’t think everything should be left to the police. Sometimes a private citizen needs to step up.
“What do you know about an hpd officer named Reginald Keller? He runs some kind of Homeland Security-related squad downtown.”
“Never heard of him,” Templeton says. “Should I have?”
“I want you to do me a favor, Brad. Take a look at this guy and see what you find. My contact in Internal Affairs leads me to believe he’s the subject of ongoing investigations, which means there’s a story there for you.”
“Not the one I’m after, though.”
“Think of it as something extra. My captain’s put me back to work, so there’s nothing I can do for you at the moment on the other thing – ”
“You’re off the task force?”
“I’m keeping a hand in,” I say, not wanting him to wriggle off the hook. “Do this for me and you’ll not only get the IAD story but I’ll give you what you need on Hannah Mayhew, too. It’s a twofer. You can’t beat that.”
The wheels are turning on Templeton’s end of the line and I know better than to keep talking. After some audible groans and sighs, he finally relents. I repeat Keller’s name and give him Salazar, too, along with everything I know about Comprehensive Risk Assessment. By the time he’s finished writing, there’s an energetic note in his voice.
“You’re gonna follow up on this, right?” I ask.
I hear his pen rat-tat-tatting against the receiver. “You take care of me, man, and I’ll take care of you.”
“Deal.”
On the way over, I try Cavallo’s phone, hoping to make my apologies for ditching the task force. Not that I’d had a choice, not really, but I didn’t want her thinking I was ungrateful, especially for the good advice last night.
It’s not Cavallo I’m abandoning, though. It’s Hannah.
Detectives are reassigned all the time. I took a shot at the Mayhew case and struck out. I did what I could for the girl, and now it’s up to Cavallo. That’s the logic, anyway. Only this isn’t about logic. I’m turning my back on the girl. Moving on. Like it never mattered in the first place. Like it was just another job. The phone rings, Cavallo doesn’t answer, and in my mind the luminescent face of Hannah Mayhew starts to dim.
I leave a message and hang up.
The address is on Morgan Street, a couple of blocks north of Westheimer between Montrose and Bagby, a tight-packed warren of blocks where newly built modernist houses and condos sit cheek by jowl with run-down duplexes and wood-paneled apartment blocks. The sidewalks disappear and reappear, some patches of road pristine and others as fissured as a polar ice cap of concrete. Hipsters and homeless mingle on the block, shiny Volvos and Mini Coopers parallel parking alongside aging rust buckets.
The place I’m looking for is a two-story redbrick affair with tattered awnings over the ground-floor windows. Seventy-five years ago it could have been a factory or a warehouse, but now it has that long-abandoned look, with grass growing up through the sidewalks and the wood-trimmed window splintered with rot. The signs of occupation are slight, the sort of markers left by squatters rather than developers. The original front door, approached by a short flight of cracked steps, has been replaced by a glass commercial entrance with hand-painted lettering announcing the morga n st. café & art collective. Near the handle, a series of adhesive credit cards assure the cash-strapped of a ready welcome, and a taped-in sign indicates free Wi-Fi.
Inside, the impression is better. Glossy concrete floors, zinc-topped café tables and aluminum chairs giving off a dull sheen under the track lights. The corners house overstuffed leather chairs, most of them occupied, and a series of rickety bookshelves bursting with fat paperbacks. As I make my way to the counter, a tooled mahogany buttress reclaimed from some old building – possibly this one – repurposed without being restored, no doubt intentionally, several students glance up from their laptops, making me as the Man.
A large square table, another refugee from bygone days, hosts a half-dozen middle-aged ladies crowned in various stages of blond, each of them clutching a copy of the same book. They pause in mid-discussion, turning to watch me pass. Judging by the volume of ink on skin, the multiple piercings, they’re doing their best to keep up with their daughters.
Over the counter, the menu’s inscribed in chalk on four large blackboards suspended from the rafters. I missed my morning coffee, so the first order of business is testing the house blend. The girl on duty is short and lithe, upholstered in nubby fabric from the developing world, dreadlocks tied back, a stack of tribal bangles protecting her wrists. But her glasses say ARMANI on the side.
The coffee is better than good. After two gulps I’m seeing the world with new eyes. My elbow on the counter, I scan the room, realizing I’m one of only three men present. Everyone else is female and white, affecting an affluent version of grunge. The girl behind the counter hovers a few feet off, seeming uncertain how to deal with my lingering presence.
“You have some studios here, is that right?”
She raises a pierced eyebrow, like she wasn’t expecting someone in a jacket and tie to know about the studio space, or even art in general.
“Umm,” she says. “Yeah.” Her ringed thumb indicates a set of double doors to the right of the counter. They’re painted the same matte black as the walls, so they blend in nicely apart from the crack of light running between them. “There aren’t any shows or anything today, though. And the studios are actually private.”
“Nothing is actually private.” I slide a card across the counter, then finish the last of the coffee.
She holds the card close, staring at the words through her designer glasses. It’s a while before she processes the significance.
“You’re a cop?”
“I’m a homicide detective.” I dangle the keys to Thomson’s studio, a long silver door key and a shorter brass one that looks like it might fit a padlock. “I need to take a look inside.”
“My manager’s not here,” she says.
“That’s okay. As you can see, I have the keys.”
“Well, but… I mean, don’t you need a search warrant?”
I lean across the counter, making eye contact. “Not actually.”
The double doors swing open at the first push. As I pass through, I half expect her to rush after me, but mine are the only footsteps along the tiled floor. The featureless hallway turns right, then dead-ends at a locked door. This is where the building renovation seems to have ended. Through the glass panel over the lock I see a long corridor of raw sheetrock lit by a string of exposed bulbs, the walls pierced by a series of garage-style openings sealed off by the same segmented metal pull-downs that secure self-storage units, each with a shiny padlock at its base.
The silver key opens the door. The pull-downs are numbered sequentially, but only some of them are labeled. Near the end of the corridor, one of the doors is slightly raised and I can hear music playing on the other side. Sarah McLachlan. That one I steer clear of. I check the names on the other doors for Thomson’s, but he isn’t listed, which means I have to go one by one, testing the brass key in every padlock.
I’m a quarter of the way down when the music stops and the raised door rattlesnakes toward the ceiling. A small black-haired woman peers out, wiping her hands on a pair of paint-mottled jeans.
“Can I help you?” she asks.
“Sure.” I cast a hopeless glance along the corridor. “You wouldn’t happen to know which one of these belongs to Joe Thomson?”
She leans against the doorframe, crossing her arms skeptically.
“Joe’s not here. Nobody is but me.”
“I know he’s not here,” I say, walking toward her. “I’m not looking for him, just his studio.”
Her eyes dart to my hand, where the keys glisten. She’s in her twenties, attractive in a candid, wide-eyed way, her hair wrapped in some kind of scarf, maybe to keep it clear of the paint. The baggy plaid shirt and loose-fitting jeans give her a squared-off look, hiding any figure she might have. Her feet, mostly concealed under a puddle of denim, appear to be bare.
“Are you a friend of his?” she asks.
I hand her one of my cards, giving her a moment to look it over. “Could you point me to the right door, please, ma’am?”
“I don’t understand,” she says, still looking at the card.
“A little help here is all I’m asking for.”
“I mean, what do the police want with Joe? Has he done something? He’s such a nice guy, always helpful. He’s, like, my art buddy. I can’t believe he’d do anything…”
Her reaction doesn’t seem right. There’s nothing strange about one cop showing up on another’s doorstep, no reason to assume there’s any guilt involved. Unless.
“Ma’am,” I say. “You realize Joe’s a cop, right?”
She blinks. “What do you -? No, I didn’t realize. How could he… I mean, we shared a… No, never mind what we shared. He’s a cop? Joe? You’re not making this up?”
“He was.”
“Was? He’s not anymore?”
“No,” I say. “He’s not anymore. Now, can you tell me which door is his?”
She holds the card in both hands, thumbs squeezing it into a parabola. Without speaking, she nods toward the lockup directly across from hers. I stoop to the ground, fitting the lock inside, twisting until the hook unclasps. The lock fits tightly. Once I work it free, the door springs up a couple of feet, then sinks several inches. I give the handle a good yank, lifting the metal skin clear.
“The switch is on the wall,” she says.
I flick the lights on. Thomson’s studio is narrow, not more than twelve feet across, but it’s almost twice that length. One wall is covered in shallow gunmetal shelving units that hold, in addition to a few cardboard boxes, an inventory of crude busts executed in plaster, clay, and in a few cases stone. Vaguely human heads on rustic pedestals, mostly looking – intentionally or not – like victims of blunt force trauma, with swollen lips and cratered eye sockets and half-formed ears. I stand there looking at them, uncertain what I’m seeing.
“Joe’s heads.”
I turn. “We haven’t been introduced. I’m Roland March.”
“My name’s Jill,” she says. “Jill Fanning?” Turning the name up at the end like it’s a question. Either she isn’t sure who she is, or she thinks maybe I will have heard of her.
“These heads, that’s what he made?”
There must be thirty of them at least, lined up with methodical precision like cans on the grocery store shelf. On its own, I doubt any of them would be that remarkable, but it’s another story taken together. A kind of primitive power resides in their collective stare. This was therapeutic? Somehow I doubt it. Not so much the work of a man chasing away his demons as courting them, but then I’m no critic of art.
Turning from the sculpted glare, I take in the rest of the studio. The opposite wall houses a series of tables – folding metal jobs with dust-covered tops, a couple of tall, narrow wood platforms straight from the planting shed, some boards propped between sawhorses. Chisels and hammers of various sizes litter the surfaces, along with awls, files, and a rust-red saw.
A couple of scrap-metal sentinels stand in back, figures composed haphazardly of random parts. The welding gear sits in the corner. As I approach to inspect it, Jill Fanning gives one of the iron figures a tap with her knuckle, sending a vibration through its limbs.
“He’s been experimenting with this stuff recently. It’s nice to see him branching out.”
On one of the tables I find a black sketchbook underneath a smooth kidney-shaped rock. The pages are filled with portraits – creaky, literal-minded, two-dimensional sketches that hover somewhere in the gray zone between folk art and simple inability. The pictures are all of the same woman, round-faced with flowing black hair, full lips and closed eyes. If the misshapen heads elicit revulsion, these earnest attempts at photo-realism induce pity. I turn the book so Ms. Fanning can have a look.
“I’ve never seen these before,” she says, taking the sketchbook in hand, flipping the pages slowly. She bites her lip.
“I think they’re meant to be you.”
She laughs. “I doubt that.” Then, frowning. “They don’t look like me, do they?”
I answer with a noncommittal shrug. But yes, they do. Stephanie Thomson’s suspicions come to mind, the fear that her husband had gotten involved with one of his fellow artists. Maybe there was more truth to this than she realized.
“How often would you say Joe was down here?” I ask, glancing into a couple of boxes on a nearby shelf, which contain mostly clay-covered books and abandoned tools.
She’s still transfixed by the sketches. “I don’t know. Maybe once or twice a week. I’ve been here constantly – I’ve got a show coming up – and I’ll typically see him early in the morning, sometimes late at night. He’s unpredictable, I guess you could say. The way it seems to work for him is, he gets this inspiration and rushes over here to do something about it.”
“Always the same inspiration, it looks like.” I pick up one of the heads. It’s surprisingly light. Plaster dust transfers to my hands.
“He’s one of those people who can’t get it to come out right. So he keeps doing it, different variations, like he’s obsessed, you know? There’s a shape in his mind, a certain face, and he keeps trying to capture it again and again.”
She closes the sketchbook and returns it to the table, putting the rock back on top. The halting repetition of her own face on the page has given her pause. I can see the wheels turning as she realizes the implications of her own words. Hers was one of the shapes in his mind, the latest obsession. Before letting her leave, I ask all the usual questions, but she can’t say whether Joe seemed depressed or not, whether he’d been behaving differently.
“Had he given away any prized possessions?”
“No,” she says, then pauses. “When he was up here a couple of days ago, I did hear him talking to Vance – that’s the guy next door – asking him to hold on to a box of stuff. He said he didn’t have room for it.”
Glancing along the shelves, I find that a little hard to believe.
“He gave it to this Vance individual, and not you?”
“We weren’t that close.” Her eyes cut to the sketchbook. “Really.”
“You have a number for this guy?”
She crosses the hallway, retrieving a BlackBerry from her purse, scrolling through the numbers to find the right one. I copy Vance’s information into my notepad, then thank her. As she leaves, I have the feeling she hasn’t told me everything. I get that a lot, and sometimes it’s hard to know whether what’s being held back is important or not. One thing I’m fairly certain about. When Jill Fanning said she was not close to Joe, that was a lie.
I leave a message for Vance, asking him to get in touch as soon as possible, then try Cavallo’s number again. She doesn’t pick up, so I call the station, which routes me over to the task force desk, where a secretary asks me to hold. A few minutes later, Wanda’s voice comes on the line.
“Theresa isn’t here,” she says. “She took a personal day.”
“Oh. Well, I guess you heard about my new assignment?”
“Congratulations. I can tell you, your friend Lieutenant Rick is green with envy. He’s been scampering all over the place looking for a way off this sinking ship.” She frames the observation as an ironic joke, but her tone is pure bitter. “I just spent the last half hour listening to him argue why, in spite of being here to handle the media, it shouldn’t be him in front of the camera. He’s afraid having his face associated with this would tank his career.”
I’m not sure what to say to that. There’s a reason why I’ve never had the urge to chase after rank. Listening to the resignation in her voice, I feel guilty for abandoning her team, even if it was at my captain’s request. Guilty but also relieved, which makes me feel even worse.
“I’ll talk to her later,” I say, hanging up.
Downtown, back at my own desk, I start working my way through Thomson’s personal effects, broken down into a series of inventoried evidence bags. Most of these things I examined quickly at the scene, but I have some time to kill before heading over to see the medical examiner, so I might as well use it.
I locate the bag containing Thomson’s phone, then limber up my writing hand for some extensive transcription. We have software to do all this, but call me old-fashioned. I like to do some jobs myself. Every call he placed, every call he received, every call he missed, I record them all. Then I work my way through his programmed numbers, seeing what I can find. Jill Fanning is there, though no calls have been recently placed to her or received from her. There’s no listing for Vance, but the number she gave me is on the list of placed calls two days back.
This morning’s incoming calls are all from Stephanie. Just after midnight, though, he received one from Reg Keller’s home, and then he placed one to a number I recognize, Tony Salazar’s mobile phone.
On the back of the phone there’s a peephole camera. I thumb my way through the menu layers, then find Joe Thomson’s stored photos. They’re the usual jagged, low-quality images, random photos of the skyline, of himself, of the world viewed from behind his steering wheel. There’s one of Stephanie grilling in the backyard, her moving hand blurring her face. Nothing surprising.
The last picture on the roll is the exception.
It’s worse than the others, taken in dim light, the face not much more than a white smudge framed in black, the features vague. The torso, equally washed out, cropped halfway down the chest. If I hadn’t seen the sketches, if I hadn’t just come from meeting Jill Fanning in the flesh, I’m not sure I could have made the identification. All I could have told from the picture is that the woman’s eyes were closed, and she was undressed.
But since I did just see the sketches and meet Ms. Fanning in the flesh, since I heard her tell me the two of them weren’t close and recognized it immediately as a lie, I don’t have much trouble imagining who this woman is, or what it means that Joe Thomson carried around a photo of her in the nude. His wife’s suspicions are more than confirmed. I’ll have to have another talk with the woman now.
Remembering Stephanie, though, my thumb hovers over the erase button. Bascombe had a point earlier. The man killed himself. You don’t have to trash his memory. Ignorance being bliss, it might be better for his wife to go on thinking she was wrong, that there was nothing between Thomson and this other woman. I can spare her this much with the push of a button.
But like I said, I don’t have the whitewash gene. Part of me wants to cover for him – not so much for his sake as for hers – but I know deep down that the unvarnished truth is better than even a well-meaning deception. I’m not here to pretty things up, to give Stephanie Thomson or anyone else a reassuring vision of the world as she thinks it is. All I have to do is uncover the way things really are. I didn’t make them that way, and I don’t have the power to change them. Even if it’s tempting to think I do.
My thumb moves away from the button and I turn the phone off. Maybe she’ll find the photo once his effects are released, and maybe she won’t. That’s not my decision to make.
The autopsy is why I’m the designated suicide cop, simple as that. Nobody wants to see a fellow officer on the slab, whether you knew him or not. Hedges could spread the burden around, but he chooses to let it rest on his least favorite, no doubt thinking this will motivate better performance. In my case, it only seems to make things worse.
Bridger waits until my arrival to begin work, starting with some observations about the state of the body and the visible wounds. By the time we reach the Y-incision, I’ve tuned out, retreating a few steps, letting the soft-focus blinkers fall over my eyes. Organs are transferred to various stainless-steel vessels for weighing, samples are taken. The process is methodical, one I’ve witnessed so many times over the years I have actually lost count, something I never would have imagined when I first joined the unit.
Toxicology results don’t come back overnight. The preliminary reports on the Morales shooting were exceptional, not just for their superfluousness but for their speed. As much as I’d like to know by tomorrow morning whether Thomson was coked up when he pulled the trigger – assuming he pulled it – I don’t make a fuss when Bridger says “as soon as possible.” There’s no doubt, after all, about the cause of death.
He follows me outside after stripping down to his scrubs. Out on the curb, we watch the thunderheads roll by and Bridger lights up a cigarette, quickly generating a cloud cover of his own. We’re silent awhile, because we have to be. Jaded as we are under the professional veneer, the fact is we’ve just finished cutting someone up, and that’s not the best way to initiate conversation.
Bridger stubs the butt out in an ashtray near the side exit, then returns to the vigil.
“There’s a storm coming,” he says. “That’s what they’re saying on the news.”
I glance at the sky. “Looks like.”
We fall silent again. I can sense him working up to something. “I know you pretty well,” he says.
I nod in agreement.
“There’s nothing on the scene to suggest he didn’t kill himself?”
I shake my head.
“But you don’t think he did it.”
“No, I don’t.”
He ponders this, scrubbing his sole against the pavement. “All right, well here’s something. It isn’t much, but since you’re thinking along these lines…”
My ears perk up. “What have you got?”
“The trajectory of the bullet. The entrance is low, right by the ear, and the exit is high, almost the top of the head. So the gun would have been held like this.” He puts his index finger against his temple, adjusting the angle to roughly forty-five degrees. “If you wanted to be sure, though, you wouldn’t hold the gun at an angle like that. You’d be afraid of ending up a vegetable instead of dead.”
“If you put the muzzle right under your chin and fire straight up, you’re good to go.”
“Right,” he says, adjusting his finger accordingly. “That’s what I’d expect. Or maybe you’d hold it sideways right at the center of the head, so you know the bullet’s going straight through.”
“So it doesn’t look consistent with a self-inflicted wound?”
He shakes his head. “I’m not saying that, Roland. His hand might have slipped, he might have been distraught – I can think of a thousand reasons why he’d end up doing it this way. But there’s just that little twinge of doubt, you know? Because I’m not seeing exactly what I’d expect.”
The problem is, a medical examiner’s gut feelings are no more admissible than a detective’s. If the shooting doesn’t sit right with Bridger, all I can take from that is encouragement. And I need more. A shared hunch isn’t the leverage I need in the interview room with Keller and Salazar. Unfortunately, when it comes to the pathology, it looks like that’s all I’m going to get.
It’s not my house. Better not be. But the closer I get, the louder the music – the peculiar thump and whine of the dirty South. And the cars get thicker, too, lining the curb on either side of the street.
Rolling up to my driveway, I find a Toyota suv squatting halfway over the line, with a queue of others sitting bumper-to-bumper all the way up to the garage. The windows of Tommy’s apartment glow orange, silhouettes grinding in and out of view.
As I sit there, foot on the brake, a group of young men in jeans and V-neck shirts thread their way toward the back, hoisting twelve-packs of Shiner and Lone Star to keep from clipping an antenna or side-view mirror. The one bringing up the rear pauses, cups a hand to his mouth, and howls into the night “Whoooo-hoo,” already lit up from the previous stop on their evening crawl.
A fantasy reel flickers to life in my mind: I’m dragging Tommy down the apartment steps by the scruff of the neck, kneeling him down on the curb, dispatching him execution-style. But violence isn’t the answer. Except when it is.
Down at the end of the street I find a parking spot, then double back along the sidewalk. The neighbors have taken refuge behind closed drapes and lowered blinds, but my house emits no light.
I let myself in the front door. Inside, the only illumination comes through the back windows, a grid of shadows with the occasional figure ducking past. The only sound is the muffled music and the vibration of hundred-year-old glass in the windowpanes. Otherwise, the house is so still it could pass for abandoned.
I head to the back, lifting a shade with my finger. The yard is empty, but a crowd of people congregates on the stairs, most sitting while a few cling to the railing, trying to pick their way to the top. I count fifteen, maybe sixteen heads, and I’m guessing there are as many more again packed into the small apartment.
Another reel: the wooden stairs collapsing under the weight, Tommy teetering on the threshold to keep his balance, arms wind-milling through the air, then falling with a gasp onto the jagged tip of a two-by-four.
I told him to keep things low-key. I told him there would be trouble.
“Satisfied?”
Her voice makes me jump. Behind me, veiled by the dark, Charlotte sits gargoyle-like in a wing chair, her feet on the cushion, knees drawn up to her chin.
“I didn’t see you there.”
She keeps very still. “You said you were going to have a talk with him. You promised to at least do that.”
“I did,” I say. “I told you that.”
“It wasn’t enough.” Her voice rises. “It obviously wasn’t enough.”
“I guess not. And you’ve been sitting here all this time? In the dark? You should have at least called me, babe – ”
“And said what?” She throws up her hands, but without much force in the gesture, weary of repeating the complaint. “Anyway, there’s no telling where you’d be this time of night. No, wait.” A stiff laugh escapes her lips. “You’d be where you always are. Even though you promised me you wouldn’t go there anymore.”
“Charlotte – ”
“I’m tired,” she says. “Tired of what’s going on under my nose. Tired of every conversation turning into some kind of argument.”
The fight goes out of her, and in the gloom I can see her gazing at me, her bottom lip in a swollen pout. That gesture strips years off her. I feel my heart moving in my chest.
“So am I.” I perch on the edge of the sofa, stretching my arm toward her, resting a hand on her knee. “I have a blind spot when it comes to that kid. I know that.”
She covers my hand with hers. “You identify with him.”
“It’s not that.”
“Roland, it is. Trust me, I know you.” She rubs at my knuckle with her thumb, smiling in the darkness. “You cut him slack because you’ve been cut so much slack yourself. Do unto others, you think. You have this crazy take on the Golden Rule.”
“Is that such a bad thing?”
“No, honey, it’s not. But you do it because you’re afraid.”
“Of what?” I ask.
“Of the world coming down on you. It’s like he’s your good luck charm or something. So long as you let him run wild, you can run wild, too.”
I squeeze her knee, then slip my hand away. “I’m not running wild. And I don’t identify with that slacker, either. And to prove it, I’ll go talk to him now. I’ll throw them all out.”
“My hero,” she says with a girlish laugh, not even a hint of irony. Then she uncoils and puts her arms around me, pulling us close. “It’s the right thing to do. And don’t worry about the consequences.”
“I’ll go right now.”
She draws my head down, hands warm on my cheeks, anointing my forehead with a kiss.
I throw the back door open, pound my way across the deck. Seeing me coming, the more perceptive people on the stairs realize the party’s over. They stand and make way for my ascent, slipping down the driveway once I pass them. Near the top, a shaggy-haired boy squints appraisingly at me, blowing smoke through his pursed lips. He starts to gesture toward me with the lit cigarette, starts to open his mouth to speak. I swipe the cancer stick out of his grasp, sending it somersaulting into the night, then shoulder him out of the way.
The apartment door hangs wide. I give it a kick anyway, to get people’s attention. The furniture’s shoved into the corners to accommodate more people, all of them youngish, probably a mix of college kids and Tommy’s fellow grad student instructors. And strangers, too, I bet.
“Tommy!”
Heads turn, couples break up, but my tenant is nowhere to be seen. I squeeze through the door to the bedroom, but he isn’t in there. I head for the narrow galley kitchen.
“Tommy!”
In the kitchen, sitting on the counter with her feet propped on the opposite cabinet, the waitress from the Paragon. Marta. She sips from a red plastic cup, gazing absently through the arrow-slit window. The others packed into the kitchen file out at my appearing. She glances over, recognizes me, and chucks her cup into the sink.
“What is this?” she says. “Police harassment?”
“Where’s Tommy?”
“He left not long after I showed up. Didn’t want to talk, I guess. But listen, you should leave him alone. He hasn’t done anything.”
“He’s done this,” I say, sweeping my hand inadvertently against the refrigerator. I try again, motioning carefully at the party still ebbing along over my shoulder.
“So what?”
“So I told him not to.”
“What does it matter to the police if he invites some people over?”
“It matters to me,” I say. “I live here.”
She cocks her head, then smiles wryly. “This is your place? You’re the landlord? So that’s how he knows you.” Her eyes roll. “Now it all starts to make sense.”
I don’t have time for this. There’s a neck to wring. But there aren’t many places to hide in here, so I suspect she’s right about Tommy taking a hike. Who throws a party and then leaves? The more I think about it, the more my tenant fits the bill.
“Your wife is nice,” Marta says.
“My wife?”
“The lady who lives here – she’s your wife, isn’t she?”
I nod. “How do you know her?”
“I met her,” she says. “When I was here before. She gave me a ride home.”
“That was you?” I ask, leaning against the cabinet across from her, arms crossed, not exactly blocking the exit but fencing her in a bit.
She glances out the window again, nodding.
“Charlotte, my wife… she was worried about you.”
There’s something false about her sudden laugh. “About me?”
“You were in quite a state, she said. She even thought maybe something happened to you, that you’d been drugged or something.”
Her bravado is gone, and in spite of the heavy eyeliner and tight-fitting top, she seems quite childlike and small, almost virginal. And she’s lost all ability to meet my gaze. Still, her voice keeps its hardness, projecting world-weary scorn.
“I was just a little out of it from the night before.”
“Are you and Tommy friends or something?”
“Do I look like any of these people are my friends? I just know him from the bar. A bunch of them come in and, I don’t know, I just thought it might be fun. See how the other half parties, you know? Personally, I didn’t bother finishing school, and if you ask me, I didn’t miss anything. From what I see here” – she nods toward the living area – “I’d say I didn’t miss nothing at all.”
“How old are you, Marta?”
“Old enough.”
“Twenty-one, at least?”
She rolls her eyes again. “Well, duh. You know where I work.”
“Charlotte said that when she drove you home, she dropped you at a dorm. If you’re not in school, why do you live in the dorms?”
“I don’t,” she says. “That’s just where I left my car.”
“She also said you couldn’t remember who you came with.”
“Not their names.”
“Is that a common thing for you, memory loss?”
She glares are me. “I’m not good with names, okay? That doesn’t mean anything. Look, I said your wife was nice to me. I wasn’t trying to make a big thing out of it.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m just concerned. Because if something did happen to you – ”
“Then what?”
“Then I’d have to do something about it.”
The words come out, they float between us in the air, unseen but making their presence felt. Why am I worried? The memory of Charlotte’s distress, perhaps. The sudden though incomplete vulnerability Marta’s shown, or my earlier hunch that her hardness concealed a penchant for abuse. Or maybe it’s all the missing girls at the back of my mind, blending together, seeping out as a general concern for young femininity. Hannah Mayhew, the nation’s absent daughter, and the nameless one I tried to make her into – not even a woman, just a pattern of blood on the sheets.
And behind them all, the girl who’s always absent but always threatening to make herself tangible, always visible in hints and traces in the face and shape of every woman I see of a certain age. The one I won’t talk about, because Charlotte’s right about the futility of revisiting the past.
“You’re kind of nice,” Marta says, “in a weird sort of way.”
“Not really. Not once you get to know me.”
“Tommy says you are.”
He has his reasons. And maybe Charlotte sees them more clearly than I do. I’ve been shielding him without realizing why, afraid that a reckoning of any kind could start off a chain reaction, forcing everything into the light. As a consequence, a girl like this, motivated by God knows what undefined ambition, some desire to belong, could come under my roof and suffer – what? Nothing, she says, and I want to believe her. I want to believe I don’t deserve a reckoning on her account.
“You’re young,” I tell her. “I don’t know what happened to you the other night, if anything did. But your life… it should be a lot more than this. I’m just saying, don’t waste it.”
She hops off the counter, heading slowly toward the living room. “I’m not looking for a surrogate daddy,” she says, “but if I was…”
A surrogate daddy. And what is Tommy to me? An adopted son?
“Get out of here. I’m gonna be rude to some people. You don’t want to see me when I get rude.”
“You forget,” she says. “I already have.”
Tommy’s party ends not with a whimper but a bang, the sound of me snapping the door shut behind the last of his friends. I follow them down the stairs, herding the pack, channeling people into their cars and then tapping the roofs until they pull away. The final car reverses down the drive with me trailing the bumper, hands on my hips, badge and holstered gun gleaming in the headlights. If Tommy gets it into his head to throw another shindig, I have a feeling not too many of these folks will see fit to attend.
Once they’re gone, I camp out on the front steps for a little while on the off chance my tenant will return. But I figure he’s been tipped off and decided to spend the rest of the night on somebody’s couch. Back inside, Charlotte greets me at the door. I start to say something, but she pushes her lips against mine.
“You did it,” she says. “Time for your reward.”
“You were right,” I say.
“Don’t sound so surprised. Now come on.”
I let her take my hand and lead me up the back stairs. All is not right in my world, but one small corner is about to get noticeably better.
It’s Marta at the breakfast table this time, looking just like she did a few hours ago. She sinks a spoon into her cereal, letting milk drip over the side, and Charlotte gazes at her fondly, stroking her hair. They show no surprise when I appear at the door. They both smile at me, both with the same smile, bearing a resemblance to each other that they don’t in real life.
“I’m all grown up,” Marta says, holding her spoon up like an exclamation mark.
Then the kitchen door starts rattling over her shoulder. A knock so loud it sends tremors through the floorboards. They turn, eyes wide, Marta dropping the spoon into the bowl, Charlotte covering her mouth with her hand.
“Don’t let him in,” Marta pleads.
“Let who in?” My legs take me forward. My hand goes to the doorknob.
“Please don’t do it! Please, please, please!”
“Don’t be afraid,” I say.
“Roland.” Charlotte’s voice. “Roland, wake up.”
My eyes blink open. I turn toward her. “What?”
“Someone’s pounding on the door.”
“For real?”
And then I hear it. The nightstand clock reads just past six. I roll out of bed, pulling my pants on, sliding my pistol from the holster. An overreaction, maybe, but it’s underreacting that gets people killed. At the bedroom door I pause and turn. Charlotte’s crouched at the bedside, feeling around for her discarded clothes.
The back door rattles on its hinges. Whoever’s doing the knocking, he’s hitting wood, not glass, otherwise there’d be shards all across the kitchen floor. I don’t open it. I don’t slit the shades for a peek. Instead, I go to the window overlooking the deck, which affords a flanking view of the back door. Tommy’s my prime suspect, and I’m considering putting a round into him. Nothing fatal, just a nick in the thigh. I know firsthand how annoying those can be.
When I part the shades for a look, it isn’t Tommy at all. I pad into the kitchen, tuck my sig into the snack drawer, then unbolt the lock.
Wilcox glares at me, nodding slowly. “I should have known.”
“Known what?” I ask. Then, when he doesn’t answer: “I meant to call you.”
I beckon him over the threshold, motioning in the direction of the breakfast table, but he doesn’t budge an inch. He wears a gray suit and regimental tie. Already, there are sweat stains on his white, spread-collared shirt.
“I didn’t come here to chat,” he says. “But I heard about your new case. I want you to tell me one thing – and you’d better not lie to me, because I’ll know if you do. Tell me you didn’t have anything to do with Joe Thomson’s death.”
“What?” I take a step back. “Is that what you came here for?”
“I know you didn’t pull the trigger, Roland. That’s not what I’m saying. But are you working some kind of angle here, using me to do it? All that work I did with the DA, and suddenly the guy tops himself. And who do they put in charge of the investigation but you? Questions are going to be asked. It’s already happening. Just so you know, I won’t be covering for you.”
“I have no idea what you mean,” I say.
“Tell me you didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“I didn’t.”
“It was just a coincidence. The guy’s cracking up, he’s feeling guilty about turning on his friends, and in a fit of despair he dumps one in the brainpan. Happens all the time.”
“He didn’t just shoot himself.”
“No? Then what?”
“What do you think?”
He runs the back of his hand over his forehead, mopping the sweat. “I think that if you’re trying to play me here, if this is some kind of windup so you can settle the score with Reg Keller – ”
“They did it,” I say. “I can’t prove that yet, but we both know it’s true. He was going to roll over on them, so they staged his death. What else could it be?”
“Yeah, but how would they find out? You think he told them?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
I’m not going to tell him about my call to Stephanie Thomson and how she tipped Salazar off. The thing about Wilcox is, he likes everything to be neat. Even at our best, my unpredictability could make him nervous. Pulling over on the highway and switching a digital recorder on so Donald Fauk could do his patriotic duty by confessing to his wife’s murder – that had made his skin crawl. He’d have kept Fauk quiet until we could hustle him into an interview room, everything tidy and squared away.
But I knew, in spite of everything I was going through at that moment, a much worse ordeal than a superficial gunshot, a pain I would have endured a thousand gunshots to forgo, I knew that it was now or never with Fauk, whether the confession was orthodox or not.
“You’re upset,” I tell him. “I get that. But you haven’t done anything wrong here, and neither have I. They’re the ones who did this, and they’re going to pay for it. Just stick with me, all right?”
“I’m not lifting a finger for you.”
“Fine,” I say, shrugging off the hurt. And it does hurt to hear him speaking this way. “You don’t have to do a thing. I don’t want you to do a thing, if you get my drift. The thing I specifically don’t want you to do is tell my captain – or anybody else, for that matter – about the deal we had in place for Thomson. They’ll pull me off the investigation if they find out.”
Finally, he steps into the house, a bum-rush over the threshold, getting right up in my face, jamming his finger into my chest.
“You think I can keep that quiet? They’re gonna find out, my friend. Bascombe already talked to a guy in my office.”
I shake my head. “He only knows about the past. Not this. And I’m not asking for a cover-up here. Just keep your own mouth shut, okay? Buy me some time, at least.”
His finger rears back for another peck, then pauses in the air. His eyes drift over my shoulder. I turn to find Charlotte there, wearing my shirt from last night. Her legs look pale in the morning sun. Her eyes blink.
“Stephen,” she says, doing another button up. “What are you doing here so early? What are you doing here at all? I haven’t seen you in… forever.”
He drops his eyes and backs off, mumbling excuses on his way out the door.
“Don’t leave on my account,” she says.
He turns his back on us and goes, not even bothering to shut the door. I hear his shoes tapping the concrete, then his car door slamming and the engine turning over.
“What was that all about?”
I shut the door, turning the dead bolt. “Work.”
While she kicks off breakfast, I go upstairs, running my head under the shower and then dressing quickly, collecting my keys and wallet, my empty holster, my newly charged phone. Coffee is on the table when I return, and so is my pistol.
“I found that in the drawer,” Charlotte says, buttering some toast.
I eat fast, but not fast enough. Just as I’m leaving, my phone starts to ring.
“Who is it?” she asks.
“I don’t recognize the number.”
She walks toward me. “If it’s somebody with information wanting to meet up face-to-face, I’m not letting you out that door.”
“Don’t worry.”
The voice on the other end of the line crackles with nerves, but after a sentence or two I realize it’s the overeager crime-scene tech, Edgar Castro.
“It’s a little early, Edgar.”
“Is it? I’ve been up all night.”
“Are you going to tell me why, or do I have to guess?”
He clears his throat before continuing. “The thing is, I’m getting static here from my boss, like they don’t want me to make a big deal out of this. And maybe it’s nothing, but…”
“Maybe what’s nothing?”
“It’s kind of complicated,” he says. “But I thought you’d want to know.”
“Know what?”
“It’d be easier to show you than try to explain.”
“Show me what?”
“Could you come down to the lab?”
I sigh, rolling my eyes for Charlotte’s benefit. She rolls hers back for mine.
“Half an hour,” I say to Castro.
“Excellent,” he replies. I imagine him on the other end of the line, pumping his fist in triumph. Whatever has got him so worked up, it better have the same effect on me.
The moment the gun is in his hand, Edgar Castro’s eyes light up. He uses a serrated folding knife to remove the plastic tie running through the barrel, then eyeballs the breech to make sure there’s not a round in the chamber. When he passes it across the desk, I can sense his reluctance to let go. After double-checking for safety, I release the slide. It slams shut with a familiar metallic snap.
“Everything look right to you?” he asks.
I give the pistol a closer inspection. The blued finish is worn down on the edges, probably from holster wear, and the plastic factory grips have been replaced by checkered cocobolo. Along the front strap, a strip of skateboard tape provides tacky traction. The barrel is stamped.40 S &W, the cartridge our service pistols are chambered for. Thanks to my time clerking in the gun shop as a young man, I have an abiding awe for the trusty.45, but over the years I’ve come to respect the smaller, hotter.40. Apart from the fancy hardwood, this gun is a tool, plain and simple, the same as the one I carry every day.
“The tape’s a little ghetto,” I say, “but otherwise it looks fine.”
Castro’s little corner of csu is dark, packed with computer screens, lit by arc lamps, littered with a recycler’s dream supply of empty Dr. Pepper cans. The workspace, wiped clean apart from the pile of plastic evidence bags, was created by fitting a tabletop over a shoulder-to-shoulder rank of filing cabinets. He scrounged a desk from somewhere, too, a castoff from the dark days before the current cubicle system was installed.
He fishes a loaded magazine from a separate evidence bag, sliding it over.
“This stuff ’s all been checked for prints already?”
He nods. “It’s cool. Now, does that look right?”
The magazine’s weight feels good in my hand. I press down on the uppermost cartridge with my thumb, testing the spring’s resistance.
“I don’t get what you’re asking,” I say. “If there’s something wrong here, you’re going to have to point it out.”
He takes pistol and magazine back, inserts one into the other, then works the slide.
“Is that really necessary?” Even though the muzzle is safely aimed at the ground, I wince a little. Castro doesn’t inspire gun-handling confidence. He seems just the sort for an accidental discharge. Fortunately, the other technicians seem to give him a wide berth. The only other occupant of this particular room – calling it a lab would only dignify what looks like an oversized storage closet for high-tech equipment – vacated as soon as I showed up.
He drops the magazine and ejects the chambered round. It flips through the air, thumping to rest on the gray carpet.
“Just what you’d expect, right?” he says, setting the weapon down between us. “Now take a look at this.”
The next item on his show-and-tell list is a double magazine carrier, nice tan leather from Milt Sparks, the sort of thing you clip to your belt to keep spare ammunition handy. Thomson seems to have been a man after my own heart, judging from the grips and gun leather, splashing out for the good stuff.
“Nice,” I say. “So what?”
“Look at the magazines.”
With a sigh I withdraw the mags. They look the same as the other one. I thumb down the top round again, letting it spring back. Then the difference registers. The shape of the cartridges. Instead of the long, flat plane of a.40 caliber round, these are bottlenecked at the point where the bullet fits into the brass to accommodate a smaller projectile. I slide a round out, inspecting the bottom.
“These are.357 sig,” I say.
“Exactly. And they’re both the same. Now, the spent brass recovered inside Thomson’s vehicle was.40 caliber, and so are the rounds in the clip we found inside the gun. We dug the bullet out of the door pillar, and it’s.40 caliber, too, and a match for the barrel. So the fatal round was fired through that barrel, from that magazine. Everything is how it should be.”
“Except this.” I tap the.357 sig round against the desk.
“Right. So my question is, why was Thomson carrying one kind of ammo on his belt and another kind in his gun? You can load.357s into the same magazine as a.40, but have you ever tried firing one from a.40 caliber pistol? A little hint: don’t even try it. So either this guy Thomson was monumentally brain dead – I mean, really – or he didn’t pay much attention to detail. Or…”
“Or what?” I ask, though I already know where he’s going.
Castro picks up the gun and fieldstrips it, removing the entire slide assembly, then pulling the barrel out. He holds it up to his eye like a telescope.
“This is the barrel that fired the bullet that killed Detective Thomson,” he says, “but does that mean this is the gun?” He taps the pile of disassembled metal. “Not necessarily. You know what happened when the.357 sig round first came out? A lot of guys believed the hype, so they went out and bought drop-in barrels to convert their.40s into.357s. It’s as simple as fieldstripping the piece and putting a different barrel inside. Like this.” He opens a drawer, removing a silvered drop-in barrel, which he fits into the slide assembly, putting the pistol back together. When he’s done, he racks the slide a few times. “Now, if you stick one of Thomson’s spare mags in, this baby’s good to go. That’s really all it takes.”
He blossoms his hands like a magician, then sits back looking very satisfied. The theory forming in my head goes something like this. Someone in the passenger seat pulls a gun, pressing it against Thomson’s head. Pulling the trigger creates a contact wound, but to make the ballistics look right, the killer has to improvise. And it could only be improvisation. If he’d planned ahead, he might have found a way to cover his tracks better, but in the moment he just has to make do. He’s shot Thomson – now what? So he switches barrels between his own pistol and Thomson’s. Meaning the killer was armed with a sig Sauer P229, as well. One of us, more than likely.
“So let me get this straight,” I say. “You think someone shot Thomson, then fieldstripped both the murder weapon and Thomson’s gun, swapping the barrels and the magazines? Only why would he switch mags?”
Castro shrugs. “Maybe he’s doing it, and he realizes there’s a difference in the bullets. He wouldn’t be able to chamber a.357 round in a.40 caliber barrel, so that might be what tipped him off. He tries it, gets a jam, and has to switch the mags.”
“Then why leave Thomson’s spares behind?”
“He doesn’t see them,” he says. “Detective Thomson’s sitting down. He was wearing the mag carrier behind his left hip, so they’d be on the opposite side.” He pats his left hip. “Plus everything’s happening so fast. The perp messed up, basically.”
“Any prints on the barrel? What about the rounds in the magazine?”
He shakes his head. “There he didn’t mess up. They were wiped clean. Which is strange when you think about it. Those rounds should have prints all over them, right?”
“Mine would.”
I go through the motions in my mind, stripping the guns, changing the barrels, sorting out the ammunition. It’s complicated, but under stress someone familiar both with handguns and forensics could make it happen. And missing the extra magazines would be an easy mistake. The scene would have been dark, he’d be pumping with adrenaline, a dead man on the seat next to him, the rain hammering on the roof. There’s a problem, though.
“Maybe Thomson was absentminded. Maybe he forgot he’d loaded those mags with.357 sig rounds.”
“And he wiped his own prints off the barrel and cartridges?”
“I hear you,” I say. “I think you’re on to something, Castro, but you have to admit it’s thin.”
“Circumstantial, I know. But here’s another piece of circumstantial evidence. The trajectory of the bullet? If Detective Thomson really shot himself, he held the gun at a strange angle – ”
“That’s what Dr. Bridger said.”
“Look at this.”
He produces a plastic-bound report just like the one he gave me on the Morales shooting, flipping to another one of his 3-D reconstructions. This one has two panels. In the first, a crash-test dummy representing Thomson holds a pistol to his head, canting the gun at a forty-five degree angle. A red line from the barrel penetrates his head, continuing up through the roof of the vehicle.
“That’s not right, is it?” he says. “The bullet didn’t go out the roof. It was in the door pillar. But if he was sitting upright, the trajectory would have sent it through the ceiling. So he was leaning toward the door, like this.” He points to the second panel, where the dummy rests his head against the pillar. Now the red line is flat, running side to side, and the head is at an angle. “But why would he do that? It’s a strange way to shoot yourself, isn’t it?”
Yes, it is. But it makes perfect sense if someone else was in the car. The shooter drew on Thomson, punching the pistol forward into the side of his head. It struck him, pushing his skull against the door pillar, and then the shooter fired.
“You mind?” I ask, snatching the empty pistol.
Not only does Castro not mind my putting the gun to his head, he’s eager to arrange things just so. We set our chairs side by side against the wall, then he sits down and drapes his hands over an imaginary steering wheel. I get beside him, my finger away from the trigger, and slow-motion Thomson’s pistol through the air, from my lap to a point just above his ear. As soon as it touches, he slides toward the wall. When his head taps sheetrock, the angle of the gun is pretty much straight.
“It works.” I put the weapon down. I let out a sigh. “So that’s what happened.”
The sudden grin on Castro’s face, like I’ve just awarded him an A+ on his class project, reminds me again how green the kid is. Green or not, though, he’s sharp. And if there were a mirror in the room, it wouldn’t surprise me to see an equally stupid-looking grin on my own face, because my excitement has to be on par with his, if not higher.
“Good work, Castro. Really. Now, I’m going to have to ask you to do me a favor, and it won’t be easy for you. This information? We need to keep it between the two of us right now.”
His smile fades. “But why?”
“Think about it. If your theory is right, this wasn’t a premeditated thing. Something happened and the killer decided there was no other choice. He pulled his gun and fired.”
“And?”
“And it just so happened his gun matched Thomson’s. So does mine, Castro. So does yours. You see what I’m saying?”
“Anybody could have a sig Sauer.”
“Sure they could,” I say. “But we both know that’s not the deal here, right? For the time being, I need this to look like a suicide investigation, and if you shoot your mouth off about this theory, the wrong people are going to find out I’m on to them. So for now, can we keep it between the two of us?”
“I already told the other guys,” he says quietly.
“But they didn’t listen, did they? Let’s leave it at that.”
The struggle on his face lasts a second or two, then he nods with resignation. Playing along means no immediate recognition for his work, but since his colleagues aren’t backing him, there’s not much risk of professional trouble. This way, at least, he can feel like he’s in the know, keeping secrets for the detective in charge.
“Okay,” he says, sticking a hand out. “Deal.”
There’s no way he’ll let me go without a handshake, so I give in. His palms are damp and warm. I wait until I’m safely hidden behind the elevator door to wipe mine dry.
Get a cop to open up about his personal frustrations, and once you get past the office politics, the slow advancement, and the various fractures in the justice system, he might, assuming he’s the philosophical type, start talking about the gap between knowledge and proof. I’ve been cut by both sides of the blade, knowing things I couldn’t prove and proving things I didn’t really believe. The idea that there’s any connection between what we believe and what we can prove goes out the door early, at least it does if you’re paying attention.
I’ve sent men to prison with no idea whether they did the crime or not. The case was there, so I made it. The ultimate decision belongs to the judge or jury, something I took comfort in once, though not so much anymore. If we had to know – really know – what happened, no one would ever go to jail. Fortunately, you can prove things in court that you can never truly know.
By the same token, you can know things that can’t ever be proven. And that knowledge often has a certainty to it that the evidential sort never does. There are these unproven things about which I have a quasi-religious certainty, things I would act on more readily than anything I could support with mere evidence. I can’t explain this exactly, but anyone who has trodden long enough on the line between fact and truth will tell you the same.
Or not. I can only speak for myself.
When I try imagining Keller’s hand on the murder weapon – or Salazar’s, which is easier somehow – the mental image is absurd, almost laughable. Even so, it’s my new article of faith. Castro’s hunches fit in with Bridger’s qualm, but it can all be explained away. Everything can. Only I know what these men are capable of. I bear the marks on my flesh.
It’s not enough. It won’t convince Hedges or Bascombe. It won’t satisfy Wilcox. And if I go to any of them, I’ll tip my hand. That’s why Castro has to keep quiet. That’s why I have to tread very carefully, planning my next moves for maximum effect.
Back at my desk, I put in another call to Cavallo. She hasn’t returned yesterday’s call, and I’m beginning to think she never will. She’s probably relieved to see the back of me. Vance, the man who’s supposedly holding a box from Thomson, hasn’t called me, either. That’s the lead I want to follow up, and it’s as simple as feeding his phone number into the computer.
While I’m copying down the contact info on Mr. Vance Balinski, a Caucasian male aged thirty-four years, residing in an Uptown condo with a ten-year-old Mercedes coupe registered to his name, Detective Aguilar appears at my elbow, black eyes sparkling in his lobster-red face, a photo lineup clutched in his hands. Thanks to his gang experience, he caught my shooting, and now he perches on my desk and hums a little fanfare.
“What’re you so chipper about?”
He hands over the lineup, along with a well-chewed ballpoint pen. “You know the drill.”
Right away, I recognize the shooter. Looking at his mug shot, I’m surprised my guard wasn’t up from the get-go. A tough customer with the faraway stare of a man who’d gut you just to see whether his knife was sharp.
Aguilar nudges my chair with his foot. “You see him here or not?”
I circle the right man and hand the page back.
He nods in satisfaction, humming another bar. “Dude’s name is Rafael Ortiz, an enforcer for LTC. Which means the cholos in the house with Morales were his boys.” He gives me one of his unreadable stares. “Any reason they’d want to clip you?”
“Something to do with the case, I assume. Beats me what it is.”
We commune silently, aware that I’ve only stated the obvious. Then he starts humming again, like a man whose case is down. He folds the sheet and tucks it into his jacket. “You won’t have to worry about this Ortiz, anyway.”
“Why?” I ask. “You haven’t picked him up already, have you?”
“As we speak, he’s cooling on a slab at the morgue. Most of him is, anyway.”
“He’s dead?” It doesn’t make sense. I replay the shooting in my mind. He put a round in my door, then another in my leg, and I touched up his dental work with my elbow, but nothing rough enough to put him in the ground. Plus, it was after I shot up the truck that he hopped inside, so my bullets didn’t do the work. I can’t figure it out. “It wasn’t… I mean, I didn’t do it, did I?”
He gets a kick out of this and slaps my arm in appreciation. “Did you put a shotgun in his mouth and pull the trigger?” He flattens his hands against his head, then pops them sideways, the same gesture he might use to exaggerate the size of a fish he’d caught, only in this context it’s meant to be an exploding cranium. “No? Then you can rest easy, March. It wasn’t you.”
“The individual driving the truck,” I say. “He had a shotgun.”
“Yeah, I know.”
As he leaves, patting the lineup in his jacket pocket, I sink back into my chair, wallowing in bewilderment. Not that I’m going to lose much sleep over the buckshot decapitation of a man who tried to make Charlotte a widow. Still, I’d like to know who did the business. And why.
“I’m not avoiding you,” Cavallo says. “Believe it or not, there’s all this work they want me to do. It didn’t stop just because you left.”
“Wanda said you took a personal day.”
“I was sick. I think this case is giving me an ulcer.”
There’s more to it than that, I have no doubt, but I don’t want to press her. Her voice sounds scratchy, like she’s been yelling at someone. I don’t want to make her yell. I want her happy. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s an integral part of my master plan.
“Listen,” I say, “Theresa…” If she objects to my use of her first name, she doesn’t verbalize it. “There’s a favor I need to ask you.”
“Fire away. But just so you know, the answer’s gonna be negative.”
“In that case, I’m not going to say it over the phone. Mind if I drop in on you?”
A long pause. “Is it really that important?”
“Life or death.”
“Right. Well, I’m up at Northwest. Lunch is on you. And the answer’s still going to be no.”
“See you in twenty.”
As soon as I hang up, I grab my jacket and take the elevator down, moving on autopilot through the car pool. After lunch I’m going to drop in on Vance Balinski in person and find out why he hasn’t gotten back in touch. First, though, I need to convince Cavallo to do a little moonlighting.
The car clunk-clunks along the Pierce Elevated, static coming in loud and clear over the radio. My phone starts to ring.
“March.”
“What do you want?”
I notice a silver Impala on my tail, edging closer, the driver’s bald dome visible, a phone pressed to his ear.
Keller.
“You wanna pull over a minute?” he says. “I’d like to talk face-to-face.”
I give my car a little gas. “No, thanks. I’ll be in touch to arrange an interview in due course.”
“An interview?”
“You worked closely with my victim. Standard procedure.”
He sighs. In the rearview I can see him kneading his brow. “They’ve still got you working the suicides. If I’d have remembered that…”
“What?” I ask. You wouldn’t have shot Thomson? You would’ve made it look gang-related, like my attempted murder, instead of staging a suicide?
“Nothing. Pull over. I want to talk.”
We race past the I-10 exit, switching lanes to avoid a stack-up on the far left. Everything slows down, lights are flashing, shattered glass kicks out across the interstate. A pickup with a dislocated fender hugs the concrete median, and up ahead a little Honda looks like somebody set off a grenade in the trunk.
“Nasty,” Keller says.
I hang up the phone. A second later he calls back.
“What’s the problem, March? You were only too happy to barge in on me the other day. Now you’re running scared. You got a problem with me or something?” Baiting me. He’s too far back for me to make out his expression, but I can imagine the sneer on his lips. “The thing is, I’ve been hearing these rumors about you. They’re saying it won’t be long before you’re out on your ear. Bouncing from one detail to another, that’s what they call terminal velocity. Means you’re about to hit the ground. Hard. I’d hate to see that happen to a guy of your caliber, March.”
“Really.”
“I was thinking…” He chuckles. “I’ve got an opening on my team…”
I push the end button. We’re coming up on Cavalcade. Near the exit he moves to the right and puts his blinker on. I watch his car until it disappears down the ramp. Just as I begin to breathe easy, the phone rings again.
“One more thing,” he says. “If you don’t want the job, there’s no hard feelings.”
“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.”
“Fine. Tell that pretty wife of yours I said hello.”
This time it’s Keller who hangs up, leaving me to contemplate the fact that Cavalcade will take him to Studewood, five minutes away from my house. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to go there. But then, I wouldn’t have thought he was stupid enough to kill a cop, either.
Thanks to Keller’s veiled threat, I turn up late to my lunch with Cavallo. While evicting the tenant might not rank high on my list of marital duties, protecting my wife does, even though I’m pretty certain the man’s just yanking my chain. I find Charlotte upstairs in her office, drinking cold coffee and staring at a column of text on her computer screen. Moving closer, I can read the lines, a stack of whereas, whereas, whereas down the left-hand margin, waiting for her to come up with the wording of each petition.
“You wanna trade jobs?” she asks.
“No thanks. I prefer getting shot.”
She blinks affectionately. “What are you doing home?”
I make up some excuse about forgetting something, then head out the door, casting a glance up and down the street. No sign of Keller, of course, and no sign of Tommy’s car, either, which is a shame. As much trouble as he is, I wouldn’t mind him being nearby right about now. Still, there’s no danger. Keller’s just pushing my buttons.
Cavallo chooses the 59 Diner across from Willowbrook Mall, triggering my speech about eating at chain restaurants when there are perfectly good hole-in-the-wall establishments nearby.
“Not out here,” she says. “And anyway, at least it’s a local chain.”
In my book, the 59 Diner actually located on Highway 59 makes perfect sense, and has the added benefit of being a little broken down and slightly greasy. The slicked-up suburban version leaves me cold. There aren’t even any rips in the vinyl upholstery of our booth. The menu isn’t tacky to the touch. When our waitress arrives with spot-free water glasses, I frown, which only invites Cavallo to observe there are 59 Diners all over the place. On Interstate 10, for example.
“Across from ikea,” she adds.
“Yeah, thanks. Listen. I’m sorry for leaving you to go it alone on the task force.”
“What are you talking about? We have enough dead weight as it is.”
“So you didn’t take a sick day when you heard the news?”
“Sick with relief, you mean?” She gazes into the distance. “It’s just this case catching up with me. You heard the Fontaine kid’s parents got a lawyer? They’re talking about suing the city now, which means the da wants to put a charge on the boy after all. If they would just let it drop, they’d be home free. But you can’t expect people to skip a potential payday anymore, even if their kid’s slinging.”
I could point out my misgivings about the way Fontaine was treated, but that would only get her wound up. And besides, I see her point.
“How’s Donna Mayhew holding up?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Doing a lot of media now. You saw her on cable last night?”
“I didn’t even know she was on.”
“Now she’s expressing concerns about the way the case has been handled. I think she’s mad they’re dragging Hannah’s name through the mud. That stuff about the drugs, the restraining order.” She slaps her laminated menu shut. “I’d be mad, too – but it’s not our fault.”
She goes on like this for a while, venting about task force woes. With the media pressure intensifying, more effort at the top seems to be going into damage control than finding Hannah Mayhew. The rumors are getting out of control, too.
“The team’s so porous,” she says. “Whatever you put into it leaks out by the end of the day.”
In the latest gaffe, some bored detectives who’d seen a documentary about forced prostitution started jawing on the topic of white slavery. By that afternoon the news wires were running a story, anonymously sourced, suggesting the task force was looking at this as a probable theory. Blindsided by the question during his cable call-in debut, the chief had responded that “every avenue was being investigated,” which had the unintended consequence of validating the rumor.
“So now, in spite of the fact that there’s absolutely no evidence, we have half our team suddenly playing catch-up on the white slavery angle. It’s ridiculous. I told Wanda I’m sick of playing this game.”
“And what did she say?”
“She told me to go to lunch.”
I crack a smile. “It sounds to me like you took off sick and ended up watching the news coverage all day.”
She nods. “And reading the Hannah blogs.”
The Hannah blogs? I don’t even want to ask. The life this circus has taken on makes my head spin. “This is the closest I’ve ever been to a case like this.”
“A missing persons case,” she asks, “or a media blender?”
“The blender. I worked Missing Persons awhile, remember?”
“The Fauk case,” she says. “That was pretty big at the time.”
I shake my head. “Not like this.”
The waitress, looking clean and wholesome, stuns us both with her high-wattage smile, then jots our selections down with a satisfied nod, like they reveal something deeply good in our respective characters. As soon as she’s gone, I roll my eyes, but Cavallo doesn’t respond. She’s glancing out the window at the lovely view of the parking lot and Highway 249, a lot of concrete washed in searing sunlight.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer at first. Her gaze has a soft and sightless quality, as if her eyes were the back of a silvered mirror. When she responds, it’s not with words. She digs in her purse and puts her warped copy of The Kingwood Killing on the table between us. The cover curls upward toward the ceiling. She’s not as conscientious with her books as Joe Thomson was.
“I finished,” she says.
What does she expect, congratulations? My collar tightens up all the sudden. That book to me is like a crucifix to a vampire. I can’t seem to look at it without a cringe.
“You should have told me,” she says, her tone pure grief counselor, her eyes piercingly sincere. If my hand was on the table, she’d no doubt give it a compassionate squeeze. “It makes sense now, your obsession with the case. Trying to make all the pieces fit. I’m sorry I wasn’t more understanding, March. You should have said something.”
I pick up the book, flipping the pages with disdain, then slide it back across the table.
“It must have been so terrible,” she says.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know,” she says. “About your girl.”
A twitch under the skin of my cheek, an involuntary tic I try smoothing away. She sees it and leans over the table with a pained smile on her lips. I glance away, ignoring her words.
But she won’t stop. The woman just won’t stop.
“This may sound strange, but now that I know, I feel like I get you. Before, I’ll be honest, you always seemed a little cold to me. I knew from Wanda you had a reputation, you used to be an up-and-comer, and I just thought, you know, your whole demeanor, it was bitterness. Angry at life. And that thing you said about God, wanting to kick him… now I understand.”
You don’t understand. You couldn’t possibly. You sit there with that book at your elbow and you think that because of those words, you somehow know me, that there’s a bond running deeper now between us than anything we could have established through mere contact. You think my soul is in there, my key, the pattern hidden underneath the seeming randomness of my actions. But you know nothing at all. Nothing. And if you would just stop speaking -
“I’ll be honest,” she says. “It really broke my heart when I realized. Hannah, what she means for you, what they all must mean for you…” Her bottom lip swells. “And that girl tied to the bed, the missing body.”
I’m going to say something, Theresa, if you don’t shut your mouth. You won’t like it, the words hitting you like a slap in the face.
“I thought, when they pulled you off, you’d be relieved to get back to Homicide. But now I see what you must be going through – ”
My mouth opens, the words lined up like the staggered cartridges in Thomson’s magazine, but before I let them off, before I give Cavallo what the drunk in the Paragon parking lot got, my hand snatches the book off the table and flings it, pages fluttering, across the glossy floor. She jumps. The guy in the opposite booth, reading the Chronicle in solitude, glances down at the book near his feet, then adjusts the paper so he doesn’t have to witness what’s developing next door.
Cavallo’s eyes flare. “What the – ”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. “Don’t smother me in this cheap psychobabble of yours, telling me what Hannah Mayhew represents for a person like me. Don’t even talk about…” I can’t even form it on my lips, the feminine pronoun. “Don’t even. That book,” I say, “what’s in there,” I say, “the whole stinking,” I say, “you can’t… I don’t even…”
Now her hand reaches for mine, pulls it halfway across the table, and even though she has to know what’s at risk, she leans closer.
“I know it’s hard,” she says.
“You don’t know – ”
“March, listen to me. You lost your daughter. I get that. But the way you’re reacting, it’s not right. What it’s done to you, it’s not right.”
“I lost…?” I still can’t say it. “Lost isn’t the word. Lost is really not what happened. I didn’t lose anything. Taken, that’s what you should say. ‘I know what was taken from you.’ ”
“And that’s why you’re angry at the world,” she says, stroking my hand. “Angry at God.”
“God? I’m not angry at God, Theresa. What does God have to do with anything? I’m angry with the guy who decided to open the Paragon early that day, and I’m angry with all the people who decided to get drunk watching the national tragedy unfold on TV, and I’m really angry – I’m furious – at the woman they let leave there, they let get behind the wheel, and she wasn’t even paying attention when she hit them, and there wasn’t a scratch on her, Theresa – can you believe that? Nothing but bruises from the air bags. She walked away. I’d kill her now if I could, but – ”
“March,” she says.
“I’d kill her now, I really would. But she already saved me the trouble. With pills. Now you know what I’ve always wondered? If she was gonna do that, why’d she have to wait until after, huh? She could have done it the day before and saved us all a lot of trouble. And saved us all. A lot…”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t realize how painful this would be for you, or I wouldn’t have said a word.”
Not good enough, Theresa. You opened this can of worms. “And you think because you read about it in a book – ”
“The book has nothing to do with it,” she says. “I just didn’t know. The book is just how I found out.”
“Wanda never told you?”
She shrugs. “It’s been six years.”
“So what, I shouldn’t be so upset about it? I shouldn’t be struggling still, or having such a hard time?”
“That’s not what I said, March. Don’t put words in my mouth.”
“And it’s seven. Seven years as of next week, remember? The big anniversary.”
Cavallo falls silent, gives me a look of pity. My forehead’s clammy. The small of my back, too. The people around us are making a point of not paying attention, which is good of them really. Indulgent. I start to wilt a little with embarrassment. Better to say nothing than to pour out all this raw, unedited self-revelation, especially in front of Cavallo, who doesn’t deserve it, and who still has to be convinced to do me an after-hours favor.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“You don’t have to apologize.”
“I’m sorry. The thing is, it’s not something I like to talk about.
There’s no point dwelling on things. And this time of year…” Across the table she’s nodding encouragingly, and I know something more is owed to her, some compensating confession. I’ve told her off, and to make up for that, I have to trust her with some confidence.
“March,” she says, “I completely understand.”
“The hardest part…”
Her eyebrows lift. “Yes?”
“It was Charlotte driving,” I say, my voice distant, “and she was injured, too. In the crash. The car, it hit them like this.” I form a T with my hands, like a coach calling a time-out from the sidelines. “So the passenger side…” My twitch comes back. I can’t say more about that. “But Charlotte, her head hit the window hard, and there had to be surgery, you know? I wasn’t there. I was still somewhere in Louisiana. They grounded all the planes, you remember, and so me and Wilcox arranged with this detective there, Fontenot, to get a car we could drive back to Houston. We put Fauk in the back in cuffs, then hit the road.”
She nods the whole time, the details fresh on her mind from Templeton’s account.
“What’s not in the book is this…”
The doctor had offered to tell her for me, but this was my job, the one I took on without realizing the moment we married, the moment our daughter was born. Charlotte’s eyelids fluttered and then opened. She blinked at the gathered onlookers, family and friends from the four corners of Houston, bewildered by their presence. Then the surroundings dawned on her. She glanced anxiously at the tubes running into her arm, at the blinking, hissing machines over each shoulder. Finally, with a hint of panic in her eyes, she noticed me sitting at the foot of the bed. Her intubated arm reached forward.
“Roland?”
I didn’t tell the others to leave. I didn’t have to. At the sound of her voice they began to file out, all except her sister, Ann, who lingered at the doorway, thinking she might be needed, until Bridger urged her out into the corridor. She disappeared with a suppressed sob.
“What’s wrong?” Charlotte asked. “What am I doing in here?”
“You don’t remember?”
She bit her lip, eyes darting toward the door. “How long have I been like this?”
“A few hours,” I said, checking my watch. “About eight.”
“Eight? What happened to me?”
I took a deep breath and tried to start, but lost my grasp of vocabulary. All the words in my head suddenly gone.
“Roland,” she says, “am I… sick?”
“You were in an accident. You really don’t remember?”
Her eyes grew wide. “If I remembered, I wouldn’t have to ask. Why did everyone just leave? What’s wrong, Roland? It’s something terrible, isn’t it?”
I nodded my head, unable to do more.
She gazed around the room in frustration, casting back in her mind. Putting the pieces together, I suspected. Working out what must have occurred. Exhaling, her body grew small under the covers, her chin trembling.
“Why wasn’t Jessica here? I didn’t see her. Where is she?”
“She’s…” I willed myself to say it, but still nothing came. “She’s -”
“Is she all right? Is Jessica all right? Roland, did something happen to her? You have to look at me and tell me. Tell me what happened.”
I tried, but couldn’t even bring myself to look at her, or even imagine the expression on her face. Begging me, imploring me to do the most terrible thing, to wound her in the deepest way I could. Suddenly, I didn’t want to be the one.
“Baby, she’s…” But no. I couldn’t.
“There was an accident.” Her voice matter-of-fact. “Was she in it? Was she hurt in the accident?”
I nodded.
Charlotte sucked in her breath, and the tethered hand went to her mouth. I glanced up to see her eyes welling with shock.
“A car came,” I said. “The driver ran the light. A drunk driver. She ran into you, into your car.” My throat tightened. I began to cough. “She hit… She hit the passenger side.”
“I was driving?” she asked. “I was behind the wheel? Who was the passenger? Was it Jessica?”
I nodded again.
Her breathing took on a voice, each gasp an unknown word sighed into the air, a glossolalia of grief.
“She’s all right, though,” Charlotte said. “She’s all right.” She imbued the pronouncement with a confidence she surely couldn’t feel. The intervals between each sentence, each word, punctuated by the strange sibilance of her breathing. She’s all right, the words said. No she’s not, the breath answered. “Tell me, Roland. Tell me she’s all right.”
My head shook.
“She’s… hurt?”
My head shook again.
Charlotte’s lip trembled. “She’s -?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, choking on the syllables.
Her face opened utterly, the eyes wide, the mouth a twisted gash, even the tear ducts began to burst and stream, as if a prophet had struck a rock. The moaning breath came quicker and quicker, hyperventilating, and her arms thrashed at the bedclothes, twisting the plastic tubing against her skin. I moved up the bed, my arms circling, holding her down, squeezing gently.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“It’s my fault,” she whispered. “I did it.”
“No, it’s not your fault.”
The door opened and I turned to find Ann there, hands over her mouth. I waved her back and she retreated, letting the wood slam against the doorframe.
Charlotte shrank in my arms, emptied herself out. The sigh from her lips was like a soul departing. Her eyes fluttered again, then closed. She rested her head against the pillow, going slack.
I stood, feeling so drained, so completely flayed open and raw. But it was done. The unthinkable deed. I shrank back, edging alongside the bed, resuming my seat near the footboard. The room grew quiet apart from the occasional beep and hiss of the monitors. I felt my own eyes closing, though there was no relief.
“Roland?” she said.
“I’m here.”
I opened my eyes and she was sitting up in bed, examining the tubes in her forearm. She smiled wanly, preternaturally calm, glancing around the room in mild dismay.
“What’s wrong?” she said. “What am I doing here?”
“What do you mean?”
She bit her lip. “How long have I been like this?”
“Charlotte, I already told you this. It’s been eight hours – ”
“Eight?”
“I told you – ”
“What happened, Roland? Tell me what happened?”
My fist closed around the blanket. “Are you serious?”
“Am I… sick?”
“You were in an accident, remember?”
“An accident?” Her hand went to her mouth again, tugging the tubes taut. “What’s wrong, Roland? It’s something terrible, isn’t it?”
“You don’t remember?” I heard myself saying. “You don’t remember what I just told you? About Jessica?”
“She’s all right, isn’t she? Tell me she’s all right.”
Her hand reached toward me, eyes pleading, the bruises on her cheek glowing with lividity, and I… I recoiled, retreated into my chair, glancing to the floor in confusion, the gears of my mind seizing up and grinding.
“She’s hurt, isn’t she?”
I choked back a sob.
“But she’s not -?”
“She is,” I said.
Again, the strange breathing, the primal keening grief, as fresh as the first time. Her cheeks flowed with tears, her mouth gaped, and then her arms, so recently still, flailed with renewed violence, slapping the intravenous cable against its pole. I forced myself forward, wrapping her again in my arms.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “It’s okay.” Not even listening to what I said, the words running contrary to all reality and sense.
But they calmed her. Just like before, she subsided. The tide of pain went out, leaving her adrift, her head lolling on the pillow. I got up again, weary and disoriented and a little freaked out. The chair was just a few steps away, but I barely reached it before sinking down.
Jessica. Her body was just a few doors down, unless they’d already moved her. I wanted to be with her, to stay at her side, her small cold hand clutched in mine. If I kept holding it, she would have to stay, and the doctor, sensing my state, had offered to tell Charlotte for me, to break the news. He’d volunteered reluctantly, stoically, the way a man steps forward for a thankless task, to do his duty to God and country, and I was tempted. But this was my job, not his, so I had unclasped my hand and let my daughter go.
Now Charlotte’s breathing was steady and deep, like she’d gone to sleep. I glanced at the doorway, wishing someone would come through, too tired to get up and open it.
“Roland?”
At the sound of my name, a shiver ran through me.
“What am I doing here?”
She sat up in bed, glancing dreamily at her surroundings, smiling with her chewed lip, the bruises purple and bright, like she thought someone was playing a trick on her. Like she’d been transported to the hospital in her sleep so we could all have a good laugh.
“What’s wrong?” she said, the shine leaving her eyes. “It’s something terrible, isn’t it?”
“You don’t remember.”
Her hand reached out. “Tell me what happened.”
I pushed myself out of the chair, then went to the door.
“Roland?” she called. The note of ignorant alarm, the terrible suspicion alloyed with hope, was the same as before, her memory resetting to the moment she woke up.
“Because of her head injury,” I tell Cavallo, “my wife suffered memory loss. Short term. She’d keep forgetting things, and you’d have to tell her all over again. Not who she was or anything like that, but the immediate past. The crash. She’d ask about it. She’d ask about… her,” I say, finally getting the pronoun out. “And at first I kept telling her, and her reaction every time was pretty much word for word like she was reading from the same script, her head playing the moment over and over again.”
Cavallo covers her mouth, peering at me over her fingertips. “That’s awful.”
“The repetition,” I say, “I couldn’t keep doing it. So for two days almost, until she finally got her memory back, I kept it to myself. She’d ask what had happened, and I’d lie to her. Our daughter’s death, it became my secret. And when she finally did remember, when I knew she wouldn’t ask again, God help me I was actually glad. Because I’d never have to tell her again, your daughter is dead. And I hated myself for feeling that.”
The bill paid and the story told, I stagger outside, dazed by emotion and blinded by the light, fumbling for the sunglasses I must have forgotten in the car.
On the curb, after a long pause, I ask for the favor I mentioned before. I need help digging some dirt on Tony Salazar.
“If you don’t want to help,” I tell her, “I’ll understand.”
“It’s not that.” She brushes a stray curl from her eyes. “I’m just a little overwhelmed. And to be honest, it makes me uncomfortable not doing things by the book.”
“Wanda said you were a little uptight.”
“I’m not. But keeping tabs on a fellow cop…”
“These guys aren’t fellow anything. And listen, I still believe there’s some kind of link.”
She puts her arm up between us, like she’s checking the distance. “You don’t have to say that, March. I already told you I’d do it. It’s that or waste my time sitting through briefings on white slavery. I’ll do what I can.”
“In your free time?” I ask, cracking a smile. “Your fiancé won’t be too happy about that.”
She looks wanly at the engagement ring, its sparkle washed out by the sun. “My fiancé’s in Iraq, March. He doesn’t care what hours I work.”
“I didn’t know.”
“What can I say?” She starts toward her car, shrugging in profile. “Noboby’s written a book about it yet.”
I’m still sitting behind the wheel of my own vehicle, soaking up air-conditioning and pondering the turn of events with Cavallo, when my phone starts ringing. Brad Templeton sounds breathless on the other end of the line.
“I don’t want to talk to you right now,” I say. “Your book is a thorn in my side.”
“That’s fine. I’m just touching base with all the dirt I dug up on those names you gave me, but if you’re not interested – ”
“I’m interested. Forgive my uncharacteristic rudeness.”
He chuckles. “It wasn’t easy, my friend, because you had me looking in the wrong direction with all that Internal Affairs stuff. There’s nothing there. But what I did find is a lot juicier. Did you know your friend Keller filed incorporation papers for a private security firm earlier this year?”
“Do tell.”
“He’s connected, I’ll give him that. The corporate officers are a who’s who. Looks like he had some backers with deep pockets.”
“Had? As in, doesn’t have anymore?”
“That’s where it gets interesting,” he says. “Remember that guy Chad Macneil?”
The name is familiar, but I have to reach back all the way to last week’s headlines to make the connection. “The financial planner?”
“The guy who went missing, that’s right. Sunning himself on the beaches of South America, or so the story goes.”
“What about him?”
“He’s on the papers, too. The treasurer.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’m not. And the crazy thing is, I’m not so sure the investors realize it. I had a chat with one by phone – don’t worry, I didn’t tip my hand – and he seemed oblivious.”
“Are you saying Macneil stole the money out of the corporation?”
He laughs. “It’s a private company, March. I don’t know how I’d find something like that out. But don’t you think it’s an intriguing possibility?”
Yes, I do. Thomson reached out with the promise he could name shooters in the Morales case. Morales was, among other things, a money man – Lorenz even floated the ludicrous idea that since there were no drugs in the house, maybe the crew that hit it had come for the money. Now that notion doesn’t seem quite so ludicrous anymore. Not if Keller’s treasurer, when he absconded, took the company’s capital with him.
In fact, a lot of things suddenly start looking like they might connect. Mitch Geiger’s rogue crew jacking dealers left and right, showing no respect for the territorial boundaries. The tactical know-how of the shooters at the Morales scene, with Castro’s theory about the flanking maneuver outside the bathroom window. It would explain how Thomson could be so certain about naming the bad guys. Maybe he knew them. Maybe he was there. Something like that, it could easily eat away at the conscience of a supposedly reformed man.
“Anything else for me?” I ask.
“That’s it. Now, what have you got for me?”
“All in good time, Brad. Just keep digging for now.”
After I get him off the phone, I check my messages and find that the elusive Vance Balinski has gotten in touch. He sounds nervous, either because he’s not accustomed to leaving voicemail for a homicide detective, or because he knows what’s in the box Thomson gave him. According to the message, he’s on his way to the Morgan St. Café right now, dropping the package off at the counter. I can pick it up there anytime.
I check my watch. If I drive recklessly, I might just get there before he leaves.
Just inside the door, Vance Balinski crouches on a café chair, head ducked between his knees, attended by a semicircle of alarmed women including the one who’d worked the counter on my last visit. Everyone turns when I call his name, a few even jump. He straightens, casting around blindly for the sound of my voice, eyes clenched tight, a wadded towel pressed to his nose. When he takes it away, the fabric glistens with fresh blood. Blond curls frame his punching bag of a face, perfect as a wig fitted after the fact. One eye opens, the blue cornea bright in a red sea of burst vessels.
“You cops,” he says, choking on the words. “Never around when you’re needed.”
After confirming with the shell-shocked women that the police have been called, I crouch down for a closer look at Balinski’s injuries. In addition to the facial trauma, his rib cage has been kicked to shards, so bad that he winces with every labored breath.
“Who did this to you?” I ask.
“Some Mexicans.”
“What did they look like?”
He coughs a plug of bile into the towel. “They looked like Mexicans.”
“What about the box,” I ask, already knowing the answer.
He shakes his head. “That’s what they wanted.”
Between coughing fits and interruptions from well-intentioned bystanders trying to get him to lie down or drink some water, he manages to communicate the gist of the story. He pulled up outside the Morgan St. Café, popped his trunk to retrieve the box Thomson had given him, then heard footsteps rushing up. Before he could turn, they were already on him, hammering away with their tattooed fists. He flailed defensively, slipping backward into the trunk, only to be pulled out by the ankles. Twisting on the concrete, balled in the fetal position, he endured a flurry of bootheels until a stray steel-capped toe connected with his chin, knocking him out. He awakened in the hot dark confines of his own trunk, using the glow-in-the-dark release lever to get out.
“Funny,” he says, showing me what could pass for a child’s juice-stained teeth. “I never thought that release lever would actually come in handy.”
The Mexicans were gone, and so was the box. He tipped himself onto the pavement and managed to get inside, where his mangled appearance rendered him momentarily unrecognizable in spite of his being a regular.
Losing that box is enough to make me want to kick Balinski, too. Given his injuries, I’m forced to restrain myself in the questioning, keeping the tone civil if not solicitous, but I can’t seem to keep the incredulity out of my voice.
“You couldn’t just give me the box?” I ask. “What was the point of bringing it back here?”
He studies his bloody towel, looking for a clean patch, then reapplies pressure to his swelling nose. “When Joe first gave it to me, I just stuck it in the trunk and forgot. But then you called, and I got all curious and took a look inside. The moment I did, I panicked. I didn’t want anything to do with this.”
“So you saw what was in there?”
“Cocaine,” he says. “Just like the movies. Plastic bags full of powder, stacked like gold bricks at the bottom of the box.” He uses his free hand to sketch the size of the box in the air. “And I’d been driving around with this stuff the whole time, not even realizing.”
“The box was full of drugs?”
He nods. “And these blowups. Big pictures, I mean, output from a color printer or something, big tabloid-sized sheets folded over.”
“Pictures of what?”
“Some woman. Not the best resolution, but a naked woman kind of laid out on a couch or some kind of seat, with sort of a sheet, some kind of fabric wrapped around her.”
“With her eyes closed?” I ask, thinking of the repeated portraits in Thomson’s sketchbook. “It was Jill Fanning in the picture, right?”
“Jill?” His red eye blinks. “It wasn’t her. The image was jagged, you know? Pixelated. But definitely not Jill. He wouldn’t have a naked picture of Jill, anyway.”
“They weren’t -?”
He dismisses all possibility of an illicit relationship with a wet huff, setting off another coughing fit. Someone hands me a fresh towel. I wait until he regains his equilibrium, then gingerly switch it out.
Then a couple of uniformed officers enter, followed closely by an emt. I back off, giving them space to do their job, my mind busy making the necessary connections. If what he’s saying is right, maybe in losing the box I haven’t lost everything. First, using Thomson’s studio keys, I retrieve the sketchbook, tucking it under my arm. That done, I get Edgar Castro on the phone, figuring there’s no point in swearing somebody else to secrecy when I already have a willing accomplice in the crime lab. I explain about the photo on Thomson’s cell phone, asking him to extract it discreetly and make me a couple of prints.
“Should I try and up the resolution?” he asks, his voice trembling with excitement.
A mental image of Castro clicking away in front of a computer screen for the next twenty-four hours, burning time in pursuit of near-invisible photographic enhancements gives me pause. I tell him not to bother with anything fancy. I just want to see the same thing Joe Thomson did.
The dim lighting makes her white skin gray, and all the details punctuating the monochrome bareness are rendered indistinct, a blurred lip, a smudged eye, the vague shadow of an exposed breast. And like a classical nude, some kind of winding cloth envelops her. Not the casual disarray of bedsheets as I’d first assumed, glancing at the photo on the tiny phone screen, but a more deliberate wrapping, a makeshift hammock for quick transport, an improvised shroud.
And although the sketches still resemble Jill Fanning and the photo resembles the sketches, somehow the photo does not resemble the woman herself. For Balinski, who knows her, that much would have been obvious. It takes some back-and-forth scrutiny for me to arrive at the same conclusion.
She is not sleeping, either, as I had supposed. Her eyes are closed, but there’s a pallor to the face, a slackness to the expression. Perhaps I’m seeing what isn’t there, reading details into the pixels, but I have no doubt the woman in the photo is dead.
Try as I might, I can’t match the image to Hannah Mayhew’s features. The cheeks are rounder, the skin pale, the hair apparently raven black, though the darkness might be the result of poor lighting.
“What are we looking at here?” Castro asks.
He’s been sitting so quietly at my elbow that I’d forgotten his presence. I place the photo facedown on my desk, overtaken suddenly by an impulse of modesty, not wanting her to be exposed to eyes other than my own, to anything but a clinical gaze.
“I think this is the missing victim from the Morales scene, the woman who was strapped to the bed.”
“Then what’s her picture doing on Detective Thomson’s phone?”
I give him a chilly stare. “I assume Thomson took the photo. After they removed her body from the scene.”
His lips part, but he doesn’t speak. I can hear his breathing, suddenly coming fast and heavy, like he’s just finished a sprint. After glancing through the cubicle entrance to make sure no one else is watching, he leans forward, flipping the photo faceup, and traces his finger along a series of vertical lines on the dark background, just over the woman’s bare shoulder.
“See that?” he whispers. “You know what I think that is? It looks like a leather car seat, doesn’t it? Those stitched seams right there. She was lying in the back seat.”
I examine the photo, then nod. He might just be right.
“Only why would they take the body?” he asks.
That’s the question. Assuming Keller led the crew and Thomson was there, assuming they’d come for drugs or money, what purpose was served by taking the dead woman with them? If she was dead before they arrived, assaulted and killed by Morales and his entourage, removing her body would make no difference. Same thing if she’d been killed during the shooting, either by Morales or by someone on Keller’s team. Only one scenario makes sense to me.
“She must not have been dead when they took her,” I say.
“So, what, they were bringing her to the emergency room?” He chews over the possibility, shaking his head. “Then again, maybe she’s the reason they were there in the first place. Maybe they were trying to rescue her.”
“Maybe,” I say, not believing it.
I doubt this photo, grainy as it is, will be enough for a positive identification. The sketches attest to that. Thomson must have been trying to reconstruct the woman’s features from memory, using the cell-phone photo as a prompt. Looking at the successive attempts, there’s almost a desperation in the pencil strokes, a despairing black frenzy in the haphazard shading. He would have done the series in quick succession, frustrated at his inability to get the face right, perhaps unconsciously substituting the features of Jill Fanning, who might have been at work across the hallway as he drew. An hpd sketch artist might have been capable of doing the job, but of course Thomson couldn’t take this to any of his colleagues, not if they’d hustled the woman out of the house after lighting up the other occupants, rushing into the night as she bled out in the back seat.
“She died in the car, that’s my guess. He must have taken the picture afterward.”
Castro rubs his hands together. “Why?”
All I can do is shrug.
To remember her, maybe. The moment he leaned between the front seats and snapped her photo, he might not have had a clear intention in mind. Acting on impulse, the body sure to be disposed of somehow, the cop inside him insisted on some kind of documentation. And afterward, eating away at him like a slow-working acid, the logical next step: identification. Putting a name to the face, which required getting the face right first, prompting the futile sketches.
When he’d given up on identification, Thomson couldn’t let go. The dead woman must have haunted him, because his next move was irreversible, the kind of thing you don’t do if there’s any other option. He came to me, willing to give evidence against the people who’d been with him in that house, knowing that after that he could never go back.
To get her face out of his mind, he’d risked everything. It worked, I suppose, though not in the way he’d intended. He was dead now, too, his mind blank, erased by a fellow officer’s bullet. Either that or, lying in the bowels of eternity, his final sin inexpiable, her image tormented him still.
The seventh anniversary of the September 11 attacks, though solemnly anticipated, lacks the necessary immediacy to eclipse Hannah Mayhew’s ongoing plight, especially once the story of the missing girl metastasizes into that of a botched task force investigation. Stoked by rumors of a Fontaine lawsuit and steady leaks from the Sheriff ’s Department, the story grows more legs than a caterpillar, forcing a series of awkward press conferences in which Mosser and Villanueva stand awkwardly behind a cluster of microphones, fielding increasingly strident accusations from both the local and national press.
If not for Charlotte, I would remain blissfully ignorant of these developments. While I quietly labor away on the Thomson case, hoping the lack of closure will be taken by my colleagues as a sign that I’m overly thorough or perhaps a bit rusty, she spends each night in front of the television, switching from the local broadcasts over to cable, then back to the local stations when they wrap up for the evening. On the rare occasions I’m home, nothing I do can wean her off the remote control.
“There’s hardly anything about it,” she says, meaning the anniversary. “It’s like they’ve all forgotten and don’t want to be reminded.”
“It’s Hannah Mayhew’s fault.”
She frowns. “Don’t blame her.”
We sit together in silence, bathed in the screen’s flickering blue light, not speaking of the anniversary’s private significance because we almost never do. Not that we’ve forgotten. Our omission signals many things, but not that.
On the day itself, we will keep our annual vigil, returning together to the graveside, leaving behind fresh flowers and tears and knee prints in the soft grass. Our grief will feel especially acute because it will be ours alone, unobserved by a world whose attention will be rightly fixed on commemorating the day’s larger tragedy. The Pearl Harbor of our generation will swallow up all the rest, including the random passing of a ten-year-old Houston girl, killed instantly when a drunk driver T-boned her mother’s car.
“Dying that day,” Charlotte once said, when the event was still fresh enough to talk about, “it’s like being born on Christmas, isn’t it?”
Meaning people have bigger things on their minds. There’s only so much room in the ledger, and some entries require it all, leaving no space for smaller tragedies, even as footnotes.
Tonight something has changed, though. As Charlotte flips through the channels, instead of Hannah, everyone’s talking about the latest hurricane brewing out in the Gulf, picking up speed as it approaches. Since Katrina, every swirl of clouds on the Doppler screen merits reverent attention, and the weathercasters speak almost hopefully about the potential for a Category 5 landfall, putting the New Orleans debacle to shame.
“It’ll fizzle out like all the others,” Charlotte says.
“Maybe.”
Deep down, I find myself rooting for the storm, or at least for the breathing space it will afford people like Wanda Mosser and Theresa Cavallo. Fewer press conferences would mean more time for investigation, not that I hold out hope that any amount of extra effort will produce Hannah Mayhew, safe and sound or otherwise.
To my surprise, Cavallo’s pledge to devote her free time to spadework on Salazar pays quick dividends. He rents a thirty-foot slip at the Kemah Boardwalk Marina, housing an old but well-maintained cabin cruiser, a more substantial and significantly pricier boat than I’d imagined. A call to the marina confirms the whole place is monitored by video cameras. After explaining who I am to the head of security, who has his hands full preparing for the impending hurricane, I get an open-ended invitation to review the footage.
“You have Labor Day weekend on tape?”
“I’ll spool it up for you,” he says. “But do me a favor and leave it till next week, huh? We’ve got our hands full at the moment.”
“I wish I could oblige, but… How about tonight?”
He pauses long enough for me to consider the various ways he could make my life difficult, like demanding a warrant or hitting the delete key to save himself the inconvenience. But some people will bend over backward to cooperate with the police, and he happens to be one of them. We agree on a time and I drive down to Kemah full of hope, imagining a video image of Keller and Salazar hoisting a shrouded corpse aboard the boat.
The fantasy is dashed the moment the security chief, a gray-haired man in white shorts and a potbellied polo shirt, cues up the appropriate footage. Like the surveillance tape from the Willowbrook Mall parking lot, like Joe Thomson’s cell-phone snap, the image is grainy and indistinct.
“Is there a particular slip you’re interested in?” he asks, stroking his chin.
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
He’s disappointed, but in spite of the man’s willingness to help, I don’t want to single out Salazar’s boat. There’s always the chance they know each other, and the last thing I want to do is put my suspect any more on guard than he already is.
We buzz through the footage, which is displayed in split screens on a computer monitor, starting midday on Thursday even though the shooting off West Bellfort didn’t go down until later. Approaching ten, the chief pauses.
“The marina lights go off at ten,” he says, and sure enough the screens go black.
After that, the only usable footage is of the well-lit parking lot. We fast-forward through a whole lot of nothing, and then he stops just after three in the morning, running the tape back a bit.
“Look at that.”
A black extended-cab pickup rolls into the parking lot, the truck bed enclosed by an aftermarket hardtop, turning into an empty space. Two figures get out, moving around to the tailgate. They’re too far from the camera to identify, but I’m certain the truck is Salazar’s, and there’s nothing about the figures to suggest they aren’t Keller and Salazar.
“What’re they doing?” he asks.
I lean closer to the screen. They reach into the bed, sliding out a long white form. I don’t say anything to the security chief, but it looks like a body bag to me. Between them, the two men heft the bag, carrying it off-screen in the direction of the marina. They return hours later, just before daybreak, and drive away, no sign of the body bag they’d been carrying before.
After burning the relevant footage onto a DVD, he hands it over wide-eyed, under no illusions about what he’s just witnessed.
“If you talk about this,” I tell him, “you’ll be jeopardizing an ongoing investigation.”
He promises not to, punctuating the words with a dazzled gulp.
The temptation to board Salazar’s boat is strong, but for that I really will need a warrant, otherwise anything I find will be inadmissible. Still, I gaze out over the marina awhile, the bobbing boats illuminated by strong stadium lights, thinking about how easily I could slip through for a little preview, just to make sure the search warrant is worth the effort. The only thing stopping me is my conscience. That and the thought of the security cameras overhead.
“Seven years,” the captain says, shaking his head at the muted television on the credenza, where a platform of politicians take turns reading memorial speeches before a gathered crowd and the ubiquitous media. The ticker crawling across the bottom of the screen recaps a National Weather Service warning that Galveston, just south of us, is where the hurricane will make landfall, whipping up a catastrophic storm surge.
He turns his chair to face me, momentarily uncertain why I’m here. Then he remembers.
“About Thomson’s body,” he says. “You haven’t released it yet.”
“No.”
“Any particular reason? The man’s wife wants to bury him. It’s hard enough on everyone, a brother officer going out like that. No need to prolong the suffering, March.”
“Maybe there is,” I say.
I take a deep breath, then lay it all out. I start with Chad Macneil, who disappeared, presumably with Keller’s money, and then Mitch Geiger’s rumor about the string of drug heists, perhaps an attempt to make up the loss. He listens impassively with an occasional lizard-like blink of the eyes. When I mention Thomson’s offer and how I took it to Wilcox for help, he raises an eyebrow, nothing more.
The ballistics business, Castro’s theory about the tactics at the Morales scene and later the switched barrels, gets no reaction, but at least he doesn’t interrupt. I explain the photo on Thomson’s phone and end with the footage of Keller and Salazar – I make the identification sound a little more solid than it is – carrying a body bag out to the boat.
“So they dumped this woman’s body out in the Gulf?” he asks. “And then they shot Thomson to keep him from rolling over?”
“I think so. Yes.”
“And you’re just bringing this to me now?”
I answer with an apologetic shrug.
“You wouldn’t have said a thing if I hadn’t asked about releasing the body.”
“I wanted to be sure first,” I say.
“Because you were afraid I’d take you off the case?” I nod.
“Well,” he says, leaning forward, “you were right. That’s exactly what I’m going to do – ”
“But, sir.”
He consults the calendar on his desk blotter. “As of… let’s say next Thursday, the eighteenth. On that date you will conclude your investigation, release the body, and move on. Unless of course something more concrete develops, in which case…” His voice trails off and he turns back to the television, dismissing me by unmuting the volume just as a stern-faced woman in red says why we must never, will never, forget, to a ripple of sober applause.
I stumble outside his office with another week on the clock, though it is much more than that, I start to realize. Hedges knows, he knows and approves, willing to give me enough time to develop something solid, assuming I work quickly. There’s an understanding between us now, a faint flicker of the dimly remembered bond. Something akin to trust.
There’s no time to consider the ramifications, though, because Charlotte is waiting.
I clock out early and head home, pausing at the curb with the engine running until she comes out, unsteady on her heels, fixing an earring in place. She wears a black linen skirt and a black cardigan, her hair pulled back in an elegant chignon, as if it’s a dinner date we’re headed to and not a graveside.
Stopping on the steps, she remembers suddenly, ducking inside again and reappearing with the plastic-wrapped flowers. I go around to the passenger door, opening it for her, snapping it shut once she’s safely inside. Circling back, I get behind the wheel. Next to me, the flowers on the floor mat rising up between her knees, my wife covers her face in her hands and sobs.
“It’s all right,” I say, flattening a hand on her back, feeling the gaps between the vertebrae.
She motions for me to drive.
So I drive.
At the headstone of our daughter, kneeling down with our hands clasped, we unwrap the flowers and lay them down, and then we water them with tears. On this day seven years ago, something was taken from us all. What we lost, in the overall scheme, may pale in comparison. But to Charlotte and me, it was everything. She was everything. And on the days, the infrequent days, when my heart clings to a belief in the afterlife, she is the reason, the fragile thought that the small, cold hand I let go of once will be warm once more, warm and with the power not only to be clung to but to cling. What faith I have, and it isn’t much, resides in the grip of that tiny hand.
After Hurricane Rita, the sequel to Katrina, left the neighborhood without power and thus without air-conditioning, I stopped talking about getting a generator and actually bought one, storing it in the garage along with some sticky, dust-covered jerry cans of gasoline and gallons of drinking water. Now, instructions in hand, I try to work out how to operate the thing. Never much good with engines or anything mechanical, the challenge soon stumps me, but not enough to summon Tommy down to assist. His repertoire of life skills, augmented by the time he spent in Africa, no doubt includes the function of generators. But I’d better wait at least until Charlotte is gone.
Along with Ann, she plans to weather the storm in style at a Dallas hotel, returning once everything’s back to normal. Her overnight bag is packed, waiting by the front door for her sister’s arrival. She finds me in the garage, frowning at the inscrutable little machine.
“I feel like I’m abandoning you,” she says.
“Don’t. I’ll be happier knowing you’re all right. Besides, if I don’t figure this thing out, it’ll be like an oven inside. You don’t want to go through that again.”
She takes the instructions out of my grease-stained fingers and attempts for a few minutes to make sense of them. Just as she grasps the basic idea and starts explaining, Ann’s Toyota hums quietly up the driveway, a Prius hybrid just like the ones we pretended to be giving away in the cars-for-criminals scam.
“Gotta go,” Charlotte says, pecking me on the lips.
Since the grave visit, she’s been more relaxed. All the static building in her atmosphere suddenly discharged in a flow of quiet tears, and now it’s like the tension never existed. We haven’t had an argument in twenty-four hours. Last night, she stayed up with me instead of going to bed early. Even the sleeping pills have disappeared into the nightstand.
“Be safe,” I call after her.
“You, too.”
The silence following her departure lasts a half minute before Tommy creaks down the side stairs, poking his head through the open garage door. Seeing the coast is clear, he bounds forward with a look of relief.
“Hey, it’s supposed to make landfall sometime tonight,” he says. “Got any big plans?”
“I’ve got to work.” The instructions hang limp in my hand. “You don’t happen to know how to run one of these things, do you?”
He hunches over the generator, a gleam in his eye. “Not exactly. But, hey, we can figure it out, right?”
“You figure it out. I’ll be out to check on you in a minute.”
I leave him to it, going back inside to change. The house in Charlotte’s absence takes on a still, empty air, so I shower and dress quickly, wanting to get back to the case quickly. Hedges gave me a week, which isn’t much to begin with, but if the hurricane proves as disastrous as they’re saying on the news, with massive flooding and power outages, then my week could contract into a day. So I’d better make the most of it.
Before heading downstairs, I glance inside Charlotte’s nightstand to see whether she’s taken the pills with her. The bottle rolls against the front of the drawer. I shut it, my idiot grin reflected back from the dresser mirror.
When the phone rings, I answer without checking the caller ID, expecting Charlotte since the image of her in my mind shines so vividly. The voice is male, though, and after a second I recognize it. The youth pastor, Carter Robb, who I haven’t seen since my late-night visit to his apartment, when I commissioned him with the task of finding the Dyers.
“I just thought I should touch base,” he says. “I managed to get a number from somebody at the church, but it doesn’t seem to work anymore. I do have that picture for you, though.”
“Picture?”
“Of Hannah and Evey Dyer.”
I clear my throat before speaking. “Mr. Robb, I’ve been reassigned.
I’m not working with the task force anymore.”
“Oh.”
“Have you tried calling Detective Cavallo?”
He sighs. “I have, actually. Donna asked me to, trying to get an update. She feels like, with some of the things she said on the news, there might be some bad feelings. I’ve left Detective Cavallo a couple of messages, but I was hoping – ”
“She’s got her hands full,” I say. “But I’m sure she’ll get back to you as soon as she can. And that’s nonsense about bad feelings. The lady’s daughter is missing. She can say whatever she wants.” I want to get rid of this guy, but I feel like I owe him more than a casual brush-off. “Look, what’s the best way to get in touch with you? I can make a couple of calls and let you know what I find out.”
“That would be great,” he says, giving me his mobile number as well as the number of what he calls a community outreach center. “It’s one of the places the youth group did some volunteering. A friend of mine from seminary runs it, and with the storm coming he needs some help down there getting everything secure. I’m planning to spend the night.”
“Where is this place?” I ask.
He gives an address in Montrose, just a few blocks away from the Morgan St. Café. I ask if he’s ever been to the café before, but he’s never even heard of it. It’s a small world, but not that small.
“If I find out anything, I’ll give you a call.”
“Even if you don’t,” he says. “I’d appreciate hearing something, even if it’s nothing.”
When I return to the garage, the generator is already running while Tommy stares long and hard at the electrical box, trying to figure out exactly how to achieve a link-up. Maybe he’ll electrocute himself, I think, which would solve my tenant problem. Then again, he might burn the house down, which is more solution than I’m really looking for.
“Everything all right?”
“Leave it with me,” he says. “I’ll have it going in no time.”
I study him a moment, trying to decide if what I’m seeing is confidence or foolhardiness.
“Fine.” I throw my briefcase in the car and start the engine, rolling the window down to impart some final advice. “Tommy, don’t burn the house down.”
“Not a chance.”
“And don’t electrocute yourself, either.”
Gene Fontenot answers my call in mid-apology, like he started even before pushing the talk button. “I been meaning to call you, man, really I have. It’s right here on my list of things to do.” He thumps his finger on what must be the list. “You gotta forgive me for not being quicker on this, but what can I say? We get a little busy around here. You know how it goes – ”
“Gene,” I say, cutting him off. “It’s fine. I’ve been pretty busy myself. But have you managed to track down this Dyer woman and her daughter?”
“About that…” He rustles some papers around. “Here we go. The answer to your question is yes and no. Yes, I found the lady. She got a place over in Kenner, out by the airport. That’s the good news. The bad news is, the daughter Evangeline, she don’t stay there no more. The mother says, once they moved back, the girl, she fell into her old ways. They had a lotta problems, and eventually the girl run away with some boy.”
“She ran away? When was this?”
More rustling, accompanied by some humming. “That woulda been in July sometime?” He turns the sentence up at the end, uncertain. “ ’Bout eight weeks or so ago?”
He gives me the mother’s address and phone number, which I copy into my notebook.
“Thanks, Gene. I owe you one.”
“Take care of yourself with this storm coming in,” he says. “I don’t want you turning up on my doorstep, looking for shelter.”
“This is Texas, Gene. We don’t run.”
He chuckles. “Keep telling yourself that.”
Once I get him off the phone, I give Cavallo a call. She’s surprised to hear that Robb has been leaving messages for her, confessing she’s been too busy to empty her inbox. The weary edge in her voice is enough to convince me. I’m almost reluctant to ask about new developments on the Hannah Mayhew case, but I ask anyway, and she replies with a derisive laugh.
“We were planning a big press conference today, announcing a new reward for any information, but now they’re arguing about whether to reschedule for after the hurricane blows through. People are ‘distracted,’ apparently.”
“What about the actual casework? Anything there?”
“Let me put it this way. All the tips we’ve gotten? We’re getting down to the bottom. Everything’s been followed up. We’ve interviewed over a hundred drivers of white vans like the one in the surveillance footage, even done physical searches of quite a few, and I don’t think we’re any closer to finding Hannah than we were on day one.”
I pass along the news from Gene Fontenot, which seems to irritate her. She makes me repeat everything, then asks for his number so she can call to confirm.
“Don’t worry about Robb,” I tell her. “I’ll call him back.”
“I appreciate that,” she says, her tone communicating the exact opposite. Not that I can hold it against her. She’s on a dead-end assignment, one of those cases destined to be rehashed for years to come on the unsolved-mystery shows, a future footnote for journalists writing about how media coverage negatively impacts major cases. Cavallo has a right to be difficult.
Before calling the youth pastor, I put in an hour at the typewriter before hunting down Wilcox, who’s kept clear of me since his early morning visit to my home. No cubicles for the men and women of Internal Affairs. He has a tiny glass box all to himself, with his name on a plate beside the door. I tap lightly before entering and find him busy typing away, a pair of earphones sealing him off from the outside world. To get his attention, I have to lean across the desk and yank one out.
“What do you want?”
He’s dressed in a glossy blue shirt, his tie knot thick as his throat, with his chalk-striped jacket thrown over the back of his chair. Up close, he even smells nice.
“What I want is a favor, Stephen.”
“Your case is dead, in case you forgot.”
I sit down on the edge of his desk. “The informant may be, but the case sure isn’t.”
The marina surveillance footage warms him up a little, then I slide the sketchbook and the enlarged cell-phone picture across the desk for his inspection. Wilcox is a sharp enough detective not to need everything explained. He flips through the sketchbook, his expression growing thoughtful.
“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” he says. “The finance guy who skipped to Mexico, Chad Macneil? Guess whose money he took with him.”
“Keller’s. I already know.”
His mouth curls down. “Then you probably also know that Keller’s security company rents warehouse space about a block away from where Thomson’s body was found.”
I blink. “What?”
Satisfied with my reaction, he fishes a file out of his desk, paging through it until he reaches a stack of satellite images courtesy of Google Earth with the street grid superimposed. From the air, the long gray rectangles look nearly identical, set apart only by the placement of hvac units and natural variations in the color of roofing gravel. One of them is outlined in yellow highlighter.
“That’s the warehouse Keller rents.”
“What does a security company need warehouse space for?”
“Search me,” he says, trailing his finger across the image. “This road along here, that’s where Thomson’s truck was parked, isn’t it?”
I lean down for a closer look. “That looks to be the spot. There’s a neighborhood across the street, through these trees, and I figured if there was any geographical connection, it would be to the houses.”
“Instead, it’s the warehouse. All of these are owned and managed by the same outfit.”
The layout comes back to me, a complex of gray corrugated buildings hemmed in by fields of concrete and a tall chain-link fence. “There’s a security guard there, a guy by the name of Wendell Cropper. Kind of a strange character, used to be with the department back in the nineties. You know anything about him?”
He shakes his head. “Maybe he saw more than he let on, that’s what you’re thinking?”
“How likely is it, if Keller’s using the facility, that this guy isn’t connected with him somehow? It might be worth bringing him in and sweating him a little more. In the meantime, you ever think about getting a warrant for this warehouse?”
“On what grounds? I’d need to show some probable cause. Besides, the feeling on our team is that something like that would only tip our hand. We’d be taking a big risk. If there’s nothing in that warehouse that shouldn’t be there, Keller would know we’re after him and cover his tracks.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But a warrant is what I’m here for.”
“Not for the warehouse -?”
I shake my head. “The boat. If that really was a body they dumped, then maybe there’s some trace evidence onboard. Now, if I go through the usual channels, there’s no way they won’t know what’s going on. But you guys, on the other hand, have back doors into the judges’ chambers.”
“You should have come to me sooner,” he says with a laugh. “Trying to find a judge in chambers today is going to be a challenge. They’ve got mansions to board up and yachts to tie down.”
“Maybe we’ll find one down at the marina.”
His smile fades. “It’ll have to wait.”
“If we don’t get in there before the hurricane hits, we could lose the opportunity. They’re talking about Galveston being underwater, Stephen, so I doubt the Kemah Boardwalk is going to be in good shape. I can’t have my smoking gun sinking to the bottom of the sea.”
“The slips can’t be that deep,” he says.
“Come on. I know there are strings you can pull. What’s the point of having a man inside IAD if he doesn’t throw his weight around from time to time?”
After a little token resistance, he gives way. “Fine, March. Whatever you want. But you’re writing it up, not me.”
I slide the warrant across his desk, typed before my visit. He takes it with a rueful smile, glances over the cover page, then reaches for the phone.
Thanks to the floating docks, the boats in the marina rise and fall as the water does, the waves choppy harbingers of the coming storm, as is the cloudy gunmetal sky. The late afternoon wind is electric, thick with humidity, smelling of salt. Wilcox is with me, along with a couple of handpicked officers from Internal Affairs. We check in with the security chief, who’s wearing the same shorts and shirt I remember from before, with a little more stubble around the jowls. He guides us through the network of slips, checking his clipboard from time to time as though he’s forgotten which boat we’re heading for.
The Rosalita is tucked between two newer, larger vessels, its hull pearlescent and dingy from the passage of time. We descend from the pier to the cruiser’s stern, feeling the roll underfoot, then advance beneath the open-backed enclosure that shelters the wheel. In spite of his portly form, the security chief moves in easy strides. The rest of us, already gloved, reach for the nearest handholds to keep our balance.
“If you think this is bad,” he says, “just you wait.”
The cabin door is securely locked, but we’ve brought along an officer who specializes in surreptitious entry. After a couple of minutes crouched at the door, he announces victory, stepping aside to let Wilcox pass. My ex-partner pauses, motioning me forward.
“Ladies first,” he says.
A narrow row of steps leads into the cramped cabin, which reminds me more of a fiberglass bathtub insert than the opulently appointed, wood-paneled abode I was imagining. There’s a tight banquette molded into one side, complete with folding table, and a set of storage cubbies on the other, lit only by a row of narrow dirty windows that pierce the hull. I fumble along the wall for a light switch, but if there is one, I don’t find it.
“I hope nobody’s claustrophobic,” I say.
The cabin smells damp and a little fishy, but the surfaces gleam cleanly in the dimness. At the far end, behind a tiny door, I find a cleverly compartmentalized shower and toilet small enough to make an airplane restroom seem vast in comparison. The others file in, and somebody finds the lights. Fully illuminated, the cabin reminds me a bit of a camper my uncle used to keep in the driveway when I was a kid. The idea of it seemed cool, but whenever I went inside, I couldn’t wait to get out again.
We search slowly, methodically, using flashlights to illuminate every crack and crevice, causing as little disturbance as possible. It doesn’t take long, because there’s so little ground to cover. A minute or two into the hunt, I begin to lose hope. There won’t be anything here. They brought the body – assuming it was a body – already bagged. Salazar’s truck, assuming that’s where she bled out, might yield a treasure trove of blood evidence, but by the time they reached the boat, the body would have been squared away. At best, this search might allow me to cross another possibility off the list, but there’s nothing – “Sir.”
One of the IAD officers kneels at the foot of the built-in cabinets, his arm shoulder-deep inside, cheek flat against the frame. He squints in concentration, then jerks back, pulling something loose with a ripping sound. His hand reappears, clutching a bundle wrapped in layers of thick plastic sheeting, secured by strips of duct tape.
Wilcox takes the package to the folding table, carefully unwinding the plastic. He stops halfway through, once the object’s form becomes obvious. I move in, uncoiling the rest of the sheet, removing the final layer aware that no one in the cabin is so much as breathing.
The boat rocks. We sway a little. Our eyes remain fixed on the table. Under the pile of plastic, resting unevenly, lies a blued sig Sauer P229. On the exposed side of the chamber, visible through the cutout of the ejection port, the barrel is stamped BAR STO.357 SIG.
“Is that what I think it is?” Wilcox asks.
Nobody answers. Nobody even breathes.
Driving home late that evening, I remember Carter Robb. Instead of calling, I flip through my notebook for the address he gave me, stopping by on the way. I find him with a group of other men, all stripped to the waist, nailing plywood sheets across the windows of a two-story brick building that could pass for the scrawny cousin of the one housing the Morgan St. Café. The ground floor is done, and now they’ve mounted ladders to reach the second, the work illuminated by shop lights in the yard, since the streetlamps are too far away. The boom box is tuned to ktru, only audible during lulls in the hammering.
I call up to Robb, who shimmies down the ladder and snatches a black T-shirt from a pile on the ground, using it to wipe the sweat from his face.
“I thought you forgot about me,” he says.
“I did.”
There must be a residual glow on my face, left over from the discovery at the marina, because Robb perks up all the sudden.
“Something’s happened?”
“Not with Hannah, no. I just happened to be in the neighborhood so I stopped by. The truth is, the task force is waiting for new developments.”
He nods slowly. “So we’re back where we started.”
“There is one thing. I talked to a friend in New Orleans and had him track down the Dyer family. According to the mother, Evangeline Dyer ran away from home again. I know you said she’d done it before. She left eight weeks ago. I haven’t spoken to the mother myself, but I have her contact information, assuming you’d want it.”
“I should call her,” he says.
I copy the information onto a blank sheet of my notebook, ripping the page out and handing it to him. He studies the writing, though his eyes don’t seem to focus on the numbers. More like he’s looking through the page, or seeing something reflected on it.
“I should call her,” he says again.
Over his shoulder, the other workers have knocked off for the moment, keeping their distance but clearly interested in our conversation. I glance their way, prompting Robb to turn as if noticing them for the first time. He waves a hand toward the building.
“This is the outreach center.”
“And what is that, exactly?”
He cocks his head to one side, smiling faintly. “The idea is to provide an encounter space. People from the church, people from the surrounding community, all coming together to talk. Not just about religion, but life. Everything under the sun.”
“I thought it was more of a homeless shelter.”
One of the others, a friendly, broad-chested man of about thirty-five, with sunken eyes and a wooden cross around his neck, steps forward to join us, chuckling at what I’ve just said.
“A homeless shelter would probably be of more use these days, but what can I say?” He shrugs in an outsized, eloquent way. “This is the vision God gave me. ‘If you build it, they will come.’ ”
“Do they?”
He seesaws his hand in the air. “We host some book clubs that are pretty popular.”
“There’s a lot of that going around,” I say, remembering the women gathered at the Morgan St. Café. I pat Robb on the bicep and turn to go.
“Oh, wait,” he says, digging in his back pocket. He removes his wallet, shuffles through a wad of folded receipts, and finally produces a folded photograph. “Here you go.”
I hold the picture up to the light. Hannah, radiant in the camera’s flash, smiles invitingly, her hand thrown lazily around the shoulder of another girl, her face half concealed behind a lump of matte black hair, a bad dye job maybe, her one visible eye rimmed thickly in dark liner. Evey Dyer raises two fingers to the lens, her nails painted black. Whoever snapped the photo probably assumed this was a peace sign, but from my Anglophile ex-partner, I know the gesture she’s flashing is rude.
“Thanks,” I tell him, tucking the picture away. “So you took your youth group to this place for their summer trip?”
Robb nods. “We helped fix the place up, went out in the community to get the word out, hosted a couple of get-acquainted parties.”
“And it was much appreciated,” the other man says. “I’m Murray Abernathy, by the way.” His handshake has a lot of power behind it. “Resident dreamer.”
The three of us stand there in the quickening wind, my jacket whipping around my hips. The sky rumbles overhead, prompting us all to look up momentarily.
“You met Hannah Mayhew, Mr. Abernathy? And her friend Evan-geline Dyer?”
“Hard to miss those two,” he says, still gazing overhead. “They really helped out a lot here. It’s a terrible thing, what’s happened to Hannah. We’re praying she gets home safe.”
“Evey ran away,” Robb says under his breath, causing the other man to deflate.
As I turn to go, the first fat drops of rain start to fall. One breaks cool against my neck. Robb knits his eyebrows as another splashes the bridge of his nose. Within seconds the clouds open and the rain drills down on us. Everyone in the yard moves closer to the building, sheltering under the eaves.
Everyone but me.
I reach my car door, glancing back in time to see Robb, his hair plastered against his scalp, ascending the ladder again, rain-battered, his face pointing heavenward.
The dream ends with a crash. I sit up, peeling the damp sheets off my skin, unable to remember a thing. On the nightstand, the glowing numbers on the clock face have disappeared. The fan overhead whirs to a stop. Uncertain whether the collision happened in real life or my head, I move to the window, peering through the rain-washed pane. It’s black outside, some shadows darker than others. The sky’s accustomed glow – an effect produced by light reflected on the clouds, producing a faint nightlong radiance – is extinguished.
Wind whistles past the house, slapping branches against the walls. I see nothing, and I’m too dog-tired to go out and look. I lie back down on top of the sheets, cocooned in a womb of white noise, and try to get some sleep. My mind races with the last images I saw on television before hitting the sack, newscasters down in Galveston knocked flat on their backsides and skyscrapers downtown popping their windows left and right.
A steady banging starts up not long after. At first I ignore it, but as my head clears and I awaken fully, the sound takes on a panicked intensity. Feeling around in the dark, I grab my flashlight, a tiny Fenix that puts my old Maglite to shame, and head down the stairs. The pounding comes from the kitchen door. As soon as I open it, Tommy pushes through, half-dressed and a little crazy, rivers of water sluicing off him.
“Hey, man,” he says, breathless. “You’re not gonna believe your eyes, I’m telling you. It’s, like, unreal up there.”
The door swings wide, propelled by the wind, slamming against a breakfast table chair. I shoulder it closed, then turn to check on him, running the light up and down his chest. His jeans, soaked through, puddle around his bare feet, the cuffs ragged.
“You all right?”
“Nothing hit me, I don’t think. But you gotta go look, man. It’s like tv.”
His mouth twists into a maniacal grin, like he’s just bungee-jumped for the first time and is ready to go again. I shine the light along his head, making sure it’s water plastering his hair down and not blood and brain tissue.
“What happened to you?”
“You gotta come see,” he says, starting for the door. He stops, finger lifted, remembering something. “Oh, yeah. Hey, do you have any plastic bags – you know, like trash bags or something? I need to cover some stuff so it doesn’t get any wetter than it already is. I don’t know, maybe we should try to carry some things down.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask, not waiting for a reply. I bolt through the door, lighting a path up the garage stairs. Everything looks normal to me. He follows me up, panting with excitement. I pass through the door and into the living room, noting nothing.
He leads the way into the bedroom. “In here.”
The moment I cross the threshold, my breath catches. My face is a foot away from a shimmering oak branch. Gazing upward, I see the jagged hole in the roof, another thick branch halfway in, and a torrent of rainwater blasting through the opening. A wad of shingles lies on top of Tommy’s bed.
At first, I can’t say anything. We look at each other, and his manic thrill jumps the divide, setting off a tingle along my spine.
“Cool, huh?” he says.
“You were in bed when this happened?”
His head shakes. “I heard this loud crack – must have been the trunk snapping or something – and my body just took over. I reached the door right when it hit.”
I run the light over him again, hardly believing he came through this unscathed, but there’s not a scratch on him. He starts jogging in place, like he’s cold, or maybe brimming with nervous energy.
“Let’s move what we can move,” I say, “then you can spend the 286 rest of the night in the house.”
“Maybe I’ll sack out on the couch. I kind of don’t want to leave.”
“You’re leaving,” I say. “Don’t even think about staying up here.”
We leave the furniture in place – the bed and dresser – just taking the drawers out. Everything from the closet ends up on the living room couch. When we’re finished, I go outside for a look at the damage. The tree came from next door, smashing the far side of the garage, which is why I couldn’t see anything from my bedroom window.
Seeing a tree like that upended, a hundred years thick, its earth-clotted roots naked to the rain, at first I can’t take my eyes off it. It didn’t break so much as it was uprooted, leaving a muddy crater rimmed with St. Augustine grass, super green in the Fenix light, as if the storm brought all its chlorophyll to the surface, the way grass might look if it could blush.
Through the roots and down the length of the trunk the whole tree seems intact. Severed power lines crisscross the horizontal canopy as if, once it began to teeter, the tree reached out and tried to steady itself, grabbing hold of the fragile cables, bringing them down with it. I’ve seen branches break off in high wind and even trunks split by lightning, but never anything like this. One of the lines lies dormant in the neighbor’s yard. Another snakes across the garage roof. I’m happy all the sudden that the power’s out.
To be on the safe side, I back the cars out of the garage and move the essentials – our rarely used bicycles, the generator, the fuel and water, my tools – onto the back deck. With the weight of that oak still resting on the roof, there’s no point in taking chances. Back inside, I throw some sheets on one of the couches, but Tommy’s too wired for sleep. He darts through the house, front windows to back, like he’s rooting for more damage and doesn’t want to miss anything.
Giving up on sleep, I rummage through the fridge, which already feels lukewarm. We’ll need to get the generator started pretty soon. But for now I grab a bottle of still-cool water and imagine the phone call I’ll have to make later today.
The bad news, Charlotte, is that your garage has a new skylight. The good news is, your tenant’s going to need a new place to live.
In her mind, it’ll seem like a fair trade.
Just after daybreak, the empty water bottle still resting on my chest, I hear Tommy above me and open my eyes. I installed myself in a chair, not meaning to nod off. He hunches over, speaking in a whisper.
“Hey, Mr. March. The cops are outside.”
“The cops?”
“There’s one coming up to the door, and another one in the car.”
He’s talking like we might be in trouble with the law, like maybe it’s time to bolt out the back. I pry myself out of the chair, the bottle dropping to the floor. I peer through the front window, then open the door. Sergeant Nix is shaking off his rain poncho on the porch. He looks up, smiling awkwardly.
“How ’bout you get yourself dressed and take a little ride with me?” he says.
“What’s the deal?”
He glances back to the patrol cruiser on the curb. “I’m bending the rules as it is, but I figure I owe you after the other day.” His eyes drop to the bandage half-exposed by my shorts.
“Yes, you do,” I say, patting his arm. “Give me five minutes.”
My mind racing with possibilities, I head up the stairs, ignoring Tommy’s whispered questions. I pull on a pair of cargo pants, a black T-shirt, and a lightweight raincoat to keep my gear dry, then I’m out the front door, trailing Nix, who opens the back of the cruiser for me, ushering me in with an ironic bow.
“This is Webb.” He motions to the uniform behind the wheel.
Webb takes us down Durham, across Interstate 10 and the Allen Parkway, until it becomes Shepherd. Though the storm has passed, the wind gusts remain strong enough to lift the wiper blades off the glass. Condensation spider-webs the edge of the windows. We turn on West Gray, passing between the two Starbucks locations that sit like Scylla and Charybdis on either side of the street. Onto Montrose, heading back to the neighborhood where I left Carter Robb, near Joe Thomson’s Morgan Street studio.
Nix gives verbal directions at every intersection, but Webb anticipates most commands, leading me to suspect that we’re returning to someplace they’ve just come from.
We drive the rain-slick streets, avoiding side turns where water’s risen higher than the road, and the power lines snapped free and coiled through severed branches. As the sun rises, we see a few people emerging from shelter for their first look at what the hurricane has done.
“Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” I ask.
Nix shakes his head. “I’m gonna show you.”
Ahead, a side road is blocked off by a parked hpd cruiser. Nix tells Webb to turn and then to pull to the curb. Soon he’s out the door, advancing toward some debris strewn across the road, motioning for me to follow. A derelict building off to the right has come apart under the pressure of wind, giving up the scraps of plywood that have long sealed its windows and doors. Out of them poured the structure’s long-abandoned contents, mainly soaked boxes and broken-down furniture, a refrigerator door, a lidless cooler with rusty stains inside.
I know these blocks pretty well, and no doubt I’ve passed this building a thousand times before, never taking any particular notice. On the opposite corner, a sleek modern three-level house is going up, or was until the storm knocked a padlocked trailer sideways against the cantilevered porch.
A long spool of plastic sheeting has unwound, too, running across the derelict’s yard and into the street. It snaps like a sail in the wind. As I approach, the plastic glistens, streaked with mud and leaves. Lumps of debris are caught up inside. It makes me think of a distended intestine. The tail end, right across the middle of the road, swells like the body of a python after it’s swallowed something whole.
Nix hunches over the unspooled plastic, lifting corners as he edges along its length toward the swollen end.
He grins. “Nothing like a decomp first thing in the morning.”
The plastic is opaque, the kind of sheeting used on construction sites to seal openings. I kneel beside the swell in the plastic, which is in fact a swaddled corpse. Discolored clothing, an emaciated and withered shape, a brownish husk of a human being, gender indeterminate, age indeterminate. Small enough that it must be a woman, though, or maybe a child.
My eyes trace the long spool of plastic back to its source, the derelict building, yet another square two-story structure in brown brick, a former business or maybe a duplex but now just a rotted shell waiting to be rehabbed or more likely demolished. Ten blocks or so east of Montrose, ten blocks or so north of Westheimer, tucked into a neighborhood without sidewalks where time-blackened bungalows sit cheek by jowl with the kind of glass and steel architecture projects going up across the street. The yard is overgrown, the windows boarded up, the doors inaccessible, a place so forgotten its plywood coverings aren’t even tagged by spray paint.
“Why am I here? You could’ve just called this in.”
“Yeah,” Nix says. “But come take a look inside.”
We follow the unwound plastic back to its source, the sheet overlapping in vine-like rings. The body must have been tightly wrapped. The wind, knocking through, snatched the bundle up and unraveled it, bringing some long-hidden secret out into the light. Although, in this heat, it wouldn’t have to be hidden long to reach such a state.
Glancing through the doorway, I see the interior walls are gone, leaving a vast dark cavity with a feral reek. A stack of wooden pallets is scattered across the floor, more plastic caught up in the slats.
“The body must have been against the far wall,” Nix says, “with the pallets stacked in front. Then the wind came through and vomited everything out.”
Underneath the pallets I spot something pink and shiny that doesn’t belong, a surface too pristine and fresh. Nix stands still, letting me advance alone. Whatever it is, he’s already seen it. A faux leather purse almost untouched by the surrounding filth, its surface glinting dully, zippered shut and waiting.
“Everything’s just how we found it. Only I did check inside.”
I slip on a pair of gloves, then pull the zipper open. A slim wallet nestles up top. I lift it gingerly and place it on the floor, using the edge of my finger to pop the strap. The wallet falls open. Behind the plastic id window, there’s a Texas driver’s license.
“No way.”
Back at the entrance, Nix smiles grimly. “Murder will out, right? But I’ve never seen it happen like this before. I thought you’d want to get in on it, all things considered.”
I stand up slowly, blinking at the light outside.
“You better put everything back how you found it,” he says.
I obey, operating on muscle memory, my thoughts elsewhere. Numb with disbelief. No feeling of accomplishment, certainly no closure. The usual exhilaration a big break induces, utterly absent. Tommy’s maniacal grin flashes in my mind. The tree on top of my garage, the translucent winding sheet out on the road. The wound in my thigh starts to throb.
“I’ve got a call to make,” I say.
“I bet you do.” He walks forward, gazing down at the purse. “So we’re even.”
“Right.”
Back outside, I’m limping, advancing in tiny increments, stopping to look around. I half expect the sergeant to come after me, laughing, saying it’s all some sick joke. Approaching the body once more, I get down on my knees. My hand goes to the plastic shroud, then hesitates, as if my touch had the power to profane. I decide not to look again. Instead, I put a little distance between myself and the corpse, the object of so much hope on the part of so many people.
After a storm like this, cellular reception is spotty. Houston rain showers have been known to bring a network down. But the line is crystal clear, the ringing so loud I hold the receiver away from my ear.
“March.”
Cavallo’s voice comes out like a yawn, but I don’t apologize for waking her. Instead, I give her the news, flat and detached, and she receives it in the same spirit.
“Are you sure?”
“Not from the body,” I say. “It’ll have to be tested. But her purse is here, with her identification, so it seems like a safe bet.”
“We’ll see,” she replies. Her words aren’t a form of denial, just a professional insistence on checking off the necessary boxes. “If you’re right, then I guess it’s finally over.”
Spoken like a Missing Persons investigator, but I don’t correct her. What looks like an ending to her, though, is just a start. We have a body at long last, and a body is not an end but a beginning.
“Just get over here.”
“I’m on my way.”
After I hang up the phone, I dial another number. I don’t have to. I’m under no obligation. And it’s doubtful there is anything constructive Carter Robb can do. An identification – even from someone who knew her, even if I was perverse enough to pull back that plastic and ask him for one – isn’t going to be very easy, given the state of decomposition. Maybe the clothes would be recognizable, though Cavallo will have an inventory of what she was last seen wearing.
I call anyway, not for the sake of the case, but because I know how I would feel, just blocks away, already consumed with guilt, finding out how close I’d been without realizing. I don’t owe it to him, but I can’t help feeling that on some level I do, maybe in the way we all owe each other everything, every possible courtesy, on account of what life puts us through.
He arrives first, the officers at the end of the road flagging down his car. He’s dressed like he was last night, only he’s wearing the wadded T-shirt he used to wipe his sweat. I motion for him to come through, but he approaches slowly, stopping a good distance back, cupping his hand over his mouth, closing his eyes. And then he crumples to the ground.
“What’s this?” Nix asks.
I shrug, then start off toward Robb. “I guess we all have favors to pay back.”
“This was an act of God in every sense of the word,” Cavallo says from behind her mask, speaking to no one in particular. Wanda Mosser glances my way, lifting an eyebrow, but I make no response out of respect for the dead.
We gather around the autopsy table, waiting for Bridger, who enters with a set of X-rays in hand, pegging them up against the light table. The enlarged negative image of a chest cavity, ribs translucent against the black background, and next to it a side view of the skull. He uses a pencil eraser to point out the light-colored blemishes.
“Here and here,” he says, indicating two cone-shaped anomalies, one in the chest and one in the abdomen. “And here we have a third.” Touching the eraser against another white cone inside the cranium.
Mosser clears her throat. “So that’s two to the chest and one to the head? Like an execution?”
A Mozambique Drill is the term she’s looking for, but I don’t correct her.
“Not exactly,” he says, moving to the body. “The angles are very different. Your people will be able to tell you more, but it looks to me like one of these chest shots was fired head-on, and the others at a steep trajectory, like she was on the ground. The head shot, as you can see from this stippling, was a contact wound, probably a coup de grace. But based on the two chest wounds, I’m guessing some time passed before the second shot, at least enough for her to fall to the ground.”
I go over to the X-rays for a closer look. “The bullets look small.”
“My money’s on.22 caliber,” Bridger says, “but we’ll know for sure in a minute.”
The official identification was made this morning using dental records. Wanda and Rick Villanueva prepared the release, but it was the chief who held the actual press conference. Thanks to the power blackouts all over the city, most people in Houston still won’t know that the body of Hannah Mayhew, the girl whose disappearance riveted the nation, is now on a slab at the medical examiner’s office where, powered by generators, her autopsy is proceeding.
Wanda wanted to be here, as did Cavallo, but by rights I’m the only one obligated. This is a homicide investigation now, and thanks to my captain’s dogged insistence on protocol, it belongs to me, the first detective on the scene. Considering my experience on the task force, the decision makes sense. Not that anybody else on the squad sees it that way.
“Time of death?” I ask.
Bridger pauses, then begins the Y-incision, ignoring my question for the moment. A technician steps forward to cut the ribs, lifting the sternum free. Next to me, Cavallo’s breath seems to catch.
“I’m only speculating,” Bridger says, “but based on the amount of decomposition, it wouldn’t surprise me if she’s been dead pretty much since the day she disappeared.”
Cavallo adjusts her mask. “Sixteen days.”
“Give or take. And based on the postmortem lividity, I’d say the body was moved after death. So she wasn’t killed in that house, I’m guessing, just dumped there.”
The plastic sheeting probably came from the work site across the street, and access to the building itself wouldn’t have been difficult. It was boarded up so long ago that the panels would have been easy enough to shift. The question is, who would think to place a body there? I’ve already canvassed the neighborhood, interviewing everyone I could find, and the contractor from the house across the street has promised me a list of employees as soon as he can find a way to charge his laptop. Of course, the killer could have driven by on a whim, noticed the location, and taken advantage of it.
By the end of the autopsy, Bridger confirms what the X-rays suggested. Hannah was killed by a.22 caliber gunshot to the head. The bullet entered at the temple. She’d already been shot twice before, once in the chest, collapsing a lung, and once in the abdomen, the second shot probably fired while she was in a prone position or possibly propping herself up.
“There’s no indication of a sexual assault?” Wanda asks.
He shakes his head.
“Well, thank God for that.”
It’s hard to muster much gratitude in the face of the desiccated husk of Hannah Mayhew, but somehow I find myself agreeing.
Out in the corridor I peel off my mask, happy to breathe freely again. Cavallo leans against the wall, then sinks down on her haunches, clenched arms extended over her knees. Wanda pats her absently on the head, then starts to go.
“I want to be in on this,” Cavallo calls after her.
“In on what, honey?”
She jabs her thumb in my direction. “This. If he can horn in on my case, then I can horn in on his.”
“Fine with me,” I say.
Wanda snaps back, “Well, it’s not up to you.” She’s done so much wrangling over the past two weeks it’s become second nature, but the flash of anger dissipates like smoke. “Suit yourself. I guess it makes sense for one of my people to keep an eye on things.”
She leaves us in the hallway. I start to say something, then stop. Cavallo gets back to her feet, peeling the scrubs off.
“I could do without this part of the job,” she says.
“So could we all.”
“What I said before, though, I think it’s true. This is an act of God. We might have never found that girl if it wasn’t for the hurricane.”
“That’s what the insurance people call it, an act of God. I had an act of God on my garage, too, and I don’t think they’re going to pay for it. Not that I’m complaining.”
She gives me a sideways look. “I don’t want to know.”
When Bridger emerges for a smoke break, we follow him out, standing on the wet curb in case he has any further observations to make. He’s silent, though, absorbed in his own thoughts. After a while, we leave him to it.
The contents of Hannah’s purse are spread out on the table between us. Nothing remarkable, really. The wallet I opened at the scene, a zippered cosmetics bag, tissues, a pack of gum, some barrettes and ponytail holders, a stray earring, the usual things. But there are two cell phones, both powered off. The pink Motorola RAZR is Hannah’s. The other, a cheap brick of black plastic, is a mystery, at least until Cavallo switches it on and checks the number.
“This is it,” she says. “The phone she was getting calls from the day she disappeared.”
“If he left it behind, then there probably won’t be any prints.”
She opens an evidence bag. “We’ll check anyway.”
“Yes, we will,” I reply, dropping the phone in.
Brad Templeton tracks me down not long after, his voice brimming with excitement, like he thinks the Hannah Mayhew murder investigation is something I personally engineered to help with his book deal. He keeps pumping me for information until he finally realizes I’m about as responsive as a cpr dummy.
“You are gonna give me something, right? We do have an understanding, don’t we?”
“This isn’t the time, Brad.”
I have to give him something, though, so I pass along Wilcox’s name, suggesting he cozy up to my ex-partner, who’s now taking the lead on Keller and Salazar. I’m trying to keep a hand in there, but IAD is a clannish outfit and since their search yielded the potential murder weapon – at least, the part of it that wasn’t swapped with Thomson’s pistol – they call the shots. For now, anyway. I haven’t given up on that one, though anything I do at this point will have to be very discreet.
“You’re pawning me off on Wilcox,” Brad says.
“I’m leading you to water,” I tell him. “It’s up to you whether you drink.”
As soon as I’m off the phone I grab my things and tell Cavallo we’re going back to the scene. Now that the immediate aftermath of the storm is behind us, people might remember things they didn’t before, and the ones who weren’t around during the initial canvass might turn up. We’re almost to the door when Jerry Lorenz steps through, blocking the path.
He looks Cavallo up and down, giving me an approving nod.
“Congratulations,” he says. “You sure landed on your feet.”
I’m not sure if he’s referring to my pretty new partner or to my case. Judging from his smile, a little of both. The strange thing is, he’s utterly genuine, offering apparently heartfelt congratulations, no hard feelings in spite of our run-in on the still-unsolved Morales case. He has no idea, since I never briefed him, on how much further I took that case, or how close Wilcox now is to busting it open.
I expect Cavallo to recoil from him, or at least to steer clear, but she pats him on the shoulder as she passes. “Congratulations yourself.”
Out in the hallway, I ask, “You know that guy?”
“Who, Jerry?”
“Jerry Lorenz, right. He’s the one I had so much trouble with.”
“Who, Jerry?” she says again, unaware of how annoying this repetition is.
“Lorenz. I know I told you his name.”
She shakes her head. “I never put it together. You don’t get along with Jerry, huh? Everybody gets along with Jerry.”
“He’s an idiot.”
“He’s not so bad.”
“How do you know him?”
She starts to answer, then stops herself, so I repeat the question. Reluctantly, she says, “He’s in my Bible study.”
“Your what? Jerry Lorenz is in a Bible study? You’re jerking my chain – ”
“No, really. He is. There’s a group of us that meets about once a month. You should come sometime.” She frowns. “Or maybe not.”
“Why were you congratulating him?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just now, you said ‘congratulations yourself.’ ”
“Oh that. I meant the baby, obviously.” She stops in her tracks, realizing I have no idea what she’s talking about. “His wife just had a baby. A little boy. Don’t tell me you work with the guy and you don’t know that?”
I shrug. “I guess it never came up.”
We drive back to the derelict house, Cavallo taking advantage of the time to theorize on what it means that I take so little interest in my colleagues’ personal lives. Ignorant of Lorenz’s baby, unaware that her fiancé is overseas. She wonders aloud what else I don’t know, and how with so little curiosity I can honestly call myself a trained observer.
“I’m only interested in people when they’re dead.”
I mean it as a joke, but it doesn’t come out funny. She grows serious, remembering whose death sparked my interest in the current investigation.
The fresh canvass yields nothing, but we do find a small crew of construction workers across the street, trying to square away the damage left by the hurricane. The toppled trailer has been righted and now awaits replacement. In the interest of thoroughness, we have a chat with them, only to discover that half the men present aren’t on the list the contractor finally handed over.
“They might not be on any lists,” Cavallo says afterward, meaning like so many in the industry, they might be illegals.
When we’re done, I take her over to the Morgan St. Café, where the power’s finally back on, treating her over iced coffee to the story of Vance Balinski’s curbside assault. I show her Thomson’s sketchbook and the enlarged cell-phone photo, and seeing her interest is piqued, I take her back to the studio for a look at his intimidating series of busts. Locking up, I’m surprised to find Balinski himself in residence next door, a fat bandage on his nose, a line of stitches running along his bottom lip.
“I’m clearing my place out,” he says. “I can’t get any work done here now, not after what happened.”
His own studio is a tidy, squared-away affair, a couple of large abstract paintings along the wall, a table and stool, an easel for work in progress, and at the back an assortment of finished pieces. I can only see the one in front, which looks to me like a solid field of orange with two fuzzy reddish lines running vertically, dividing it into thirds. It doesn’t look too hard to do, but I refrain from saying so.
“When Thomson gave you that box,” I ask, “did he explain why?”
Balinski moves the paintings on the wall over to the stack in back. “Honestly, we were both pretty baked at the time. He’d been kind of morbid recently, I don’t know how else to describe it, even more obsessive than usual about things. Something had set him off, but I don’t know what. We’d been to a couple of bars, and on the way back over here he said he wanted to give me something. I thought it was a gift at first, and I was telling him he didn’t have to do that, but he said if he didn’t, they might find it. He said they were keeping tabs on him now, because he wasn’t reliable.”
“Who was keeping tabs?”
Balinski shrugs. “Joe never talked about things, and when he did, you couldn’t really ask for more detail, you know? He just said what he said and you listened. That’s what I did, anyway.”
“So he never said who was keeping tabs on him?”
“Well…” He glances around the studio as though he’s misplaced something. “That night he was kind of tripping. He said he’d gotten into something, and they started out dirty but went in clean. He kept repeating it, like he thought I was arguing with him. ‘No, we were dirty at the beginning, but not going in. Going in, we were clean.’ And he was really proud of it, too, whatever it was.”
“Did he say what he was going into?”
“I don’t know what he said, man. It’s not like I was paying close attention or anything. It was all kind of confusing. He was dirty but really he was clean. Whatever. The guy handed me a box full of blow. Then he shot his own head off. It’s not like he was sane or anything.”
We leave him to do his work. Back in the car, Cavallo asks for the sketchbook again, flipping absently through the pages.
“He meant the Morales house, right?” she asks.
“Going in clean? I guess so. They went into the house clean, whatever that means.”
“They went in for the woman. For a righteous cause.”
I nod. “Maybe.”
“But that’s not why they went in the first place.”
“They started out dirty, going for the money or maybe drugs, but they were clean when they went in, meaning their aims changed.” Castro’s computer-generated crime-scene sketches come back to me, the abstract figures transected by red lines. “According to one of the crime-scene investigators, the guys who hit the Morales house showed some tactical sophistication. Maybe they did a little recon first, got the lay of the land – ”
“And saw the woman tied to the bed.”
“Right,” I say.
“And instead of scrubbing the mission, they went in anyway. Not for the loot, but to rescue the victim.”
“Something like that.” I shake my head. “Only it’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? The place they decide to stick up just happens to be the one where this woman’s being assaulted? They interrupt the crime in progress, decide to intervene. Seems like a long shot. Besides, these guys aren’t the type. We’re not talking about heroes here. Just the opposite.”
“Yeah, but isn’t that the point of the whole dirty-clean thing?”
There’s something to it, I realize, but Cavallo’s already put a human face on Lorenz. I’m not going to let her humanize Keller and Salazar the same day.
“The point is,” I say, “she’s dead. Whoever she is. And maybe she wouldn’t be if they hadn’t gotten involved. Maybe they’re the ones who put the bullet in her.”
The last time I was at Cypress Community Church, the parking lot was near empty. Now every space marked out on the vast plane of blacktop appears to be filled, with overflow lining the street. Cavallo, dressed head to toe in black, sits beside me in the passenger seat, rubbing her hands nervously against her thighs.
“I don’t think I can face her,” she says.
Maybe she means Hannah. Maybe the mother. I don’t know and I don’t ask.
“If what Bridger says is right,” I say, “there was nothing you could have done. Hannah was dead before you even started to look.”
She nods, but it’s one thing to see the sense in an argument and another to really believe it. The girl’s death has hit her hard, and Cavallo’s not the type to let herself off the hook. I can relate. I feel the same. For me, though, the territory is more familiar. To loved ones, the only promise I can fulfill is to deliver up a suspect. Cavallo works a job where it’s still conceivable to bring the runaways home and set the captives free.
We hike across the boiling pavement, blending in with the other mourners streaming between the rows of cars and trucks, of station wagons, minivans, and sport-utility vehicles, each one gleaming hot in the sun. In parts of the city, the power is back, though more for a visit than a permanent stay. It still flickers back and forth, forcing me to run my generator most nights, though it’s never enough to get the house truly cool. I’ve grown accustomed the past few days to always sweating, always feeling dirty, none of us being quite as presentable as we are when the electricity’s on. I am not as impervious to heat as I’ve always assumed.
As the entrance gets closer, I remember the blanket of cold air that descended the first time I was here. Pulling the glass door open, I can almost feel it. But no, as I pass over the threshold in Cavallo’s wake, the air is only marginally cooler inside. No respite awaits us inside the church, not even this.
The crowd carries us along through the soaring atrium, and I find myself wondering how many of these people actually knew Hannah. There are surely too many. Glancing around, I observe what I always do at funerals, a throng of people behaving only marginally more sober-minded than usual, most of them dressed for comfort in everyday clothes, a few dressed more formally – usually older, usually present in some quasi-official capacity. The teenage kids in front of us wear jeans and striped rugby shirts, while the women behind us, chatting among themselves, are in blouses and khaki capri pants and sensible flats.
I feel a hand on my elbow and, turning, find Gina Robb staring up at me through her cat-eye glasses. She tugs me out of the crowd and beckons Cavallo to follow, guiding us through the side exit toward the church offices. Her demeanor is grave, her eyes raw from crying, and whenever she tries to explain herself, her throat seizes up. So she relies on hand gestures to convey the fact that someone wants to see us.
Donna Mayhew’s office door stands open, but the entrance is blocked by a throng of attendants. Gina parts them wordlessly, conducting us inside until we are face-to-face with the bereaved mother. She stands, austerely composed, at the very corner of her desk, draped in swathes of black, with black netting over her face. In contrast to the casual mourners in the atrium, she’s like a figure from the distant past. Her hands, clasped tightly in front of her, are also gloved, prompting me to wonder where this funeral regalia comes from. I keep a black suit in the closet for funerals, but then I attend them with a fair amount of regularity. Of course, this is not her first bereavement. The woman has lost her husband and now her daughter, too. She is alone in the world, a feeling I can relate to only in part.
“Detective,” she says, extending a hand to me. “They tell me it was you who found her body.”
An awkward cough at the back of my throat. Do I correct her or let the error stand? Glancing around, I see men in dark suits, women with clenched tissue pressed to their eyes, a murmur of grief passing between them.
Cavallo tries to say something. I turn, and find her face wet with tears, her lips trembling. Donna Mayhew opens her arms and the two women embrace. I glance away. In the corner, Carter Robb stares glumly back at me. We haven’t spoken since the day I summoned him to the scene. Then, I’d been unable to coax him anywhere close to the body, and he’d only agreed reluctantly to enter the derelict building for a look at the purse. Trying to confirm it was hers, he couldn’t stop choking on his words. He’d wanted to help, to do something, but that wasn’t what he’d had in mind.
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Mrs. Mayhew is saying. “This was not your doing. We all have to be brave in the face of it. The Lord gives and he takes away.”
The words seem empty to me, and desolate, but her voice is anything but. There is a strength in her that wasn’t here before, back when there was still some chance of a happier outcome. She no longer agonizes over whether she’s meant to drink from the cup. Now she knows, and the effect of the knowledge is heartbreaking to witness. Some people, when they suffer, derive power from the ordeal, a certain dignity, and along with it the grace to bestow benediction, as potent as it is unlooked for. In response, the usual hollow assurances about bringing the killer to justice die on my lips, and sensing my inability, she nods, as if she wouldn’t want me to say such things, to commit myself to the impossible.
“I wanted to see you both,” she says, “because I know some of the things I’ve said to the media must have sounded like criticism, and I want to say I’m sorry. It was not directed at you.”
Cavallo tries to silence her with a lifted hand.
“It’s all right,” I say. “You don’t need to justify yourself to us.”
“I also wanted you to know that I’m done. I won’t talk to them anymore. I didn’t want to at first, and I only did it in the off chance it might help bring my baby home. But now there’s no reason, and I won’t talk to them again. I wanted you to know.”
She speaks quietly, with a determination that doesn’t seem congruent with the subject, as if the decision she’s referring to runs much deeper than the one her words avow. An embrace of silence encompassing much more than television interviews, as if she’s sworn off saying anything ever again.
Her gloved hand closes around mine briefly, squeezing, her eyes gazing at me through the netted veil. “I know you’ll do everything you can. Thank you.”
I step back. She gives Cavallo a similar blessing, and then we both retreat out into the hallway, joined by Gina Robb and her silent husband. He comes close to me, leaning almost to my ear, speaking in a harsh whisper.
“I want to talk to you later. I want to do more this time.”
This time, as if there’s a second round to play and everything might still come right.
We leave them, rejoining the other mourners. Cavallo wipes her eyes with the back of her hand, pretending I’m not beside her, probably embarrassed by her show of emotion. We file into a wide, soaring auditorium, a stadium of worship with a semicircle of seats around a raised platform. Behind it, a multi-tiered choir loft and a backstop of abstract stained glass, but I’m not looking past the platform. My eyes get no further than the casket at its base. The lid is closed, and a large portrait of Hannah is erected on an easel behind it. A hush descends on everyone who sees it, the crowd growing still, struck by the reality of that small wooden box.
Another casket flashes in my mind, another body. I see Charlotte pale with grief, the vein in her forehead throbbing, the bruises from the car accident still evident under a layer of makeup. My eyes sting.
“I can’t stay,” I say, turning back, not waiting for any reply, hoping she won’t come after me, hoping she won’t try to follow.
Hedges casts a disapproving eye over my cubicle, staring the way he might at a spelling error in the first line of a report. I weather the scrutiny. There’s nothing I can do about the mess. Casework grows like weeds all around me. My cup overruns, and so does my murder book. In addition to evidence recovered with Hannah’s body, the copious lab work that’s been trickling in all morning, and the first wave of file boxes couriered over from the former task force hq in the Northwest, there’s also a layer left over from the Thomson investigation, things I haven’t had time to box up for Wilcox. Aguilar has been detailed to help, and Bascombe checks in every half hour or so, looking at me the way a kid looks at a magician, wondering what’ll happen next time I reach into my hat. So I haven’t had a lot of time for tidying up.
“Everything all right, sir?” I ask, hoping to move him along.
He can’t bring himself to give the order – Clean up around here, all right? – but I can see how bad he wants to.
“You have everything you need?”
“Yes, sir.”
He nods, clears his throat. “You’ve been doing good work, March. Keep it up. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’re back on form.”
“Thank you, sir.”
As he leaves, a little ember of pride burns in my chest. It means something, coming from him.
Lorenz drops by, too, blowing on a steaming cup of coffee, and I notice some kind of encrustation on his collar, a speck of dried milk maybe, though I imagine it’s baby spit. I recall having seen something similar before, only I didn’t appreciate the significance. I try to picture him cradling a newborn on the bridge of his belly, bouncing back and forth. I put baby talk in his mouth, trying to conceive of the sound.
“You were lucky to get out from under the Morales shooting when you did,” he says. “If that thing goes down now, it’ll be a miracle. No hard feelings, huh? If I overplayed my hand, I’m sorry. I got a talking to from Terry Cavallo yesterday, telling me you were good people. I shouldn’t have come down so hard. What can I say? It was a big break for me, and I kind of blew it.”
He cocks his round head, smiling anxiously, practically willing me to accept his apology. But I’m too stunned to react all at once. I buy myself some time by nodding and shrugging, a song and dance of body language meant to convey something like it happens to us all and don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s easy to be gracious in the ascendant.
“Forget about it,” I say, hoping the words don’t sound as hollow to him as they do to me.
Lorenz takes me literally, blinking a couple of times, smiling, and generally acting as though he doesn’t know who he is or how he got here. He tips his cup in salute and walks away.
When she arrives a while later, Cavallo turns a number of middle-aged heads, but if she notices the stir, she gives no sign. Aguilar grows attentive all the sudden, abandoning his own desk and pulling a chair up to mine. The crowding seems too ridiculous not to comment on, but Cavallo says nothing so I keep quiet, too. Every time I glance his way, he gives a subtle, conspiratorial grin. My desk phone rings.
“Can you come up here?” Wilcox says. “There’s something I want you to see.”
I grab my jacket and leave the field to Aguilar, who seems grateful for the uninterrupted view.
“You need me?” Cavallo asks.
Over her shoulder, Aguilar’s eyebrows rise slightly in alarm.
“I can handle this one on my own.”
For the first time in more than a year, Wilcox’s lips curl upward at my approach, though his smile is charged not with friendship but triumph. He pulls me into the office, then closes the door.
“We got him.”
I turn. “Who?”
“Have a seat,” he says. “All will be revealed.”
My heart’s already racing as I sit down. He circles the desk, grabs a thin folder, and slaps it down in front of me, the same way a poker player throws down a winning hand. The paper trembles in my hand. Inside the folder are test results on the handgun recovered from Salazar’s boat.
“First off, there was dried blood on the muzzle and slide, which had been wiped down but not too carefully. The samples match Joe Thomson.”
A long breath escapes me. “This is it.”
“There’s more. The drop-in barrel and the rounds in the magazine both had prints all over them, also Thomson’s.”
“And the frame?”
His smile’s as wide as a crocodile’s, showing just as many teeth. “That’s where it gets really good. Like I said, the gun was wiped down. The lab had a hard time lifting prints from the frame and slide. But they pulled a partial off the hammer, another partial off the front of the trigger, and a thumb that wasn’t Thomson’s on the magazine.”
“Are you going to tell me whose it was?”
“Look and see.”
I flip the page over, scanning the lines, until my eye rests on the name. REGINALD ALLAN KELLER. I let out another breath. “The man himself.”
“And it gets better. That particular P229, the serial number traces back to Keller, too.”
“So it’s airtight.”
“Exactly.”
We observe a moment of silence. This was a long time coming, and now that it’s here, now that my old nemesis is literally in my hands, it doesn’t seem real. The feeling’s very different from the sense I had kneeling next to Hannah Mayhew’s corpse, the numbness at the end of what I knew all along would be an unfulfilled quest. There’s nothing conflicted or ambiguous about this. If anything, I’m giddy, and Wilcox must be, too, the way he’s grinning ear to ear, the way he insisted on us sharing this moment together.
I start to laugh.
He laughs, too, slapping his hand on the desk. “You got him.”
“I got him,” I say. “No, we got him.”
He shrugs the honor off. “It was all you, March.”
“It was Thomson,” I say. “If his conscience hadn’t gotten to him – ”
“It was you.”
He comes around the desk, clasps my hand in his, shaking, stoking the ember inside me into a full-blown flame. Whatever came between us before, whatever drove Wilcox away, it’s not there anymore, or at least it’s abated for now. I rise out of the chair and he gives me a manly, one-armed hug, beating my shoulder blade with his open hand.
“Now what?” I ask, reeling back.
“What do you mean, now what? We’re gonna frog-march him out of here. The man killed a cop. He’s going down.”
“When?”
“I’ve got people on him now. He’s holed up in his apartment as we speak. As soon as I can get the team together, we’re taking him. The warrant’s in process now.”
“I’m in.”
“I know you are.”
“And what about Salazar?”
“We don’t have eyes on him, but we will.” His smile fades. “To be honest, I’m not sure we can make as strong a case there – ”
“It was Salazar who tried to have me killed,” I say, my voice thick.
“I realize that, but tying it to him is another matter.”
“We have him on video carrying the body. It’s his boat the gun was on.”
“Right,” he says. “Now, think about that. Why would Salazar hold on to that gun? I’m assuming Keller didn’t intend him to. If you ask me, he kept it so he’d have some leverage over his boss, just in case. Which means Salazar might be willing to pull a Thomson. He might be willing to roll over on Keller. Would you be okay with that?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“You might want to prepare yourself.”
So the guy who dirtied up my shooting years back will go down, but the one who undoubtedly arranged to take me off the board gets a walk? It’s hard to wrap my mind around. So I don’t even try. There’s no point admitting clouds on what ought to be a sunshine moment. Keller’s done, that’s what’s important.
My head’s still swimming as I exit the elevator on the sixth floor, punching the keypad code to admit myself into Homicide. When I return to my desk, Aguilar’s gone, replaced by an unexpected visitor. Carter Robb sits across from Cavallo, elbows on his knees, talking earnestly in a subdued voice.
“What’s the deal?” I ask.
They both look up. Cavallo speaks first. “Carter came by to talk. He’s got some interesting ideas about the case.”
“Really.”
He gazes up at me with haunted eyes, an expression I recognize all too well from the mirror. I know this man is carrying a load of guilt, floundering for some way to slough it off, but I also know he’s not going to find deliverance here, not through talking. And anything helpful he might have been able to give is already in our hands. Cavallo is too compassionate to tell him so, and if I didn’t have somewhere to be, an old enemy to slap the cuffs on, I might even play along. I like the guy, after all. But Wilcox is going to give the signal any second, and I don’t have time to mess around.
“It can’t be a coincidence her body was found so close to the outreach center,” Robb says. He rubs at his face the whole time he speaks, probably not aware of what he’s doing, running his fingers so hard across the stubble on his cheeks that I can hear the friction. “There’s some kind of connection, isn’t there? And that’s when all the trouble in Hannah’s life began, when I took the kids to the outreach center. That’s where everything started going wrong.”
I check my watch. “Mr. Robb, I’m going to have Detective Cavallo take another statement from you, all right? I’ve got to be somewhere, otherwise – ”
Cavallo’s eyes harden. “Where are you going?”
I don’t have time for the statement, I don’t have time to explain, and the way they’re both looking at me, one despairing and the other expectant, both thinking they have a claim on my attention -
“Has something happened with the case?” Robb asks.
“Not this one.”
Cavallo stands. I take a step back, only to bump into Aguilar, who extends two coffee cups out at arm’s length, trying to avoid spilling on his shoes.
“Hold your horses,” Aguilar says.
My desk phone starts to bleep. I squeeze forward, nudging Robb’s chair aside. Since I can’t push these people out of the way, I push the contents of the cramped cubicle instead, accidentally toppling the topmost box from the nearest stack. Cavallo dives for it, pushing a pile of paper off the edge of the desk, half of it landing in Robb’s lap while the other half hits the floor. Aguilar jumps back for no reason, splashing more coffee on himself.
I lift the receiver.
“Be up here in ten,” Wilcox says. “And grab a vest on the way.”
“Will do.”
I put the phone down, surveying the scene. While Cavallo reaches across Robb to wrestle the box back in place, he’s on his knees retrieving overturned files from the floor. Aguilar curses his spattered shoes, saying something under his breath about ruined calfskin. It’s ridiculous enough to laugh at, if only I hadn’t set the comedy in motion.
“Sorry,” I say.
My fellow detectives glare, while Robb reappears from under the desk with an armload of now intermingled paperwork, which is going to require some organizing. Later. I take it from him, drop it on the desk, and turn to go.
“Where are you going?” Cavallo asks.
“I’ve got to grab a vest.”
“A vest? For what?”
I glance around, making sure no one’s near enough to overhear apart from Aguilar.
“Keller,” I whisper. “We’re about to kick his door.”
“That’s not our case.”
“It’s not yours.”
Robb steps closer, holding Thomson’s sketchbook open in his hands. “What is this?”
“Nothing to do with you,” I say, snapping it away.
He ignores my reaction, his brows knitted. “No, really. What are those pictures?”
I sigh, glancing again at my watch, then flip to the back of the sketchbook, producing the cell-phone photo enlargement. “They’re an artist’s representation of that.”
The photo is weightless, but he reacts like I’ve handed him an anvil, slumping back against the desktop, letting the image drag his arms down.
Cavallo bends down. “What’s wrong, Carter?”
“Where did this come from?” he whispers.
Suddenly, the clock doesn’t seem to matter anymore. I take the photo from him. “We believe this woman was killed during a shooting in southwest Houston. Her body was dumped in the Gulf.”
“What?” he croaks.
“Do you recognize her?”
He reaches for the picture again. “I think… I’m not sure. It looks like it could be Evey.”
Aguilar puts the coffee mugs down. “Who’s Evey?”
“Evangeline Dyer,” I say.
I slip the photo he gave me out of my notebook and make a comparison. Maybe he’s right. It’s hard to tell, given the quality of the cell-phone snap, and the way Evey Dyer’s hair hides her face in the candid picture.
I’ve broken men down in the interview room before, had them crying like babies for their mamas, and at moments like that there’s a satisfaction you get, a sense of psychological power. But Carter Robb isn’t broken by any power of mine, and when he hunches over the chair, one knee on the seat, his body across the back cushion like a seasick man leaning over water, I can’t help but pity him. Aguilar backs off, baffled by what’s happening, and Cavallo puts her hand on Robb’s back, stroking methodically.
“I’ve got to make a call,” I say.
It takes the rest of my ten minutes to get Gene Fontenot on the line, and as I enlist yet another colleague to obtain yet another dna swab from yet another mother, Cavallo shakes her head, either at the irony or just the weight of the moment. There’s no way Robb could have made a positive identification from that photo, not objectively, but I know in my bones he’s right.
Fontenot bucks a little. “You want me to get a swab from this lady? And what am I supposed to tell her, that you’ve got a body in the Houston morgue you want to check it against?”
“I don’t have a body, Gene. Just some blood on a sheet.”
“You’re a piece of work, you know that?”
I put the phone down, head spinning, the raid all but forgotten.
Cavallo gazes at me, eyes shining. “You were right.”
“About?”
“The two cases,” she says. “They really are connected.”
It’s true. If the woman on the bed – just a girl, really – was Evange-line Dyer, then that means the Morales shooting and Hannah Mayhew’s disappearance are truly tethered, just as I’d suspected at the beginning. Only I still can’t fathom how.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Robb says.
He struggles to his feet, shrugging off Cavallo’s touch, and starts loping toward the exit, his shoulders hunched, like Atlas in a T-shirt and jeans. She tries to follow, but I motion her back.
“Let him go. He needs to lick his wounds.”
As Robb passes through the door, Wilcox squeezes in, wearing a Kevlar vest over his shirt and tie and a blue hpd jacket over the vest. He bounds over, drawing a lot of attention from the detectives in the squad room, most of them former colleagues, though his move to IAD dampens any impulse they might otherwise have to welcome him.
“Are you coming or what?” he asks.
“I’m coming.”
Cavallo grabs her jacket. “Me, too.”
Wilcox turns on her, none too pleased. “Do we know each other? Because I don’t remember issuing an open invitation.”
“The cases are connected,” she tells me, ignoring Wilcox entirely. “This is my case, too. Don’t even think about leaving me behind.”
“What does she mean, the cases are connected?” Wilcox asks. “What cases?”
“Come on.” I take each one by the arm and start for the door. “I’ll explain everything in the car. Let’s not keep our man waiting.”
The tenants in Keller’s apartment building, a vintage tower on Memorial Drive that was updated a few years back, converted into swanky mid-century pads, react to our shotguns and drawn side arms with a surprising sangfroid, as if they’re accustomed to armed police raids. More likely, the scenario is too foreign for immediate processing, the stuff of television rather than real life, more a product of stunned excitement than alarm.
We stack up in the hallway outside his door, first Wilcox, then me, with Cavallo on my elbow clutching a shiny-looking Beretta, barrel down. Her vest doubles her width, like she’s wearing a life jacket. Behind her, a couple of iad detectives, one with a pump shotgun and the other with a portable battering ram, and the surveillance boys we picked up out on the curb, who reported that Keller went in and still hasn’t come out and his car’s parked in his reserved space.
Still no sign, they said, of Salazar.
Advancing to the edge of the door, Wilcox rings the bell. He waits a moment, then knocks.
“Houston Police Department,” he growls.
Nothing. He waves the ram forward and a thrill goes through me. No matter what anyone says, taking a door down is exhilarating work, a pure adrenaline rush, the law enforcement equivalent of an extreme sport. Anything could be on the opposite side of that door. Keller could be sitting in his underwear in front of the tv, or deafened by the roar of the shower. Or he could be hunkered down behind a makeshift barricade with an illegally converted automatic rifle leveled at the entrance.
The detective rears back, then lets the ram do its work. The metal cylinder coasts forward, seeming to move too slowly to do any real damage. But when it connects, the door crunches open, splintering at the dead bolt. He lets go and the ram thuds to the ground.
We rush the entrance with a frenzy of shouting, advancing into the apartment, making sure no corner goes unswept by the barrel of a gun. My feet thunder through the hardwood entry, breaking right into a wide-open living space with floor to ceiling windows at the far end, and a balcony that overlooks Memorial. Cavallo fans out beside me, circling a white leather sectional. The bedroom is at the far side. I’m the first one there, my gun sights resting just below my plane of vision, ready to snap off a round if necessary.
Over my shoulder I hear the others calling out.
“Clear!”
“It’s clear.”
“Everything clear.”
A low platform bed with bookcases rising on either side. Another window, its light baffled by shades. No sign of him. The bathroom door is open, the light on, casting a golden glow into the room. I step toward it, hugging the wall for cover, canting my barrel into space. Getting closer, I use the mirror to scan the room. The glassed-in shower is empty. No sound of running taps or movement of any kind. Taking a deep breath, I push through.
“Clear,” I say.
The team regroups in the living room, where the surveillance guys exchange a shrug.
“Maybe he went down to do some laundry?” one of them says.
“Or walked across the street to the Starbucks?”
I go to the balcony, pulling the sliding door open. Glancing down to the parking lot, I see the reserved spot is now empty.
“His car’s gone.”
There’s nothing more ridiculous than a roomful of drawn weapons and no one to point them at. A spate of dejected re-holstering ensues, then we have a look around the place. The desk in the living room corner has a faint dust line where a laptop computer used to sit – the power cable is still plugged into the wall. A chunk of clothes seems to be missing from the closet, exposing a recessed safe, its door ajar.
“We didn’t just miss him,” Wilcox says. “He skedaddled.”
He gets on the phone, putting the word out to patrol to keep an eye out for Keller’s car. It isn’t much, certainly not enough to soften the collective adrenaline crash.
“What now?” I ask.
He pauses to consider. “Okay, we need to keep some people here, and we’d better send some to Salazar’s place, too.”
“Got it,” one of the IAD detectives says.
“And that warehouse they’re renting – ”
“We’ll take that,” I say, heading for the door, motioning Cavallo to follow.
“I’ll send some backup to join you,” he calls after us. “Meanwhile, we need to tear this place apart.”
I wait until we’re in the elevator to say anything, and then I slam my fist against the wall instead. The ringing in my knuckles feels better somehow.
“I knew that was too easy.”
Cavallo nods, leaning back against the railing. “Why’d you choose the warehouse?”
“Instinct. I figure they rent that place for a reason, and if he’s split in a hurry, maybe he’ll need to drop by there first. It’s better than chasing our tails back there. I want to keep moving.”
When we reach the car, I remember Cavallo’s lead foot and toss her the keys. She doesn’t miss a beat, sliding behind the wheel and starting the engine. Out on Memorial, as we race past Starbucks, I glance over just to make sure Keller’s not in there, slurping on a Frappuccino.
No such luck.
A feeling builds inside, a fear really, that I’ll never catch up to him. He’s flown for good, escaped the net, cheating me one last time.
We pull up outside the padlocked gate, the block of gray warehouses almost indistinguishable from one another. I knock on the security booth’s shuttered window, but there’s no response from inside. The sun beats down. Behind the glare on the windshield I see Cavallo thumping her fingers on the steering wheel.
With a pair of bolt cutters we’d be inside in two shakes, but as far as I know we don’t have a search warrant on this place, and even if we did, we don’t have the cutters. I dial Wilcox for further instructions. Before he picks up, Cavallo starts pointing to the fence. When I turn, Wendell Cropper is standing halfway between the nearest warehouse and the gate, frozen in place.
“Come on over here,” I call out.
He advances, stopping about twenty feet off, blading his body sideways, his pistol on the far hip.
“Can I help you with something?” he asks.
“Open the gate.”
Cropper lifts one foot, then hesitates, like he’s not sure whether to move forward or back. If I tell him it’s the warehouse we want to see, he might make a stink about seeing a warrant, so I try a different tack.
“We need to have a talk with you, Mr. Cropper. Open up.”
He squints at me, feigning recognition. “Oh, it’s you. I didn’t recognize you at first, Detective.” But he still doesn’t move toward the gate.
I grab the padlock and give it a shake. “If you don’t mind, we’ve got other stops to make, so I’d like to get through this pretty quick.”
“Well,” he says, digging through his pocket. “All right, then.”
His hands shake so bad that he has trouble sliding the key into the lock.
“You nervous about something, Mr. Cropper?”
Once he pulls the padlock free, I walk through, pushing the gate wide as I advance, motioning Cavallo to drive through. As she does, Cropper moves to block her path. I take him gently by the arm.
“Don’t get yourself run over,” I say.
She parks just inside the gate, then gets out. The security guard backpedals, positioning himself between the car and the warehouses. I follow. When Cavallo joins us, she stands on his opposite side, forcing him to backpedal some more just to keep an eye on us both.
“Is something wrong?” I ask him. He’s got that wide-eyed fight-or-flight look, and he’s still blading his strong side away from us. I flick my jacket back, revealing my holstered gun, just to test his reaction. His hand twitches slightly, then relaxes. Cavallo catches the movement, too.
“Put your hands on your head,” she says, resting hers on the butt of her pistol.
Cropper looks at her, aghast. He doesn’t move.
Over his shoulder, the metal warehouse door trundles upward. As it rises I glimpse the back end of a black Ford pickup, an enclosure covering the bed. On the opposite side of the entrance a pair of legs advances toward the vehicle. The door lifts and I see a box held in two hands, a lidded file box like we use in the office. Then a muscled torso and the tanned face of Tony Salazar. He glances over, casually surveying the scene, then sees us and stops in his tracks. The box hits the ground.
“It’s him,” I say.
As soon as the words are out, Cropper makes his move. His hand flashes to his side arm, the gun clearing leather, the muzzle coming up. Cavallo’s nearest, so he points her way.
Training takes over, years of muscle memory. I draw in a smooth, single motion, not waiting for the sights to come online. Instead, I let the first round go at his belt line and the second, aided by recoil, hits just below the sternum. The third is in the upper chest, and then the empty brass lands at my feet and Cropper’s staggering backward, his Glock in midair.
Next to me, Cavallo stands flatfooted with her hand still on her holstered gun, shoulders hunched by the loud reports.
“Get back to the car!” I yell.
She draws and turns toward the fallen security guard, kicking his gun clear. But Cropper’s not a threat anymore. I grab her sleeve with my free hand, yanking her back, just as the first muzzle flash erupts from the warehouse. The shot whistles through the air at head level, a near miss. After a pause, Salazar keeps shooting, and I fire back while beating the retreat, hoping to throw off his aim.
A gouge opens up in the hood of the car as I’m pushing Cavallo down behind the tire. I hit the pavement in a slide, skinning my elbows and knees. My pistol’s slide is locked back, meaning I’ve burned through thirteen rounds already. Three in Cropper and ten downrange at Salazar. As I reload, Cavallo returns fire. I’d rather she stayed behind cover. I grab her arm again and pull her back.
“Don’t give him a target.”
She shrugs free. “If somebody shoots at me, I’m shooting back.”
“You won’t hit anything at this range,” I say, but she’s not listening. As she fires I try to pinpoint Salazar’s position. He’s tucked alongside the truck bed, using the vehicle for cover. All I can see is the muzzle flash from around the enclosure.
It’s hard to think clearly when you’re taking fire. Either you go to ground or you keep pulling the trigger. It says something about Cavallo that she chooses the latter, but that kind of bravery won’t turn her side arm into a rifle. I open the passenger door and crawl over the seats, fumbling for the button that pops the trunk. When I hear the dull thunk, I slide out, grabbing the keys from Cavallo and moving around back. Inside a locked box in the truck, there’s a shotgun and an ar-15. With the latter, I can reach out and touch him, something I’ve been itching to do.
“March!” she yells, her voice shrill. “He’s starting the truck.”
I raise myself into a crouching position in time to see the reverse lights illuminate. It took him a while, but he’s done the arithmetic. All we have to do is keep him pinned. Backup is on the way. But he has to fight his way out, which means the sooner he moves the better.
“Keep shooting!” I say, grabbing for the rifle. I fumble with the charging handle, chambering a round of 5.56 nato. I’ve manipulated the controls a thousand times on the range, but now it’s like my fingers are disarticulated, one clumsy mass of flesh.
I hear the squeal of tires, smell the rubber burning, and when I look up again the Ford is out in the sunlight. Salazar accelerates backward, cuts the wheel, then rocks to a stop. I lift the rifle, hunting for his silhouette with the iron sights. The truck accelerates, picking up speed, heading straight for us. He would have been better off going the other way.
The front post lines up over his head. I take a deep breath and squeeze off a round. The windshield shatters into a spider web of glass, but the truck bears down on us.
“Move, move, move!”
I jump clear just as the Ford hits, smashing the front of the car, dragging its crumpled shell into the street before slinging it aside. My sights come up again, but before I can fire, the truck hauls across the road, rumbling over the curb, heading straight into the curtain of trees separating us from the houses on the other side. It crunches into a thick oak, sending up a cloud of smoke and steam.
Cavallo limps up beside me, clutching her elbow.
“Are you okay?”
She nods quietly, advancing across the street. I follow, ready to fire. We reach the far curb just as the backup units roll up.
“Stop.” I put a hand on her arm. “Let them take it from here.”
I toss the AR-15 to the ground and pull my badge out, just so we’re clear on who’s who. Cavallo holsters her Beretta and sits down on the curb, burying her head in her hands. The uniforms rush up to us, then creep steadily across the grass toward Salazar’s mushroomed truck, weapons drawn. They haul him out of the cab. I hear him screaming as they push him to the ground, twisting his wrists back for cuffing. I slump down beside Cavallo and try to catch my breath.
I tell the story a dozen times, first to strangers and then to friends. Amazingly, when they haul Salazar to the road on a backboard, he’s still breathing in spite of the hole in his upper chest. Wendell Cropper isn’t so fortunate. His body, covered by a tarp, lies where he fell. Numbered markers sit next to my shell casings and his unfired Glock. Inside the box Salazar dropped, Lieutenant Bascombe, one of the first detectives on the scene, discovers the cocaine and the printed photos described by Balinski. The bed of Salazar’s Ford is full of more boxes, some stacked to the brim with coke, some with dog-eared bundles of cash.
Mitch Geiger, the narcotics intel guru, arrives in time to catalog everything, speculating that the truck’s contents represent the haul from at least five stash-house heists.
“They couldn’t move this much,” he says, “so they just sat on it for the time being. If you hadn’t shown up, he’d have disappeared with it all.”
When he finishes with me, Bascombe turns to Cavallo for her account of the action. As she’s speaking, he stops her with an exclamation of surprise, then bends over, scratching at her chest. She swats his hand away.
“Just look,” he says, laughing incredulously.
She glances down. There’s a pancaked bullet lodged in her vest. She panics as soon as she sees it, flailing with the Velcro straps. I help her take the Kevlar off, then inspect the damage.
“You didn’t feel that?” I ask.
She presses a hand to her sternum. “I didn’t realize – ”
Bascombe puts an arm over her shoulder, bares his gleaming teeth. “The boss told me March got his luck back. Looks like it rubbed off on you.”
Instead of basking in the sense of relief, Cavallo sits down again, the reality of the situation crashing down on her. “I could’ve been killed.”
“But you weren’t.”
She doesn’t look reassured.
Before we’re released from the scene, I get a call from Wilcox, who’s been camped out at the hospital since the ambulance transported Salazar.
“He’s still in surgery,” he says, “but they’re telling me he’s going to pull through.”
“Good for him.”
“Good for us, March. I was right about what I said before. On the ride over, he kept taking the oxygen mask off and saying one word. Want to take a guess? Immunity. I’ve got a lawyer coming now. I’m pretty sure he’s going to talk.”
When I hang up, part of me wishes I’d aimed better, putting the round through his head instead of his chest. But then I remember Cropper lying dead on the pavement, and figure I’ve got enough blood on my hands for one day. There’s a burden that goes along with killing, even when you’re justified in taking a life. So being spared that is something, even if it means a deal for Salazar, the man who tried to get me killed.
Donna Mayhew reaches her hands out, one toward Cavallo and the other toward me. Without thinking, I clasp the hand, cool and small. She seems smaller since the funeral, diminished, a wan light in her eyes.
“We’re here to talk to Mr. Robb,” I say.
She nods, as if she’d known this already. “He’s upstairs, doing the high school Bible study.”
The double doors leading through to the stairwell are at the end of the hall, but we don’t move. The three of us stand in the office corridor, exchanging no words, no eye contact. After a moment, Hannah’s mother sighs.
“Evey, too,” she says. “And in that terrible place.”
So Robb told her. Of course he did.
“I tried calling her mom, but I couldn’t bring myself to…” She blinks at me, smiles weakly, and folds her arms tight around her frame. “I don’t know this world. I don’t recognize it anymore.”
Cavallo’s arm goes to her shoulder.
“It’s all right. I just, there’s a connection, isn’t there? The two of them, what happened to them. Something was happening and I didn’t see it.”
“You couldn’t have,” Cavallo says.
But Mrs. Mayhew cocks her head toward me, like she’s just noticed something that should have been obvious all along. “You knew, isn’t that right? When you came here that first time, that thing with the Q-tip. You thought – what? That Evey was Hannah?”
“More or less.” My mouth is so dry, the words come out in a whisper. “I got it wrong.”
“Maybe we all did. For a long time now I’ve had this feeling I don’t know my daughter anymore.” Her tear ducts open, her eyes shine with damp. “And now, I can’t really explain it, but it’s like I got her back.”
At the top of the stairs, my leg throbs and I lean against the wall for a breather, grateful to have the bullet wound as an excuse so Cavallo can’t make any cracks about my being an old man. She waits patiently, chin tucked, preoccupied by our encounter with Donna Mayhew.
“Ready?”
I’m not ready, not after that. Mrs. Mayhew has something to work through, a mystery of her own, much deeper than ours. A solitary question that can never be adjudicated, any answers she might find in this life impossible to validate. I know something about that, and what it can do to a person.
So I push on with a nod. This wing of the church is new to me, a long linoleum-lined hallway with classroom doors on either side. It could pass for a high school except for the Bible verses painted on the walls and the framed portraits of robed and bearded men, heroes of the faith presented in a sentimental neo-Victorian soft focus. I glance into a couple of empty classrooms, noting folding tables and stackable chairs, the space flooded by afternoon light.
At the end of the hallway, Cavallo pushes through a set of double doors, holding one open for me. We pass into a larger classroom, where the office-building suspended ceiling has been torn out, the exposed trusses painted black. Past a sea of now-empty couches, a group of thirty or forty teenagers sits in a semicircle around a raised stage. Carter Robb is up there, a tiny book dangling from one hand, a trap set and amplifiers and a couple of guitars on stands behind him.
“Let’s wait back here,” Cavallo whispers, motioning toward one of the couches. Glancing around, I spot a table in back stacked with empty pizza boxes and two-liter bottles of Coke and Sprite. We take our seats, and a couple of kids turn to see who’s come in. Robb gives no sign of noticing us, though we’re hard to miss.
Judging from the tone of his voice, the lingering pauses between the words, the way he makes pointed eye contact with first one student then another, his talk has reached its climactic finale. Robb’s style is very different from, say, Rick Villanueva’s, making up for what it lacks in polish with an extra dose of intensity. But then he’s not coaxing ex-convicts with outstanding warrants into a state of mental paralysis; he’s telling a bunch of slouching, dough-faced teens that all God wants from them is justice, mercy, and humility. Justice must be the greatest of these, because it’s justice Robb lingers on – not only justice for ourselves, he insists, but for the strangers among us, for the outcasts.
“If God, the judge of everything, does what is right, then will he expect anything less from you? Or you?” He points his finger into the audience, then turns it on himself. “Or me? We look out for ourselves, but it’s not enough. We look out for our friends, but that isn’t enough, either. Justice for all, that’s our calling. We can talk about mercy for the undeserving – and we’re all undeserving – but here in the fallen world, living life under the sun, we have to talk about justice for the undeserving, too. And at the end of the day, it has to be more than just talk.”
As I listen, our conversation in the church van comes to mind, the conflict in his head between the safe and the good. If it’s still there, he’s not sharing it with his disciples. If he blames himself for Hannah Mayhew’s fate, or Evangeline Dyer’s, he hasn’t tempered his message as a result.
He ends suddenly, dropping his head, clenching his eyes tight in prayer. Next to me, Cavallo does the same. I shift in my chair, looking around. At the back table, a woman in an apron and baggy jeans starts taking foil off a tray of brownies, cringing at each metallic ripple.
The gravity of the moment ends as soon as the prayer does, with the teens rushing back to the table for dessert, casting a curious glance or two our way. Three or four gather around Robb, who tries to edge toward us while some more wander onstage to pack up instruments. These kids would have known Hannah. They would have known Evey Dyer. Of all people they’d have a right to be shocked by what happened to the girls, to be traumatized. If they are, I see no sign. The resiliency of youth? Maybe. Or it could be that some wounds go too deep to be casually observed. I know something about that, too.
“I’ll be with you in just a second,” Robb says, slipping past us to confer with the brownie lady.
“Hard to believe he’s the same guy from the other day.”
Cavallo shrugs. “Life goes on.”
He rejoins us, holding on to the last remnants of the stage persona until we get to the hallway, where he sighs and hunches his shoulders, taking up his burden again.
“We can talk back in my office,” he says.
“Just so you know, you were right about the photograph. The mother’s dna was a match. Which means it really was Evey Dyer in that house. The question is, how’d she get there? And what does it have to do with Hannah’s death?”
He runs his hand over his head, raising a jagged clump of hair. “It’s all I think about.”
Pausing near the stairway, he points out one of the framed pictures on the wall. Unlike the smiling ancients, this one is abstract, random primary-colored dots swirling on a white background. He walks over, telling us to look.
“Seems like nothing at first,” he says, “but if you stare long enough, you can see the face.”
Cavallo cocks her head. “It’s Jesus.”
“Yeah.” He gives an embarrassed grin. “It’s corny, I know. Not my kind of thing, believe me. But that’s how I feel all the sudden, ever since I saw that picture in your office. Like I’ve been staring at something that doesn’t make sense, and suddenly I recognize the pattern. There turns out to be a design in it all.”
She nods and we descend the stairs. It must come easily to him by now, turning everyday things into object lessons.
“So what’s the pattern here?” I ask, trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice.
“Have you talked to Murray? The guy I introduced you to the other day?”
“The resident dreamer?”
He pushes through the ground floor doorway, taking us back to the office wing. “I guess he’s a little corny, too, but a great guy. Not very many people would leave their high-powered corporate jobs to go to seminary and then do the kind of mission work he does.”
“So why should we be talking to him?”
“When I took the youth group there that first time, Hannah and Evey were really good about going out into the community and talking to people, inviting them to the center, that kind of thing. Hannah was being altruistic, but unfortunately Evey had other ideas.” He reaches his office door, then pauses. “No, I shouldn’t say that. It’s not fair. I don’t know what was in her mind, but afterward I found out she’d met a boy. The other kids were talking about it. After that week, she saw a lot of him. I didn’t worry too much – girls that age want boyfriends, right? But then Murray told me this guy was older, and maybe even a little bit dangerous.”
“When you’re sixteen, that’s the appeal,” Cavallo says.
In the office, Robb perches on his desk, motioning us to the couch. I gaze up at the sagging bookcases all around, hoping they don’t choose this moment to collapse.
“When I say dangerous, though, I really mean it. Like, drugs dangerous. And Mrs. Dyer got concerned, too, because of Evey’s past. She’d run away before, been on the streets awhile, and everybody was afraid of some kind of relapse, only you couldn’t say that to Evey because she was sensitive. Touchy about being judged.”
“So what happened?” I ask.
“Her mom put an end to it. There was a big fight. I remember Hannah coming to me, because she felt like she was in the middle. Anyway, after a week or two, everything seemed fine. Evey was back to normal, as normal as she ever was. But ever since I saw that picture, I’ve been thinking. Remember those youth-group girls who said Evey and James Fontaine were going to run away together? Well, I always thought there could’ve been a kernel of truth to that. Maybe it wasn’t Fontaine, though. Maybe it was this other guy, the one she’d met before.”
“Does this guy have a name?”
He shrugs. “I’m drawing a blank. That’s why you should talk to Murray. He talked to the guy a few times when he’d come into the center. Some deep conversations supposedly.”
“Why don’t we call your friend Murray now?”
Robb lights up as if the possibility never occurred to him. He goes around the desk, punching the number into the phone.
“I’ll put him on speaker.”
Murray Abernathy answers, but asks if he can call back later. “I’m with somebody.”
“I’ve got the police here, Murray. It’s really important.”
“Oh.” He pauses. “Give me a sec.” When he comes back, Murray settles into some kind of stuffed chair, the air hissing out as he applies weight. “All righty then. What’s up?”
Robb explains, then asks for the mysterious boyfriend’s name.
“His name? It was Frank.”
“Frank what?” I ask.
“Hold on,” he says. “It’ll come to me.” Another pause. “Frank was a Latino guy, in his early twenties I think, handsome and well-spoken. I was excited when he first showed up, because he was interested in all the big questions – life, the universe, the whole shebang. But I could see right off I wasn’t gonna make a convert. For him, it was like a test of wits. He always wanted to prove he knew more than I did. Frank was an autodidact, one of those guys who acts like he knows everything – and then surprises you with how much he really does know.”
“His last name?” I ask again.
“I’m trying to think of it. He had a cousin doing construction work around here. Somebody would drop him off, and he’d hang out at the center while he waited for the cousin to get off work.”
“The cousin worked construction?” Cavallo and I exchange a glance. The site across the street from where Hannah’s body was found is just one of many in the neighborhood. “Did you ever get the cousin’s name?”
“Wait a second.” He starts humming over the line, drowning out all distractions. “I got it. Frank was short for Francisco – ” He pronounces it Frahn-see-sco, reproducing the sound from memory. “Francisco… Rio? Rios? Something like that.”
“Francisco Rios?” The name is familiar. I quiz Cavallo with a raised eyebrow, but she just shrugs. “I’ve heard that somewhere.”
“I have no idea what the cousin’s name was,” Murray says. “But he’d pull his van out front and blow the horn, and Frank would drop everything and go.”
Cavallo leans forward. “You told Carter this guy was dangerous. Why was that?”
“He talked a lot of nonsense, but I started thinking maybe it wasn’t nonsense after all. Because he presented himself so well, I kind of assumed he was… normal. Like everybody else, you know? A little stuck up, but basically a decent guy. But some people in the neighborhood told me he’d offered to sell them drugs, and once he got in a fight out on the street and pulled a knife on somebody. Said he was gonna come back that night and shoot the guy. Around here, you’ve got yuppies living next door to dealers, you’ve got people walking designer dogs past muggers. Frank kind of fit the vibe, I guess, but when I heard one of those girls was running around with him, well…”
I lean over to Cavallo. “I know that name.”
She keeps asking questions and Murray keeps talking, but I tune it all out, focusing on those syllables, picturing the letters in my mind. I write them out in my notebook, underlining the words. Why is Francisco Rios so familiar?
And then it comes to me.
“Where are you going?” Cavallo asks.
But I’m off the couch and halfway through the door, leaving her to make apologies to Robb and come running after me. She catches up in the atrium – I make a point of not glancing toward the auditorium doors, where the coffin of Hannah Mayhew so recently stood – grabbing at my arm to slow me down.
“Come on,” I say.
“What’s the rush?”
“That guy, Francisco Rios? I know him. We scooped him up at the George R. Brown, and he handed me Salazar’s business card. He’s a confidential informant. I called to check, then cut him loose.”
“If he was Salazar’s snitch – ”
“It’s him. He’s the one we want.”
“So maybe Salazar will give him up.”
Out in the parking lot, the sun blazing overhead, I stop in my tracks, one hand on my hip, the other pressed to my forehead, trying to pull the memories free. “There was somebody with him. A guy named Coleman who had a warrant out. When we let Rios go, he blew up. He kept yelling he was going to tell everybody, that Rios was going to be dead.”
“Tell them he was an informant?”
I nod. “We need to talk to Coleman. I got the feeling they knew each other pretty well.”
Robb wasn’t wrong, not about the pattern. You stare long enough and nothing’s random anymore. The pieces fit.
Sometimes all too well.
I’d had him. Zip-tied and all to myself, alone in the restroom at the end of the corridor, Saturday morning on Labor Day weekend, within forty-eight hours of Hannah’s disappearance and Evey Dyer’s death. I’d had him and I let him go, not realizing who it was I was letting walk out into the sunlight. All I wanted was to get out of there, to bag the assignment and move on to real police work, to get my teetering career back on two feet. His fear comes back to me, how desperate he was not to be locked up, to the point he’d even out himself as an informant in front of Coleman. I’d even given him advice, telling him to play it cool next time, never wondering why he panicked in the first place.
And Salazar, when I’d offered to take the kid downtown, had suddenly changed his tune about wanting to see him. Neither one of them wanted Rios in custody. Now it made sense. Rios knew he had blood on his hands. Salazar didn’t want his informant, who’d been tipping him to the location of stash houses, to spend a moment inside, either, afraid he’d start talking.
“I didn’t see it.”
“See what?” Cavallo asks.
But I don’t answer. All the mistakes of the past couple of weeks come back to me. Getting kicked out of Homicide for ditching Lorenz. Spooking Thomson’s wife to the point that she outed him to his killers. Cutting Tommy slack when I should have come down on him, when for all I knew Charlotte was right and something bad had happened to Marta, the girl who spent the night in the garage apartment. It all pales in comparison to letting Frank Rios walk. The trouble is, in a case like mine, mistakes are irreversible. You can’t always work your way back. You can’t bring the dead back to life. And the man you let go might never be caught again.
There’s nothing left but the guilty knowledge of what you might have done, how brave or selfless or good you could have been, if only you’d known then what you do now.
Salazar’s willing to talk, but not with me in the room, the guy who put him in the hospital. His attorney does the complaining, and before Wilcox can lodge a halfhearted protest I throw my hands up and head for the door. Glancing back, I take little comfort in Salazar’s condition, the wheezing pumps and dripping tubes, the oxygen feed, the inert lump of flesh beneath the sheets. Partial paralysis, the doctors told us, the loss of control on his right side. In spite of the successful surgery, Salazar is anything but okay. I reached out and touched him all right, with a hand that’s never going to let up.
I wait in the hallway awhile, until Cavallo comes out to report.
“He’s putting it all on Keller,” she says. “He dragged the others into the business, he orchestrated the raids. It was him who killed Thomson and forced Salazar to cover it up.”
“And Evangeline Dyer?”
“He had no idea she’d be there. When they looked through the window and saw her, Keller wanted to abort, but Thomson insisted on going in. He says it was Keller who shot her, accidentally, firing blind through the door. They were taking her to the emergency room, he says, and then she died.”
“What was she doing there in the first place?”
“Says he doesn’t know. Rios told him it was another stash house, and afterward the informant disappeared, so he never got a chance to ask.”
“What about Rafael Ortiz, the gangbanger who shot me?”
“Says he’s never heard of the guy.” She shakes her head. “He’s not going to cop to that, March.”
I take off down the corridor in a rage. “So basically, he’s not giving us anything we don’t already have?”
“He’ll testify against Keller.”
“In case you didn’t notice, we don’t have Keller. At this rate, there’s not going to be a trial for Salazar to testify at.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“Not by much.” My frustration is the sort that only grows when it gets an airing. A host of dead-end possibilities flood my mind. “Think about it: he’s been trying to find Rios since day one. When I let the kid go, he was already gunning for him. Why? Because he wanted to put a bullet in him. Believe me, he wasn’t going to ask what went wrong, why the informant suddenly sent them to the wrong house. If he’d have been able to find Rios, somebody like Ortiz would have finished the kid off, like he almost did me. Or maybe Salazar would have done it himself and dumped the body alongside the Dyer girl’s.” I slap the wall, drawing a glare from a passing nurse. “You know what? Maybe he did. That would be perfect. The Rios kid might already be at the bottom of the Gulf. We’ll never find him because there’s nothing left to find.”
“Calm down, March,” she says. “It’s not your fault you didn’t arrest Rios when you had him. You had no way of knowing…”
“I’m not stupid. I realize that.”
“Then stop beating yourself up and get on with the job.”
That’s good advice, and I decide to take it. Leaving Cavallo to hold Wilcox’s hand for the remainder of the interview, I bug out, heading back to Montrose with my list of construction workers in hand. Nobody by the name of Rios, but that doesn’t mean the cousin isn’t on the list. I park in front of the site, where some damaged framing is being slowly repaired by a skeleton crew of helmeted workers, stripping my jacket off and leaving it in the car, not a concession to the heat but a psychological tactic. I want these men to notice that the approaching hombre wears a gleaming shield, and more than that, a dull black, well-worn gun.
“Francisco Rios,” I say, motioning them over. “Which one of you knows the guy? He’s got a cousin here, right?”
The workers shrug and exchange glances, one of them asking me to repeat the name. I do better, whipping out the driver’s license photo off the system, along with the picture Salazar took when he registered Rios as a confidential informant. They gather round, squinting and shaking their heads. One of them leans forward, though, tapping a hard brown finger on the page, his eyes drifting upward in recollection.
“Yeah,” he says. “I seen him. You know who this is?” He turns to one of the others. “That’s Tito’s cousin, the one with the big attitude.”
The man next to him looks again, then nods. “I think you right.”
“Who’s this Tito?” I ask.
“Tito the Painter.” He brushes his hand back and forth in the air, like I might not be familiar with the term. “He don’t work here. We got nothing to paint yet. But he’s always around, you know, at the various sites, ’cause he’s working so cheap.”
“What’s his last name?”
He scratches his chin, then murmurs something in Spanish to the other man, who shrugs. “Everybody just call him Tito the Painter. But I can tell you where he stays.” He rattles off an address over on the West side, an apartment complex off Hammerly.
I thank him, then turn to go. Instead of heading straight to the address, I drive around the area looking for other sites, asking workers and foremen alike whether they’ve seen Tito the Painter around, or know his full name. Everybody seems to be familiar with the guy, some even recognize the photo of Rios, but no one can add to what I already know.
Passing by the outreach center, I see Abernathy out on the front steps talking to two slender white guys in retro sunglasses and snap-front shirts. He comes out to the curb for a quick chat, but he’s already told me everything he knows about Rios.
“What about the van?” I ask. “You said his cousin would pick him up in a van.”
“It was white. It had ladders on the side, I remember that.”
“He’s a painter, apparently.”
“Makes sense. It was that kind without windows, you know? Sliding door on the side. I can’t remember if there was a company name. I don’t think so.”
“You didn’t write down the license number or anything?”
He smiles. “I’ll remember for next time.”
Back downtown I go through the boxes of task force paperwork, hunting for the Willowbrook Mall surveillance footage, or at least some stills. Aguilar, sensing my excitement, wanders over and dives in. A minute later, Lorenz joins him, and then Bascombe and Ordway walk by wondering what’s going on. Before long, we’re all digging through boxes side by side, stacking the contents on the floor, my chair, and any empty space we can find.
“Got it,” Bascombe says, lifting a sheaf of paper from the bottom of his box.
We spread the stills out on the conference table, scrutinizing the grainy images.
“Does that look like a ladder to you?” I ask, pointing to a pixely shadow alongside the van.
They all take turns looking. The consensus is that it might be, though Ordway has to spoil the moment by pointing out it could also be a long dent, a streak of paint, or even a missile – basically anything. Look long enough and you see what you want to.
“You have the address,” Bascombe says. “Why don’t we go check it out?”
“All of us?” I ask.
He smiles. “Why not? You want to keep the glory all to yourself?”
“Let’s roll.”
On the drive over, convoying in three cars, I can’t help remembering my last outing in force, the pointless kick-down of Keller’s door. Hopefully this one will turn out better. We pass the apartment complex and then circle around, cruising slowly through the parking lot. At the front of the line, Bascombe sticks his arm out the driver’s window, pointing up ahead. I crane my neck, gazing along the length of vehicles parked under the complex’s corrugated shelter. At the end of the row, a white van sits, with a long, paint-spattered ladder knotted to the roof rack. The lieutenant parks right behind it, leaving me to pull ahead while Aguilar takes up a spot behind. We all get out at once, donning sunglasses, adjusting gear.
“You know what to do, ladies,” Bascombe calls out.
We’re detectives, so we do what we always do. Knock on doors. Ask questions. Throw our weight around. It’s not hard to find out which door belongs to Tito the Painter, or that his real name is Tito Jiménez, and he has a little cousin who sometimes stays with him. We congregate in front of his door, ready for anything.
“March,” the lieutenant says. “You do the honors.”
Jiménez opens right away, throwing the door wide, no apprehension. He shields his eyes from the sunlight, confused by the sudden appearance of so many hpd detectives on his doorstep, but he doesn’t panic or run, doesn’t try to slam the door on our faces. He’s older than I expected, in his early forties, with a salt-and-pepper goatee, a belly that strains against his white T-shirt, and skin the same shade of yellow-tan as a shade-grown Connecticut cigar wrapper.
“Is this your van out here?” I ask.
He nods.
“Is your cousin here?”
“Frank? He don’t stay here no more.”
“No?”
He pushes his bottom lip out. “I told him to leave. He had this girl here living with him, and I said, ‘If you’re man enough for a live-in girlfriend, you’re man enough to pay your own rent.’ I didn’t like her here, always messing everything up.”
A glance over his shoulder suggests the standards of tidiness haven’t improved. I flip through my notebook, pulling a photo of Evangeline Dyer – not the postmortem snap Thomson took, but one Robb provided, Evey and Hannah in happier times, before the Dyers returned to Louisiana. It’s folded over so only Evangeline’s face shows, the part not obscured by her hair.
“Is that the girlfriend?” I ask.
He pauses to study the picture. The silence is so intense over my shoulder I know I’m not the only one holding his breath. Jiménez hands the photo back, nostrils flaring.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s her.”
I ask him where Rios and the girl went after he kicked them out, but he claims to have no idea. According to him, they aren’t that close, him and his cousin. Rios showed up one day saying some dudes he owed money to had taken his car and ransacked his old apartment, stealing a lot of his stuff. Before that, they hadn’t had anything to do with each other.
“Who did he owe money to?” I ask.
He shrugs, not because he doesn’t know, but because he doesn’t want to say the name, afraid of getting involved. I push him, and when that doesn’t focus the man’s attention, Bascombe steps forward, all six foot four of him, lowering his sunglasses in slow motion.
“Dude by the name of Octavio Morales,” Jiménez says. “Bad dude, but not anymore.”
“He’s dead now.”
Jiménez nods uncomfortably.
“What do you know about that?”
Up to now, he’s been forthcoming, but the painter suddenly loses all interest in talking. I can’t tell if he knows something and doesn’t want to say, or if he’s just afraid of being dragged into a court case, running the risk of having to testify. Either way, he’s obstinate, so Bascombe decides to wrap things up.
“Mr. Jiménez, we’re gonna have to ask you to come downtown. We’re seizing the van, too. Detective Lorenz, you wanna call us a tow truck, son?”
“On it, sir.”
Before he knows what hit him, Jiménez is cuffed for his own safety and baking in the back seat of my parked car. We take a quick look inside – we’ll be back soon enough with a warrant for a more thorough search – and then gather at the van, not opening the doors or even touching the handles, leaving everything for the forensics team to go over in detail. But we can’t help peering through the glass. Ordway goes around back, using his flashlight to peer inside.
“Boys,” he says.
We join him, taking turns glancing through. A sheet of plywood lies in back, a makeshift floor, with ladders and buckets and rollers stacked high. Along the side, though, near the sliding door, there’s a crawl space cleared from front to back. The white metal between the plywood and the door is marked with specks of dried liquid that look black from here.
“That could be paint,” Aguilar says.
“Yeah.” Bascombe adjusts his sunglasses. “It might also be blood. Anybody want to bet?”
Nobody does. We’re all thinking the same thing. We might not have found our killer yet, but we’re standing just outside the crime scene.
“You look good in orange, Coleman. It suits you.”
He responds to my jibe with a tug of the wrist, drawing the handcuffs securing him to the interview table taut.
“At least loosen them a little bit,” he sighs.
“Sorry about that, but last time we met, you got pretty rowdy. It’s for your own good. I don’t want all those deputies outside to have to come in here. They didn’t look too fond of you, to be honest. Here I was thinking you were a trusty, some kind of model prisoner.”
“You the one who put me back in here,” he says. “Don’t expect a man to make your life easier when all you do is make his harder.”
“I’m not asking you to make my life easier. I just want you to make it harder for Frank Rios. Remember him?”
Coleman’s brow lowers and his cheeks puff up. He remembers.
“Looked to me like you knew him pretty good,” I say. “Where’s he stay, huh?”
He smiles at the question, shakes his head. “Hey, send that other cop back in here, man. At least she’s pretty to look at.”
“I would, but she’s sensitive. I don’t think she appreciated what you said.”
“It was a compliment, man.” He gives a one-handed shrug, jiggling the handcuff again. “You can’t lock a man up like this and expect him not to say nothing when a piece of that walks through the door.”
“Oh, I’m sure she was flattered.”
It’s been five minutes since Cavallo walked out, either feigning offense or really feeling it. Either way, we’d been getting nowhere and he was using her presence as an excuse. Things needed a little shaking up.
“The way it’s supposed to work,” he says, “is I have something you want, so you give me something I want in return. Like a trade, man. Why I gotta explain all this?”
“I thought I had something you want. Revenge. You told Rios he’d be dead, so as long as he’s out there enjoying life, he’s making a fool of you. Now, if I knew where he stays, then he’d be in here, too, and maybe the two of you could work out your issues.”
“Our issues? You mean, like therapy?”
“Something like that.”
“So let me get this straight. The trade you’re offering is, I tell you where to find him, and you’ll send him to jail so I can shank him? They gettin’ all this on tape, man?” He laughs at his joke. “Here’s what I don’t get, though. When they made it a crime to snitch out your homeboys? You ain’t gonna send a man to jail for that. So what he done, man? You at least gotta tell me that.”
“You want to know what he did?”
“Man, how many times I gotta say it? Yeah, I wanna know.”
“You want me to tell you?”
He throws up his free hand, slumping back in his chair. “Mr. March, you didn’t used to be this slow. What happened, you have a stroke or something? Can’t you understand plain English no more?”
“Murder,” I say.
He sits forward, eyes narrowing. “Who he killed?”
“Nobody you know.”
“That boy Octavio? I heard about that.”
“No, not him.”
“Who then?”
“A girl, Coleman. He killed a teenage girl.”
His eyebrows raise. “He killed her? You talking literal or metaphorical? ’Cause I don’t think literally he killed nobody. It’s Little Evey you talking about, right? The one always followin’ him around.” He shakes his head. “I mean, what he done, it’s bad, but it ain’t the same as killin’.”
The hair on the back of my neck stands up. I want to pounce on him, dragging out everything he knows, reaching down his throat with my fist if I have to, but the worst thing I can do is let on that I’m excited, or even interested.
“So you’re sticking up for him now, Coleman?”
“I ain’t stickin’ up for nobody, but if you was in the same kind of bind, you might see it different. You say he didn’t kill Octavio, but if anybody had a reason, it’s him. Man, he loved that girl for real. Drove all the way to New Orleans to get her back, that’s how much. Somebody take your woman like that, like she just another installment on the payment plan, what you gonna do then? Yeah, he killed him.”
“He didn’t,” I say.
Now he looks confused. “He told me he was gonna. I talked to him right after he left Octavio. He said he gave over the money – not all he owed, but a nice chunk he got from moving some product – and Octavio, he goes, ‘That’s a pretty little thing. She can stay here and work some debt off, too.’ And I go, ‘What you gonna do?’ I thought maybe he was wanting me to back his play, only that’s not my thing, right? But he’s all like, ‘I got it handled already. I got it taken care of.’ ”
“You thought he meant he was going to kill Octavio?”
He looks at me like I’m wearing a dunce cap. “What else you think he meant? Like I said, you’d do the same thing.”
“Where’s he stay, Coleman?”
“Listen,” he says. “Since I been in here, I been thinking. So what if he’s snitching to the police, huh? He’s all right. What I said, that was words spoken in anger, without due consideration. I don’t wish nobody no ill. There ain’t no hate in me at all, not no more. It’s wrong to be a snitch, and it’s for sure wrong to leave that girl behind instead of throwin’ down right there, but what’s he gonna do? Answer me that. He said there’s, like, four or five of ’em, and they got guns.”
“Coleman, I’m going to tell you something and I want you to listen good. I’m not talking about Octavio Morales, and I’m not talking about Little Evey, either. The girl he killed was somebody else, a friend of hers. He shot her. He shot her three times with a.22. Right here” – I mark the spot on my own body with a fingertip – “and right here. And then he put the barrel against her temple and put the last one right here. In cold blood, Coleman. Now, are you going to sit here and try to defend that, or are you going to tell me where he stays?”
But he’s not ready to roll over yet. “Why he done it?”
“Does it matter why?”
He clamps a hand over his mouth, looking down at the table through slitted eyelids. I sit there and let him stew. Whatever I can say, I’ve said it already. The rest is up to him. If Cavallo were back at the table, she could try to work on his sympathies. She could whip out that cross of hers and tell him if he wants to get right with Jesus, it’s time to talk. But all I can do is level with him man to man and hope it’s enough. Part of me wishes she would walk back in so the burden wouldn’t rest on me alone. But she’s not going to sit here and be spoken to like that any more than I could sit through Hannah Mayhew’s funeral, thinking of my own girl in the casket the whole time.
“Listen,” he says, then lets out that sweet long sigh every interrogator will tell you is music to the ears, the sound that means he’s about to give it all up. “The thing is, there ain’t no one place he stays. But I know a couple you can check. He’s got this cousin named Tito – ”
“We know about that. He isn’t there.”
“All right. Did that cousin tell you he’s gotta van? Frank borrows it sometimes, and when they was looking for him that’s what he’d do, just pull over somewhere and sleep in the van.”
“We’ve got the van,” I say.”
He nods. “Before he start paying him again. That’s why he went, to get clear of the man. He was like, ‘I’ll pay you, but you gotta leave me be.’ Only that ain’t how it worked out, I guess.”
“Besides the van, where would he stay?”
“There’s some motels he’d go when he had money. And a couple of people he might stay with sometimes – including me, before this happened.” He jerks the cuffs again. “Give me that notepad and I’ll write some things down.”
I slide the legal pad across to him along with a pen. He hunches over and starts writing. I should feel relief, even optimism, but the longer it takes the less likely it is that Rios will be holed up at any of the locations. I was hoping he’d have a fixed abode, some kind of hideout known only to him and Coleman where we were sure to find him.
He hands the pad back.
“Now, Mr. March, on account of all this cooperation here, you gotta do something for me, right?”
I stand and head for the door. “I can put in a good word – ”
He laughs. “Whatever. That ain’t what I mean. Listen here. My grandma, every Saturday morning she walks over to Emancipation Park and sits on a bench there. She reads her psalm and she prays, probably for me. She can’t come up here, and me… well, I don’t like to call from here, neither. But you could tell her a message for me.”
“What message?”
“That everything’s all right,” he says. “Tell her it’s okay. Tell her I go to church every Sunday and sing in the choir.”
“Do you?” I ask.
He rolls his eyes. “You can tell her that, man. I helped you out.”
“Fine,” I say, tapping the edge of the pad against the table. “I’ll tell her.”
Cavallo waits outside, arms crossed, still steaming from Coleman’s earlier baiting. She asks what I got out of him and I tell her. When she hears I’m supposed to assure the grandmother that he’s a choirboy, she snorts in derision.
“There must be a different definition inside.”
While detectives from my squad work Coleman’s list, trying to bring Frank Rios to heel, and Lieutenant Bascombe sweats Jiménez personally in Interview Room 1, I pay a visit to the crime lab garage, where the white panel van has been carefully gone over, every surface scrutinized, every fascia removed for testing. The technician walks me through the results. The dried specks we saw through the window are indeed blood, and Luminol tests show smears all over the interior, especially under the plywood.
“He scrubbed it out pretty good,” the tech says, “but when I shined the black light on it, the floor just lit up.”
Removing the plywood, he also recovered a single spent shell, a tiny, crimped.22 caliber casing. Rios knew to collect them, but missed one in the rush.
“When we unloaded the painting supplies, we also found rolls of plastic they use as drop cloths. We’re seeing if we can match the ragged edge up with the sheet her body was rolled in. Might not work, but it’s worth a try.”
I nod in agreement. “What about the gun?”
“No sign of it.”
Back upstairs, a group of spectators is camped out in the monitor room, watching Bascombe’s performance.
“How’s he doing?” I ask.
Ordway sits up front, paws folded over his belly. “He’s just staring at the poor man. It’s unbelievable. Tito talks and the lieutenant just stares him down, so Tito talks some more.”
“Anything good?”
“He’s admitted to keeping a Ruger.22 under the seat of the van.”
“It’s not there now.”
He nods. “He says it’s got to be Rios who took it.”
“Does he know where Rios is staying?”
“Naw, but he offered to go undercover and find him.”
“For real?”
“The man’s desperate at this point. He also says Rios might have hightailed it back to Old Mexico.”
“I doubt that. Remember, I spoke to him. The kid’s got no accent. If he wasn’t born here, he definitely grew up here. It’s not like he just crossed the border. I saw his driver’s license.”
“And illegals can’t get those.” Ordway smiles at my naiveté.
“Well, if he is south of the border, Mack, we’re sending you down to get him.”
“Be my guest. I’m overdue for a vacation.”
Back at my desk, I stare at the computer awhile, then find myself flipping through Joe Thomson’s sketchbook, tracing the lines of the now-familiar face with my fingertip. While I’m daydreaming, Aguilar taps me on the shoulder and says the captain wants to see me. I knock on the boss’s door and he summons me inside.
“March, we’ve had our differences. You haven’t always made things easy for yourself around here, not recently. But I’ve had a good feeling about you the past couple of weeks. Kicking you down to the task force was probably the best thing I ever did.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“I’ve talked to Bascombe about this, and we’re on the same page.”
I nod uncertainly.
“To make a long story short,” he says, “I’m putting you back on the board. Starting tomorrow, you’re on rotation like everybody else. No more special assignments. No more loaning you out. You’ve proven yourself.”
He reaches across the desk to shake my hand.
“No more suicide cop?” I ask.
He hesitates at first, then smiles. “Right. No more.”
The heavens haven’t exactly opened up and no choirs of angels sing, but the firm pressure of the captain’s handshake goes a long way. Light-headed, I turn toward the door.
“Sir,” I say, pausing on the threshold. “My cases aren’t down yet. We don’t have Keller. We don’t have Rios. The way Wilcox is handing out immunity, Salazar will walk.”
“It’s a matter of time, that’s all. Your work on this… everything before pales in comparison.” He glances around, retrieving his copy of The Kingwood Killing from the shelf behind him. “This pales in comparison. Really. Good work.”
“Thank you.”
The door closes behind me. The farther I get from it, the less his confidence reassures me. We know what happened and we can pretty much prove it, and by some standards that’s enough, even if no one spends a day behind bars. The detective work is the same, either way. But there are things you can live with and things you can’t.
If Rios left his girlfriend behind as part of a payment to Octavio Morales, and then he put three bullets into Hannah Mayhew for trying to help her friend, the idea of him walking away, growing old somewhere in Mexico or under another name here in the States, in this very city where a man can walk in plain sight for decades without being recognized for who he is, that concept is unacceptable. If the world works that way, I want no part of it.
But it does work that way.
The guilty walk, it happens all the time, either because people like me can’t make the charges stick, or we can’t even find the suspect to stick them to.
Cavallo comes through the squad room door, flicking a strand of hair behind her ear, not yet noticing me. I fall in behind her, overtaking, prompting a surprised smile.
“I’ve just been patted on the back,” I say, “but I don’t feel like a good boy.”
“Maybe this will make you feel better. I just saw Wilcox in the elevator. The case against Keller lost one of its legs. The hospital called. Salazar flatlined this morning.”
“He’s dead?”
“Some kind of blood clot,” she says. “It got in the lungs.”
“I need to sit down.” I slump into the nearest chair, pulling my tie loose.
“Are you all right?”
“Let’s see. I’ve been shot. I got a bad cop with a conscience murdered. I killed a rent-a-cop and just found out I killed a real one, too, even if he was dirty. And I’m still missing both of my murder suspects. But I’m doing a great job, and they’re putting me back on rotation – ”
“Which is what you wanted, right?”
“What I wanted,” I say, “though I was never foolish enough to think it could happen, what I wanted was to find that girl alive. And instead I’ve found two of them dead.”
But that’s not right. I know it’s not. I never wanted to find her alive. All along I wanted her dead, I wanted to be the one who made the connection, the one to point the finger and say, The girl you’re looking for? She was here all along. And in a way, that’s exactly what I’ve gotten. I’m only whining because, having gotten it, I find I don’t want it anymore.
“Hollow victories are still victories, at least on paper, but I find them a little hard to celebrate.”
“You were almost killed,” she says, pointing to my leg. “And if you hadn’t shot the rent-a-cop, he’d have killed you – or worse, me. The same goes for Salazar. He dealt the hand, not you. Tonight you’re going home alive, and you get to sleep in your own bed. Tomorrow, you can get up and hunt the bad guys again. In my book, there’s nothing hollow about any of that. So if you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, why don’t we get back to work?”
She charges down the aisle, heading for the crowd near the interview room. I climb off the chair, brush my pant leg off, and follow.
Days have passed, Coleman’s list of haunts is long exhausted, and the hunt for Frank Rios continues. His face is plastered all over the news. The tip lines are flooded with dead-end sighting reports, pinpointing him all over Houston, in Mexico, and as far away as California. Patrol drags in a young illegal who more or less fits the description, then another, but it’s all for nothing. Rios is in the wind.
At first, Bascombe lets me slide. This isn’t homicide work, after all. He ignores my riding out with the surveillance teams, knocking the same doors I knocked yesterday and the day before. He doesn’t raise an eyebrow at Cavallo, who’s still camped in my cubicle even though our case is technically down.
Then he appears at my desk, coffee mug in hand, and says, “All good things come to an end.”
We troop down to the captain’s office, where chairs are already set out, and I’m congratulated again for the good work. Hedges gives Cavallo a sideways glance, like he wants to check her out without seeming to. She’s busy tracing her fingertip along her pant leg, following the course of a pinstripe. Not looking up, just waiting for the inevitable heave-ho.
“I think Wanda wants her detective back,” Hedges says. “And I’m feeling the same way about you.”
I clear my throat. “Finding Rios is a top priority. The chief said so himself on the news.”
“Which is why there’s a full-court press out there. But let’s face it, your talents can be put to better use. It’s time. Right, Lieutenant?”
Bascombe’s grunt is open to interpretation, but the captain takes no notice. Later, outside the office, he puts a big hand on my shoulder, shaking his head in commiseration but not saying a word.
Cavallo perches on the edge of my desk, arms crossed, blowing a stray hair out of her eyes. She blinks a lot, then tries to smile.
“Oh well.”
“I’ll talk to Wanda,” I say.
“And tell her what?”
“She’s closer to this thing. She’ll understand.”
“No,” she says with a resigned sigh. “Hedges is right. We’ve done all we can do for now. When Rios comes up for air, they’ll grab him, and then we’ll take this thing to trial. In the meantime – ”
“We’ll keep working it, you and me. After hours. They can’t dictate what we do on our free time.”
But Cavallo’s not buying it. She gets up, twists her purse over her shoulder, and gives me what’s meant as a reassuring smile.
“You should transfer out of there,” I say. “Come to Homicide. You could hack it up here, Theresa.”
“You think I don’t know that?” She heads for the door. “I’ll be honest. I think I’d rather be hunting for the victims, not the killers. It’s better for the soul.”
Aguilar sees her going and stands. Lorenz does, too. By the time she makes it out, the whole squad is on its feet, even Bascombe leans through his open door.
“I’ll miss that one,” the lieutenant says.
Aguilar nods. “She’s a good one.”
But I don’t have time for sentiment. I grab the phone, start dialing the number, slumping in my chair as it rings and rings.
“Hello?”
“You’re a patient kind of man,” I say, “the kind who likes to sit and watch a place for hours on end. Isn’t that right?”
After a pause, Carter Robb answers in the affirmative. He’s already proven himself, staking out James Fontaine like he did.
“You said you wanted to do something this time.”
“I do,” he says.
He knows Rios, has seen him up close. He won’t mistake someone else for him, the way a uniform working from a photo and a physical description might. “Well I have something, assuming you’re still interested.”
“I am.”
“We aren’t giving up,” I tell him. “That’s the main thing.”
And just like that, I set Robb loose on the street, another set of eyes. I give him the list from Coleman, give him my home number, and tell him that in the unlikely event he catches sight of Rios, he should call me right away.
“It’s a wild goose chase, I realize that. But it’s better than nothing.”
“I’m on it,” he says, then hangs up.
When I put the phone down, there’s a warmth running through me. I like this kid. I haven’t misjudged him. Just like that, he’s taking up the task. What I’ve just done, it’s wrong. It’s outside the bounds. But I don’t regret it, not even a little.
Charlotte returns from Dallas looking tan and rested, with a canvas tote full of new clothes and a determination to see the last of our tenant. While he’s out in the suburbs winging his way through one of the many community college classes he teaches for extra money, she and Ann pack up the sleeping bag and dirty clothes and men’s magazines he’s littered around the living room in her absence, boxing everything neatly, then climb the stairs and do the same thing in the garage apartment. Thanks to the neighbor’s chain saw, the roof is free of tree limbs, so they work in the heat beneath the rustling blue tarp, so focused they barely speak. My offers of help are uniformly rejected. Clearly the sisters cooked up a strategy on the drive home.
“I’m not sure this is entirely kosher,” I say. “Tommy has rights here as a tenant.”
Charlotte hardly glances up. “Don’t worry.”
She’s gotten tired of waiting for me and has taken matters into her own hands.
Just as they finish carrying all the boxes down to the driveway, leaving nothing upstairs but the furniture, a moving van pulls up to the front curb. Ann gives instructions while Charlotte watches, a contented smile on her lips.
“It wouldn’t be right,” she says, “to expect a tenant to live in conditions like this, and there’s no telling when the insurance will pay up. Finding him another place is the decent thing to do, Roland. Anything else would be irresponsible.”
“Shouldn’t he get a say, though?”
“His dad pays the rent, and I’ve already talked to him.”
“You have? When?”
Her smile widens. She has been busy, very busy during her absence. The thought of Tommy’s reaction worries me a bit, but it’s a relief to have the old Charlotte back, in control of her life once more, the refractive, toxic influence of the anniversary finally in abeyance. I put my arm around her bare shoulders, squeezing her tight, as the movers head up the stairs to do the heavy lifting.
“Go up and change,” she says, brushing her hand on my suit jacket. “We’re all going out to dinner when Tommy gets home.”
“Dinner? All right then.”
In the bedroom I peel off my work clothes, changing into jeans and a short-sleeved pullover, leaving it untucked over my backup gun, a slim Kahr K40. My mobile phone rings, a number I don’t recognize.
“Mr. March? It’s Gina Robb. I’m sorry to bother you, but – ”
“What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering… have you seen my husband? It’s just, he’s been out looking, you know, and he didn’t come home last night – ”
“Out looking for what?” I ask, pretending I don’t know.
“That man. The one who killed Hannah.”
“He’s up to his old tricks,” I say, trying to make light of the situation. “I told him when he staked out James Fontaine’s house to leave it alone. I figured he’d learn his lesson.”
“Well, he hasn’t. He thinks he has to do something. No matter how many times I tell him it’s not his fault, no matter how much he’s already done – and he’s done a lot. No offense, but I don’t think anyone’s done more than him. But it doesn’t matter. Nothing he does can bring her back – either of them, Hannah or Evey.”
“And he’s not answering your calls?”
“I’m afraid. Either something’s happened to him or… he’s done something.”
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m sure he’ll get in touch.”
“If you hear from him – ”
“I’ll make sure he calls you.”
Once she hangs up, I dial Robb’s number. Charlotte, who’s come inside with Ann, interrupts her conversation to call up the stairs. As the phone rings I tell her I’ll be down in just a second. Robb answers.
“I just got a call from your wife,” I say. “She’s worried that you didn’t come home last night, and you’re not answering her calls.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Listen, Carter. I wouldn’t have given you that list if I didn’t think you’d be cool. You’re freaking out, and that makes me worry.”
“I’m not freaking out,” he says.
“It’s going to take more than that to reassure me.”
“I’ll call her. I was stupid. I wasn’t thinking.”
“You were out all night?”
“I couldn’t leave. I had a feeling he was gonna show up. Every time I’d put the key in the ignition, I’d know the moment I left he was gonna be there. So I couldn’t do it.”
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” I say. “I’ve made a string of bad calls lately, so I guess this is just the latest. It’s not your fault, it’s mine. But look, it’s time to pull the plug.”
“Not yet.”
“It’s time,” I say. “You’ve spooked your wife, and you’re starting to spook me, too. So let’s put an end to it, all right? I appreciate your help. You made a real difference. Without you, we wouldn’t have put this case down. You’ve done good work, okay? It’s time to let yourself off the hook.”
“Not yet.”
“I understand you feel responsible. Get over it. This isn’t your load to carry. You’re absolved, all right? So go home to your wife.”
He’s quiet a long while, long enough for me to picture him. Not in a church van but in his own car – I’ve already lectured him about that – a mess of fast food wrappers and water bottles on the floor, his worn out little Bible on the dashboard or across his lap, so he can read and pray and watch all at once, convincing himself his freelance surveillance has some kind of religious significance. I recall his eagerness when I first made the offer, like a starving man invited into the bakery. I should have known right then what I was doing was wrong.
“Carter?”
“Fine,” he says. “I’ll go home.”
“You promise? I’m going to call Gina later, so if you don’t – ”
“I said I would.”
Charlotte calls up the stairs again. Apparently Tommy has arrived home. I want to press Robb harder, but I don’t have time. I’ll have to assume his promise is good. And I will be making that call to Gina sooner rather than later. Trust but verify.
When I join them in the kitchen, Tommy seems baffled by the sudden goodwill coming from Charlotte, but he’s sufficiently in love with himself to imagine that, given time, anyone could share the feeling, so he doesn’t peer too deeply into the matter.
“Hey, I just need to run up to the apartment before we go.”
“No time,” Charlotte insists, tapping her watch face. “We’ve got reservations.”
Ann loops an arm through his. “Besides, you look perfectly fine. Don’t go changing on our account.”
On the way out, he glances toward the living room, but if he notices all his things are gone, he doesn’t let on. We crowd into Ann’s car, the sisters in front, and accelerate into the early evening traffic. As we cruise past the Paragon, Tommy and I exchange a look. But our table is booked at a trattoria on Morningside in Rice Village, not far from the Bridgers’ West University home, where the manager seems to be on friendly terms with Ann. This is all, I realize, her doing. In spite of her bleeding heart when it comes to humanity in general, she can conjure up a ruthless streak for one-on-one dealings.
My hunch is borne out by the way my sister-in-law plays hostess, an unaccustomed role for her, offering a running commentary on the menu, drawing Tommy out about his teaching, the intangibles of his dissertation, and what he calls his activism, which consists mainly of attending various coffeehouse meet and greets and dropping in on the occasional protest. The funny thing is, I can tell she likes him. They have a good bit in common, really.
She gets him talking about West Africa, no doubt having learned from Charlotte that his summer in Ghana is such a touchstone. He can talk about it for hours. I relax and sneak a look in Charlotte’s direction. She still wears the contented smile, as if she’s reclining poolside in the sun, her eyes hidden behind big round sunglasses, her fingers trailing in the water.
By the time the bill arrives, we’re all good friends. The wine has flowed on Tommy’s side of the table, and now he glows with a damp-skinned sense of social triumph. In the car he talks at length about what’s wrong with the world, using words like bourgeois, consumerism, and globalization to great effect. Ann and Charlotte smile encouragingly, the car heading amiably down Kirby past Dryden, making a left onto Swift. We cruise the vehicle-lined street, block by block, until Ann pulls to a stop in front of a white brick duplex with black shutters, a hulking structure from the 1940s that looks part Tara and part art deco.
“Here you go,” Ann says.
The car is silent. Tommy glances toward me in confusion, noticing the keys dangling from Charlotte’s hand as she reaches between the seats.
“What are we doing here?” he asks, a baffled smile on his lips.
Charlotte puts the keys in his open palm. “Dropping you off.”
“I don’t get it.”
“This is your new place,” Ann says, adjusting the rearview mirror for a better look.
“I’m afraid the insurance isn’t going to come through anytime soon,” Charlotte says, “so I had a talk with your father, and he thought it was best for you to relocate. You’ll like this place.”
“It’s great,” Ann agrees. “Original fixtures and tile. And plenty of space out back for entertaining. The old lady downstairs is charming.”
He turns to me. “Is this a joke?”
In spite of everything, I feel for him. The occasion calls for a quip of some kind, but I have a hard time mustering anything, so an anticlimactic shrug has to suffice. Tommy sputters a few objections, only to find the sisters ready, swatting him down with ramrod charm. His things are already in the new apartment waiting for him. The first month’s deposit has been made. Charlotte digs through her purse, producing an envelope from the bank with his prorated rent refund in cash. That seems to clinch things. Fingering the stiff bills, he pops the door open and climbs onto the curb, waiting for the rest of us to get out.
He seems to think we’re all going upstairs to have a look at the place, but Ann quickly disappoints him. Her foot punches the accelerator, slamming the passenger door shut.
“Hey – ”
I turn in my seat, watching Tommy watch us, the keys drooping from one hand and the envelope from the other. Charlotte bursts out laughing, her feet drawn up onto the seat like a girl’s, and Ann grins, proud at her achievement. She rights the mirror, then glances over her shoulder at me.
“That’s how you solve a problem,” she says.
The sisters exchange a high five. I sit quietly in back, reflecting on how differently problems are solved when you’re a lawyer instead of a cop. Tommy, impervious to hints and even subtle intimidation, has been a conundrum to me, a first-class irritation. Even after the hurricane offered deliverance, I allowed him to install himself on the couch. It never occurred to me to buy him off. Charlotte has spent no telling how much to bring about her long-awaited eviction, but now she has it and she’s utterly pleased.
Not that Tommy was ever the real problem. It’s just that the real problem couldn’t be solved and never can be. This time next year, there will be another Tommy, because there always is. To move on, even temporarily, we need a sacrifice on the altar; we need to shed some metaphorical blood. Again, a hollow victory, but a necessary one. Yet another means to an end.
Or maybe I’m talking nonsense. My wife is happy, laughing like she used to when we first met. Instead of overanalyzing, maybe it’s time to simply enjoy. I pass my hand between the seats, finding hers. She clasps it, drawing it onto her lap, sitting back with a heavy, satisfied sigh.
It’s dark when Ann drops us off. Charlotte starts through the back door, dragging me by the hand, but I notice a light still burning in the garage apartment window.
“You left a light on,” I say, peeling my hand free.
“Leave it.”
“It’s people like you causing the energy crisis. Go on in, I’ll be back in a minute.”
She goes inside, leaving me to bound up the stairs, fumble with my keys, and shoulder my way through the door. Already there’s a musty, outdoors stench to the apartment, conjuring fears of the dreaded black mold. Now that Tommy’s out, we’ll have to see to this.
The neglected light is in the kitchen, reminding me of my conversation with Marta, the waitress from the Paragon. I pause with my hand on the switch, making myself a commitment not to return to that place, one I’ll probably break in time, though perhaps I won’t. To seal the promise, I turn off the light.
“March.”
The voice, coming suddenly out of the depths of the pitch-black living room, makes me jump. My hand slides under my shirt, reaching automatically for my off-duty piece.
“Don’t do it. You can’t see me, but I can see you.”
A pinpoint flashlight switches on at shoulder height, maybe fifteen feet away, blinding me, the kind of light usually affixed to a tactical firearm. Blinking, I struggle to make out the silhouetted figure behind the halo. But not because I haven’t identified the voice.
“It’s not too bright of you, coming here,” I say.
“That’s funny, under the circumstances. I never figured you for a wisecracker, so that’s good to know. Just keep in mind, if you go for that gun, it’ll be the last thing you do. And it won’t be hard for me, putting you down. I’d enjoy it.”
“Then go ahead. If you’re expecting me to beg, you’ve got another 358 think coming.”
The bravado in my words surprises me, but I’m pleased, too. You fantasize about this situation – when the time comes, how will you go? On your feet or on your knees, that kind of thing. And I’ve always wanted to think of myself as defiant right to the end, a man who won’t snivel when the time comes to take his bullet, who’ll fight if the opportunity presents itself, not clinging too tightly to life.
“I hope you’re proud of yourself,” he says.
“Good. I am.”
He snorts with derision, the light dipping slightly. “I’ll bet you are. You know something? I’ve never understood you, March. From the very beginning. It’s like you picked me out of the air, picked me at random, and decided to do everything in your power to ruin my life.”
“You started it. You made me look dirty.”
“What, snatching that gun? Your shooting was clean and we both knew it. What I did, it didn’t harm you. I wouldn’t have let that happen. If you think that, then you don’t know me at all.”
“I know you, Reg. Believe me, I do.”
“You don’t know a thing.”
“I know you popped Joe Thomson. What kind of cop – what kind of friend – does a thing like that? You worked with that guy for years. That’s cold-blooded. Don’t say I don’t know you, man, because I know your type. I always have.”
“I never could figure you out,” he says. “Back in the day, I saw some real promise in you. The way you handled yourself under fire, I was impressed. And even later, after you had me in your crosshairs, I still used to think you could be salvaged. When I heard what happened to your kid, March, I was genuinely sorry. And then the way you used it, wringing a confession out of that wife murderer. Man, that knocked me over. You want to talk cold-blooded – ”
“I didn’t use anything. That’s not how it happened.”
He whistles impatiently, unimpressed. “Thomson? He was as dirty as they come, and you would’ve let him walk just for testifying against me. Isn’t that right? The irony is pretty rich when you consider it was him that lit up that girl.”
“The girl on the bed? Salazar said that was you.”
“No doubt. He also said I pulled the trigger on Joe, which is a lie. He was the one. He’s your rogue cop. If I’d had any idea what was going on under my nose, I would’ve done something about it, but instead of coming to me – ”
“Is that your story? That’s why you’re here? You’re holding a gun on me to tell me you didn’t do it? Get a lawyer then and let’s go to court. I’d love to see you try to wiggle out of this.”
He tries to laugh, but it comes out as more of a hiss. “He stitched me up good, him and you. There’s nothing a lawyer can do…” His voice trails off, like even he’s losing confidence in the innocence ploy. Whatever his reason for being here, it’s not to enter a plea. “And I was almost out, March. All you had to do was wait and I would’ve handed over my badge and gone into retirement. Nobody had to die…”
“Tell that to the girl.”
“We tried to save that girl,” he sniffs. “That’s the crazy thing. It was all running fine until we put the white hat on.”
The tactical light lowers a bit more. I can almost see him, at least that’s what I tell myself. My body breaks out in a cold sweat, my hands tremble, my thoughts race. Do I stand here and banter until he decides to pull the trigger, or do I draw, risking an early demise? There’s a chance, there’s always a chance, that he’ll miss and I won’t. Or I’ll be wounded but still able to get off a shot. If the roles were reversed, though, I wouldn’t fancy the other guy’s chances.
“I have to tell you,” he says, his voice different, talking more to himself than me, “a turn of events like this, it’s enough to make you think. As long as we did our thing, you wouldn’t believe how easy it was. Everything went like clockwork. Believe me, we’re only losing the war on drugs because we aren’t fighting it, not on their level anyway. It was beautiful. Candy from a baby. But the moment we try to be the good guys, it all blows up. I should have left her there. I knew that. We should have stuck to our thing. We hadn’t planned for that, so we should’ve walked away. But we didn’t. Instead, we went in there, guns blazing, like the cavalry coming to the rescue, and that one… pure… instinct, that’s what destroyed us.”
The room grows quiet. In a moment, wondering where I am, Charlotte will venture outside. She’ll call up the stairs, or even ascend them, and I’m not going to let that happen. My hand is damp. I wipe it against my pant leg. I don’t want anything to ruin my move, no glitch in the cycle of muscle memory, my hand flashing, pistoning forward, firing blindly into the light.
“March,” he says. “Don’t be stupid.”
I relax my hand, biding my time.
“I’m not here to punch your ticket, man. Not yet. It’ll happen one day, believe me. When you least expect it. Blah, blah, blah – you know the speech. But I’ll do it now if you want, and I’ll go down there and put a bullet in your wife, too. It’s your call.”
“Then why are you here?” I ask.
“Good question.” He laughs dryly. “Call it pride. Arrogance, maybe. But I wanted you to know I could do it. I wanted you to know you didn’t win. Trust me, March, I’m gonna land on my feet. I have other irons in the fire, my friend. There are people in this world who will pay gladly for the kind of skills I have to offer. You got lucky, sure, but it wasn’t your great detective work that brought me down.”
“I realize that. It was your own people, Reg. Thomson’s conscience. Salazar keeping that gun around to use against you.”
“No,” he says, the light bobbing. “It wasn’t that. It wasn’t you. It was fate.”
Before he finishes, the light disappears, leaving a ghost image behind on my retinas. I hear him moving. I shuffle backward, deep into the kitchen, drawing my pistol as I slip on the linoleum floor. Steadying myself, I raise the muzzle, but there’s nothing but darkness to focus on. My vision adjusts and I see the lighter darkness of the open door. I edge forward, gun at the ready, peering around the doorframe and down the stairs. The back door of the house, illuminated by a mosquito-swarmed bulb, is shut tight. Outside the cone of golden lamplight, nothing stirs.
I edge my way down, puzzling over the rapid exit. The stairs creak under me. When Keller left, I didn’t even hear the descending footfalls. Wait a second…
Back in the apartment, I switch on the overhead light. The bedroom door stands open, the tarp flapping gently in the night breeze. Moving slowly, leading with my weapon, I approach the threshold, sweeping the room until I’m sure it’s clear. I feel around for the bedroom light, but nothing happens when I flip the switch. The closet light works, though. Once it’s on, I can see the gaping hole in the bedroom wall where the roof and window collapsed under the tree’s weight. The tarp is folded back, revealing a stretch of windowsill.
As I advance, the top of a ladder is visible. It leads from the bedroom window down to the neighbor’s yard. On the far side of his property, the wooden gate stands open. Tires squeal on distant pavement, the sound of a nemesis making good his escape.
Arrogance, he said, and he must be right. What else would drive him to put everything at risk like this, just to let me know he’s not finished with me? Just to issue an empty threat. The funny thing is, I could see myself taking the same risk for the same pointless gesture. That’s rivalry for you.
I let myself into the house, shutting the back door and locking the dead bolt. The stairs give off an odd glow. Investigating, my gun still in hand, I find a row of candles flickering upward, one every couple of steps.
At the top, Charlotte stands, her legs bare, her body swathed in one of my white dress shirts, the collar turned. Her eyes sparkle in the candlelight.
“I thought you’d never get back,” she says. “What took so long?”
I slide my off-duty gun back in the holster, slump down on the bottom step, and bury my head in my hands. Behind me, I hear her weight on the steps, her bare feet padding down, and then her hand touches the back of my neck, cool and dry, her fingers sliding upward through my hair.
The sheets drag away from me, Charlotte rolling in her sleep, and I wake up, staring into the dark, feeling the fan’s cool breeze on my skin, listening to the blades revolve. A thought surfaces, a memory, a yellow string knotted around my imaginary finger, and I turn to the nightstand in dismay, where the clock reads a little past midnight. I was supposed to phone the Robbs. Is it too late to bother them?
My mobile, still in my pants pocket on the floor, displays a string of missed calls. At dinner I’d turned off the ringer and never switched it back. Gina Robb is listed, and so is Carter, calling from his cell. He left a message just a minute ago – it was the buzz of notification, not Charlotte’s movement, that must have wakened me – speaking in a breathy whisper, mentioning an apartment complex in Sharpstown and giving me a unit number, telling me to meet him there right away. I redial his number, but the call goes straight to voicemail.
“What are you doing?” Charlotte asks as I pull my clothes on.
“I’ve gotta go.”
She’s been married to a homicide detective long enough to accept sudden departures. She rolls back over, then grabs my pillow to shore her head up.
“Since you’re leaving,” she says.
Past midnight the landscape of Houston changes, which is another way of saying there’s a lot less traffic. I roll the window down, letting in a blast of humid air, my foot heavy on the accelerator, my heart tight in my chest. The blocks fly past and I’m racing down Interstate 10 until it melts into the Loop, the lighted glass and steel buildings along Post Oak and the towers hedging the Galleria all shimmering in the hazy night. I exit onto Highway 59, impatient in spite of the brisk driving, a sense building inside me that I’ve overstepped. That the error I planted by enlisting Carter Robb will reap a black harvest.
When I reach the address – a modest, drive-up affair with tiny fenced balconies on both levels, perhaps a dozen units in all – I find to my surprise a red logo-covered van from Cypress Community Church parked on the curb just a block away. The man knows nothing of subtlety, but then who would suspect a church van of containing a set of watching eyes?
The complex is not one of the access-controlled empires favored by the gangs, but just a brown, run-down and rusted rental property dating from the 1970s, the kind of place I would have driven past without notice if I hadn’t been looking for it. And if there wasn’t a church van out front. One thing I’m sure of: this address was not on our list.
The number Robb gave me is upstairs, so I ascend the metal steps, keeping my footfalls light, not knowing what to expect. A dusty, spider-webbed grill sits next to the door. The bulb in the fixture beside the entrance is burned out, but the peephole glows dimly, letting me know somebody’s home. I draw my pistol, tucking it down beside my hip, then give the door a light rap.
It opens slightly, straining against a security chain, and I get a glimpse of Carter Robb’s face, pale, damp with sweat, eyes bulging a bit, before the door slams shut. He releases the chain and throws it open wide. His skin has a noticeable pallor, as if he hasn’t eaten in a long time and might be feverish. He wears dark jeans and a black T-shirt that reads VIVA LA REFORMACION in red letters, with a posterized man dressed like he’s going to the Renaissance Festival taking the place of Che Guevara.
“You called,” I say, casting a wary glance over the apartment.
The living room is filled with matched furniture straight out of a thrift shop, upholstered in nubby, synthetic-looking blue tweed. A stack of magazines, mostly checkout counter fare, is centered on the coffee table with the TV remote on top. Posters tacked on the wall. In an armchair, a basket of laundry consisting of towels and socks and T-shirts and women’s underwear, still waiting to be folded. Plastic cups are discarded everywhere, some of them empty, others still with liquid stagnant inside.
Robb wobbles on his feet, taking a step back to steady himself. I reach out, then notice what’s hanging from his left hand.
“You want to give me that?”
He blinks, then glances down at the Ruger.22 caliber pistol, almost as if he didn’t realize it was there. With the barrel down he hands it over. I strip the magazine out, ejecting a round from the chamber, then tuck it into my waistband for safekeeping.
“Now, why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“I better show you,” he says.
He points down the hallway, toward the bedroom presumably, and I see there’s blood on his hand, and more wetting his dark shirt. His knuckles have the bruised and scuffed look of a man who’s thrown some punches without knowing how. We walk toward the hallway, Robb pausing over the laundry basket. He lifts a wadded shirt, leaving a smear of blood on the fabric.
“This was Evey’s.” He turns it this way and that, then lets it drop. “I was just about to leave, like you said, and as soon as I turned the engine on, there he was. He knocked on a door – not the one from your list – and talked to some guy. They exchanged something. I think he sold the guy drugs, because he had a wad of cash in his pocket. I followed him, and this is where he went.”
He leads the way to the back bedroom, with me trailing a few feet behind, dreading what I’ll find on the other side of the door. I remember the saintly spasm of Octavio Morales’s death agony, the startled expression on Joe Thomson’s face in his final gasp. The security guard, Cropper, coiled up in a pool of blood, dead by my hand on the warehouse pavement. And Salazar, his body small and crumpled under the hospital sheets, that death also down to me.
And this one is, too. Even if Robb pulled the trigger, it’s my sin to carry, just as much as if I’d put the gun in his hand and told him to shoot. I’d deputized him, appointed him an instrument of vengeance, and probably destroyed the man in the process. I can tell by the way he’s moving, the jerking, twisting shuffle, the thousand-mile stare. He’s been gutted, his soul carved out, astonished to find himself capable of such bestiality.
I pause in the dark hallway, just outside the light spilling through the bedroom door, imagining Frank Rios as I last saw him, picturing him spread out on the bed like Morales, hands lifted stiffly heavenward, the blood cooling, settling in his extremities. But when I enter, it isn’t a beatific corpse waiting for me.
Rios sits on the edge of the bed, his wrists lashed together with an extension cord, its opposite end secured to the bedpost beneath him, between his legs, forcing him to hunch forward, to tilt his battered head up in order to see. He looks at me through one eye, the lid swollen, his face puffy and scratched, blood dripping from his mouth and nose. It takes a moment for him to recognize me, and then he tugs on the cord violently. He spits to clear his mouth.
“You gotta help me, man,” he whispers.
Robb goes to the mirrored closet, leaning back against the door, his knees buckling under him. As he slides down, he leaves a wet trail on the glass. I kneel beside him, pulling at the T-shirt. A seeping washrag is duct-taped to his side. Underneath, a tiny hole oozes blood.
“Put pressure on this.” I replace the rag, moving his hands to cover it. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Wait,” he says, reaching toward my hand. “Make him tell you what he told me.”
“You’ve been shot, Carter. We’ve gotta get you to the hospital.”
“It doesn’t matter. Make him tell you.”
I pull free, walking out into the hallway. There’s no way I’m going to let him bleed to death on the carpet while I chat with Frank Rios. The emergency operator scrambles ambulance and police and then it’s back into the bedroom, where both men look up, both appealing to me. From the bathroom I grab fresh towels, then bend over Robb to try and staunch the flow of blood. Over my shoulder, Rios coughs sloppily and spits some more.
“You don’t get it,” he hisses, addressing Robb, not me, continuing a conversation I must have interrupted with my arrival. “Not you, not that other one – Murray. You talk, but it’s not inside you like it was in her.”
“Shut up,” I say.
Robb shakes his head weakly. “Let him talk.”
“I knew,” Rios says. “I could tell looking at you. Talking. That Murray thinks he’s so smart, quoting all these philosophers he’s never read. But he’s not. You’re not. This” – he shrugs against the cable – “it means nothing.”
I don’t want him to talk. I don’t want to hear his side of the story. Some killers, when they realize it’s over, they want to tell their life story. They have pronouncements to make, as though taking life gives them some heightened insight into living it. I’ve sat through enough of these lectures, even been entertained by a few, but not this time. Not him.
“You murdered Hannah Mayhew,” I say.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like, then?”
He drops his head, showing me the top of his skull, his matted hair, a target to lash out at, to crush. I feel it in me, that desire to hurt him, to make him suffer, to put him down like a rabid dog. The lives he’s destroyed, the anguish, the senseless brutality – no one would begrudge me doing it, and there are plenty who’d consider it my duty. There are some men not worth bringing in alive, not if you can help it. I have the means, and coursing through me like a high, like a toxin in my system, I have the motive, too.
“I loved her,” he says. He does more than say it. He wails the words, filling them with a repellent self-pity. “I tried to stop them from hurting her.”
“Evey, you mean. You abandoned her. I know what happened to Evey. I saw the aftermath firsthand.”
His head shakes. “I sent them to save her, but they didn’t. You know what they did? He told me. Tony told me. They dumped her, man. They put her in the water like she was just garbage. And they were gonna do that to me, too, if they ever caught me.”
I can hardly stand it. “So you’re the victim here.”
“Everybody’s the victim. I work for the police, man. The good guys. I pass along whatever they need to know. And they supposed to help me. That’s what he says. Tony. They gonna help me with the money I owe. They gonna square everything in time. Only they don’t, so then I gotta do it. Except… Except…”
The emotion in his voice is real enough. I can believe, in his own sick and self-centered way, that he loved Evangeline Dyer, just like Coleman said. But hearing him say so, hearing his words thicken with grief, pollutes her memory. I see her face in Thomson’s photo, on the many pages of his sketchbook, in the picture folded over and tucked in my notebook, Evey and Hannah saying goodbye before the Dyers left for Louisiana. Even though I never knew her, even though I pursued her blindly, just a body tied to a bed, I feel she belongs to me in some way she doesn’t to him, the man she ran away with, the man who left her to her fate.
Something Donna Mayhew said comes back to me. I didn’t know her, but now I feel like I’ve found her. Only I’ll never find Evey, down at the bottom of the Gulf. She’s lost for good, and this is as close as I’ll ever get.
“You left her,” I say.
“I sent help.”
“And what about Hannah? She didn’t deserve to die. She didn’t deserve to have her body dumped, either, but that’s what you did.”
At the mention of her name, his demeanor shifts. He twists his head up, looking at me through the hooded eye. “That girl, she wouldn’t stop calling. She had to talk to Evey, wouldn’t stop until I put her on the phone. But how could I do that? I tried putting her off, but she knew something wasn’t right. She wouldn’t let go of it. And I thought, this girl could get me in a lot of trouble – or maybe I wasn’t thinking. I was afraid.” He spits again. “Afraid of them finding me, afraid of anyone knowing.”
“So, what, you kidnapped her?”
“I agreed to meet her. Told her Evey and me would be at the mall. That’s where we used to meet, before Evey went home to the Big Easy. Hannah, when she showed up, I told her she had to stop calling me. I said Evey went back again, but she could tell it was a lie. And I went, ‘This has gotta end.’ ”
“Then you killed her.”
He shakes his head. “I was just trying to scare her, man. But she got real angry and was like, ‘What you done to her?’ And she says she’s gonna call the police. Under the seat, my cousin Tito, he keeps a loaded gun.” He turns sideways to look at Robb, who hasn’t moved in a while. “He’s got the gun, man. You better watch out.”
“I have the gun,” I say, then hunching over Robb: “You okay? Help’s coming, so just hang on.”
“Is he okay?” Rios says. “What about me? Look what he done to me!”
“He could’ve done worse.”
A sticky laugh escapes his red lips. “No, he couldn’t. Not after what I told him.”
He stops talking, now that I want him to. But there’s no way he can keep it up. Not everybody talks, but everybody wants to, I’m convinced of that. The hard men, the professionals, they know to keep their mouths shut. But it doesn’t come naturally. Like killing, you have to overcome a lot of instinct to stay quiet, whether you’re guilty or not. The effort on its own is sometimes enough to give the game away. So I know he’s going to open up.
“Told him what?”
Under the circumstances, though, he could admit to anything and get away with it. It won’t take much of a lawyer to argue any confession made in this room is coerced. But I don’t need him to confess to anything. All I need him to do is exist; all I need is his body so that justice can be executed upon it.
“Told him what?” I ask again, giving him a nudge.
“Don’t touch me, man.”
I push him again, and he rears back.
“What did you tell him that was so important?”
“Go on,” Robb says.
Rios starts nodding, a nod like a train coming over the horizon, slow at first, hardly perceptible, then it gains momentum, quickening to the point that his head bobs back and forth, his intention arriving. “It was her fault. She saw the gun and the stupid girl reached for it. It went off, and she’s sitting there in the passenger seat, looking surprised, like she never saw that coming.”
He looks up at me, gauging my reaction, then he chuckles. Telling the story is like committing the crime again, only this time with an audience. We’re helpless bystanders, Robb and I, witnesses. Forced to hear, powerless to stop him.
“She was trying to save her friend,” I say, because I can’t say nothing. “A girl you supposedly loved. And you killed her.”
My anger leaves him unfazed. “She didn’t react at first, but then she kind of cried out. I dragged her back between the seats, put her on the floor of the van, you know.” He closes his eyes, remembering. “I never did that before, never shot someone, and it kind of surprised me she didn’t die right there. Maybe the bullets were too small. She started crying then, laying in back. I started driving, ’cause I was afraid somebody heard the shot.”
I recall the parking lot, standing in the space where Hannah’s car was found. He’d shot her, and when she didn’t die, he threw her in back and drove around, waiting for her to bleed out.
“So I’m driving,” he says, “and I look back and there she is, crawling up to the front again.”
The more he speaks, the calmer he gets, like his energy is channeled entirely into the story and he’s almost proud to tell it. There’s a pleasure he takes in describing the scene, like a kid at a campfire describing the weirdest thing that ever happened to him.
“She was kind of clawing herself toward me, you know? Her hair was hanging over her face, like in a horror movie or something. And it was scary, man, scary to see her coming.”
Behind me, Robb shifts his weight. “She didn’t give up. She was brave.”
The interruption trips him up, and for a second Rios can’t remember where he was. Maybe the emotion in the youth pastor’s voice has thrown him off. It’s not anguish. It’s not the choking, soul-eating rage that I’m feeling. What it sounds like is love.
“I had to shoot her again,” Rios says, his voice rising an octave, “while I’m still driving. That time she got quiet. And I thought, Wow, I think she’s finally dead. I drove like that awhile and then I look in the mirror and she’s right there, staring at me all pale like a ghost. I almost crashed, man. I had to pull into the driveway of somebody’s house, and I turn around and she’s holding her stomach, and she’s got these tears streaming down her face, and she keeps going, ‘What did you do to her? What did you do?’ And I keep telling her, ‘It wasn’t me. It wasn’t me.’ ”
He shakes his head, laughing incredulously at the thought.
“There I was. I got the gun, and it’s like I’m the one who’s afraid, you know? Trying to make an excuse or something, so she don’t get mad at me. Well, she kinda fell over then, up against the side of the van, and she started making this noise… I can’t even describe it. It was loud, though, and I thought somebody was gonna come outside and see what was going on. I climbed in the back and told her, ‘You gotta shut up now, you gotta shut up.’ And I put the gun against her head…” He makes a pistol of his fingers, inching it forward in the air, drawing the cord along. “I put it against her head just the way he put it against mine.” He cocks his head toward Robb. “And she looked at me just how I looked at him, and she said just what I said. Only she meant it.”
“What do you mean? What did she say?”
“She said it twice, like she wanted to make sure I understood. What she said was, ‘I forgive you.’ She said it two times, maybe for her and Evey both. ‘I forgive you, I forgive you.’ ”
When he speaks the words, something goes out of me. I turn to Robb, who’s looking up, expectant, making sure I understand what I’ve just heard. We are witnesses together, yes, but not helpless. He looks feverish from the gunshot wound. His eyes burn into me.
“She forgave me.” He whistles under his breath. “You believe that? If I’d known she could be like that, I don’t think I coulda shot.”
He leans back a little, tugging on the cord, offering up his wrists like he expects me to free him, like he thinks I’ll whip out my lock-back knife and cut him loose, the way I did last time, when Hannah Mayhew’s blood was still fresh on his hands, though I couldn’t see it. I straighten up, feeling tired and spent.
Seven years ago, on that awful day, while I transported a knife murderer across the state line, my little girl’s heart was so full of empathy, so sad for all those strangers and their families, that she made Charlotte take her to a church vigil. They held hands, sitting on the hard pews, and they prayed for those people, and when they left, the car hit them and Jessica died.
And it was for nothing, I always thought. But I was wrong.
Against the mirrored closet door, Robb winces at the wound in his side, which is good. It shows he’s not too far gone to feel. He catches my eye, smiles grimly against the pain, and tries to get up. I move to stop him, but change my mind. I help him to his feet.
We edge down the hallway, leaving Rios behind, and I clear the basket of clean white laundry out of the way so he can sit.
“It wasn’t true what he said,” Robb whispers. “About me putting the gun to his head. Maybe he thought I was going to shoot him, but I never would.”
“It doesn’t matter to me.”
“It does to me,” he says.
I go into the kitchen, find a fresh plastic cup, and pour a measure of tap water out. Then, uncertain whether he should drink anything, given the position of the bullet, I dip a fresh towel in the water and use it to wipe his brow.
“You did good,” I tell him. “Hannah would be proud.”
He shakes his head, but not in denial. “I’m the one who’s proud. Proud of her.”
The metal steps rattle outside with the weight of uniformed officers and EMTs, the knock at the door filling me with relief. I step away from him, letting the responders do their work, taking Robb’s vitals and freeing Frank Rios, then cuffing his hands behind his back. I slip the Ruger from my waistband and put it on the kitchen counter along with the magazine and the bullet from the chamber, alerting the uniforms to its presence.
Then I step outside into the warm night, gazing up into the thick, radiant blanket that in this city always hides the stars.