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But Merci believed
that suffering and aloneness were part of the law enforcer's life. She believed
there was more to life than lifting the scab. She believed they could take their
defusings and debriefings and Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing and
stick them where the sun don't shine.

The nightmares would
end; the stains in her soul would fade. If she had to awaken a hundred more
times deep in the black morning with her legs beginning to cramp from chasing
Colesceau through dream bamboo, then that was what she would do.

"Sit.
Tell me about him."

Merci explained the
basics of Paul Zamorra's hopeless predicament. Cash, as a physician acquainted
with the glioblastoma, concurred that the situation was indeed hopeless, in the
medical sense. She'd heard the radiation/chemical implants, said she'd heard of
bad complication.

"You
think he might kill himself?" Cash asked her.

Merci
nodded.

"Most
suicides will communicate their intentions—verbally or none verbally. Has he
done that?"

"Yes.
Said he wants to just fly away when all this is over. 'This being Janine's
life."

Merci
looked at the doctor, well aware that the suicide rate among cops is roughly
three times the national average, that more cops lose their lives to suicide
than to homicide.

Merci
continued, "He didn't say a word about his wife to me, until few days ago.
Now, he's brought her up three different times. I think he wants to talk."

"Then
he's ripe for a QPR intervention, and he wants you to do it.

Cash
had presented a Sheriff Department lecture on suicide and QPR—Questioning,
Persuading, Referring—just six months earlier, which Merci and forty-eight
other deputies had attended. Merci had told herself she had no specific reason
for being there other than to bolster her friend's attendance numbers. The
upshot of the QPR intervention was you listened, then talked the potential
suicide into getting professional help, fast. Cash had cited new studies
showing that the hot phase of a suicide crisis was relatively short—three
weeks.

"I'm
afraid that if I suggest a shrink, he might take his toys and play somewhere
else."

"I'm
the somewhere else."

Merci
considered.

"He
thought this experimental treatment was going to save Janine. He told me that.
It reminded me of your lecture—the part about prediction

"Well,
yes. Male suicides tend to make dire predictions. You know, something like 'the
sun won't rise tomorrow' or 'they'll find me in some field someday.' But this
hope about the new treatment ... I can where you're going with that."

"Everything
seemed to be riding on it."

"And
now it's failed."

Merci
nodded, looked out the window at the completed fall of darkness. She disliked
the winter months, when the light was gone by five and the nights seemed to
last forever.

"Your partner
may start looking for a place to do it. It's just like a homicide—he'll need
means, motive and opportunity. With cops, it's almost always guns. You need to
take the next step, Merci. You need to ask him the question. Be blunt about it
if you have to:
Are you thinking of killing yourself?"

"I
know," she said quietly.

"Merci, is he
absentee any more than you'd expect, given the situation?"

"He's gone a
lot. I get the feeling he won't do anything while she's alive."

"You may be
right, but you're the Gatekeeper, Merci—the first finder. You're the one who
can aim him out of this. We've got great statistics on QPR success. It works.
But it takes the first finder to make it work. You're it. Question him. Get him
to me. That's my professional recommendation."

On
her way to the door, Merci stopped and hugged the doctor again.

"Thank
you."

"You've done the
right thing here, Merci. I wish the care you took of yourself were as
thoughtful and kind as the care you take of your partner."

"But
I'm not suicidal, Joan. Come on. I'm fine."

"Being not
suicidal and being fine are two very different things. Make an appointment and
tell me about how fine you are then, will you? Bring Tim. I'd love to see him
again."

"I'm not going
to go through with that EMDR, with you or anyone else. I don't trust any
initials but SD, P.D. or FBI."

They
smiled, laughed.

"Look, girl, we
don't have to do Eye Movement Desensitization if you don't want to. But the
EMDR results have been fantastically good in situations very similar to
yours."

Merci opened the
door. "But that's me, Joan—fantastically good in every way."

"I love you, friend. Let me help you if I can. You've
certainly helped me."

T
im was
sitting on her father's lap at the dining-room table when Merci walked in.
Clark's wedding album was open in front of them just out of reach of Tim's
greedy hands. Tim shrieked when he saw her, struggled to get free.

Merci could see the
soft pain on Clark's face as he looked up at her. .Merci kissed his cheek, then
lifted Tim away. The Man was getting: heavy. She glanced down at the album: a
black and white shot of CIark and Marcella next to a giant wedding cake. They
looked very young and very happy. Every couple of months Clark got the album
out, got dreamy and quiet, took a walk or a drive, went to bed early.

"No
dinner for me tonight," she said. "I'll be going over to Mike

She looked at her
watch. The idea of seven o'clock sank through heart like a boulder through mud.

"You
work out your problems last night?"

"Just
the usual disagreements, Dad. We're fine."

"He's
a good guy."

"I
can still disagree with him, can't I?"

He
smiled a little, flipped the album page over.

Merci showered while
Tim pouted at her from behind the mesh his playpen. He hated confinement and
held her fully responsible, but was either that or he'd wander off, crack his
head on something, swallow a toy, knock over the TV or—Tim's favorite—play with
the electrical outlets. He was exceptionally hazardous. And he was talking a
lot now—long sentences of nonsense syllables mixed with words, all of which he
seemed to think she understood.
Wablum, bob-wop, mom-mom-mom, wob-lalla,
mum-mum-mum, goy, goy,
goy ...

She said them back to
him from behind the clear glass shower door, and he seemed to understand them
just fine. What exactly was she telling him? Shaving her legs, she hoped it was
something helpful.

She loved the way Tim
made her feel like she was an infant, too: carefree, opinionless, plugged
directly into the moment, only one modifier necessary—
mine, mine, mine.
In Tim's world there was no seven o'clock date with a man you had once loved
and were now reluctant even to look at.

In the mirror she saw
herself, a tall, naked, big-boned, dark-haired woman chattering away like a
mockingbird.

She carried on the
conversation while she dried off, put on her makeup, got dressed. She made sure
the clip was full, then put the borrowed Colt .45 in her purse, careful to
turn her back to keep Tim from seeing it. Anything he saw, he'd try to get
into.

Half an hour later
she was back in the kitchen with a glass of wine, Tim up in the highchair,
Clark fiddling with a soup he'd been making for the last three days.

"Back in '69,
Dad, did you think there was something wrong with the Bailey case?" she
asked.

Clark
exhaled and turned. "I was burg-theft, Merci."

"You
were a good investigator. You heard things."

"I
never heard anything like that."

Clark had never
talked much about his days on duty. He wasn't a raconteur, wasn't nostalgic,
didn't think anybody was really interested. She knew for a fact that Clark
could make a good story boring.

Merci had adopted
some of her father's fundamental beliefs about being a cop years before she
thought about becoming one: You did the job, you shut up about it, there was
them and us, loose lips sink ships.

But she hadn't gotten
her other beliefs about being a cop from Clark at all. She'd never understood
where she did get them, certainly not from her rather beautiful, rather
insecure, rather treacherous mother. Where she differed from Clark was: You
kicked ass to the fullest lawful degree every day of your life, and that's how
you kept criminals from taking over the planet. You were part of the balance of
power, not just employee in a bureaucracy. What you did made a difference, a
damn large one. You were right and you were good, and you had a privilege to
believe it and a responsibility to act it.

"Then
what did you hear?"

"I heard
Thornton say the body was moved. He talked too much my opinion."

"Thornton told
me nobody cared about a dead whore. Glandis told me it was because nobody
trusted anybody else in the department back then. Everybody worried about
whether the next guy was a communist or not."

"That was one
rotten year, Merci. But it really wasn't comical or that simple."

"No.
I know."

Merci watched Tim try
to get the safety spoon to his mouth with a load of mashed potatoes on it. He
stared at it so hard his eyes crossed. He started kicking. The potatoes were
already on the bib, the highchair tray, his face, his hair, his fists. Mouth
open, Tim pushed the spoon into his chin, dropped it, pushed it around
the tray top before getting it again. Still kicking. She wiped him off with a
damp washcloth for the third time in five minutes.

"Were
you for Bill Owen, or against?"

Clark turned and
looked at her, then came over and sat down. "Against, Owen had been
sheriff for twenty-two years. He was old. I thought we needed a man more
hands-on. Someone who would clean things up a little, get a shine on the
department. See, we had lot of undeveloped, open land back in those days. We
were kind of a rural force. But the county was growing and we needed an
organizer, someone to bring us up to speed. We didn't have a crime lab. We
didn't have a morgue. We didn't have a substation down in south county. Bill
just liked to sit back and watch things happen."

"What
about him being tight with Meeks?"

"Meeks was
powerful, dishonest. Development money ran county government—everybody knew it.
I tried to keep that out of my thinking, so far as the department was
concerned. I didn't care who sheriff's friends were."

Merci thought about
this. It was pure Clark to remain neutral.

"Were you a
Bircher?"

Clark
sighed and turned a page in the wedding book. "Real briefly. About a year.
But those guys threw too much heat, not enough light."

"Did Owen know
you were against him?"

"Probably.
But I was just a burg-theft investigator. I hardly ever talked to Bill
Owen."

"So
who were the guys
really
against Owen then? The deputies who wanted him
out?"

Clark
held up the book to Merci. He smiled, pointing to the picture of Marcella on a
beach in Mexico. It was an Acapulco honeymoon. She looked like a Bond girl—big
hair, big boobs, big sunglasses, little bikini.

"I asked you a
question, Dad."

"Beck
Rainer was the most obvious. He was popular, a good lieutenant, the point man.
Ed Vale spoke his piece. Then, a whole lot of rank-and-file guys—North,
Wilberforce—guys like that. Jim O'Brien was a pretty outspoken young deputy
then, a gung-ho Bircher. Funny as a rubber crutch. Tough as nails."

"Evan's
father?"

"Yeah.
Strange. Of all the men I worked with back then, the last one I'd pick as a
suicide was Jim O'Brien. You never know who's going to crack."

"Where was Pat
McNally on the Bill Owen debate?"

Clark
nodded. "Pat was quiet. He wasn't an Owen supporter, but he didn't flaunt
it."

"It was sudden
when Owen stepped down, wasn't it?"

Clark
shut the wedding album and shrugged. "Surprised everyone. I guess he'd
just had enough. Merci, can I ask you where you're going with all this? There's
no connect between department politics and Patti Bailey that I can see. The
case got lost in the shuffle. Lots of them did. Don't swing for the fence every
time."

Merci
felt her neck go hot. She wiped Tim's face again. He smiled and grabbed for the
dish.

"Look,
Dad. Someone murdered Patti Bailey, cleaned it up real slick. Thornton takes
the case, a good young dick, but he can't come up with anything. It looks to
him like the body was moved. Thornton says there was no pressure for an arrest.
Not from Owen in sixty-nine, from Vance Putnam, who replaced him. Not from his
partner, Rymers, who ran Homicide Detail and made the assignments. Thornton
says nobody cared about a dead whore in sixty-nine. Glandis tells me same thing.
All right. But my question is
why not? Why
didn't anybody care? These
men aren't incompetents. They're not animals. So why
don't they care?
Then you say the case got lost in the shuffle. Well, Dad, I appreciate that,
but I want to know . . .
what shuffle?
They were busy. We're always
busy. They didn't know when the sheriff was going to step down. Well,
we
don't know when Brighton's going to step down, but we don't lose the Aubrey
Whittaker case in the damned alleged
shuffle.
The next and obvious question
is: What if someone profited from her murder? Those are legit questions, if you
ask me. Do you think that's swinging for the fence?"