Things You Won't Say (34 page)

“I’m ready,” Christie said. She closed the visor, sealing away the photo of Elroy’s ex-wife. She wondered if he regretted telling her.

They rode in silence until they reached the scene of the shooting and she saw Mike. Elroy pulled into the parking lot and turned off the ignition. Mike didn’t seem to notice their arrival; he was standing with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground, at a memorial of dying flowers, a teddy bear, and a spray-painted
RIP JOSE
across the pavement.

Christie opened the car door and hurried toward him. “Hi,” she said. She turned around and waited for Elroy to approach. “This is Elroy. Elroy, this is Mike, my—” She paused. In the past, she’d introduced Mike as “my son’s father.” But today, something made her say “my good friend.”

She saw Mike smile at her, as if he understood the shift in the relationship.

“Thanks for coming,” Mike said. He reached out and shook Elroy’s hand.

Elroy nodded. “Can you walk me through what happened?” he said. “Then maybe we can go talk.”

Mike nodded. “Sure,” he said, although Christie saw a white line form around his lips, vivid against his tan skin. She hadn’t thought about how difficult this would be for him. She wondered whether Mike had returned to this spot since the shooting.

“We, ah, entered from this angle,” Mike said. He took a few steps away from them and twisted to the right. “Jay was ahead of me.” Mike pointed. “And the, ah, the teenager was over there. When it happened, I mean. About where the flowers are.”

“Okay,” Elroy said. “Just take me through it, nice and slow, from the beginning.” He didn’t write anything down or videotape it, but Christie saw how carefully he was watching. He was motionless, his eyes fixed on Mike.

“We got the call and pulled in. We left the cruiser there.” Mike gestured to a spot near Elroy’s battered Volvo. “Jay, the guy I was partnered with, he started running,” Mike said. “He pulled out his pepper spray and held it up.” Mike’s hand went to his belt and he demonstrated. Mike seemed almost in a trance now, his words a soft monotone. “That’s about when I got hit. I spun around. When I turned back, Jay was ahead of me. He’s yelling for the guy to freeze, then I see the motion to grab a weapon. I see the gun come up and I draw and shoot.”

Elroy nodded. Christie held her breath. Mike was staring straight ahead, to where Jose had fallen. She watched as Mike slowly approached that spot, then got down on his knees and touched a finger to one of the dying red roses. Christie thought she saw his lips move.

Elroy gave him a moment. “Let’s go through it again,” he said. “Christie, can you take Jay’s spot?”

Elroy went over and stood next to the memorial. He looked around, and Christie saw him taking in the parked cars nearby, the building behind them, the road running parallel. Elroy was odd, but something in his expression told Christie he was brilliant.

While Christie walked over to where Jay had been standing, an old car that needed a new muffler slowed down as it cruised by the parking lot. The young guy at the wheel wore reflective sunglasses, but Christie thought he was staring at them. When she looked back, though, the car turned the corner and disappeared.

“Okay,” Elroy said. “Let’s do it.”

He took them through the scene three more times, like they were actors preparing for a play.

“Why isn’t he saying anything?” Mike asked Christie at one point while Elroy squatted down in the position Jose had held at the time of the shooting, shielding his eyes as he stared in the direction Mike and Jay had come from.

“He’s busy thinking,” Christie said.

Finally Elroy straightened up and came toward them, his gait in his old cowboy boots as unhurried as ever. “You guys know Jay worked in California before coming here, right?” Elroy asked.

“No,” Mike said. “Actually I didn’t. I barely talked to the guy. He couldn’t shut up, so I always tried to tune him out.”

“Well, it’s not like the prosecutor is going to volunteer any information to you,” Elroy said. “Anyway, he put in three years on the force. I talked to his old partner. He couldn’t say enough good about the man.”

Christie stared at Elroy. By now she knew him well enough to know more was coming.

“Then I talked to another guy on the force. Off the record, of course,” Elroy said. “He wasn’t so keen on Jay.”

Mike’s expression transformed; his eyes turned bright and his face grew alert. “What’d he say? You’ve got something, don’t you?”

“They pulled over a car once and Jay missed seeing a bag of coke on the passenger’s floor,” Elroy said. “Guy had a piece in the glove compartment, too. He didn’t reach for it, but they never would’ve found it if the other officer hadn’t spotted the coke. Thing was, Jay was standing on that side of the car. He was closer.”

Christie felt a flush of excitement. “I’m telling you, there could be something wrong with his eyes!”

Elroy quashed that hope. “He would’ve undergone a vision test regularly to be a cop.”

“But he missed seeing something important,” Mike said.

“That he did,” Elroy agreed.

Mike closed his eyes for a second and swallowed hard. “You don’t know what this means to me.”

“Hey, it’s not going to win you the case,” Elroy said. “There’s still the issue of the missing gun.”

Christie caught motion out of the corner of her eye and saw the same old car driving past the parking lot again. She reached into her purse for her Mace and closed her fingers around the cool metal.

“Maybe we should go somewhere else to talk?” she suggested.

She saw Mike follow her eyes and take in the car. “Yeah,” he said. “Probably a good idea.”

“You want to follow us?” Elroy suggested.

“Actually,” Mike said, “I took the Metro here. I, ah, had to turn in my cruiser a while ago.”

“So hop in,” Elroy said. Christie felt as if she couldn’t get into Elroy’s Volvo quickly enough. The old car was still there, idling at the stop sign. There were three guys in it now. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought there had been only one previously.

Maybe the guys had known Jose. Maybe they’d recognized Mike.

She and Mike and Elroy all climbed into the car without another word, and Christie locked her door.

“So where to?” Elroy asked, starting the engine and pulling out the exit that would put them farthest away from the idling car.

“Why don’t we head back toward my place?” Christie said. “We can get a drink around there.”

Mike kept twisting around to look out the back window, and Elroy’s eyes flicked to the rearview mirror every minute or so. “Are they behind us?” Christie asked.

“Nope,” Elroy said, and she released the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding.

They were all quiet for the rest of the drive. They found a pub in Arlington and got a table for three. Elroy ordered a vanilla milk shake along with French fries—Christie didn’t want to think about his cholesterol—and Mike asked for a Coke.

“No beer?” Christie asked. She’d imagined them having a cocktail together, then maybe moving on to dinner. The table was a disappointment, too; she’d been hoping for a booth.

Mike shook his head. “I’m not drinking anymore.”

“Since when?” Christie asked.

“Since now,” he said. “I want my head to be clear.”

He turned to Elroy. “So what happens next?” Mike asked. “And man, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. I don’t know what your hourly rate is—”

Elroy held up a hand. “You’re not paying me anything,” he said. “Truth is, I kind of like being back on a real case. So, the next step is I want you to write everything down. I know you’ve done it already, but you were probably defensive before, right?”

“Yeah, but I told the truth,” Mike said.

“That’s not what I meant,” Elroy said. “You were probably just focusing on your actions related to the shooting—what you saw, what happened to you. I need you to look at things with a wider lens. Take time to really go through it all like a movie, frame by frame. Look at things in the corners of the picture. Write down every single detail, even things that don’t seem important.”

“Okay,” Mike said. “I can do that.” He hung his head, and Christie barely heard his next words: “I’ve been doing that every night, pretty much.”

Christie’s cell phone buzzed in her purse, but she ignored it.

“I’m going to do some more checking in the meantime,” Elroy said.

“Are you going to look more deeply into Jay’s background?” Christie said.

“Yup,” Elroy said. “That’s top on the list.”

Mike’s cell phone rang a moment after Christie’s stopped.

Jamie,
Christie thought. Did she know they were together?

“I better get this,” Mike said. He answered and listened for a moment. His forehead creased, and he looked up at Christie. Something in his expression made her heart drop.

“When did this happen? Can I talk to him?”

Not Jamie, Christie thought. It was worse. It was Henry.

“That’s ridic— You know what? Fine. I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Mike said.

He hung up and got to his feet in one fluid motion. “Henry got in a fight at baseball camp,” he said.

“Is he okay?” Christie cried. She’d kill anyone who’d hurt her baby.

“He’s the one who started the fight,” Mike said. He reached into his wallet, extracted a twenty, and put it down on the table. “He’s getting thrown out of camp. We need to go pick him up.”

“What? He’s only been there a day. What could have hap
pened?” Christie slung her purse over her shoulder. “We can take my car. It’s in the lot at my apartment building.”

Elroy stood up, reaching for his cowboy hat. “I’ll drive you there.”

“Thank you,” Christie said. She impulsively reached out and gave him a hug. He was such an odd, dear man. The thought came to her that he was perhaps the only man in her life who could become a friend. Other than Mike, of course.

“Did they tell you anything else?” Christie asked.

Mike shook his head. “Henry wouldn’t have done this unless someone provoked him. It had to have been about me,” he said.

“Not necessarily,” Christie said. “It could have been about a girl. It could have been about anything!”

Mike just shook his head again.

“Hey,” Christie said. “We’re going to get through this together, okay? We’ll go help our son now, and then Elroy’s going to get these stupid charges dropped.”

“Okay,” Mike said, looking at her with such gratitude that her heart seemed to swell inside her chest.

•••

Ever since the previous evening, when Mike had packed his bags and left, Jamie had felt numb, unable to eat or think clearly. Shock, she thought, looking down at the slim gold band on her left hand. When Mike had slipped it onto her finger all those years ago, staring at her with his intense eyes, so handsome her knees had gone rubbery, she’d decided she’d never remove it. And she hadn’t, even when her fingers had swelled during pregnancy and it had bitten into her flesh.

Six months ago—no, three!—she would’ve said she had a great marriage. Not a perfect one, but a solid union, something that would endure through the years, weathering bumps, growing sweeter when one of their kids got married
and she and Mike danced cheek to cheek at the wedding, and when they looked down at the face of their first grandchild.

Now she had no idea where Mike had gone, or if their marriage was shattered beyond repair.

Jamie walked over to the kitchen table and sat down, her eyes gritty and her limbs heavy. She should have fed the children dinner at least an hour ago, but instead she’d opened the snack drawer and told them to have at the granola bars and Pirate’s Booty. On a normal evening, the kids would be taking baths now, or changing into pajamas. But Jamie no longer cared about bedtimes or nutrition. The routines that had given shape to their days had been blasted apart.

She wondered what Jose’s mother was doing at this exact moment, if she was also fighting to stay upright when everything in her begged to collapse to the floor. Lucia had another son to care for, and maybe that was the only thing keeping her going. Jamie thought about what she’d read in the papers, that Lucia was a single mother who worked as a receptionist at a doctor’s office. Church was a constant in her life.

Lucia Torres sounded like a good person, Jamie thought. Maybe she talked to patients who’d gotten scary diagnoses, promising to pray for them and bringing them glasses of water as they waited to be seen. She might give them a reassuring pat on the arm as she murmured words of comfort.

Church was probably even more important to her now, Jamie thought. She wondered if Lucia was going to services every day, lighting candles and taking communion. Praying for her lost boy.

Maybe Jamie should start going to church more often, too. Wasn’t it supposed to be a place filled with forgiveness and love? She could desperately use some of that.

Forgiveness.

Jamie was on her feet before she realized she’d had the intent to move, her fatigue falling away.

“Kids?” she called, and for once, they appeared in the kitchen on cue. All three of them.

“We have to get in the minivan, now,” Jamie said. She couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought of this before. It was a way out, maybe the only way out. She grabbed her iPhone from the charger on the counter and Googled the Whitepages website. Luck was with her; she found the address she needed quickly.

She wondered briefly if driving was safe, since she still felt strange—outside of herself, almost, as if she was a bystander watching a Jamie clone in action—but a sudden surge of energy was overpowering her sleeplessness, more than compensating for her recent insomnia.

Eloise was struggling to strap on her sandals, so Jamie just scooped her up, shoes and all, and ran to the minivan and deposited her in her seat. When Sam and Emily came outside the dog followed them, so Jamie just motioned for everyone to get into the vehicle, even Sadie.

“Hurry!” she called, adrenaline thrumming through her veins. The sky was turning a dusky purple; she had to rush before it got too late. “Let’s go!”

The kids were remarkably obedient; they climbed into the van, strapped themselves in, and sat without fighting or demanding the radio. In fact, they were quieter than Jamie could ever remember them being. Either they’d sensed the urgency brewing in their mother or too much television had left them in a semipermanent daze.