Dust to Dust

by Tami Hoag

  Kovac went into the closet to pull out a couple of Andy Fallon’s suits, and wondered who would do the chore for him when the time came.

  “You like one of these, Mike?” he asked, coming out of the closet with a blue suit in one hand and a dark gray in the other.

  Fallon didn’t answer. He stared across the room at the photograph on the dresser. The one of Andy’s graduation from the academy. A frozen split second of pride and joy.

  “A man should never outlive his kids,” he said bleakly. “He ought to die before they can break his heart.”

  13

  CHAPTER

  A MAN SHOULD never outlive his kids.

  He shouldn’t have.

  He hadn’t.

  He can see the scene unfold before his eyes, as plainly as if two decades hadn’t passed: The still night. The squeak of his shoes. The sound of his own breathing.

  The house seems huge. A trick of the adrenaline rush. The back door stands ajar.

  In the kitchen. White fluorescent under-counter lights humming like high-voltage wires. Pass through into darkness. Rooms dark, moon bright and beaming through windows. A silence that presses like fingers against his eardrums. Seconds that pass in slow motion.

  He moves with athleticism. (The feeling is vivid, even though he hasn’t been able to feel anything below his waist for twenty years. He remembers the tension in each and every muscle of his body—his legs, his back, the fingers of his left hand curled around the grip of his gun, the contractions of his heart.)

  Then there it is. Surprise at the sight of something he can’t quite remember. Death in a sudden blue-white flash. An explosion so loud. The power of it knocks him backward even as he shoots in reflex.

  Officer down.

  Blind. Deaf. Floating.

  Disbelief. Panic. Release.

  I’m dead.

  He wishes he had stayed that way.

  He stares in the darkness, listens to his own breathing, feels his own frailty, feels his own mortality, and wonders for the millionth time why he didn’t check out that night. He has wished it often enough but has never done anything about it, has never found the nerve. Instead, he’s stayed alive, steeping himself in bitterness and booze and drugs. Twenty years in purgatory. Never emerging because he won’t look the demons in the face.

  He faces one now. Even in his drugged state, he sees it clearly and recognizes it for what it is: the Demon of Truth. The Angel of Death.

  It speaks to him calmly and quietly. He sees its mouth move, but the sound seems to come from within his own head.

  Time to die, Mike. A man should never outlive his kids.

  He stares at his old service revolver, a squat .38 with a big scar on the butt where the bullet that severed his spinal cord had cut deep on its way to his body. The gun they said he had killed his killer with that night, the last night of his career.

  He hears a little cry of fear and guesses it must have come from his own body, though it sounds far away. His hands try to push at the wheels of his chair, as if his body were trying to escape the fate his mind has already accepted. Strange.

  He wonders if it was this way for Andy—fear swelling as the noose tightened around his throat. God, the feelings that image sets loose inside him! Embarrassment, rage. Guilt and hate and love.

  “I loved him,” he says, his speech slurred. Spittle runs down his chin from the corner of his mouth. “I loved him, but I hated him! He did that. It was his own fault.”

  Saying it is like plunging a knife into his chest over and over. Yet he can’t stop saying it, thinking it, hating Andy, hating himself. What kind of man hates his own son? He cries again, a loud, agonized wail that rises and falls and rises and falls, like a siren’s call. Only the demon hears him. He is alone in the world, alone in the night. Alone with his demon, the Angel of Death.

  A man should never outlive his kids. He ought to die before they can break his heart. Or before he can break theirs. You killed him. You hated him. You killed him.

  “But I loved him too. Don’t you see?”

  I saw what you did to him, how you broke his heart. He did everything for you, and you killed him.

  “No. No,” he says, tasting tears. Panic and anguish swell like a tumor in the base of his throat. “He wouldn’t listen. I told him. I told him . . . Goddamn him,” he sobs. “Goddamn fag.”

  The pain tears out of him in a raw scream and he flails his arms at the demon, pawing like an animal.

  You killed him.

  “How could I do that?” he cried. “My beautiful boy!”

  You want free of it, Mike? End the pain.

  End the pain. . . .

  The voice is seductive, tempting. He cries out again, nearly choking on the fear as it thrusts up his throat.

  End the pain.

  It’s a sin!

  It’s your redemption.

  Do it, Mike.

  End it.

  The cold barrel of the service revolver kisses his cheek. His tears roll over the black steel.

  End the pain.

  After all these years.

  Do it.

  Sobbing, he opens his mouth and closes his eyes.

  The flash is blinding. The explosion is deafening.

  The deed is done.

  Smoke drifts in sinuous strings in the silent air.

  Time passes. A moment. Two. Respect for the dead.

  Then another flash, and the whir of a motor drive.

  The Angel of Death slips the photo in a pocket, turns and walks away.

  14

  CHAPTER

  SHE WOKE FROM a restless, dream-filled sleep and saw him. He stood beside her bed, backlit by the grainy light that seeped around the bathroom door: a huge, faceless silhouette with shoulders like mountain slopes.

  Panic exploded like a bomb in her chest. Shards of it wedged in her throat, making her gasp for breath. It tore down through her stomach like shrapnel. The muscles in her arms and legs spasmed at the shock.

  Run!

  He raised both hands and let go of something as she started to come up off the mattress. She saw it coming as if in slow motion: the thick, twisting body of a snake. The colors of it were very clear to her: the creamy underside, the brown and black pattern on the back.

  Arms flailing, she launched herself up and forward. For a split second, confusion tipped her brain this way and that. The world went pitch-black. She couldn’t see. She couldn’t feel. Her feet didn’t seem to be under her, though she was running as hard as she could.

  Something hit her on the side of her right eye and cheek. The force was like a sledgehammer connecting to her skull. Her neck snapped back and she thought she might have cried out. Then all motion stopped and she realized the thing that had hit her was the floor.

  Oh, my God, I’ve broken my neck.

  He’s still in the room.

  I can’t move.

  She felt consciousness ebb away like a slippery thing. She clawed at it with her will, forced her brain to continue functioning.

  If she could move her legs . . . Yes.

  If she could move her arms . . . Yes.

  She pulled her arms in tight to her sides and slowly pushed up from the floor. Her head felt as heavy as a bowling ball, her neck as fragile as a broken toothpick. She sat back on her knees, cradling her face in her hands, pain coming like a pulse. Realization blinking on and off in her mind. Neon bright, then blackness. Neon bright, then blackness.

  It wasn’t real.

  It didn’t happen.

  It hadn’t been a dream, though, not really. More like a hallucination. She had been awake but not conscious. Night terrors, the experts called them. She was an expert by experience. Years and years of it.

  Now came the familiar wave of despair. She wanted to cry but couldn’t. The protective numbness had already begun to set in. She didn’t welcome it, merely resigned herself to it, and slowly, unsteadily rose to her feet.

  Still holding her head in one hand, she turned on the lam
p on the dresser. There was no one in the room. The light reflected a warm glow off the creamy tone-on-tone striped wallpaper. The bed was empty, the curved upholstered headboard naked of its usual pile of pillows. She’d thrown the pillows to the floor on either side of the bed, and had knocked her water glass off the nightstand. A wet stain darkened the ivory rug. The alarm clock lay on the floor near the empty glass: 4:39 A.M.

  Moving carefully, in pain, she went to the bed and pulled the covers off. There was no snake. In the logical part of her brain, she knew there had never been, yet her gaze scanned the floor. She half expected to see the dark, slender shape disappearing beneath the closet door.

  She worked on regulating her respiration, the exercise nearly as familiar to her as breathing. Her head was pounding. Pain was like a knife in her neck. She felt sick to her stomach. She gradually became aware of a stickiness in the hand that cradled her head, and knew it was time to assess the damage.

  Amanda Savard stared at herself in the bathroom mirror, dimly taking in the surroundings reflected around her image. Soft, elegant, feminine: the environment she had created for herself to give a sense of security and belonging. The same words generally described the image she presented the world, but now she looked as if she’d gone five rounds in a boxing ring. The area around her right eye was swollen from the impact of the fall, and bright red where skidding across the rug had burned her skin. The color blazed against the pallor of her face. She pressed two fingertips gently around the wounds, feeling for fractures, the pain making her breath hiss through her teeth.

  How would she explain this? How could she hide it? Who would believe her?

  She took a washcloth from the linen cupboard, wet it with cold tap water, and touched it to the raw spots, gritting against the urge to wince. She took three Tylenol and went back to the bedroom. Awkwardly she stripped off the nightshirt she’d sweat through, and pulled on an oversize sweatshirt and a pair of leggings.

  The house was silent. Everything was normal according to the security system panel on the wall beside the bedroom door. She’d gone through her nightly ritual, checking locks before going up to bed. And still the sense of danger lingered. She knew from experience the only thing to do was to walk through the house and prove there was no intruder.

  She took her gun from the drawer in the nightstand and went out into the hall, moving like a ninety-year-old woman. Room by room, every light in the house was turned on, every room checked, every window, every lock. All of the lights remained on. Light was a good thing. Light chased away the ghosts in the shadows. Those ghosts had been haunting her for so long, it was a wonder they still possessed the ability to frighten her. They were as familiar as family, and as deeply hated.

  In her office, Kenny Loggins came on at the flick of a switch on the bookcase stereo system. A quiet, gentle song about the holidays and memories of home. The emotions it evoked in her were emptiness, loneliness, sadness, but she left the song on anyway.

  She liked this small room at the back of her house. The space was cozy and felt safe, and looked out on her backyard, which was very private and dotted with birdfeeders. She lived in Plymouth, a suburb that bent and twisted around marshes and woods and Medicine Lake. It wasn’t uncommon to see deer nosing around the feeders, though none was braving the security light tonight. Three photographs she’d taken of them through the window hung in small frames in the office. One held a ghost image, her own reflection in the glass superimposed over the animal as it stared at her.

  She closed the blinds, too edgy to expose herself to the outside world. She needed to feel enclosed. Her bedroom was her sanctuary when she had to get away from work. The office was her sanctuary when she had to escape the shadows of her life.

  There was no escape from anything tonight.

  Her desk was neat, the shelves and cubbyholes above it well organized. Bills and papers properly filed, paper clips in a magnetic dish, pens in a cherrywood cup. There were no photographs and only a few mementos, including a badge kept in the far upper-right-hand nook of the shelves. Her constant reminder of why she had become a cop in the first place. She rarely looked at it, but she picked it out now and held it in her hand and stared at it for a long while, acid burning in her stomach.

  Spread on the otherwise uncluttered surface of the desk was a copy of the Minneapolis Star Tribune, open to the pages most people skipped on their way to the sports. The piece that interested her was an inch long, stuck down near the bottom. DEATH RULED ACCIDENTAL. There wasn’t even a photo.

  That seemed a shame, she thought. He’d been so handsome. But to most of the metro area, he would never be anything more than a few lines of type, skimmed over and forgotten. Yesterday’s news.

  “I won’t forget you, Andy,” she whispered.

  How could I? I killed you.

  Her hand closed tightly on the badge until the edges bit into her fingers.

  DARKNESS STILL CLOAKED Minneapolis as Amanda Savard arrived at city hall. Most of the lights that shone in office windows facing the street were left on overnight. No one came in at this hour, which made it the perfect time for her to sequester herself in her office without being seen. The longer she could avoid that, the better. Though there would be no ducking the funeral in the afternoon. At least she would be able to get away with dark glasses for the occasion.

  Even now, with little chance of running into another human, she wore black sunglasses with frames just large enough to cover the damage she’d done to herself. She had swathed her head in a wide black velvet scarf that wrapped around her neck and trailed dramatically back over her shoulders. Drama had not been her goal. Hiding was.

  Her footfalls echoed in the empty hall, boot heels ringing against the old floor. The distance to Room 126 seemed to stretch out before her. Inside her gloves, her hands were sweating. She gripped her keys too hard. The adrenaline from the dream had never entirely burned off, the residue leaving her feeling both jittery and exhausted. Dizziness swam through her head at random moments. Her legs were weak and her head pounded. She couldn’t turn her neck to the right, and she felt nauseated.

  She put the key in the lock and pulled up short, the skin prickling on the back of her neck. But the hall was empty—what she could see of it. She passed through the Internal Affairs outer office without bothering to turn the light on, and went directly to her own office, where she’d left on the desk lamp.

  Safe. For an hour or two. She hung the scarf and her coat on the wall-mounted rack near the door, and went around behind the desk. She slipped the sunglasses off to check her reflection in the mirror of her compact. As if there had been some chance of a miracle between home and here.

  The burns around the right eye looked angry, red, shiny with antibiotic gel. There had been no hope of covering them with makeup, and no way to keep bandages in place. The area directly around the eye was puffy and bruised purple and black.

  “That’s a hell of a shiner.”

  Savard bolted at the sound of the voice. She wanted to turn her back, but realized it was too late. Embarrassment and shame flooded her. Anger and resentment rushed in their wake. She grabbed the sunglasses and put them back on.

  Kovac stood just inside her door looking like something out of a Raymond Chandler novel: long coat with the collar turned up, hands stuffed in the pockets, an old fedora slouching down over his forehead.

  “I suppose getting popped in the face is a common hazard of working IA.”

  “If you want to see me, Sergeant, make an appointment,” she said in the chilliest tone she could manage.

  “I’ve already seen you.”

  Something about the way he said it made her feel vulnerable. As if he had seen something more than just the physical evidence of what had happened to her, something deeper and more important.

  “Did you go to a doctor for that?” he asked, coming closer. He pulled the fedora off and set it on her desk, then ran a hand back over his short hair. His gaze was narrow and zoomed in on the damage she’d
done to herself. “Nasty.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, glad to have the desk as a buffer. She moved to the far end of it on the pretext of putting her compact away and stowing her purse in a drawer. The dizziness swirled through her and she kept one hand on the desktop to steady herself.

  “And I should see the other guy, huh?” Kovac said.

  “There was no other guy. I took a fall.”

  “From what? A three-story building?”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  “It is if someone did that to you.”

  He was paid to protect and serve, as the saying went. It was nothing personal. She shouldn’t have wanted it to be.

  “I told you—I fell.”

  He didn’t believe her. She could see that. He was a cop, and a good one. She’d made it her business to find out. Sam Kovac had years of experience listening to the nuances of lies. And while she wasn’t exactly lying, neither was she exactly telling the truth.

  She watched Kovac’s gaze slide to her left hand, in search of a ring. Wondering if there was an abusive husband. The only ring she wore was on her right hand. An emerald that had been passed down through the women in her mother’s family for a hundred years.

  “Believe me, Sergeant. I’m the last woman who would let a man get away with this,” she said.

  He weighed the idea of saying something more, drew breath for it, then stopped himself.

  “You didn’t come here to see about my well-being.”

  “I ran into Cal Springer last night,” Kovac said. “You’ll be proud to know he’s still sweating bullets over your investigation.”

  “I have no interest in Cal Springer. I told you, the Curtis case is closed. The investigation was full of mistakes, but none of the allegations of impropriety bore fruit. None that would stand up in court, at any rate.”

  “Incompetency is Cal’s forte, but he’s too big a chickenshit for impropriety. What about Ogden? I hear he threw down Curtis’s watch at Verma’s place.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “I can’t. Could Andy Fallon? Ogden was on the scene when my partner and I got to Fallon’s house on Tuesday.”