by Tim Weaver
‘No buts.’ Jo shrugged. ‘Or maybe one. With the job that I do, sometimes it can be hard to find an equilibrium.’ She glanced out of the window again. ‘What if, huh?’
Barnes frowned. ‘What if?’
‘What if I’d made different choices?’
‘From looking at your file, your choices seem pretty good.’
‘They were choices,’ Jo replied. ‘I don’t know if they were good.’
She looked at Barnes and knew what the psychologist was seeing: the hint of something in Jo’s face – monochrome where it should have been colour.
Barnes said, ‘You told me in our last session that perhaps one day you might like to teach.’ She flipped through the pages of her pad. ‘Does that still interest you?’
‘Maybe. Lecturing, that sort of thing.’
Barnes nodded. ‘Do you think you would miss being a cop?’
Jo let out a long breath. ‘I don’t know. It would be different, obviously. I mean, I wouldn’t be getting calls at one in the morning because some asshole has blown a hole in his wife’s chest, but I imagine that buzz you get on cases – you would miss it sometimes.’ She watched as Barnes made notes. ‘Although, I don’t know if “buzz” is the right word exactly. I’ve been a cop for over eighteen years, and at some point that buzz became more like a …’ She sighed, searching for the word.
‘A debt?’
Jo glanced at Dr Barnes.
‘Exactly,’ she said. ‘Exactly.’
Her eyes stayed on the psychologist, trying to read her, finding something in Barnes’s choice of phrase that she identified with instantly. A debt. That was exactly what it was.
‘But for now,’ Barnes said, moving on, ‘you’re still a cop?’
‘I’m still a cop, yeah.’
‘Did you always want to work homicides?’
‘Always,’ she said. ‘I never wanted to do anything else. I guess, to start with, I wanted to be a cop because I was an obstinate jerk and needed to prove that I was just as capable as any man. It was hard, though. When I graduated from the academy in ’74, it was still compulsory for female deputies to wear heels, skirts and lipstick.’ She flashed Barnes a humourless smile and, for a second, the psychologist broke from her professional sobriety and rolled her eyes. ‘That rule got tossed in the trash soon after – but there was plenty more garbage to go around. You remember the Night Stalker?’
‘Sure. It’s pretty hard to forget a man like Richard Ramirez.’
‘You probably know all this already then, or you’ve heard, but while he was busy putting the city on its knees in ’85, the push to track him down turned into one of the biggest manhunts in the entire history of US law enforcement. Plus, we were in the middle of a crack epidemic too. What I’m saying is, I’d been a detective for seven years by that time, and I alone was catching at least one new homicide every week. So, after seven years, I had a ton of experience. But do you know when I got asked to join the Night Stalker task force?’
Dr Barnes shook her head.
‘Never,’ Jo said. ‘I did zero hours on that. They didn’t trust me.’
‘Because you were a woman?’
‘Sure, that was most of it. But also because I had the temerity to rely on instinct sometimes. I mean, I know police work. I know it. I know when something doesn’t feel right, even if I don’t have the proof; even if the evidence says it’s right. But, after a while, I stopped saying stuff like that at the station. I learned that lesson – probably too late, actually.’ Jo came to a halt, not liking the anger rising in her voice. ‘But you know something? Since Rodney King, since the riots, the old guard – the old way of thinking and doing things – it’s starting to get dismantled, and things are slowly starting to change. I don’t want to be some token appointment, have never wanted a job just because some arbitrary quota system says I should have it. But it’s 1993, I’ve eaten a whole hill of shit in the LASD for more than eighteen years because I’m a woman, and probably set my career back another five just by having the sheer impudence to get pregnant, so you know what?’
Barnes shook her head.
‘When I got a call from the LAPD last week and they started telling me they’re pushing for better race relations, as well as more senior female officers, and that they’d admired my work in the Sheriff’s Department, you bet I sat there and let them make their pitch. I listened to them offer me a job in Robbery-Homicide – a lieutenant in RHD, no less – and I didn’t spend one single second interrupting them, even though I knew the whole thing was purely driven by politics. You know why I kept so quiet?’
‘Why?’
‘Because I would deserve every dollar I got.’
‘You sound like you might take it.’
Jo shrugged. ‘I might, or I might not.’
Dr Barnes worked in the Employee Support Services Unit – or what LASD staff more commonly referred to as ‘Psych Services’ – not out on the front lines, so this news was going nowhere: it was all protected by doctor–patient privilege.
It was exactly why Jo kept coming.
Originally, she’d agreed to the counselling because it gave her a chance to vent to someone who knew how the LASD worked, and it got her out of the office a couple of times a month. But now it was more than that: it was an ongoing conversation about life, about her choices, about acceptance and loss.
‘How long have the LAPD given you to decide?’ Dr Barnes asked.
‘A couple of days. I told them I needed time to think about it.’
Jo reached forward and picked up her glass of water.
‘And have you been thinking about it?’
‘Pretty much constantly.’
Barnes was studying Jo, a slant to her face as if she knew something else was coming. ‘Detective Kader?’
‘I think I’ve been coming long enough for you to call me Jo.’
Barnes smiled. ‘Jo, then. Was there something else?’
‘It can be hard, that’s all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, it’s the job I deserve, but I don’t know if it’s the one I should take.’
‘Why not?’
Jo thought of Ethan, pictured him that morning at the table, eating his cereal while telling her about a book they’d been reading at school about a lonely wolf pup.
‘My son, Ethan,’ she said, one hand on her water, ‘I reckon he’d probably say I was a pretty good mom. A definite pass, but maybe not top marks. Parenting is one of those jobs you never really master. It’s got a learning curve like this’ – she held up her spare hand at ninety degrees – ‘so anyone who tells you they’ve got it figured out is a liar. All you can really hope for is that you make more right choices than wrong ones.’
Jo looked out of the window again and could make out a vague reflection of herself, her face pale, ghostly, her eyes painted with blobs of light.
‘I’m not sure I ever told you this,’ she said, quieter now, the words harder to say, ‘but a long time ago, my husband gave me this picture album for my birthday. Ira was really good at taking pictures – and so, up until Ethan was six, he took all these photographs of us on outings we’d have, on vacation, even while we were sitting around at home. And so he gave me this album as a present, and I thought it was a sweet thing to do, but as I opened it up and started flicking through the pages, I began to realize something: there would be months between pictures of me. It was all about Ethan, obviously, so there were a ton of pictures of him, and Ira was the one with the camera, which meant there were shots of them at the beach, in parks, on jungle gyms, in bounce houses, playing soccer, having frozen yoghurt, a whole bunch of things. But, whenever I was featured, we were at home, Ethan was always in his PJs, and he was usually full of snot or running a temperature or sick from some bug. Man, I remember feeling really annoyed about it to start with – how this album featured all these photos of them doing fun stuff, and then me with Ethan when he looked sad, and tired, and grumpy – to the point where I though
t, “I’m definitely going to say something to Ira.” And then a couple of weeks after that, late at night, as I was driving back from the station, something suddenly occurred to me. Ethan was always sick in the pictures of me and him because, when he had a cold, or he couldn’t breathe, or whatever it was, he didn’t sleep. The illness would knock him out of his routine, and so he’d be getting up earlier and going to bed later. But once he was back in his routine, I’d be leaving before he was up and getting home after he was asleep.’
Her eyes dropped to her glass of water.
‘There were no pictures of me doing the fun stuff – going to the beach, or eating ice cream – because I …’ Jo’s voice faded. ‘Well, because basically I was never around.’
There were no tears in her eyes.
Not yet.
But she could feel them coming.
‘There are cases I’ve had that I’ve found impossible to let go.’ She stopped, dug around in her jacket pocket and came back with a small notebook. Its edges were tattered. She laid it down on the table between her and Dr Barnes, slid a finger inside and flipped it open to a well-worn section in the middle. Her handwriting was small, detailed, deliberately hard to read, but the title at the top was bigger and much clearer.
It was a case number.
#4729-81.
Underneath that was an address.
Star Inn, 1005 La Cienega.
‘That,’ she said, putting a finger to it, ‘that’s the one that got away.’
Barnes came forward in her seat, laying her legal pad down on the table next to her, trying her best to make out Jo’s handwriting.
Under the address were three lines.
Gabriel Wilzon. Donald Klein.
Acid. Bathtub.
Vale?
‘The thing is, though,’ Jo said, her throat taut, her emotions much harder to suppress now, ‘you have to make a decision. I still think about this case now. I think about what I might have missed, what I could have done better, how I might have wasted time chasing the wrong person for the wrong crime. But that debt you talked about earlier – that commitment you feel to the dead – at some point, if you don’t want it to rip your family apart, you have to make your peace with it and let it go. As hard as it is, and it’s hard, you need to accept that you’re not going to be as effective as a cop, you’re going to be twenty, thirty per cent less engaged than you should be, but you’re going to have a kid that actually talks about you as if you exist, and looks at you like you aren’t a total fucking stranger.’ She paused. ‘I just realized it all way too late.’
‘Because you were working this case?’
‘It definitely contributed to my blindness,’ Jo replied. ‘The whole time I was trying to figure out the truth, even years later, I overlooked things I shouldn’t have.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like, periodically, all the way through those first six years of Ethan’s life, Ira would complain about these headaches he was getting. I just thought it was his job, or working from home, or looking after Ethan during the day, so I told him to take painkillers and then left him to go to the next crime scene, and the next one, and the next one. Two months after he gave me that photo album, I got home one night, and Ethan wasn’t asleep in bed, he was lying on the floor of the living room, just sobbing.’
‘Because of Ira,’ Barnes said delicately, shuffling back in her seat.
‘Right.’ Jo nodded. ‘He’d suffered a brain aneurysm.’
Jo pushed a smile to the surface, an attempt to show some stoicism, but it was a phoney reaction, one that didn’t belong, and it vanished almost as soon as it formed.
‘I went into the living room, and I found my son lying next to his dad, his face literally scarlet from all the tears he’d shed for Ira, and I tried to comfort him, tried to take him in my arms, but he wouldn’t even let me touch him. He wriggled free from me every time I tried to hug him. He kept going back to Ira’s body, over and over, and just kissing his dad on the face.’ This time, her eyes blurred. ‘He didn’t want me because he didn’t really know me any more. It was like my son barely recognized me.’ She looked down at the notebook, still open between them, at her words, the ink, the blemishes on the pages. ‘Once things had settled down, Ethan and I grew closer. I’ve made it up to him, I’ve sacrificed that twenty or thirty per cent at work and have become a worse cop in order to be a better mom – and it’s been worth it. It’s been totally worth it. I mean, I could have already been an LT, not only getting there now – but I made a choice and sacrificed that chance because I love my son.’
Slowly, she drew the notebook back towards her.
‘But you know what the worst thing is? Despite all the lessons I had to learn, all the heartache and guilt I had to endure when Ira died, how much I love Ethan with every atom in my body, there still isn’t a month that’s gone by – not a single one in eight years – when I haven’t opened this up, and …’ She stopped, shaking her head, pressing a finger to the names most prominent on the page. Gabriel Wilzon. Donald Klein. ‘I can’t forget it,’ she said, wiping her tears away. ‘That’s all. I need to solve it. And I know I won’t find any peace until I do.’
48
Her full name was Amelia Griffin.
She and her two children lived in Undercliffe, a small suburb to the north-east of Bradford city centre. I’d got her address from the registration plate of her car and now I was sitting in the front of mine, watching her house from a bend in the street about two hundred feet further down. I’d already been to Isaac Mills’s, because the initial plan had been to confront him, but his Lexus was gone and his house alarm had been set.
I’d come for answers, not codes.
Not keys.
We were past that now.
I’d spent two hours outside his house, had gone to Keighley town centre, to the mill again, walked the streets and parks surrounding his property, before returning to his house for another three-hour sit-in, and he hadn’t come up for air once. I’d phoned Seiger and Sten and, when one of Jacob Pierce’s staff had picked up, I’d pretended that I’d recently done some work with Mills but had lost his contact details, and they told me they’d never heard of him. It had sounded genuine too, the woman’s confusion hard to fabricate, so – as a final move – I’d tried phoning Mills’s mobile. It went straight to voicemail.
After I rang off, I started to realize something: because whatever Mills was doing for Jacob Pierce was completely off the books, so was anything that happened to him as a consequence. I’d looked at his empty house, its shutters closed, and had started to wonder if someone had discovered what he’d done for me. I was so conflicted about Mills, I didn’t even know how to process the feeling. I still wasn’t sure if I could trust him. And yet he’d given me the alarm code and the key to Pierce’s hidden room.
He’d led me to the clothes.
The conversation between Patrick and Freda.
I looked down into my lap, at his handwriting, the sequence he’d written on the reverse of the Dictaphone: G76984Z. I still hadn’t worked out what it meant, but he’d put it there for me to see. It was there, too, because he didn’t want to be found out. That was why the clues were so subtle: he was trying to fly low.
But maybe they hadn’t been subtle enough.
Someone opened the front door of Melia Griffin’s house: it was her fifteen-year-old daughter, her face fixed on the screen of her phone. I watched her go, head down, still staring at her mobile, and then – ten seconds later – her mother came to the door, opening it a sliver and looking out to where the girl was going. She didn’t want her daughter to see her, to know that she was checking on her, conscious of embarrassing her. The girl was long past waving goodbye as she walked away – didn’t even look up from her phone – but her mum watched her all the way to the end of the street and, when she was gone, Melia lingered there for a second. It was such a delicate and natural moment, a mother still finding it hard to let go, even now, that – for a second –
I lost sight of my reason for being here, thinking of my own daughter instead, almost twice the age of Melia’s. I pictured Annabel, and then Olivia. I wondered what they were doing.
And then the door closed again.
Back in the present, I decided to drive all the way to Keighley again, to see if Mills had returned, but the house was exactly as I’d left it, and when I got back to Melia Griffin’s place again, I slipped into the same holding pattern as before, filling my time by replaying sections of the conversation between Patrick and Freda. I listened to their voices and then looked at my notebook, at the frayed margins where some of the pages had been torn out, at others that I’d filled up in the hours since. I got my mobile and went through the pictures I’d taken in the room at Seiger and Sten: the clothes, the smashed iPad and phones, the driving licences behind windows in wallets. And then I looked up and the sun had begun to set, the brightness of the sky giving way to a mauve sweep. The daughter was arriving home again, her eyes still fixed on her phone.
As she let herself in, reality started to hit me: no matter how long I sat waiting – or how patient I was – Mills wasn’t coming here.
He wasn’t going home either.
But that didn’t mean Melia couldn’t tell me where he was.
49
Melia and her kids lived in an end terrace, a short alleyway running along the left edge of the property, their back garden ending at a row of high laurel bushes, as thick and as opaque as a wall.
I moved along the alleyway first, giving myself some time to think: just knocking on the door was never going to cut it. It would put her on edge. I had to know exactly what I was going to say. At the petrol station, when we’d first met, she’d struggled to remember me, and I had no idea what Mills might have said in the meantime if she’d asked who I was. He could have lied and said that I was the person I’d pretended to be, a guy she and Isaac had bumped into in town a few weeks before that. Or he could have told her that he had no idea who I was.
