Mercy Dogs

by Tyler Dilts

  They were on the porch. It was covered.

  “No,” Ben said.

  “That’s okay. Would you mind stepping out onto the porch?”

  “Yes, I would mind.”

  Lopez stopped smiling.

  “Are you going to arrest me?”

  The younger cop made a soft grunting noise, and Lopez shot him a sharp glance over his shoulder. “No, Mr. Shepard, not at this time.”

  Ben took the phone out of his shirt pocket, swiped left on the lock screen, and snapped a few photos of their faces. “Then we’re done here.”

  He closed the door and threw the bolt. His knees buckled, but he managed to catch himself on the knob and remain on his feet.

  “What’s wrong?”

  The sound of Peter’s voice startled him. “Nothing, Dad. Just some guys knocking on the wrong door. How about some breakfast?”

  After they had eaten—Ben had a bowl of oatmeal, too, something he hadn’t done in ages—Peter said his stomach was hurting and he’d like to rest a little more before he got started on his cleaning.

  At the desk, Ben swallowed a lorazepam and wrote MATTHEW LOPEZ on the yellow pad he’d been using for his notes on the investigation. Then he underlined it. Then he underlined it again.

  Something was wrong about them showing up at the door this morning. When he heard the knock, even though he questioned the timing, he’d expected it to be the Long Beach Homicide detail. Not Jennifer, of course. If she was next up in the rotation, the investigation of Rob’s murder would go to someone with no personal connection to the case. Then again, maybe no one knew how connected Ben was to Rob. He’d told Jennifer about talking to him, but that was when things were a lot less complicated than they were now. Maybe it would be a good thing if Jennifer caught the case.

  He figured that depended on why Lopez came to see him. The San Bernardino cop would have no jurisdiction in Rob’s murder case, and unless he was a complete idiot, he’d stay away from Ben if he were a suspect or even a person of interest in the killing. It could be that Lopez was just a loose cannon who wanted a piece of someone he thought was involved in the murder of a fellow deputy.

  But Rob was Internal Affairs now. IA guys didn’t inspire much loyalty, except maybe within their own squad. It wasn’t like in the movies, where they were just about always portrayed as the evil mortal enemies of the rank and file, but they didn’t make a lot of friends, either. Lopez didn’t seem like IA. Ben was wary of profiling, but he seemed like a narc. He had the swagger and tough-guy posturing in his physicality. It was obvious he was trying to underplay it, but when Ben didn’t go along with the script, it ruffled Lopez’s feathers. He tried not to let it show, but Ben pissed him off.

  Had he made himself an enemy, Ben wondered? No. Either Lopez was already an enemy or he wasn’t. The encounter on the porch wouldn’t have been enough to tip that scale one way or the other.

  The big question was what to do now. He didn’t have anything else to go on in his search for Grace. He wanted to find Kyle, but there was nothing he could think of that would get him any closer, not with his limited resources.

  He was hesitant to contact the police before he had a solid plan, but what about Becerra? How involved would he be in the investigation of Rob’s murder? The detective already knew Rob was connected to Grace. And Jennifer said she’d reach out, too. Whoever was working Rob’s case would know about it by now.

  Maybe the best thing to do would be to contact Becerra and tell him what he’d found out about Kyle and about Grace’s previous job and home. The only problem with that would be explaining how he found the information to begin with. He couldn’t tell him that he’d broken into the hotel room, photographed Rob’s files, and left a man bleeding on the floor.

  But he could say he learned about Kyle from Amy. That wouldn’t even be a lie. There was a slight risk that Becerra would follow up with her, but was it likely that he’d press her hard enough to discover who mentioned the name Kyle first?

  Shit. It was all such a huge clusterfuck.

  He closed his eyes and listened to the rain pattering on the roof. The sound calmed him, so he just sat and focused on his breath for a few minutes.

  In and out.

  He rolled the chair a foot or two back from the desk and rested his hands in his lap.

  In and out.

  He noticed the tension he was holding in his shoulders, the tightness in his neck.

  In and out.

  He noticed the hollow feeling in his stomach.

  In and out.

  He noticed the dull ache in his right hand, and his mind started to drift to the stranger in the hotel room. He acknowledged that memory and gently brought his focus back to his breath.

  In and out.

  In and out.

  In and out.

  Ben brought his attention back to the room, to the sound of the rain, and slowly opened his eyes.

  There were really only two things that mattered right now. Keeping his father and himself safe and finding Grace.

  When Ben checked on Peter, he found him still napping on his bed. Ben eased the bedroom door closed and walked softly to his own bedroom, where he eased that door closed, too. He went to the side of his bed and sat down. Then he reached out and slid the drawer open. The Glock and its magazine were right where he had left them. He picked up the pistol and slid the magazine into the well in its grip until it clicked into place.

  But he didn’t chamber a round.

  Not yet.

  Your father gets up to go to the bathroom and leaves you and Grace sitting at the patio table.

  “What was he like before?” she asks.

  “He was nice,” you say.

  She smiles. “He still is.”

  “Smart, too.” He really was, you think. You didn’t think so when you were younger. You always got annoyed at the way he seemed to have an answer for every question, and even more annoyed when they inevitably turned out to be right. There’s a pang of guilt in your chest when you think of how little time you spent with him in those last few years before your mom got sick. Once a month, maybe, you’d come over for dinner. And that was only because Kate . . . You saw your mom a little more often, even after she left the department. She had been a cop for a long time. She knew what it was like. And even though she said you didn’t have to hold back with your father, that he understood the weight you carried, you were never comfortable really letting him in. You remember the time you told him about a little boy who’d been repeatedly abused by his stepfather with his mother’s consent, and the pain you saw in your father’s eyes. You never wanted to see that pain again, so you held back. Eventually, you understood how hard that was, and how it got easier if you kept your distance. So you kept it.

  You realize you’re drifting away and worry that Grace has noticed. If she has, she doesn’t give you any indication, and even though you know the awkwardness you’re suddenly sensing is self-inflicted, you feel the need to fill it with the first thing that comes into your head. “He wrote a book once,” you say.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. It was about World War I.”

  “Like a textbook?”

  “No, it was nonfiction, but it was the story of this one group of soldiers that he followed all the way through the war and then for a while after it ended.”

  “Wow. Did you read it?”

  “Yeah, but I was too young. I was in high school. Thought it was boring.”

  “You should read it again.”

  “I wish I could. It’s out of print. He used to give them to anybody who asked. We thought he had more in his office at school, but after he retired, we could never find them. Ten boxes of books and I went through every one again and again and couldn’t find a single one of his.”

  “He gave away all the copies of his own book?”

  “That’s my dad.”

  Ben didn’t really know what to do next. There wasn’t anything he could come up with that might help him get close
r to locating Grace. He had a lead, sure, but no real way to pursue it. At the very least, a conversation with the LBPD was surely going to take place soon, but he decided to let that come to him because he had no idea where it would lead. Bernie had been willing to stay with Peter, when Ben told him he’d have to go in to the station for a few hours sometime in the next few days, but he feared he was being wildly optimistic. There was a real chance he’d be gone longer than a few hours. What if he’d hurt that stranger more seriously than he thought? What if they tried to hang Rob’s murder on him? He couldn’t discount that possibility. It was all too much for him to process.

  Just as the anxiety found a foothold and began to pull at the edges of his focus, his phone rang. Boswell, the screen read. Ben picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mr. Shepard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m calling to confirm your appointment with Dr. Boswell at one today.”

  For a moment, he was offended that they thought it necessary to remind him, as if they were implying that he wasn’t capable of getting his father there on his own. Which, of course, he wasn’t, as he had so clearly demonstrated a few days earlier. “Yes, we’ll be there.” He didn’t bother pointing out that it wasn’t his appointment at all, but his father’s. What would be the point?

  Peter was in the living room, sweeping the hardwood floor in front of the couch.

  “Hey, Dad?”

  His father looked at him, surprised like he’d been caught doing something he shouldn’t.

  “Thanks for cleaning up.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ben said. “But I forgot we need to take you to the eye doctor today.”

  “For this?” He raised a finger and touched his eyelid.

  “Yeah.”

  Peter’s shoulders slumped. “Is it time now?”

  “We have to go in about an hour.”

  He looked at his son, trying to smile back at him, then gently lowered the broom to the floor and went into his bedroom to change his clothes.

  Ben was relieved when his father did slightly better on the vision test than he had the last appointment. Though the trajectory of Peter’s macular degeneration was a long downward slope, there were plateaus and even a few occasional upticks. The treatments, as awful as they were, still seemed to be working. With everything that had been going on, it was a relief to have a bit of good news.

  The office was busy, so even after they did the retinal imaging and the medical assistant had put in the drops and they’d waited twenty minutes for Peter’s eyes to dilate, they still had to wait another half hour in the small windowless exam room for the doctor. Usually Ben tried to read something while they waited, but today he couldn’t focus. He always felt like the wait was harder for him than for his father, then felt guilty since he knew it was probably because Peter didn’t remember what was coming.

  Up until his father’s second-to-last surgery, Ben would always excuse himself and go out into the waiting room. But with the most recent cognitive decline, his father had become more fearful and more easily agitated, so Ben sucked it up and sat there for the whole procedure.

  When Dr. Boswell came in, Ben stood and shook his hand. He tended to get along much better with his father’s doctors than he did with his own, partly because they genuinely seemed to be friendlier people and partly because he took better care of his father than he did of himself.

  After he greeted Ben, Dr. Boswell turned to Peter and shook his hand, too. “How are you doing, Peter?”

  “Hanging in there,” Peter said pleasantly, as he always did.

  The doctor turned to the computer, examined the retinal images on the monitor, and said, “This looks very good.” Then he turned down the lights and looked into Peter’s eyes, both through a device mounted to the wall on a swing arm and through a handheld lens. “It looks like the Eylea is still working.” He turned to the medical assistant and said, “We’ll do both eyes.”

  He left the room while the young woman prepped Peter with different eye drops. Ben watched his father with a kind of admiration. He wasn’t sure how he did it. Maybe he wasn’t fully aware of what was coming, but even going back a few years, to when they started with Dr. Boswell and he hadn’t experienced much memory loss at all, he’d never complained or showed any hesitation. They even used to laugh when Ben got squeamish and went out to the waiting room until they were done.

  A few minutes later, Dr. Boswell came back into the room, rolled his stool over, and inserted the retractor into Peter’s left eye. Ben still couldn’t help but think of the end of that old movie, A Clockwork Orange.

  But it got even worse.

  Dr. Boswell said, “Look down and to the right,” and then inserted a needle into the sclera of Peter’s eye and injected the medication.

  Ben had seen his father go through this almost a dozen times now and still winced and shuddered with the same intensity as the very first time he’d watched it happen.

  Before he’d even fully recovered his composure, they were done. Dr. Boswell was shaking Peter’s hand again and saying, “We’ll see you in six or seven weeks, okay?”

  How his father managed to smile warmly and say “Thank you” after having a needle jabbed into each of his eyes, Ben would never understand.

  The voicemail message from Jennifer had been left shortly after they got home. Ben didn’t hear the phone because he’d turned the ringer off while they were at the appointment and forgotten to turn it back on when they left. It was another hour and a half before he realized what he’d done and found the message.

  When Peter’s eyes were dilated, he was always worried about doing something that might hurt them. Ben explained, as he always did after the appointments, that he didn’t have to worry about anything except being uncomfortable, but he still always went out of his way to make sure all of the blinds were closed and the lights turned off for a few hours after an eye appointment. It helped Peter relax.

  It was only after his father was settled in the darkened living room watching Walk the Line on one of the cable channels that Ben thought to check his phone. As awful as it was to watch his father get the shots in his eyes, at least it was a distraction that allowed him to substitute a tamer anxiety for the one he felt rushing back when he saw the message waiting on his phone.

  “Hi, Ben,” she said. “You’ve probably already heard this by now, but if you haven’t, I’m afraid I have some bad news. Rob Kessler was murdered.” She paused. “Dave Zepeda is the primary on the case and he needs to talk to you. Can you get someone to take care of your dad for a few hours tomorrow? Give me a call as soon as you can and let me know.”

  He held the phone in his hand and stared at it for a long time.

  If they wanted him to get someone to look after Peter, that meant they were expecting him to go to the station. That wasn’t a good sign. But they also let Jennifer give him a heads-up, so he didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe they were going to charge him and she was just trying to make things go as smoothly as possible.

  No. He trusted Jennifer more than anyone in the department. If they were planning a takedown, she wouldn’t help them with it.

  Still, he thought, he could say no, that he didn’t have anyone who could stay with Peter while he went to the station, that they’d have to come to the house if they wanted to talk. If they agreed to that, he would feel a lot less pressure, knowing it meant they were more interested in an interview than an interrogation.

  What would Jennifer say if he just asked her what was going on? Would she tell him? He wanted to believe she was still his friend, but what evidence did he have? A pity lunch every month or two wasn’t much to go on.

  “Stop,” he whispered. “Just stop.”

  He called Jennifer back.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Zepeda needs to talk to you about Rob.”

  “What happened?”

  “Someone killed him.” She wasn’t saying much. />
  “At the Marriott, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I met him there a couple of times.” He wanted to be as honest as he could. But in the back of his mind, he knew it would be better to admit he’d been there so it wouldn’t seem like he was holding anything back.

  He half expected her to say she already knew that, but she didn’t. “It was pretty ugly. Someone cut his throat while he was sleeping.”

  It surprised Ben that she told him that. He expected her to withhold any specifics. Maybe he was being paranoid and they weren’t looking at him as a suspect at all. “Jesus,” he said. If she told him that, maybe he could push a little further. “Any suspects?”

  “That’s why we need to talk to you. The only thing he seemed to have going on here was your missing-persons case. We’re hoping you might know something that can help us get more of a handle on that.”

  Ben sighed loud enough that Jennifer heard it through the phone. “What was that?”

  “Nothing. I was just worried.”

  “About what?” she said. “Do you think we were looking at you for it?”

  “No,” Ben said, embarrassed. “Not really, no.”

  She was silent a moment before she asked, “Are you all right? I know this has been a lot of stress for you. Is it triggering any of the old symptoms?”

  “I’m doing okay. I mean, I’m worried about Grace, but . . .” He lost the thought briefly, but recovered. “But I’m okay.” He knew she heard the stutter. Before she could ask anything else, he added, “What time do you want me to come in tomorrow?”

  “Let me check with Zepeda. We can probably come to you. Would that be better?”

  “Really, I’m okay,” Ben said, certain she wouldn’t believe him.

  An hour after the end of the call, Ben had four and a half pages of notes that covered everything he’d learned from the time he realized Grace was missing until he found out that Rob had been murdered. Even the stranger in the hotel room. He felt comfortable taking his chances with that. The only thing he left out was his shield. He would tell them he’d talked to Marcus and Amanda, and even that he told them he was looking into Grace’s disappearance. Just not that he had impersonated a police officer. Maybe it would come up in the subsequent investigation, and if it did, he’d admit to it then. But maybe it wouldn’t and he’d be spared that indignity.