by Peggy Bird
“We’re in Portland, not in a war zone.”
“It sure as hell looks like a war zone to me. How many more dead and wounded does it take for you to qualify it as one?”
“It’s a crime scene and I’m a cop. This is what I do. And you cannot — I won’t let you — keep me from doing my work.”
“It’s just a damn job.”
“Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe what you don’t understand is what else I’ve been trying to tell you. This isn’t a damn job to me. It’s who I am. If you can’t accept that … ”
She stopped, knowing that what they said next would be either the beginning of a new phase of what was between them or the end of it.
“Suppose I can’t accept it,” he said, his voice low and strained.
“If you can’t accept who I am, then we can’t be together.” She walked away without looking back.
She threw herself into getting the crime scene details taken care of. Sam didn’t need a prompt to take over the job of interviewing and handling Jake. He just did it. Before the doctor left, he made a move to come talk to Danny but she fended it off by getting into a conversation with one of the other cops. By the time they’d finished talking, Jake was headed out to the parking lot.
The only good thing that happened was that Kaylea agreed to come stay with her until Danny found a suitable place for her to live. Danny wasn’t sure whether her relief at that decision was solely because of her fears for Kaylea’s safety or because she knew that having a roommate, even for a short time, would help take her mind off the gaping hole that had been torn in her gut when she’d seen Jake Abrams walking alone down the trail toward his vehicle. Without looking back.
Chapter Fourteen
It took her a couple of days but finally Danny made a phone call she knew she had to make. Amanda picked up on the second ring.
“Danny, I’m so glad to hear from you. I’ve wanted to check on you but Sam asked me to wait until you called. How’re you doing?”
“I’m okay. Not the best week I’ve ever had but I’ll get over it. So, you know that dinner on Saturday is off, then.”
“It doesn’t have to be. The three of us can … ”
“I guess Sam didn’t tell you this part but I have a temporary house guest, one of the vets from the Forest Park camp. She needed a safe place to stay until we get her settled, so she’s with me.”
“No, he didn’t tell me. But she’s welcome, too.”
“I doubt she’d feel comfortable, Amanda. It took her forever to warm up to me. Besides, I don’t think I’m ready to be social yet. Kaylea — the woman staying with me — is about all the company I can handle.”
“I understand. But you know the invitation is always open for you, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. Thanks for understanding.”
She was about to end the call when Amanda said, “Danny, did Sam ever tell you why his first marriage broke up?”
Surprised, she said, “No. Other than his sons, he never really talks about that part of his life.”
“Well, I don’t think I’m betraying any great secret but you might want to know the story.” She waited for a moment and when Danny didn’t say anything, continued. “When Sam and his first wife got married, he was a middle manager for an electric utility.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Not many people in the Bureau do. Thing is, he was bored and looking for another career option when one night at a dinner party, he met the husband of one of his wife’s colleagues — she’s a school teacher … ”
“That I did know. Middle school, right?”
“Yup, where they should get combat pay. Anyway, Sam’s bored, meets this guy who’s a cop and gets interested. He applies, is accepted, and goes through the Academy. Six months into his rookie year, his partner gets shot. Not killed. Not even badly hurt. But it scared the hell out of Sam’s wife. They’d just had a second baby and she was sure she was going to end up a widow.”
“Oh, crap.”
“He offered to quit but she wouldn’t let him. He was clearly happier than he’d been at his old job so she tried to tough it out for a year or two but she couldn’t. They divorced. Not too long after she marries a guy who’s got a nice, safe desk job and a year or so after that Sam and I meet.”
“So, the moral of your story is … ?”
“There’s no moral, Danny. I only wanted you to know your partner knows exactly, and I mean exactly, what you’re going through. He may pretend otherwise but he’s an old softie when it comes to people he cares about. And he’s worried about you. Don’t wall yourself off from people who are concerned about you.”
Danny gulped back the lump in her throat. “I didn’t think I was but maybe you’re right. Maybe I should … I don’t know … talk to someone. It’s been killing me. I miss Jake so much but I can’t stop being who I am to be with him. I don’t know what to do.”
“You’re smart. You’re resourceful. You’ll figure it out.”
• • •
Jake hadn’t slept well in days. The dreams had come back. Not as bad as they had been when he first returned from Iraq but bad enough. Finally he’d called the psychiatrist who’d worked with him four years before and made an appointment. The shrink told him he thought what had happened in Forest Park had triggered an attack of PTSD. Jake wasn’t sure that’s what it was. He’d managed it so well for the past few years that he was more inclined to think it was a legitimate worry about the woman he loved and how she put herself in harm’s way. That was reasonable. PTSD wasn’t.
Whoever was right, when the dreams didn’t stop he had to acknowledge there was some relation to his experience in Iraq. And it was losing him yet another woman. The loss of his almost-fiancée paled into insignificance when compared to this. Danny was the real deal, the woman he knew he wanted to be with for the rest of his life.
So that meant he had to figure a way around it. He wasn’t about to give up, not this time.
This was more damage than flowers and chocolate could repair, he knew that. He and Danny had to work it out, find a way to deal with his anxiety and her job. To do that, she’d have to talk to him and that wasn’t happening. She wouldn’t respond to any of his attempts to communicate. He was desperate enough to try texting and emailing even though he knew that was hardly personal enough. But she didn’t answer those messages any more than she’d responded to the phone messages he’d left her. Nothing worked.
He thought about waiting for her outside Central Precinct and trying to convince her she should talk to him, even waited in the park across the street once when he was on his way to make rounds at the camps close to the time she usually went into work. But when he saw her, he didn’t move to intercept her. He wasn’t sure she’d stop long enough for him to say anything and he didn’t want to make a scene.
Then he decided he’d wait for her at her house. On his second evening vigil of waiting and wondering where the hell she was, it occurred to him that one of her neighbors might have warned her about him sitting there and it would look like he was stalking her. Which, of course, he was. That would likely get a restraining order out against him, seriously affecting his chances of explaining it all to her. So he gave up on the idea of trying to hunt her down there, too.
Then he had an idea — he’d talk to Sam. If anyone knew her, he did. Maybe he’d have some good advice.
So, instead of continuing to stalk Danny, he began to stalk Sam.
Off and on for three days, mostly at lunchtime or when he thought Sam might be leaving for home, Jake sat in the rain across from the Justice Center and watched for him to come in or out of Central Precinct. No luck. Finally on day four, the sun came out and so did Sam. Jake followed him to a food cart, watched as he ordered his lunch, then approached him.
“Sam, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“I wondered when you’d make your move. You’ve been stalking me long enough. Sure, Doc. If you don’t mind my eating in front of you, we
can go over to that bench. I have about fifteen minutes before I have to be at a meeting.”
When they were settled, Jake began, “What I wanted to talk to you about was … ” He was suddenly short of words, not able to put a coherent sentence together.
Sam swallowed the bite of gyros he had in his mouth before rescuing him. “Let me see if I can help. You know you fucked up big time in Forest Park and you’re trying to figure a way to get to my partner so you can explain yourself because you’ve decided you can’t live without her or something like that. That cover it?”
“Thanks, yeah. I know I have to apologize for what I did, tell her I’m sorry, but … ”
“Are you sorry for what you did? Or are you sorry it drove her away and you’ll say whatever it takes to get her back?”
“You’re good at your job, too, aren’t you?”
“Good, too? Meaning, you’re good at your job or she’s good at hers?”
“Holy hell, Sam. Remind me never to get crosswise with you. I wouldn’t like the interrogation.”
“So, let’s agree that we’re all good at what we do — you, me, Danny — and move on. Answer the questions about being sorry.”
“I don’t know the answer to your question about being sorry for what I did. I’m still working that out. I know I’m dead sorry I drove her away. But I don’t know yet if I can say I wouldn’t do the same thing if the situation occurred again.”
Sam took another bite of the gyros, carefully pulling down the paper it was wrapped in, a thoughtful look on his face while he chewed and stared at Jake. “What’d your shrink say about this?”
“How do you know I talked to my psychiatrist?”
He ignored the question. “What’d he … she … say?”
“He says I reacted instinctively, like I would have in Iraq. He said it’s not necessarily related to Danny. I’m not so sure.” He took a deep breath and asked the question he most needed an answer to. “How’s your wife handle what you do?”
“The first one left me because she couldn’t live with it. Amanda trusts that I know what I’m doing.” He polished off his lunch and wiped his fingers on a napkin before balling the trash up in a neat package and standing up.
“She knows that, statistically, I’m more likely to be hurt in a car accident driving to work than I am on duty. And she knows I don’t take unnecessary risks. She trusts me, like I trust her to take safety precautions in her glass studio so she doesn’t inhale powdered glass and ruin her lungs or slash a major blood vessel open by carelessly handling one of the big sheets of glass she works with every day. We trust each other. It’s what people who love each other do, Jake.”
Jake stood up, not sure what to say next. So he did the only thing he could think to do — he put out his hand and said, “Thanks, Sam. I appreciate you talking to me.”
Sam took his hand. “Not a problem.” He pitched his trash into a nearby container then added, “One more thing — about getting caught crosswise with me? You’d really hate it if you got there by making my partner any more unhappy than you already have.” He ambled away, leaving Jake with no idea how any of what Sam had told him would get him closer to Danny but unaccountably happy to know that she was unhappy right now, too.
Chapter Fifteen
“Doctor Abrams, there was a phone call for you a few minutes ago.” Barbara Black, who was temporarily staffing the front desk, said.
Following his conversation with Sam, Jake had made rounds at the hospital and had pre-op visits with the patients he was operating on the next day. He was tired, he was out of sorts, and he wasn’t sure he should even be at the clinic.
What he was sure of was he didn’t know what had just been said to him. “Sorry, Barbara, I wasn’t listening carefully. Who did you say called?” The office manager wasn’t his favorite staff member and he knew she returned the feeling. He didn’t like the patronizing tone she used for their patients. She didn’t like the way the patients turned to him with questions about the clinic. Some of them were spooked by her and her different colored eyes — one was blue, the other hazel — that gave her an off kilter look.
“You got a phone call from someone named Kaylea. She said she needed to see you and you’d know where she was.”
Kaylea called him here? What the fuck? “Did she say why she needed to see me?”
“No, but she sounded pretty upset. She was whispering. Like she didn’t want someone to hear her. Is she one of your patients?”
“Yeah, she has been.” He looked around at the full waiting room. Shit, he couldn’t leave now. Not with this many people waiting to be seen. “Is there another doctor here right now, Barbara, to help Doctor Campbell?”
“Doctor Nelson should be here any minute.”
He looked at the clock. It was almost five. “I hate to do this but I need to go see what Kaylea wants. I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ll tell Tom Campbell before I leave.”
“I’ll tell him. I’m on my way to the back to get my coat and go home anyway. You get going.”
“That’s okay, Barbara. I’ll take care of it. Thanks for getting the message to me.”
• • •
Jake knew Kaylea was Danny’s temporary roommate, although he didn’t think Danny was aware Bob Aronson had told him. That made him a little uneasy about going to her house when, he assumed, she wasn’t there but he didn’t think Kaylea would have contacted him had she not been in trouble. The thought crossed his mind that he should call Kaylea to find out what he was walking into but if she’d been whispering, afraid someone would hear her, he didn’t want to alert whoever that was.
He even thought about calling Danny but he dismissed that idea, too, assuming that if Kaylea had wanted Danny, she would have called her.
Arriving at Danny’s house, he sat at the curb, looking around, trying to see if he recognized a car, a person, anything that looked suspicious. It was difficult to be sure in the darkening evening but he didn’t think he saw anyone who looked familiar, nor did he see a small, dark colored sedan like the one described by some of the witnesses to the shootings.
There was a light on in Danny’s living room, but that was the only sign of life in the apartment. After Jake’s recon of the street from inside the car, he got out and walked the block, doing a quick sweep of it from the sidewalk. Still nothing.
He approached the house, all his senses on high alert.
Kaylea didn’t answer the door when he rang the bell. When he knocked and called her name he finally got a response. A weak, scared-sounding voice asked, “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Kaylea. Jake Abrams. You called the clinic and said you wanted to see me.”
“I didn’t call Doctor Abrams. I don’t know who you are but whoever you are, you’re lying.”
“Kaylea, look through the peephole in Danny’s door. You’ll see it’s me.”
There was silence, presumably while she checked him out. Then, as he heard the clink of a security chain being undone and the thunk of a deadlock being released, she said, “It is you. But I didn’t … ”
Kaylea was interrupted by someone behind Jake speaking, the voice somehow familiar. “That’s right. You didn’t call him, Kaylea. But it was the only way I knew how to get us all together like one big happy family.”
Before he could turn to see who it was, Kaylea said, “Oh, fuck, Doctor Abrams. That’s him … her. Those eyes. Now I know. That’s who shot up the camp.”
The person behind him shoved a weapon into Jake’s back. “Inside, Doctor Know-It-All. Get inside now.”
• • •
Danny finally had a lead on the car seen at the camps. After running the various possible combinations of partial license plates through the DMV database, she had a list of small, dark colored sedans in the Portland area. She’d worked her way through it, cross-referencing it with the staff and volunteer list at VMSC. Sure enough, a black Honda sedan belonged to someone there. Not a man, but the officer manager, a woman named Barbara Black.
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Danny headed for Old Town and the clinic.
What she discovered there made her very uneasy. Greta was at the front desk and told her that Jake had come in for his shift about ten minutes before and almost immediately left. The doctor who’d talked to Jake said he’d been called out for a patient named Kay Leese, or something like that, who’d asked for help.
It didn’t take much of a mental leap to get from Kay Leese to Kaylea. But why had she called Jake at the clinic? She didn’t have that number on her cell phone. She had Danny’s and Jake’s cell phone numbers. Why hadn’t she called one of them?
When Danny asked to speak to the person who’d taken the message, the news got worse. Barbara Black, who’d been covering for Greta while she took a coffee break, had given him the message. But Barbara wasn’t around. She’d left shortly after Jake had, saying she needed to go home early because of a family emergency.
Shit. Shit. Shit.
Danny ran to her car and headed over the river, calling Sam while she was crossing the Broadway Bridge and filling him in on what was happening. He would take care of backup. But she was going to be the first person on scene and she had to figure out how they were going to handle it.
She cruised the street, scoping it out. What she saw confirmed her worst fears. Parked directly in front of her house was Jake’s SUV. Parked three cars behind it was a black Honda sedan, license plate 639 MLS.
Quadruple shit. Kaylea and Jake were inside Danny’s home with the person who had just rocketed to the top of Danny’s suspect list as the murderer of four people.
Danny parked her car around the corner from her house and assessed the situation. She had no idea where Barbara, Jake, and Kaylea were in the apartment so she wasn’t sure whether she and her team should go in the front or the back. They didn’t want to put Jake and Kaylea in any more danger than they already were.
