Three Weeks to Say Goodbye

by C. J. Box

  “I haven’t heard either way.”

  “Detective Torkleson assign you here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Detective Hoyt,” Cody said, flashing the badge at a distance and pocketing it quickly. He was well practiced, I thought. He could even fool cops. Then he spoke with absolute authority. “We need to get in there and talk to the victim. This is Jack McGuane, an intimate of the victim. He’s likely the only person he’ll talk to.”

  The uniform shrugged. “From what I understand, he’s hamburger. You aren’t likely to get anything out of him.”

  “Let us by, please.”

  The uniform shrugged and sighed elaborately and called inside on the phone near the door. The door lock buzzed, and we were in.

  “Mr. Eastman?” Cody asked the desk nurse.

  “Room 738,” she said. “Listen, he’s scheduled for surgery any minute now. I’m not sure you…”

  I followed Cody and braced myself. Even so, I wasn’t prepared for what I saw when we went into 738.

  “Fuck!” Cody said beneath his breath.

  He was unrecognizable. He was a body beneath a sheet connected to what looked like dozens of chirping and humming machines and hanging bags of fluid. The bundles of tubing that connected his body to the hanging bags looked like exposed tree roots. His face was entirely covered with ban dages. Thin gauze covered his nose—two dark spots of blood where his nostrils were—and a fogged-up oxygen mask covered his mouth and nose. His head beneath the wraps was misshapen, crushed in on one side and bulging out on the other. It didn’t hit home to me that it was Brian in that bed. No way. This long bag of broken bones and bruised meat could not be him. I half expected the Brian I knew to stroll in from the hallway and say something cryptic or sarcastic.

  If it weren’t for a sockless ankle not covered by the sheets and a pile of clothing at the foot of the bed I recognized as his, I wouldn’t have known it was Brian at all.

  I felt something bitter rise in my throat, and I was unable to speak.

  Cody approached the bed and fished through the sheets for Brian’s hand. He found a ball the size of a mitten.

  “They even broke his fingers, those bastards,” he said.

  He leaned down over the bed. “Brian, can you hear me? It’s Cody. Can you hear me in there?”

  No reaction of any kind.

  “Brian, you’ll be all right,” Cody lied. “Help me get the people who did this. It was Garrett and his Sur-13 pals, right? Help me get them.”

  Nothing.

  I stepped forward and touched Brian’s naked ankle, the only piece of flesh not ban daged that I could see.

  “Come on, Brian,” I said. “You can do it. Was it Garrett?”

  Not even a movement.

  Suddenly, the room was filled with orderlies led by a nurse, who was angry we were there. “You two, out of here now! He’s going straight into surgery, where we’ve got two trauma docs waiting. How did you get in here, anyway?”

  Cody didn’t badge her.

  I said, “He’s our friend.”

  “The best thing you can do for your friend is step aside,” she said, and we did.

  Once they were gone, I used Brian’s dark bathroom to throw up.

  “HE WAS SET UP,” Cody said as we paced in the ICU lounge. “Whether Garrett—or his dad—started the communication with Brian about phony photos or came in later I can’t say. But he was lured down there, and they jumped him.”

  “Can we prove it was Garrett?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Cody said. “We can try.” He stopped pacing and lowered his voice. “Jack, you’re square in the middle of a police investigation. You’re seeing it from the inside looking out, and it looks pretty fucking confusing, doesn’t it? This is what we do when we don’t have an eyewitness or a confession. There are rarely black-and-white circumstances. You and I are pretty sure Garrett Moreland and his compadres did this because you think you might have heard him in the background. That and all of this crap that’s been going on between you and him. But we can’t reveal everything, can we? Like why we were coming back from Montana when the call came in?”

  I shook my head, confused. Instead, I said, “When you flashed your badge and lied to those people, it came pretty easy, didn’t it?”

  Cody glared at me. “What are you saying?”

  I swallowed hard. “I’m not so sure lying comes as easily to me.”

  Cody shook his head. “I’m disappointed in you, Jack. You still don’t get it. It’s what I was trying to tell you a minute ago. There are rarely black-and-white circumstances. We want to get to the absolute truth, but most of the time we fall a little short. I mean, we know what we know—but sometimes we can’t prove it to everyone’s satisfaction because the bar is set too high. A good cop does his best to put the bad guys away. Sometimes we need a little help. Like from our partners”—meaning me in this instance— “or from a judge.”

  The Aubrey Coates case was obviously still very much on his mind.

  He stepped toward me and reached out and grabbed me by the collar and pulled me into him. “As Margaret Thatcher once said, don’t go wobbly on me now, Jack. Remember, this is all for you.” His eyes shone, and his mouth curled down. I never really felt threatened. We’d fought before in high school, and I cleaned his clock at the time. Of course, that was before he became a cop and learned all kinds of tricks. I said, “I think it was Garrett.”

  “You think or you know?”

  “It was Garrett.”

  He let me go. “That’s what I needed to hear from you— some fucking truth.”

  “But there’s so much that just doesn’t make sense,” I said. “The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. Why does the judge want our little girl? Is he in all of this with his son, or are they operating independently of each other? And how can his wife not even know? How is that possible? Or was she lying to Melissa?”

  Cody shook his head and shrugged. “Don’t think I haven’t thought about all of those things for days since this all started. I know there’s a thread that will tie it all together, but right now I come up with nothing.”

  “Are there even any photos?” I asked. “Will we ever know now?”

  “Let’s hope to hell Brian recovers,” he said. “If he can tell us Garrett was there, it’s a slam dunk. Everything changes. Brian testifies, and no judge would place a baby with a gangbanger convicted of trying to stomp an innocent man to death. We won’t need any photos—it’ll all be over, so think positive. It’s amazing what these doctors can do.”

  Cody leaned in to me. “What’s really important is that he comes out of it. Even if he’s not sure who did it, can’t remember—you know what I mean. If we talk to him first, suggest it was Garrett, he’s smart enough to know to run with it.”

  At first I didn’t get what he was saying. Then I did. I should have felt something, some physical manifestation of guilt.

  “I understand,” I said.

  “There you go,” Cody said, punching me in the arm. “There you go. It’s what Brian would want, anyway.”

  I WAS ON MY CELL WITH MELISSA, telling her Brian was still in surgery and we hadn’t heard anything from the doctors yet, when I saw Detective Torkleson in the hallway and heard Cody say, “It’s about time!”

  Ending the call, I walked over to join them. Torkleson looked tired—rumpled, unshaven. He’d been up for hours— all through the night and halfway into Sunday. He had a thick sheaf of papers in his hand.

  “You’ve got to send a car over to Judge John Moreland’s place,” Cody told him, “pick up Garrett, and bring him in for questioning. He either participated in the attempted homicide or he was there to cheer it on. He probably lured Brian down there in that alley.”

  “Whoa, cowboy,” Torkleson said. “You’ve got to give me something to link him to the crime before I send a cruiser. I know you’ve had this guy in your sights, but he doesn’t have to talk. What I want is probable cause. Rock-solid PC. Hi
s old man’s a judge, don’t forget.”

  As if I could.

  “What do you have there?” Cody asked.

  Torkleson brandished the sheaf of papers. “Here are the call records from the victim’s phone, as requested. Good thinking on your part.” He shook the papers. “Your friend spent a lot of time on his cell, I can tell you that. The easy part was printing out the records. Now we’ve got to spend some quality time on these logs before we start sending out uniforms to pick people up.”

  “What about prints on Brian’s phone?” Cody asked.

  Torkleson made a face and held his hands out, palms up. “We’re working on that.”

  “Meaning what?” Cody growled.

  “We sort of screwed that up, Cody. The phone was handled by half a dozen different cops and probably the derelicts in the alley who called it in. The prints on it are smudged. At some point someone must have put the phone in their pocket or something. There are no clean prints. I’ve got our tech guys looking for partials, but it doesn’t look promising.”

  “Shit,” Cody said, taking the papers and squinting at the small print. “How far do these go back?”

  “That’s just the past month,” Torkleson said. “Like I said, he spent a lot of time on his cell.”

  “Jesus, what a talker,” Cody said, looking at the most recent page. His finger jabbed the last number. “Melissa’s cell number,” he said to me. “It’ll take days to get through all of this to find how Garrett set him up.”

  “You’re leaping ahead again,” Torkleson said. He paused, looked at me, then back to Cody. “And there’s something else we need to consider before we put all of our eggs in the Garrett basket. Your friend Brian Eastman was very active in the gay community. I assume you know that fact.”

  “Of course we know it,” Cody said.

  Torkleson said, “Well, there are a couple of gay bars down in that district, you know. From what I’ve found out, he wasn’t a stranger at either one. And if you look at a map, this alley we found him in is a natural off-the-street route from one to the other. We’ve got some officers checking at both bars to see if he was at either one last night, but it’s hard to track down the bartenders or patrons on a Sunday morning. We’ll do it, but it’ll take a few days of good police work.

  “But some of the uniforms were talking. They think maybe this was random. Maybe your friend was going from one bar to another when some gangbangers jumped him. He was a pretty good target, you know, the way he was dressed like the ultimate yuppie. Of course, they don’t want to float this theory out loud because then it would be a hate crime, and if the mayor heard that, he’d go ballistic.”

  Cody leveled his gaze on Torkleson. “Most crimes are hate crimes,” he said.

  “You know what I mean. It could get political…”

  “Fuck that,” Cody said. “It doesn’t fit. I’m not saying Brian didn’t frequent those bars or know the route—he probably did. But when he called us earlier last night, he said he got a specific call to meet somebody. Maybe the caller picked the spot that would be familiar—I don’t know. Or maybe he picked it because it was close enough to the Appaloosa Club that the gangbangers could run back there and clean up. But Brian wasn’t out cruising—we know that.”

  Torkleson was slow on the take. “Hold it—he called you? When was that?”

  “I don’t know. Midnight, I guess.”

  “And what was he meeting this person for?”

  Cody hesitated for a moment. I felt a chill go up my spine. Were we caught?

  “Information,” Cody said, finally.

  “What kind of information?” Torkleson asked, stepping back half a step, distancing himself without realizing he was doing it.

  “I don’t know,” Cody said. “Brian kept it all mysterious. He said he was going to meet someone to night who was going to give us information that would help us in our case against Garrett and Judge Moreland. That’s why he was downtown last night.”

  I thought, Cody’s high above the crowd on a wire without a net.

  “And that’s why you asked me about documents earlier?”

  Cody nodded.

  “Anything else you’ve been keeping from me?”

  “Not a thing,” Cody said.

  Torkleson swiveled his head, gave me the dead-eye. “What about you, McGuane?”

  I knew I looked guilty. My face was burning up.

  “What?” I asked. I tried not to look at Cody.

  “You heard me.”

  I sighed. “The information was supposed to be photos,” I said. “Photos with Judge Moreland in them. Something bad enough Moreland would back off.”

  “Ahhh,” Torkleson said, nodding. “You two have been playing a little blackmail game on the side, eh?”

  “No blackmail,” Cody said. “You can’t blackmail anyone if you don’t have the photos to blackmail with.”

  “I see,” Torkleson said. “I also think right now I don’t want to hear much more. Later, though, I want the whole story.”

  “Thank you, brother,” Cody said, then quickly changed the subject back to the call list. “I’ll bet we’ve got incoming calls from Garrett on here. We’ve got to check all his numbers—his house, his cell, the Appaloosa Club, his fellow gangbanger’s numbers against these.”

  “That’s what I mean,” Torkleson said. “We haven’t had time to match up any of the incoming or outgoing numbers yet. My shop needs to spend some time on them, figure out who was talking to who.”

  I realized we were through the gathering storm. I let my breath out slowly.

  Cody looked frustrated. “What if Garrett was using a burner?” he asked. “One of those damned Tracfones anyone can buy at Wal-Mart? Then the number doesn’t mean anything at all because we can’t link the owner to the phone.”

  Torkleson shrugged. “Unless we can prove Garrett bought it, with a credit-card receipt or something. You know how this works.”

  My heart dropped. I had thought for a few minutes it would be a matter of hours. Now I wasn’t sure they had anything at all.

  “You need to send that car,” Cody insisted. “Send it now, and haul in Garrett’s ass for questioning. We know he was there.”

  Torkleson was puzzled. “How do we know that?”

  “Jack heard his voice in the background when they called,” Cody said. “Didn’t you, Jack?”

  “I thought I did.”

  Torkleson took a moment to study me. “Are you sure?”

  “I can’t be absolutely positive,” I said, “but I thought I heard his voice in the background.”

  “And you’d testify to that?”

  I swallowed hard. “Yes.”

  “I’m confused,” Torkleson said, turning to Cody. “You said you were with some woman named Melissa when you got the call. Now you’re telling me this gentleman was there with you and actually took the call?”

  Cody waggled his eyebrows, Groucho Marx style. “The three of us were together, if you know what I mean.”

  Torkleson looked dubious.

  “Cody’s kidding,” I said quickly. “Melissa is my wife. The three of us were together, and Melissa’s phone rang. Because it was Brian’s phone calling but a voice she didn’t recognize, she handed the phone to me. I swear to God.”

  “Look,” Cody said, “if you haul Garrett downtown and start hammering him before he can manufacture a story, you might be able to get him to tell us some lies we can unravel.”

  “We?” Torkleson said. “Are you suggesting you be involved in the interrogation?”

  “I can watch him from outside,” Cody said, “feed you questions.”

  “And blow the whole case,” Torkleson said. “A suspended cop actively involved in the interrogation. That’ll play real well.”

  “Okay,” Cody said, “I’ll stay completely away. But I’m keeping these call logs. You can download another copy easy enough.”

  Torkleson wiped his forehead. He was sweating. He jabbed me in the breast. “The only reason I
have to send a car to the Morelands’ to request an interview with that kid is your statement. If it turns out he was in bed the whole evening or playing cards with his good judge daddy, my ass is grass. And so is yours.”

  “I understand.”

  He studied me a few more seconds, then looked to Cody.

  “Do it,” Cody said.

  Torkleson stepped away from both of us to use his cell phone. I could have kissed him at that moment. I overheard enough to hear him caution the uniforms to be polite and respectful and to explain clearly that Garrett was being asked to come and talk because of my direct assertion, not because there was any physical evidence. As I heard him, the reason for them going to the Moreland house sounded flimsy even to me.

  “You never know what he might say,” Cody whispered to me, “once we get him in the box with a tape recorder running. He may give us five things we can disprove later. And if you heard his voice, you heard his voice.

  “Good job back there, by the way. You gave him just enough. It sounded plausible. He bought it. Maybe you’d be a good cop.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”

  WE SAT in the waiting area for the next hour not reading magazines. All three of us looked up every time a nurse or doctor walked by. Melissa called three times. Each time I had to tell her we hadn’t heard anything yet regarding Brian’s condition.

  Torkleson was dozing when his cell burred. He sat up and patted all of his pockets in an unintentional imitation of Cody before he found his phone in his jacket pocket. He said his name and no more. As he listened, his face got red. The murderous glance he shot at Cody told me things had not gone well.

  “Okay, sir,” he said, biting his words off, “I’ll be down there as soon as I know about our victim. Yes, I’ll personally apologize.”

  He snapped his phone closed with such force I wondered if it would ever work again.

  “You burned me,” he said to both of us. “I’m in so much fucking trouble.”

  “What happened?” Cody asked, not affected by Torkleson’s vehemence.

  “My guys showed up at Judge Moreland’s house. The judge was furious. He called the mayor, who called the chief, who just called me. The judge says Garrett was home all night with him, and he refused to send his son to answer questions. He said Mr. McGuane here is harassing him because of a legal matter and that Cody Hoyt is a rogue cop who is completely out of control. The chief asked me why I was even associating with you, Cody.”