by Steven James
“They had baseball bats.”
“They?” I thought again of the unidentified DNA at the crime scenes thirteen years ago.
An accomplice?
“I recognized Basque,” Ralph said, “but it was too dark to see the other guy’s face.” He shook his head, obviously frustrated with himself for not taking out both baseball bat-wielding assailants. “The second guy got me from behind. At least I managed to break Basque’s arm. Fast and clean. But they both got away.”
So Basque was back and he had a partner.
Perfect.
I was observing the evidence of the fight in the living room. Overturned furniture. Blood spatter. Broken lamps.
Dozens of handwritten letters were scattered across the floor, each signed “Love, Richard” and I remembered what Ralph had told me about how quickly Renee went through boyfriends. The pieces began to fall into place. “He seduced her?” I said. “From prison? Is that it?”
“Yeah.” Ralph motioned toward the letters. “He wrote to her for over a year. She found the evidence to help get him free. Then he turned on her.” Apparently Basque’s conveniently timed conversion in prison hadn’t changed his true nature one bit.
“Do we know if she faked the DNA evidence to get him released?”
“Believe me, we’re looking into it.”
I wondered how Rodale fit in with all of this-if he did at all.
Ralph gestured toward the kitchen. “Renee’s in there. Or at least most of her is.”
Lien-hua emerged from the doorway and I was glad when Ralph went on ahead to let us talk for a second. She’d spent a lot of time with Cheyenne over the last week, helping her recover, and we’d put our relationship on hold for the time being. “Cheyenne likes you,” Lien-hua had told me. “It’s obvious. But she has enough to recover from right now. I don’t want to hurt her any worse.”
I couldn’t argue with that, even though distance from Lien-hua was not what I wanted.
It’ll work out, I’d told myself. We just need to get past this. Settle in. It’s going to be okay.
Now Lien-hua walked toward me, and behind her I saw four members of the Evidence Response Team, including Cassidy and Farraday, moving around the kitchen.
I couldn’t see much, but the refrigerator door was open, and Cassidy and two agents I didn’t know were gathered around it. He held up a jar. From where I stood it was impossible to make out what was inside, but the woman next to him grew pale, hurried out of my line of sight. I heard vomiting.
Splayed across the linoleum floor I saw a frenzy of blood.
Lien-hua must have seen the look of anger on my face. “Pat, I know you vowed to stop him, but this wasn’t your fault.”
“I know.”
“You couldn’t have prevented this.”
Not unless I’d killed him in Chicago last month.
The road to the unthinkable is not paved by slight departures from your heart but by tentative forays into it.
I was reminded of my somber thoughts at Calvin’s funeral: we’re born, we struggle, we endure, we die, and there’s hardly anything left to show we were ever here.
Dust to dust.
Ashes to ashes.
The grim poetry of existence.
But life is more than that.
We foray into our hearts and look for ways to rise above them.
We ache and we love, we hurt and we heal.
Human beings, being human.
The sunlight was playing strangely across the linoleum.
Death matters because life matters, and the day I stop believing that is the day I’ll no longer be any good at my job.
But for now, I still am.
I approached the refrigerator.
And peered inside.
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