Dark Prison: Dark Falls, CO Romantic Thriller Book 9

by Ryan, Lori

  The officer apologized and looked uneasy as he explained Kemal had asked for an escort to her office.

  Eve waved him off. “It’s fine. He’s a friend. Thank you.”

  Kemal’s grin as the officer left made her heart do a little flip-flop and she mentally slapped it back into place. She wasn’t at all the kind of woman whose heart did little dances. Not that she wasn’t a woman under the stark black suits she wore to work each day, but she wasn’t that kind of woman. There was nothing fru-fru about her.

  But here she sat, feeling pretty damned fru-fru at the sight of this man.

  “Friend, huh?” Kemal said, eyes lit with humor.

  She shrugged. “The reality is a little complicated for a short explanation.”

  That seemed to pique his interest and he tilted his head. “Oh yeah. Why don’t you give me the long version?”

  Eve reached for the pencils on her desk and straightened them, lining them up on the left side of her blotter. “Uh, well, I guess we’re…” Damn, she had no idea what they were. She frowned at him. “Well, we’re um…”

  His smile only widened and his eyes held more than just a little hint of humor now. He was enjoying her discomfort. She was tempted to toss a paperclip at him, but had a feeling that would only make things worse.

  “How about we go to lunch? Friends go to lunch, right?”

  Her brows rose. “You want to get lunch together?”

  His smile dropped and he nodded. “I think I owe you that, at the very least after the way I treated you last night. I might have come off a little ….”

  “Unyielding? Unreasonable? Obstinate?”

  He grimaced.

  It was her turn to grin. “Did your dad tell you to apologize?”

  He shook his head, but what he said was, “maybe.”

  Eve looked at the clock. The mayor could wait until after lunch.

  Chapter Seven

  Kemal cursed himself six ways from Sunday the whole walk to the restaurant. His dad had told him he needed to apologize, but that didn’t mean he had to ask her to lunch.

  He’d been an ass to her the night before because the way he was attracted to her scared the hell out of him. It had always been that way with Eve Scanlon but she’d never given him the time of day. She’d always made it perfectly clear she saw him as her partner’s son. Nothing more.

  Except for last night. Last night, he thought he’d seen a flash of something in her eyes.

  But she’d just said she saw him as obstinate and unreasonable. Those descriptions had come to her too quickly for her not to have thought them in the past. So she couldn’t possibly have any interest in him. It was stupid to ask her to lunch.

  He held the door to a small Mexican restaurant open and Eve stepped in ahead of him.

  Based on the way they greeted her, he was guessing she’d been here before. They were shown to a booth in the far corner of the restaurant in an area that had no other tables around it. In fact, the way the booth was set up, they were around the corner from the rest of the restaurant and largely out of sight.

  He noticed Eve took the seat that let her have her back to the wall. Maybe she’d always done it or maybe it was a product of being a cop. He was guessing the latter. He knew his dad always did the same.

  He waited until they were alone before asking, “do they always seat you out of the way over here?”

  Eve pushed her menu aside, further proof she came often. “Usually, yes. They don’t really need to do it for me anymore since I’m not in uniform, but it’s a habit.”

  “What happens if you’re in uniform?”

  She looked uncomfortable. “Sometimes nothing. Sometimes people just want to say hi to us. Other times, they have something they want to get off their chests and it can be tricky. For the most part though, it just lets us have the chance to eat quickly without interruption. Patrol officers only get a half hour to eat. Many of the restaurants we go to have learned that and do their best to take our orders quickly and get our food out fast.”

  The person who sat them proved that by returning immediately with silverware and chips and salsa, ready to take their order. “What’ll it be, Captain?”

  They placed their order and handed over the menus and Kemal wondered why he didn’t know these things. His dad had been a cop for years.

  When Kemal was a kid, he’d thought his dad was a superhero, coming home in his uniform. Then one year, he’d had his dad come to his class to talk to them. Most of the kids had acted like it was cool when his dad was there, but soon they started calling him a traitor. They called Kemal Goody Goody Goodwin and said his dad was taking the side of the white man.

  It had been confusing for Kemal. When he got old enough to read about cops shooting black people, when he was old enough for the talk where his momma had to tell him how he had to behave around police officers, then he’d gotten it.

  And he’d rebelled like all hell. He’d proved to anyone who challenged him that he was anything but Goody Goody Goodwin.

  He wasn’t that kid anymore. He didn’t act out that way now, but the damage to his relationship with his dad had been done. He loved his dad and he knew his dad loved him but there was a barrier between them in some ways.

  Kemal taught history at the community college and one of the courses he taught was on black perspectives in the law. He’d talked to his dad a lot about the things he was teaching and his dad used to come talk to the class. He hadn’t in a long time.

  Still, sometimes the world of his dad’s life on the force was a mystery to him. If he was honest, even though he had listened to his dad tell his class why he joined the force dozens of times, it was still hard for Kemal to understand it. There was still some level of resentment there about his dad’s work.

  Eve surprised him by going just where his own thoughts had gone.

  “Do you still teach that course on communities of color and the law?”

  He nodded slowly, wondering where she was going with the question.

  “The mayor wants all of the unit captains to submit proposed policy changes to him. Things that will increase community support for the department after the recent events.”

  There was a twist to Eve’s lips as she said that last and he knew why. The whole city was calling for change at the police department after what had happened over the course of the last year. A serial killer who had plagued the city for years had turned out to be a detective in Eve’s unit and several people had been caught falsifying evidence in a number of cases.

  “And?” he asked.

  “And I thought if I’m going to submit suggestions for change, I should reach out to someone who’s studied the topic from a perspective other than my own for input.”

  Kemal had to grin at that. “This is you reaching out? Waiting for me to invite you to lunch and then asking me?”

  She smiled back and gave a small shrug of her shoulders.

  He let her get away with the nonresponse. “There are a lot of steps you could take that would change things for the better for the black people in our community. The department’s use of body cameras has been spotty so far, with only a few patrol officers being issued. That should be a priority. Every patrol officer should wear one.”

  She nodded. “There are budgetary constraints with that but we’re working on it. It’s something that’s at the top of our list as we talk to the city council about funding needs, but I’m going to put that into my report to the mayor also.”

  “Good,” he said, “but it’s not nearly enough.”

  Oddly, the sense that someone was just trying to be polite when he talked to someone who wasn’t part of the black community wasn’t there with her. He felt like her interest was genuine. Like she wasn’t just giving him a chance to talk so she could say she’d done her good deed for the day.

  Or maybe it was just because it was Eve.

  “Officers see a black man in the clothes of our culture, in baggy jeans or a hoodie, as a thug or a drug dealer. That
needs to change. The way we’re perceived has to change or we won’t see equality in justice. Ending broken window policing would be a big step, too,” he said.

  He didn’t stop. If she was going to give him the chance to talk to her about these issues, he would take it. “When police officers are called out for things like a broken window or loitering, loud music, that kind of thing, it can lead to a conflict situation where there doesn’t need to be one. There can be alternative workers set up for those types of calls. Neighborhood liaisons or community social workers. Whatever you want to call them. Someone who is out in the community on a regular basis, who’s seen as a support not as enforcement, can handle those calls and only call out the police if their efforts fail. Or not call the police out at all. If the call was for jaywalking, why does someone need to answer that call?”

  Eve nodded. “Those are all things I can look into, and I will.”

  “Why do I feel like there’s a but in there?” He asked. Hell, here it was. He really didn’t want to hear Eve tell him what he’d heard hundreds of times before. That black Americans were blowing this out of proportion.

  “No but,” she said. “I meant what I said. Those are all good things for me to look into.”

  “But?” he pressed.

  She laughed and shook her head. “It’s really not a but. I’m just wondering if you teach anything about the police perspective in your class. I watch the dashcam or body cam footage of police involved shootings pretty often. Whenever it’s put out there, I watch it again and again looking for answers. I try not to second guess or play armchair quarterback because I wasn’t there. It’s not fair for me to try to speculate about what the officer was seeing or feeling in that moment on scene. But I watch them because I’m looking for anything I can learn from them. Any little thing that might help me make sure that everyone goes home at the end of the day.”

  She held his gaze. “And I mean everyone. From the officers to the suspect to anyone involved in a stop. There are times I watch and I think, that officer sounds completely panicked and I have to ask myself if that officer had what he needed to be on the streets, to be doing that job. Did he get the right training before he was sent out there? Panicked is not the way I ever want my officers to be. Ever. But I also watch times where the situation changes on a dime. In a split second, a routine stop costs the officer his life. I remember one video of a female officer pulling over a man and his child is there with him.”

  She seemed to steel herself with a small shake of her head. “He’s out of the car and the officer’s telling him to stop, not to move toward her. She doesn’t fire on him, didn’t draw her weapon, and I can’t blame her for that at all. If I was in her shoes, I’d probably have handled it the same way. She didn’t want to draw on him. Didn’t want to use deadly force and once you pull that weapon, deadly force is on the table. You’ve escalated things once you do that. So she’s trying to avoid that, but from one breath to the next he’s on her. One minute she’s okay and the next, he’s moved on her so fast, she can’t stop him. His kid is watching him, this little girl, and he beats the officer to within an inch of her life in front of his child and leaves her on the road to die.

  “She lived, but she was never the same. Never able to return to the force. She’ll suffer from the medical and emotional repercussions of that attack for the rest of her life.”

  Kemal didn’t respond. He wanted to see where she’d go with this. There were times he felt like almost every black man he’d talked to about the issue. Filled with rage that they were forced to live in such a different world than that of the white people they shared the city with. But one of the things he’d learned to do as a professor was shut up and listen. There were times he’d shut up and listen to people and all they spouted was inane crap that showed him they would likely never see things from someone else’s perspective.

  Other times, though, it could lead to a conversation where each person walked away the better for it, able to see some part of the other’s view. So he listened.

  “I’ve seen dozens of those videos and know of even more cases where there are no videos,” she said. “And I can tell you what it feels like to go to a domestic violence call or make a traffic stop or roll up on a fight and know you’re going to be vulnerable when you take that call.”

  She kept talking, their food forgotten. “But I also know you can show me a million videos where I can second guess a decision made by an officer if I allowed myself to do that. Where I can’t tell you for sure that the color of a person’s skin wasn’t in play there. I think your impression is that we all want to deny the problem, but the thing is, I genuinely want the officer and anyone they engage with to be alive and well at the end of the day. Someone once said to me they thought it was great that we had all these procedures in place to screen applicants to the force and then all these procedures to continue that screening and assessment of cadets in the academy. She thought it was great. She said to me, I bet you cut down the people who have no business being on the force to a few percent or something.”

  Eve shook her head. “She thought she was congratulating us on our success, but I asked her what about that few percent? Those few percent who get through, they matter. Craig Patel mattered. A lot. And that means we can’t ever stop trying to do better, to be better.”

  Kemal knew Craig Patel was the detective who’d worked under her but who had been a serial killer for years. He couldn’t imagine what that felt like to her and the others on the force. Hell, his dad had worked with the man and hadn’t known he was evil incarnate the whole time.

  She was still shaking her head. “He mattered and we didn’t catch him in our screening somehow. So, yeah, I try not to play armchair quarterback on every police shooting that happens, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to find every way possible to be sure the men and women in our department are making the best decisions they can when they engage anyone in our community, including the people of color we serve. And I’ll keep having conversations with anyone I think can help with that, even if they’re uncomfortable. What I don’t want to see happen, though, is for my officers to feel like they’re under attack while we try to find those solutions.”

  Kemal pushed aside his plate. “I remember confronting my dad about a cop shooting when I was a teenager. He tried to tell me it was complicated, but I was so damned angry at him for what I saw as taking their side. The white man’s side,” he said ruefully, shaking his head. “But in all honesty, he didn’t talk to me much about what it was like to be on the force. I think he didn’t want to share that side of things with us. Like he wanted to keep the ugliness he saw at the job there, instead of bringing it home. To me, though, it meant I didn’t get the chance to understand why he was doing what he did.”

  Eve pushed her plate to the edge of the table as well. “He talked to me some about what he felt working and how it felt to grow up feeling like there was an ‘us’ and ‘them’ side to everything he experienced. How his life was different from mine in so many ways. I remember a day we were all looking for a murder suspect we knew was in the area. He was armed and had just killed three people in a convenience store robbery. Patrol units were called out, but the detectives were also out looking for him. Your dad called the house and told your mom not to let you leave the house.”

  Kemal frowned. He didn’t know which particular incident she was talking about. It had happened more than once.

  “I was driving and he didn’t take more than a minute to tell your mom to keep you inside because this was in a neighborhood not too far from where you all lived. I assumed he didn’t want you out so you wouldn’t run into the suspect. But that wasn’t it at all.”

  Kemal didn’t need to be told. “He didn’t want me out with that many officers out looking for a suspect.”

  Eve nodded. “The man we were looking for was black. Your dad knew it was risky you being out there with officers searching for a black suspect. The man we were looking for was in his thirties and y
ou were only eighteen, but your dad said it didn’t matter, and I knew in my gut then that he was right. And I knew it was something I would never have had to worry about.”

  She looked at him and went on. “I think in some ways, him working at the department was his way to try to break down some of that wall of distrust. A way to break down the barriers, so there wasn’t always an us and them.”

  “Shades of gray,” Kemal said and he wasn’t surprised to see Eve smile. He would guess she heard that from her dad more than once when they were partners.

  “Shades of gray,” Eve repeated.

  Chapter Eight

  Eve didn’t mind making the call to the mayor’s office after lunch. She had ideas she wanted to talk to him about.

  She had some ideas brewing in her head and she wanted to feel him out about them before she put them in the written report he’d asked for.

  For the most part, she liked Carl Dobson but there were times she thought he was more worried about how his decisions would poll with the public than whether they were the right decisions. It wasn’t in-your-face or blatant, but it was there as an undercurrent to everything he did.

  “I wasn’t sure you were going to return my call,” he said, making a joke out of the rebuke. Yes, she should have called him as soon as she got to the office.

  She ignored it and plowed ahead with her idea. “I actually wanted to talk to you about something. I know you want all of the unit heads bringing you ideas for improving accountability and community relations, but I wonder if maybe we’re going about this wrong.”

  He was quiet so she kept going. “What if we impanel a community board of sorts to help on the idea of accountability and transparency? If we want to know how to better serve the community, maybe we should be asking the community for input. And a dialogue between us and some of the leaders in the community might help build back the trust we’ve lost.”

  She held her breath, knowing the loss of trust was largely on her unit, but she meant what she said. She wanted to do what she could to earn it back.