The Price of Innocence

by Lisa Black

  ‘No,’ she assured him, wondering if there could be crumbs in the pocket of her windbreaker. But if it had broken, it would have detonated, right? And probably cut her body in half.

  The M.E. thanked the commander. ‘This is why we need a new building,’ he added to no one in particular, no doubt writing the press release in his head as he spoke. ‘No more off-site storage. Every piece of paper, evidence and samples need to be under our roof at all times.’

  The commander nodded politely and left. The M.E. wasted no time in ordering his staff back to work, but Leo stayed at her elbow. ‘You told him the truth, right? There’s nothing else you’re carting around?’

  ‘No. Thanks for sticking up for me to the M.E.’

  Her boss laughed, as if at her naivety. ‘Every once in a while I have to make him toe the line. No one can berate my people like that.’

  ‘Except you.’

  He didn’t hesitate. ‘Exactly.’

  FIVE

  Wednesday

  The funeral took place in a sporadic rain, more like a heavy mist that provided a suitably grave atmosphere but also flattened some of her reddish curls and made others stick out in the wrong direction. It gave her yet another reason to hide underneath an umbrella, had she thought to bring one along with her inexplicable sense of guilt.

  A large crowd trampled the wet grass despite the short notice. The local Jewish community had vast experience in making sure the funeral took place within a day, according to their custom. They had quickly put together a proper ceremony for Marty Davis even though he had never, so far as anyone knew, attended temple. Nor did his fellow officers hesitate to brush off their dress blues in order to support one of their own.

  The men and women in uniform had all been decent to her, regarding her with more curiosity than censure, but still she felt culpable. She should have run, not walked, out of the house as soon as she heard the bang. She might have seen the guy, or guys. Why hadn’t she heard a car, why hadn’t she heard it pull in, or pull out? Had anyone been behind them when she followed Officer Davis’ vehicle to the scene? Could anyone else have been in the house, around the back of it? Why hadn’t she run down the driveway after seeing the cop was dead, even before calling Dispatch? Why hadn’t she been more observant?

  None of the cops at the funeral asked her those questions. That did not stop her from asking herself.

  Internal Affairs had asked, of course, immediately after the incident, whipped her into one of those bleak little rooms with the built-in cameras, the rooms they used to question criminals, but they had only wanted to dot every i and cross every t. Each man – and she didn’t remember any of their names hours later, she couldn’t tell Frank when he was finally permitted to see her – had been kind, even in their frustration at her lack of knowledge. It frustrated her, too, embarrassed her to have to answer continually, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see, I didn’t hear, I don’t know.’

  One day later Marty Davis’ death remained a complete mystery. He had no spouse or angry girlfriend, wasn’t cheating with someone else’s wife, did not have any unexplained sums of money. It seemed an unlikely neighborhood for a cop-hating thug to pull a drive-by. Marty had arrested a lot of people in his twenty-odd years as an officer and received his share of threats from same, but none so far had panned out into a serious suspect.

  The Brooklyn Heights Cemetery thronged with blue uniforms, as well as civilian attire in respectfully dark colors. Theresa’s eye caught one person who didn’t fit in: hovering at the edge of the crowd stood a thin man whose clothes were dark but also worn and sloppy. He scratched at the fringe of a beard with the agitation of a drug addict and spoke to no one, indeed avoided the eyes of the men in uniform surrounding him. Theresa would have taken him for a cemetery employee or chauffeur, someone who did not wish to be there, were it not for the look of abject misery he aimed toward the open grave.

  ‘Officer Davis had a lot of friends,’ Theresa said to her cousin.

  ‘I’ll bet most of these people never met him,’ Frank said. He had gotten away from the Bingham with fewer scratches on his face than she did, but had one rather deep cut near his left ear. ‘But he was shot in the line of duty. It’s a cop thing.’

  ‘Well, of course—’

  ‘It’s also a photo op.’ He gazed without expression at several men in the most resplendent uniforms present.

  ‘Are you getting anywhere on the investigation?’

  ‘No. You been OK? No nightmares, anything like that?’

  She shook her head. ‘Why would I be traumatized? It was over before I knew enough to feel afraid, and whoever did it obviously had no interest in me.’ Her car had been parked right behind Davis’. The shooter needed only to come inside the unlocked house to find her, alone and unarmed. But he hadn’t. He had come to kill Marty Davis only.

  Leaving the body for her to explain, the day after she’d nearly been blown to bits. Theresa allowed herself a moment of self-pity. Suddenly she had been surrounded by bodies. So much death.

  Then she remembered that she worked in a morgue and spent every day surrounded by bodies, and that absurdity forced out a strangled chuckle. To cover it she asked if Frank had located any family.

  ‘None. Only a mother, now deceased, who bought these cemetery plots. She must have figured her boy for the eternal bachelor type. No siblings, no kids, no exes, not even a current girlfriend. He left all his belongings to some woman who’s still in the area but hasn’t contacted us yet. Of course he filled out the beneficiary form shortly after he began working for the department so she may have completely forgotten about him by now.’

  ‘That’s pretty sad.’

  ‘I’ll find out this afternoon when I go talk to her. Let’s hope the bigwigs are brief, or we’re all going to be soaked to the skin before this is over. I should go stand with the rest of the unit. You want to—’

  ‘I’ll stay here.’ She still felt awkward, out of place.

  ‘Probably a good idea. There’s press here, you know they’ll be on you like flies on honey if they recognize you.’

  ‘I’ve got it. Say it’s an open investigation and nothing else, not even the tiniest detail.’

  ‘There’s so little to go on as it is.’

  Thanks to me, she almost said aloud, but instead just summoned up a smile as he squeezed her elbow, then threaded his way between two women in their thirties standing in front of Theresa. They were not in uniform. One sniffled, raising a damp tissue to her nose.

  The melancholy settled on Theresa’s shoulders once more. People weren’t supposed to die on her watch. They were supposed to be dead already, before they got to her watch.

  The mist abruptly stopped dripping on to her scalp, and a glance upward told her why. A tall blond man had stepped up beside her; by holding his black umbrella slightly off center he gave her some protection and still kept himself dry. She glanced up with a quick, grateful smile, which he returned. Then he returned his attention to the people closest to the grave, who were obviously preparing to speak.

  The girl in the trench coat sniffled again. This earned her, instead of sympathy, a derisive glance from her companion. ‘Come on. You didn’t even know him.’

  ‘I did too. I must have dispatched him to twenty calls a week, for the past four years.’

  ‘He was just a voice on the radio.’

  ‘They’re all voices on the radio, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to know them. I can tell when they’re excited or they’re bored or they’re having a bad day. Can’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. And he was always having a bad day.’

  Trench Coat sniffled again. ‘That’s not true. He would never get snippy with me, no matter how busy things got. You’re just mad because he broke Devin’s nose. That was three years ago.’

  ‘Well, why did he have to brawl with his own friends? Why couldn’t he be like any other self-respecting cop and beat up suspects when he needs to unwind?’ She chuckled at her own joke. At least Theresa h
oped it was a joke.

  ‘He was too professional,’ Trench Coat insisted, but weakly.

  ‘Hah. He did a traffic stop on Sunday for a busted brake light, and after I ran the plate he let the guy go. You know why?’

  ‘Shhh.’ The chaplain had cleared his throat and begun, ‘Martin Davis spent more than half his life with the police department—’

  The second woman lowered her voice, but went on. ‘Because it was freakin’ Bruce Lambert, that’s why! The only guy in the city who can afford the fine, and little Marty gets stars in his eyes and lets him skate.’

  ‘Shhh,’ the woman in the long coat said again, and they quieted. Theresa listened as an officer described as Marty’s best friend gave a long and rambling history of the man, from his youth as a budding criminal to his post-college-dropout epiphany when he realized that he could help send other people to jail or go there himself and resolved to turn his life around. His friends saw Marty as honest, humble and extremely hard-working, a thoroughly professional officer – this earned a snort from one of the women standing in front of Theresa, obviously still miffed about that broken nose – and a great loss to the police force, especially needed at this time when Cleveland found itself under attack. Listening between the lines, Theresa heard that the dead man had not been the brightest candle in the menorah, but he had been hearty and loyal.

  The thin agitated man had backed up into a copse of trees, completely outside the circle of cops, wiping his eyes with the cuff of his jacket.

  Next the bagpipes played – ‘Danny Boy’, of course, which some sadist had long ago dictated must be played at all police funerals – and Theresa wiped her own eyes. Tears threatened all the more when, once again, her mind returned to two facts: that she, who hadn’t even bothered to learn his name, had been the last friendly face Marty Davis had seen on this planet, and that if she had done one single thing differently that morning he might still be alive. She had no idea what that one thing might have been, but still it had to be, it stood to reason – if she had taken more or less time to get to the scene, if she had gone out to her car for equipment—

  And round and round.

  When she began to sniffle like Trench Coat, the man beside her seemed to draw closer but without actually moving, and she glanced at him again. Broad without being heavy, he had blue eyes and a smile like a shy boy’s. Quite tall, but the way he curved his back as if to apologize for it made her think he was not a cop. As the last of the bagpipes’ notes faded into the air, she asked in a whisper, ‘Were you a friend of Marty’s?’

  He hesitated before answering. ‘He was nice to me during my wife’s case.’

  As he had no wife with him, this seemed a daunting line of inquiry. Had the wife been assaulted? Forcibly committed? Killed? It had to be something serious to warrant coming to the funeral of the officer involved. It sounded as if Marty Davis had always worked patrol so how involved in any one case would he have become? Perhaps they lived in the same neighborhood, and it had been some ongoing thing. Or perhaps this guy was one of those weirdos who liked to go to funerals.

  He seemed to flush just a bit, and she realized she was staring. Then they both faced straight ahead as the chaplain made a few closing remarks.

  But he didn’t seem weird, and at least the umbrella had salvaged what was left of her hairstyle. A little make-up covered most of the bruises and scratches on her face, but she still probably looked as if she’d recently been caught in the path of a Peterbilt.

  The gathered officers all turned on their radios to go through the ghostly ‘last call’ procedure. An unseen dispatcher hailed Marty by his radio number three times, the numbers echoing unanswered, and the woman in the trench coat began to sob. Theresa felt like joining her. Her tissue no longer did any good at all and she fished a napkin out of another pocket, folding it in half to hide the cheery Wendy’s logo.

  The man touched Theresa’s elbow, as if to support her, but then he leaned down to her ear and said, ‘There’s a reporter heading for you. Do you want to talk to her?’

  ‘No.’ She had not helped this investigation at all so far, and leaking details to the perfectly made-up young woman coming her way might harm it. Besides, she had nothing to add to what the press already knew.

  ‘Come this way.’ The ceremony over, the mourners all began to move at once. Some continued to sniffle while others struck up conversations in normal, even boisterous, tones. As Frank had suggested, few people were there from personal grief, many more simply to show the respect due a fellow officer. She stayed underneath the man’s umbrella and they strolled behind a few trees and the group of high-ranking uniforms. When she glanced back, the young woman with the notepad had diverted to the fire chief.

  ‘How did you know she was a reporter?’ Theresa asked her protector.

  ‘After a while you learn to spot them.’

  Like how a criminal recognizes a cop, no matter how they’re dressed, she thought, but really didn’t want to pry into what had happened to his wife or how he had become so cognizant of the media. Of course, she did want to know. ‘How did you know she wanted to talk to me?’

  ‘Her line of sight got really focused. Besides, I recognized you from the papers, so I’m sure she did too. You’re the one who – who was with him, weren’t you?’ His face, already solemn, grew even more so with the question.

  ‘Yes.’

  He opened his mouth, shut it again, watched the uneven ground passing beneath their feet – like her, he wanted to ask but didn’t want to ask. Unlike her, he did. ‘Was it quick?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very quick.’

  He did the looking down, frowning process again and this time added a nod. ‘Good. Well, I have to go.’

  They had reached the first line of vehicles. ‘Thanks for sharing your umbrella.’

  He offered to let her keep it and she refused. Then he looked over at the grave one more time – not that he could see it through the crowd – as if reluctant to walk away. Turned to go.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked, surprising herself.

  ‘David.’ He shook her hand. ‘David Madison.’

  She reciprocated, then let him slip his fingers out of hers and weave between the rows of parked cars. He did not look back, nor did he speak to anyone else. Drops of water once again penetrated her hair to dampen her scalp.

  The reporter remained lost in the crowd. The bagpipers were hustling to get their instruments out of the wet weather and the woman in the trench coat had found a uniformed man to put an arm around her.

  Frank popped up on her left. ‘What were you talking to him for?’

  ‘Huh? What?’

  ‘That guy with the umbrella. Who is he? I know I know him from somewhere.’

  ‘David Madison?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s it! He’s the husband.’

  ‘Whose husband?’

  ‘Deirdre Madison, the teacher. Don’t you remember that case?’

  ‘No, what happened to her?’ Please don’t let it be too tragic, she thought. That man doesn’t deserve tragic.

  Frank glowed with the kind of regretful excitement any human feels for really good gossip. ‘She’s in jail. She had an affair with a student.’

  ‘And she went to jail?’

  ‘The kid was thirteen. Fifteen when they were caught, thirteen when it started.’

  Theresa stared at him.

  ‘Sick, right? And they had two boys of their own, right around the same age. That’s how she got involved with the kid – besides having him in her class, he played on the same soccer team as her son. Can you believe that? I wish we’d had teachers like that when I was in school. Oh, stop scowling at me. Every guy thinks the same thing.’

  ‘You wouldn’t if it was your son.’

  This conundrum stumped her cousin, and he pondered it for so long she punched his arm. Men.

  ‘Anyway,’ he sidestepped, ‘It’d be bad enough to have your wife dump you for another man, but a little kid …’


  She turned away, searching until she saw David Madison reach a worn sedan. He closed the umbrella and got in. Did he glance back at her just before tucking himself into the car’s interior?

  ‘… what goes through the head of a guy like that?’ Frank asked.

  SIX

  ‘The Bingham was blown up by what?’

  ‘Vlads,’ Angela told him. Angela was relatively new to homicide and as carefully neutral as a woman, and one with some color, needed to be. At times he worried that this neutrality spilled over into their personal lives, that there were still worlds about her of which Frank knew nothing. On the other hand, he saw no reason to rush things. They’d both seen too many of their colleagues’ relationships crash and burn.

  ‘I nearly got disintegrated by a bunch of vampires?’

  ‘No, Georgians. As in Georgia in Europe, not the place with magnolia trees and the Falcons. They say the current president there stole the election from a Vladimir Minksky.’

  ‘So go blow up freakin’ Russia or something,’ Frank protested. ‘Why us?’

  ‘The Vlads say that the current president got much of his funding from expats in Cleveland. And there are a lot of them. Seven per cent of our foreign born population is from Ukraine and Yugoslavia alone, with other eastern European sites close behind.’

  ‘What did they expect to accomplish? As if anyone in DC or freakin’ Russia or Georgia or wherever would care if Cleveland got blown off the map.’ Frank hit the brake for a red light at East Sixty-Fifth, maybe a bit too hard.

  ‘You OK?’ Angela asked.

  ‘Why does everyone keep asking me that?’

  ‘Because you did nearly get disintegrated and buried beneath four floors of rubble, and then your cousin winds up at the scene of a cop killing?’

  ‘Thanks for reminding me,’ he grumbled, wondering, not for the first time, if Angela and Theresa ever talked about him behind his back. Theresa was blood and Angela was his partner, but they were women, and women felt anything they did could be justified. ‘My money’s on the building owner. No one can afford trendy downtown lofts any more. Most of the units were vacant – just as well, kept the body count low – and he had to be running into the red.’