The Weeping Buddha

by Heather Dune Macadam

  “I know you will!” His eyes blazed back at her, an equal opponent on a level playing field.

  “Are you two through? Ken and I want to have our black-eyed peas and collards before the year 2003! And we do have another body.” Jo started washing her hands as Devon pulled out the print tray.

  “You really think what you eat New Year’s day brings you luck?” Lochwood asked.

  “What are you going to do for luck, celebrate the New Year by arresting someone?”

  Gary and Jo chuckled. He gave them a small smile, but Devon had to wonder when she and Loch were going to start building traditions outside of the department. On their second date they had busted a serial convenience-store robber, on their third they had stopped an attempted murder. Loch’s idea of a date was multiple arrests first, multiple orgasms later.

  Devon wanted something more than working cases together, clandestine coffee clutches, and making love on the sly. But what was that something? Sometimes she wanted him to leave his wife, so they could at least have a chance to see if they worked as a couple. Sometimes she was afraid he would leave his wife, and then they’d have to face each other completely, with no way out. She liked her independence and didn’t want to have to answer to anyone. Then again, the thought of life without Loch seemed bleak and dull.

  She still wasn’t sure why she had dropped the dating scene and become exclusive with Loch. Maybe it was because she knew that even though he was married he wasn’t seeing anyone else, including his poor wife. Devon was touched that Loch couldn’t leave Marty, and, while it got in the way of their relationship, she couldn’t help but respect him for not abandoning his schizophrenic wife. It wasn’t as though Devon wanted to settle down and have a family, was it? That was not on her list of priorities. She had played around with the idea of adopting and raising a kid, but didn’t see how anyone could do that and have her career. She certainly didn’t know how the other female cops did it, and didn’t see them enough to ask.

  Jo and Loch took off their lab coats in preparation to go to the next autopsy room and left Devon to print the victim alone. She didn’t think about Gabriel Montebello the artist and friend as she pressed the ink roller across his palm. Instead she thought about the crime that had been committed against him. It was the act of malevolence that she was concerned with, not her own sense of loss. With the palm prints secured, she rolled each finger, pulling the body’s own uncopyable Social Security identification form.

  Finished with the first body, Devon hesitated outside the door of Beka’s autopsy room. Loch and Gary were standing in front of her and blocking the upper portion of the body. She waited and watched Jo move around the room with her scalpel, speaking into her microphone about the cause of death. Devon inhaled deeply, then shut the door behind her with barely a click of the latch, staying inconspicuous along the perimeter of the room.

  “We have a dilemma here, guys,” Jo was saying to Loch and Gary. “She slit her wrists, and I’d hazard to say loss of blood was the cause of death. But look at her eyes.”

  Devon looked, then turned her head.

  “What was time of death, Jo?” Gary asked.

  “Twenty to thirty minutes after Gabriel Montebello’s. I can’t tell you what her blood-alcohol level was yet.” She smiled at Loch as if she’d beat him to the question. “But I can tell you the stomach contents.” She noticed Devon at that moment, then spoke to her assistant. “We’ll run a chem test for Norflex; that seems most likely considering the prescription found at the scene. The dilation in the pupil indicates cardiac arrest—possibly from drugs. I’ve seen it before. People who really want to die have a back-up plan. And if she really wanted to die, she might have OD’d to help stem the pain of slitting her wrists. The answer will be in the heart, but I’m not sure we’re ready for a Y incision yet.” She looked at Devon.

  Devon wasn’t sure she was ever going to be ready for that. Her eyes burned. “Maybe I should print her first, then you can finish,” she suggested.

  Jo stepped back from the body and pulled her gloves off. “Why don’t we leave you alone for a few moments. Come on, boys.”

  Devon tried to nod her appreciation and say thank you, but could not find her voice. She felt Loch’s hand on her shoulder as they left the room, and the tears she had held at bay for thirteen hours finally soothed the heat in her eyes. She didn’t hear the door shut, but she could tell the room was empty by the absence of anyone else’s breathing. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, as she reached out to hold her best friend’s hand for the last time.

  CHAPTER TEN

  For I knew that I would pay dearly

  In prison, in the grave, in the madhouse,

  Wherever someone like me must awaken.

  —J. BRODSKY, About the 1910’s

  Immediately after Beka’s autopsy Devon and Loch headed out of the M.E. building. He could tell she was upset by the furrowed line between her eyebrows, but he didn’t want to push her to confide in him. “See you later?”

  She shook her head. “I need some time alone. I’ve got something on the Jack Daniel’s bottle that doesn’t fit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The label, for one thing.”

  “I just figured she was bonding with the bottle, remembering Todd Daniels, and feeling sorry for herself.”

  “I found a print inside the neck of it.” She pressed her car’s remote and automatically unlocked the driver’s door from across the lot.

  “Whose?”

  “I don’t know yet. There’s another set of prints on the knife.”

  “What?”

  “Yep, and they don’t match the print in the bottle. There’s also a waxy residue on the knife, very strange.”

  “Is it possible the print inside the bottle was left there by someone doing that whole ritual of rinsing then drying recyclables?”

  “Oh come on! If Beka was feeling so sentimental why would she wipe her prints off the outside of the bottle after she ripped part of the label off?”

  “Dev, I know where you’re going with this, but just because she didn’t shoot him like most spouses do nowadays doesn’t mean she didn’t kill him. She was Japanese. Different.”

  Devon looked stunned. “She was American! I know more about Japanese culture than she does! Did.”

  He knew he’d slipped up, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit it. “You’re so close to this case you can’t trust your own nose. You’re a damn good detective, but take Frank’s lead. Face it, you are connected to this. Finding out that your best friend is capable of murder is a horrifying thought. I can’t even imagine what you’re feeling right now.”

  She was finally listening to him, and as he spoke he saw the defensive line along her forehead drop from her face.

  “You’ve lost two friends.” He took her hand and squeezed it. “It looks like she took an overdose with complete foreknowledge that she was going to kill her husband and then kill herself—if that’s true, then she staged a death scene and the whole house is a theater set, right down to where she left his body. We’re talking about an actress here. She wasn’t just a dancer and you know it. Beka was always staging scenes, in public and in private, and the bottle was one of her props, just like the sword.”

  “And if it isn’t how it looks?” she asked coolly.

  “Then somebody else staged the scene. But we have to figure out what is real first,” he reminded her. “Put yourself in my position, Devon. If this was all an act, I need you to be aware of what that means.” He let his words sink in. “She knew you were working last night. She knew you would be at the scene. Isn’t it possible that she left that Jack Daniel’s bottle for you?”

  “She didn’t cut her own hair, Loch. I know that.”

  “How? Intuition?” He softened his voice but spoke plainly and clearly. “You didn’t even know she was leaving her husband.”

  She kicked the snow into the pavement. He knew that she was kicking herself and pondering the same question that had
occurred to him but he would never voice—what kind of best friend was she? They hadn’t spoken in almost six months. What did that make Beka, an ex—best friend? A dead ex—best friend.

  “If there’s a message from her on your machine when you get home, I want you to remember what I said. What if, and this is a big if, Devon, but it’s one I have to examine …” He looked her straight in the eyes. “What if Beka wanted to fuck with you? Isn’t it possible that she left you personal clues because of the fight you two had?” He saw her wince but could not regret his words. He was a tough investigaheather tor; that’s what made him a good detective, not mincing around the obvious or ignoring the less apparent.

  “It’s not possible,” she said sadly, “but maybe that’s what happened.”

  She left him standing in the precinct parking lot feeling as if he had kicked her guts out. He could feel the chasm inside her and wanted to fill it so the pain and loss would go away. He hadn’t felt like that in a long time—the desire to cherish someone so badly it hurt. He couldn’t stand to see her leave him behind, but as he watched she got in her car and drove off without looking back.

  He had two choices: He could continue working or he could swing by the house and check on his daughter and his wife. Normally he would have kept working the case, but he felt he owed at least an appearance to his daughter—Marty wouldn’t notice one way or the other. He followed the faint trace of Devon’s green tea perfume still lingering in the air to his car and got in.

  He patted the head of the toy dalmatian Devon had given him which had taken up permanent residence on his dashboard. She had found it in the Staten Island dumps while sorting through the rubble and debris of 9/11. It was the kind that belonged on a fireman’s dashboard. It looked like her dog Boo with a patch of soot around the eye. She had slipped it into her pocket, unwilling to leave it behind in the remains and ruins of so many lives. Covered with dirt and smelling like tragedy, the head now bobbed at him happily innocent.

  The drive home took less than ten minutes, and for fun he ran license plates on his computer as he followed unknowing holiday travelers down the LIE Usually, Devon would be right in there with him, running tags, speculating on the passengers in the cars they passed. He felt alone, and as much as he hated to admit it to himself, it didn’t feel right.

  The Brennen house was as nondescript as the neighborhood within which it was nestled. Everything was typical of a suburban neighborhood, with about as much care and forethought as the plastic houses in a Monopoly game. It was inside his house that the scene changed.

  He walked in the back door and through the kitchen where his daughter Brea, unsurprisingly, was on the phone. She waved, then turned her back on him in order to preserve her privacy. He squeezed her shoulder and headed upstairs to Marty’s room.

  He knocked twice. Waited. Then announced, “Marty, it’s me,” as he opened the door.

  “They were here again.” Her voice was so tiny and high-pitched she sounded like a cartoon character.

  He kissed her forehead and sat down next to her. “That wasn’t real, honey.”

  “But I heard them.”

  “I know.” He couldn’t go into it tonight. The doctor had told him to be specific with her every time she spoke about her delusions, but he knew she would argue for her hallucinations and he didn’t have the energy tonight to fight her insanity.

  “I told them you were a cop and would arrest them if they didn’t leave.” She was sitting, as she always was, in the center of the room with all the curtains drawn.

  “Did that work?”

  “They always come when you’re gone. Why can’t you be here more?”

  “I’m staking out the house, honey. You know, I’m right outside.”

  “They’re so sneaky. How do they get past you?”

  They had had eight fairly happy years before she had a psychotic break. Two years later she was an agoraphobic with occasional delusions, and then she had had another episode.

  He could deal with the fear of going outside. He was a cop after all and knew better than anyone all that was out there to be afraid of, but then she began to deteriorate into full-blown delusions. Brea had been nine when her mother was finally diagnosed with late-onset paranoid schizophrenia. Her weight had escalated from a hundred and twenty-five pounds to two hundred and fifty—the larger she became, the safer she felt. They had to monitor her food intake or she would still be growing.

  She hadn’t been dangerous. That was not the type of delusion her mind inflicted on them. For a couple of years she had even been able to cook dinner and get Brea off to school; she just couldn’t go out of the house. Then, in Brea’s freshmen year of middle school, Marty stopped taking her medication and had an even worse episode. She spent six months in a residential-care facility before coming home, and when she finally returned, she wouldn’t leave her bedroom. His mother-in-law came to their house during the day to care for her daughter and her granddaughter while Lochwood worked to pay for the mortgage and a part-time nurse, and save the world. He had met Devon a year before Marty’s last and most devastating episode. Lochwood had thought his life was over. Devon made him see that it wasn’t over yet.

  He looked at the woman he had once loved so much, a woman he still loved but hadn’t really seen in years. She barely resembled the girl in the wedding photographs on her dressing table.

  She patted his hand as if she were the one comforting him. “You won’t let them hurt us?”

  “They can’t hurt us, honey.” They were part of her delusion, and while Lochwood wasn’t sure who they included, he had a feeling anybody outside of the immediate household was eligible.

  “They’ll try. You know that.”

  “How’s your mom today?”

  “She’s crazy.”

  He chuckled; secretly he agreed with her assessment of his mother-in-law, but her mother was not the one taking anti-psychotic drugs. “Did you take your meds?” His voice was patient and calm, the same voice he used when speaking to children.

  “I don’t like them,” she whined.

  “I know. Where’s the bottle?”

  She pointed to the table where the nurse had left a tray of food, a glass of juice. “How can you know who I am if I’m always taking something to make me different?”

  “Honey, you get more scared if you don’t take your meds. Remember?” She shook her head. “Come on, we’ll take them together.”

  “I like when we do that.” She looked up at him adoringly.

  He brought the tray over to her side and handed her the glass of juice and four pills. “Ready? One, two, three, upsy daisy!” He tilted his head back as if he were swallowing the pills with her. Her eyes watched him as she mimicked his movements. “Now they’ll stay away all night.”

  “You always say that.”

  “Am I right?”

  “Always right.” Her voice had the singsong lilt, like a teeter-totter going up and down. Loch hated the way it made his skin crawl—worse, though, he hated feeling that way. Her illness betrayed more than her mind; it had betrayed her family.

  “I have to go back to my watch.”

  “You’ll be outside?”

  “Always am.”

  “I just can’t see you.”

  “That’s right.”

  She nodded absently; a shadow of sadness crossed her face as tears began to seep into her eyes.

  He kissed her forehead again. It was all he could do to keep from running out of her room and the house altogether. He could handle serial killers, acts of terrorism, murder, fire, car accidents; he could handle the mentally ill in crisis situations. He had thought he could handle anything—he’d been wrong. The routine, the drain of her illness, was a never-ending limbo he had no way of escaping.

  Then there was the hope Devon gave him. When he’d found her, he’d found an equal partner, both physically and intellectually. But how long would she wait for him to make up his mind?

  His daughter was off the phone by the
time he reached the kitchen. “Happy New Year, honey.” He kissed her forehead, too.

  “Happy New Year, Daddy. Grandma went out to the store, but she wants to talk to you.”

  “I don’t want to talk to Grandma.”

  “About Mom.”

  “Especially about Mom. Tell her I’ve got a murder investigation I have to get back to.” He did not want to talk to his mother-in-law.

  “Dad?”

  “What, sweetheart?”

  “I’m gonna move out. Me and Sabrina found a place to share.”

  He felt as if he’d just been socked in the stomach. “Not now, Brea. Please don’t leave now.”

  “I’m eighteen.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “I can’t stay here.” Her eyes silently pleaded with him.

  “I know.”

  “I’m going to finish the year at Stonybrook, but then I want to go to the University of Colorado, in Boulder.”

  “So far?” She nodded. “We’ll talk.”

  “When?”

  “Soon as this investigation is clear, in a few days. I have to go.” He kissed her again and walked back outside. How could he stop her from running away when he couldn’t stop himself?

  Devon pushed the hair scrunchies she had wrapped around the gear-shift up to the steering wheel and watched them pop back. She picked up the beanbag head on her dashboard and plopped it down hard. “I’m not that kind of girl!” Mean Harriet scolded. Even that did not make her smile.

  Her jeep was a collection of work and play. In the side pocket of the door she had a pair of handcuffs, mace, rouge, and lip gloss. Between the passenger and driver’s seats, beneath the coffee cup holders, was a spare gun, a torch light, a lint roller (to remove dog hair), the Toons’ Tasmanian Devil, two flares, an all-in-one tool, some foundation and face powder, a Slinky, two more pairs of handcuffs, mouthwash, a Lady Schick razor, antiperspirant, a traffic-ticket book, a Bart Simpson eraser-head pencil (a gift from Jo), and tampons. There was a roll of crime-scene tape circling the coffee cup, a tool kit under one seat, a crime-scene kit under the other, and a makeup kit in the glove compartment. On the visor on the driver’s side of the car she had a mirror with a picture of Charlie’s Angels in bikinis next to it, and on the passenger-side visor there was a strobe light for pulling idiots off the road. Devon was ready for anything, anything but her best friend’s murder or possible suicide. She plopped Mean Harriet down on the dashboard again—the head did not respond. Even Devon’s toys weren’t working right.