by G. M. Ford
“Does it now?” she said.
Dolan read from his notes. “Linda Karston, Barbara Davinci, Raymond Williams, Shirley Bossier, Merla Fritchey, Andrew Wright, Lutz Kramer, Mary Rose Ross. That’s a partial list of the people who your daughter Grace has supposedly awakened from trauma-induced comas.”
She shrugged as if to say, Whatever.
“They say there’s some guy in the Midwest, with a wife in a coma, who’s offering a hundred grand for anybody who could put him in touch with Grace Pressman. Is that true?”
“At one time it was,” Eve Pressman admitted.
“But not anymore?”
“We sued him, and he withdrew the offer.”
Dolan got to his feet and pocketed his notebook.
“I’m guessing Mr. Kimble didn’t get the memo,” Dolan said.
Eve Pressman rolled herself out into the middle of the room.
“Are we finished here?” she asked brightly.
“I’d like to talk with your daughter,” Dolan said.
“I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” she said, turning her back on him, rolling all the way over to the front door and pulling it wide open. “My daughter doesn’t appear in public these days.”
“Why is that?”
“My daughter suffers from albinism. A recessive gene she inherited from my first husband, Ronald. Bright lights are quite hard on her eyes and even the briefest exposure to sunlight puts her at risk for skin cancer.”
“I wasn’t looking for a day at the beach. I just want to talk with her. We can do it inside, at night.”
She was shaking her head. “Grace is—how shall we say—fragile.”
“Aren’t we all?”
“Some of us are already damaged,” she said. “What about you, Sergeant Dolan? What condition are you in?”
He thought it over. “Dented,” he said, after a moment.
“Married?”
“Not anymore.”
“Let me guess. It was”—she made quotation marks in the air with her long fingers—“it was ‘the job’ that tore you apart.”
“Happens to a lot of cops,” Dolan said defensively.
“Hence the cliché.”
Dolan felt his blood begin to rise. Felt the urge to reach down and pluck her from the wheelchair and shake her like a maraca. The words were out of his mouth before he realized he was about to speak. “Why you?” he asked.
“Why me what?”
“Why you? How’d you end up being everybody’s keeper? You’re running interference for your daughter. Getting between families and the social service system. Who died and made you boss?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I see people doing things like that, it’s usually because they’re trying to make up for something. What is it you’re trying to atone for?”
“I want to do everything I can to keep women from suffering the same fate I did.”
“And being a martyr to the cause didn’t have a thing to do with it? ’Cause, you ask me, you seem to be getting a hell of a lot of mileage out of this thing.”
“I don’t think I like you.”
“Join the club,” Mickey snapped.
“So nice to have met you, Sergeant Dolan,” she said with a brief, insincere smile.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this one,” Grace Pressman said.
She stood with her back to the room, gazing out across the river, into another world, watching rainy Strander Avenue fill with cars and hunched, hurrying figures, as the bars emptied for the night. Between the vast puddles on the pavement and the beads of rainwater covering the windowpane, the scene was reminiscent of an Impressionist painting, smears of overlapping color skittering and glittering over the surface, like glaucoma through glass.
Her mother wheeled her chair over to Grace’s side.
“How so?” she asked.
“I brought him back to complete chaos,” Grace said. “Joseph was just about to surface when they said they were going to move him to another room, on another floor.”
Her mother winced. “And?”
Grace rolled her nearly colorless eyes. “That’s when the father barricaded us inside. Told me he’d keep everybody out for as long as it took me.” She waved a hand. “It was completely over the top.”
“It always is,” her mother said.
Grace shook her head. “I know. But not like this. When I met with the father, for coffee, before we went to the hospital—he gave me a little book, with a leather cover. It was all burned on the edges, like somebody had tried to destroy it.”
“A diary.”
Grace shrugged. “But you couldn’t really read anything. Just a few words here and there. Parts of sentences. Parts of poems.” She waved a hand again. “The minute I started to read from it—just snippets, you know—Joseph started coming back to me. Almost like that was what he’d been waiting to hear.”
“What did his father say about it?”
“When he gave it to me in the coffee shop, he said we could talk about it later, but we never got a chance. There were cops everywhere. SWAT teams. I thought I was going to get arrested.”
“That wouldn’t be good,” Eve said. “We don’t need any kind of undue attention, right now.”
Grace caught an edge to her mother’s voice. “Why right now?” she asked.
“We had a visit from the police today.”
“Nothing unusual about that.”
“A new cop,” Eve said. “A dangerous cop.”
“Why dangerous?”
“He’s looking for the Roysters, and, unlike Officer Quinton, he’s good at his job.”
“Which means what?”
“It means we’re going to have to move the family.”
“Where?”
“I’m waiting for a call from Mr. K.”
Absentmindedly, Grace used her finger to draw in the condensation on the inside of the window. A heart. Then an arrow through it. “I never wanted any of this,” she said.
Eve nodded. “I know.”
“I just wanted the regular stuff. What everybody wanted. The house, the husband, the kids, the picket fence, minivans, PTA meetings . . .”
“You have a gift,” Eve said.
Grace sighed. “Feels more like a curse. Like, from the moment I was born, I was paying for somebody else’s sins.”
“Probably mine,” Eve said.
Grace pulled her sleeve over her hand and wiped away the heart and arrow.
“How’s your weekend?” Nilsson wanted to know.
“Quiet,” Mickey Dolan said. “Real quiet.” Truth be told, despite being on call, Dolan had turned off his phone and spent the weekend playing video games. No TV either, for fear of seeing his ex-wife Jennifer and her life-partner Joanna doing one of those same-sex marriage ads that seemed to be broadcast every thirty seconds lately. The marriage referendum went to the voters in two weeks. Dolan planned to stay subterranean until then.
“Wish I could say the same thing,” the Chief of Detectives growled. “Wife dragged me to IKEA on Saturday. Looking for a crib for the new grandbaby.” He shook his big bald head in disgust. “Like goin’ on a friggin safari,” he said. “Time we got out of that place, I felt like I’d run a goddamn triathlon.”
Dolan watched as Nilsson pulled his day planner from his briefcase and sat down behind his desk. “Well . . . let’s button this Women’s Transitional Center thing up and hand it back to the mayor.”
Dolan half rose out of the chair and dropped his report on the Chief’s desk. “We’ve got absolutely nothing,” Dolan said. “Nothing on their phone logs. Nothing in the file cabinets. Nothing on the computers. Only thing on the security tapes was us. The office is just a front.”
Marcus Nilsson had his fingers steepled over his belly and his chin on his chest.
Dolan went on. “The office was leased by something called Hallinan and Associates. Far as I can tell, there’s no Hallinan, and no associates. Paid the lease in cash and in advance. They pay for everything that way. Folding money up front. No paper trail whatsoever.”
“You pay that way,” Nilsson said, “people don’t ask a lot of questions.”
“They don’t own or rent any property or cars. Don’t pay utility bills. At least not in their own names. As far as the system is concerned, they’re nothing more than a pair of social security numbers who don’t make enough money to pay taxes.”
“Anything else?”
Dolan thought about it. “If you ask me, Chief, this Donnely Kimble guy was worked over by professionals. This wasn’t kids doing a beatdown or somebody rolling him for his wad. These were people who knew what they were doing. People who’d had a lot of practice busting heads, and knew just how far to go.”
“Interesting.”
“The Pressman woman who runs the Center—Eve.”
“What about her?”
“She’s got a daughter named Grace. Grace Pressman.”
Nilsson’s four acres of forehead wrinkled. “Where do I know that name from?”
“Several years back, she did a year and a half in juvie for negligent homicide.”
“Killed her father. Hit him with a bat. Pushed him down a flight of stairs,” Nilsson said, nodding. “Real tall, real blonde.”
“That’s the one.”
“What about her?”
“Supposedly . . .” Dolan hesitated. He raised his hands in mock surrender, as if to indicate that this was merely what he’d heard, not necessarily what he personally believed. “Street talk is that she has these special powers. That she can wake people from comas. People the medics say aren’t waking up, now or ever.”
The Chief made a rude noise with his lips. “Bunch of crystal-gazing bullcrap is what it is. Some kind of goddamn scam.”
Dolan nodded and kept his mouth shut.
“So,” Nilsson said, lifting the flimsy report off the desk. “We did what we were asked to do.” He let it drop. “They want to take it from here, that’s up to them.”
“Yes sir.”
“I made some calls,” the C of D said. “See what maybe we had that was open and we could ease you into. Get you back up to speed.”
“And?”
“Worsley in the Southwest Precinct’s got a Major Crimes opening.”
“You do realize . . . bicycle theft stats are bound to spike,” Dolan said.
Nilsson actually smiled. “You sure you’re ready for this?”
Truth was, Dolan wasn’t sure about much these days. For the first time in his life, he found himself unable to assume that the world was as he saw it. Suddenly there was another voice in his head. Reminding him that other folks, looking at the same picture, probably saw something completely different.
Not only that, but his first attempts to get back into the dating game had turned out to be spectacular flops. Whatever inner reserves were required before one could roll around naked with strangers had deserted him, on both occasions, leaving him frustrated, embarrassed and, at least for the time being, unwilling to give it another try.
“I need to put all this behind me,” he said. “Get on with my life.”
Nilsson’s smile was more like a wince. “I told Worsley you’d be down at Southwest right after lunch. He wants to have a little chat first.” He shrugged. “Before he commits to anything.”
“I’ll be there,” Dolan said. “Is there—”
His inquiry was lost in a sudden volley of raised voices from the other room.
A woman’s voice rose above the din. “Captain? Captain!”
Marcus Nilsson was on his feet and moving around the desk when the office door burst open, thumping hard against the wall, sending the old-fashioned blinds clattering against the glass like out-of-tune wind chimes.
The guy came into the room like Caesar entering Gaul. Dolan had seen Caesar’s face on television often enough to know who it was. Edwin Royster was an overripe, pear-shaped specimen, with a big wet mouth and a thinning head of hair slicked straight back. The overwhelming impression you got from being up close to him was of sheen. It was as if he’d been sprayed with a light coat of machine oil and left to steep.
Another guy sporting an elegant haircut over a thousand-dollar suit slid unobtrusively into the office. Dolan had seen him before, too, but couldn’t put a name on him.
Nilsson’s secretary shouldered this last intruder aside far enough to poke her head into the room. “I’m sorry, Captain Nilsson. I told him you were engaged . . . he wouldn’t . . .”
The C of D held up a restraining hand. “It’s alright, Joan,” he assured her. “I’ll handle it.” An angst-filled moment passed before she shot the uninvited guests a vaporizing glare and exited the scene.
“You find my family yet?” Royster demanded of Nilsson.
The Chief of Detectives ignored him, and instead directed his attention to the guy in the good suit. He held out a hand. Good Suit took it.
“Marcus,” the guy said, with a wan, apologetic smile.
“Deputy Mayor Browning,” the C of D replied. “To what do we owe—”
“Did you hear me?” Royster demanded. “Where the hell’s my family?”
Nilsson finished his handshake before turning Royster’s way. “Detective Sergeant Dolan has just now submitted his preliminary report,” the Chief said, evenly.
“Why haven’t I got a copy?” Royster demanded.
“Because police reports are confidential, and the sergeant doesn’t report to you,” Nilsson said in his best Mr. Rogers voice. “He reports to me.”
Royster strode across the carpet and stood face to face with Dolan. “Well . . . where are they?”
“I’m afraid I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation,” Dolan said.
“I asked you a question, Sergeant. Where the fuck is my family?”
“I suggest you get out of my face,” Dolan said in a low voice.
“Dolan . . . Dolan . . . you the one with the dyke wife?”
“Excuse me?” Dolan said.
“Yeah . . . the one on the tube with her gap-lapper buddy, trying to ruin the sanctity of Christian marriage.”
Despite the better part of a decade sitting behind a desk, Nilsson’s cop instincts remained intact. By the time Dolan had screwed his right foot into the carpet and taken a half step back, the Chief of Detectives had inserted himself between the two men.
Dolan was quivering with anger. His eyes were locked on Royster like a Rottweiler ogling a chuck roast.
“Don’t,” Nilsson said, then turned to the Deputy Mayor. “I’ll have the report over to the mayor this afternoon.”
“I want those dykes arrested,” Royster bellowed.
Dolan and the Chief watched in silence as the Deputy Mayor managed to get Royster moving toward the door. At the last moment, Royster turned and pointed a finger at Marcus Nilsson. “You can’t do your job, I’ll find somebody who can,” he promised, as the Deputy Mayor eased him through the doorway.
A moment later Browning poked his well-coiffured head back through the doorway. “Find them, Marcus. The mayor will get you anything you need in the way of subpoenas or warrants.” He checked over his shoulder. “We won’t forget this,” he said with a degree of ambiguity available only to prostitutes and politicians.
Nilsson gritted his teeth and did his Mount Rushmore impression as the pair made their way through the outer office and disappeared from view. Apparently satisfied they were unlikely to return, Nilsson banged himself down into his chair, slapped the flat of his hand on the desk, and pointed a big blunt finger at Dolan.
“Nice to see you’ve regained your composure,” he said with all the sarcasm he could muster. “I’d hoped y
our little vacation would have calmed you down a bit. I know this has been tough on you—woulda been tough on anybody—but we can’t have any more excessive force complaints, Mickey. Union or no union, you don’t get control of yourself, you’re gonna find your ass out on the street.”
Dolan turned away and folded his arms over his chest.
“Goddamnit. Mickey, what the hell were you thinking?”
Dolan shrugged but didn’t say anything.
“I asked you a question, Sergeant.”
Dolan turned slowly back toward the Chief of Detectives.
“I was thinkin’ I’d kinda like to find out whether or not Royster’s wife is really nuts,” Dolan said. “And whether or not he’s abusing his kids.” Dolan waved a disgusted hand. “That part bothers the shit out of me, Chief.”
Nilsson dropped his finger to his lap and nodded in silent agreement. Child abuse wasn’t one of those things you could go easy on. Or even appear to go easy on. If anything, you wanted to err way over toward medieval retribution, a fact not lost on the political side of Marcus Nilsson.
So Dolan kept talking. “I’d like to know whether this Women’s Transitional Center is really involved in the disappearance of Royster’s family, and how the woo-woo daughter and her supposed superpowers factor into it. I was also wondering how a woman’s shelter gets access to the kind of professional muscle that messed up our friend Donnely Kimble. Stuff like that. That’s what I was thinking about.”
Nilsson rocked back in his chair.
“I’ll call Worsley at Southwest, tell him you’re not going to report for a while.”
Dolan started for the door.
“And Mickey . . .”
Dolan looked back over his shoulder at the Chief of Detectives. Nilsson’s face was set like concrete. “Try not to hurt anybody,” he said.
