by Scott Frost
Parks did the introductions, but I cut him off.
“Are you a friend of Lacy’s?” I asked.
Her eyes moved guardedly back and forth between Parks and me. I could only imagine what she had heard about me from Lacy. Mom the cop. A teenager’s worst nightmare. Her eyes froze on the blood on my shirt and then traveled reluctantly up to the bruising on my face as if she didn’t want to see the source of the blood.
“Oh, God, did something happen?” she said, her voice shaken.
Parks looked over to me with no idea how to respond. I moved my chair closer to Carrie, trying to act as much as I could like a mother instead of a cop. The blood clearly made it a stretch. That, and I was out of practice.
“I had some trouble, but it had nothing to do with Lacy.” Which as far as I knew was still the truth. I hoped to God, anyway, it was still the truth.
“You’re a friend, I’ve heard her say your name,” I said.
She nodded uneasily.
“Did you talk to Lacy before she left school today?”
She shook her head.
“Is she in trouble?” she asked.
“She may be in danger. I need to find her. Did she talk to you or anybody about where she might be going?”
“What kind of danger?”
“Someone may be trying to hurt her.”
I saw hesitation in her eyes, as if betrayal was the first thing she thought of.
“Someone’s threatened her, someone possibly very dangerous.”
Her shoulders sank toward the floor, the color in her face drained away.
“All she said was . . .” Her eyes darted toward Parks, then away. “ ‘Those fucking assholes’ . . . that’s all . . . Is she going to be all right?”
I looked over at Parks. The anger that I had felt toward him began to rise back to the surface. I clenched my teeth, trying my best not to say something I would probably regret later, then turned back to the girl.
“She was talking about Principal Parks?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, as if annoyed by the obviousness of the question. “She just came from his office; she was really pissed. I mean, all she did was make a political statement and she was kicked out of school so the administration can look like they’re doing something to the people who are pissed about what Lacy did.”
“That’s enough, young lady,” Parks said.
I looked over at him.
“The time for Mr. Parks to explain himself will come.” I turned back to Carrie. “Right now my only concern is Lacy’s safety.”
She nodded.
“Did she mention any other names?”
She took a nervous breath and nodded.
“What other names?” I asked.
She looked me right in the eye. “Yours.”
“What did she say?”
Carrie didn’t flinch. “She said, ‘Like my mother’s going to do something about it.’ ”
I found myself liking this generation in ways I wasn’t aware of before. If this girl and my daughter were examples of their strength of character, I figured they’d be all right. They’d survive the piercings, the tattoos, and the sherbet-colored hair. Their parents, on the other hand, and their whole self-absorbed generation, seemed entirely hopeless. I was an expert on that.
“Did she mention any names in connection with what she did at the pageant? Someone maybe you’ve never heard of?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t even know about it.”
She smiled when she said that. She wasn’t lying. She took pride in Lacy’s ability to have kept what she did a secret. I found myself feeling the same thing.
Carrie glanced defiantly at Parks. “I think what she did was awesome.”
“So do I,” I said to Carrie.
The ability of my daughter to inspire a friend like this only increased my sense of desperation. I could hear a clock beginning to tick away the seconds in my head. Things were spinning out of control and I felt helpless to do a goddamn thing.
“Is there any place where she would go that we should look for her?”
She hesitated, still wrestling with trusting me.
“Please, Carrie, I need your help.”
She nodded. A wave of relief flooded my body.
“Starbucks.”
My heart sank. With one word my options had vanished.
“Shit,” I said involuntarily.
Carrie’s surprise at my reaction served to increase her understanding that Lacy was in real danger.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“If you can think of anything else, or if you hear from her, call me at this number,” I said, handing her a card.
Her fingers tried to slip quickly out of my hand like a hummingbird darting away from a flower, but I gently took hold of her hand before she could pull away. I looked down at the flawless, smooth skin. There wasn’t a line or a crack; time hadn’t touched her yet. I gripped her hand as if I were holding my daughter’s.
“No more secrets, okay?” I said weakly.
She looked down at my hand for a moment, then into my eyes. “Lacy’s smart. She’ll be all right.”
I started to respond, but the words caught in my throat and all I could manage was a feeble nod.
“You can go back to class,” Parks said.
She glanced at me and I nodded.
Almost imperceptibly her fingers slipped out of my hand and she was out of the room. I sat motionless for a moment, my mind unable to focus on anything. It was the same sensation I remember feeling when we buried Lacy’s father. A disbelief, a terrible sense that there was no one there to help me. I saw Harrison step up to the glass door and knock. His presence reminded me that I wasn’t there just as a mother, there was a madman out there with a bomb.
“You have a call,” he said, holding up a phone.
I looked at the phone in his hand as if I had never seen one before. Harrison saw the confusion in my eyes.
“I think you better take it,” he said, his tone leaving little doubt that this couldn’t wait.
I glanced at Parks, wanting to say something, but found there wasn’t a single word in my vocabulary that fit what I was feeling.
“I’ll take it in the hallway,” I said, getting up and following Harrison toward the door.
“Ms. Delillo—” Parks said.
With the sound of his voice, I found the words that had eluded me before. I stopped at the doorway and turned.
“If my daughter is injured or hurt in any way,” I said, looking him in the eye, “I will charge you.”
I could see the color leave his face. He appeared to shrink in his Brooks Brothers as if it were two sizes too big for him. I glared at him for a moment, then turned and walked out into the hallway next to the school’s trophy case.
“It’s Detective Fraser,” Harrison said, holding out the phone.
I took it and answered.
“Delillo.”
“You’re not going to like this, Lieutenant. I don’t like it.”
I wasn’t in the mood for a riddle.
“Just tell me what the hell you found, Fraser.”
“We were going through Breem’s phone records. He made three calls to your home number.”
I heard the words, but they still had a quality of unreality.
“My number?” I asked, just to be sure I had heard him correctly.
“Yeah, the last one was the night Daniel Finley was shot at the florist’s.”
The words hit me harder than the door that had just knocked me senseless a few hours before. The phone records had just loosely linked my daughter to the business partner of Daniel Finley, who had a bullet tear through the back of his head. I didn’t know in what way or how, but another dot had just been connected. I quickly tried to play it out in my head as to why she would have talked to Breem. There had been calls from a florist about her corsage for the pageant. That could be it, that is, if I was willing to forget the idea that there is no such thing as a coi
ncidence. But even if I did buy that, which I didn’t, it didn’t explain why Breem would have called her the night of the murder. How had a green revolution and a loaded spray bottle become connected to multiple murders?
My mind began to fill with possibilities, one of which stuck harder than the others. If this connection to Finley’s killing was real, even if tenuous, then the threat to my daughter had nothing to do with her disrupting the pageant. There was no middle-aged white male filled with rage, at least not one who was an actual threat. If Lacy was in danger, then the threat was from a man who had already killed two people and probably would kill again.
“Where’s Breem?” I asked.
There was no response from Fraser.
“Do you have Breem?” I said impatiently.
“No,” Fraser said.
“Why not?” I asked.
Fraser mumbled something under his breath that I think was “Shit.”
“His wife said he left the house before dawn. We don’t know where he is now.” He hesitated. “You want to tell me why a suspect in a murder called your number three times?”
I never liked Fraser. He was to police work what Hamburger Helper was to the food pyramid. He was what you used when you ran out of imagination. I ignored his question, even though it was the same one I was asking.
“See if he made any calls to the other contestants in the pageant,” I said.
I could almost hear the grinding of gears as he worked it out in his head.
“Your daughter?” Fraser said. “She was a—”
“My daughter,” I said, “is missing.”
I hung up and turned to Harrison, who was standing in front of the trophy case. Only then did I notice the 8x10 photograph next to the small gold trophy in the shape of a book instead of a tennis racket or a football. City debating team champs. Lacy was in the picture, second on the right, a wry smile on her face, staring at the camera as if she knew some hidden secret. She had joined the team about the same time she decided to try out for the pageant. I had missed the final debate for the championship because I had been investigating the beating death of a transient.
Harrison noticed me staring at it, though he didn’t know why.
“That’s my daughter, second from right,” I said.
He stared at it for several moments, his eyes covering every inch of the frame as if deconstructing an explosive.
“She looks like you,” Harrison said.
“No,” I said, “she’s beautiful.”
My cell rang and I picked up.
“Delillo.”
“It’s James, Lieutenant.”
There was a pause on the other end. “We found her car.”
I waited for her to finish but she didn’t.
“Just her car?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“What else did you find?” I asked, already sliding toward panic.
“The doors were locked, her keys were in it . . . a window was smashed.”
I tried to hang on to being a cop even as my hand began to shake.
“Which window?”
“Driver’s side,” she said flatly.
“Where?” I asked.
James began to answer, but my hand dropped to my side and the phone slipped out of my fingers and fell to the floor. I moved my hand up to my mouth to suppress the urge to vomit. My knees began to sink out from under me. There was no up, no down. The one and only thing that centered me on this planet had just been wrenched right out of my arms. No door could have hit me as hard as the words she had just spoken. I was halfway to the floor when Harrison reached out and took hold of my arm to steady me.
“Oh, Lacy,” I whispered.
“What is it?” Harrison said, though the words drifted by me without understanding.
I gripped his arm and regained my balance.
“What’s happened?” Harrison said.
“They found her car.”
8
LACY ’S YELLOW HONDA was parked on a quiet middle-class residential street with neatly clipped lawns about two miles from the Starbucks where she had called me. There was nothing unusual about the way the car rested next to the curb, no indication that it had been forced to the side of the road. A gardener’s leaf blower droned in the distance. The normalcy of the scene only served to heighten my sense of dread.
Harrison pulled our car up behind the squad that was parked in back of her Honda and started to get out.
“I need to just sit here a minute,” I said. The words slipped out of my mouth as if I were out of breath. “I need to . . .” I stared at the bright yellow of her car. She called it her sunflower.
“I’ll look it over. Take your time,” Harrison said.
He closed his door and started toward Lacy’s car.
“Make sure the uniforms haven’t compromised any prints,” I said, trying to cling to whatever cop instincts remained in me.
That was my baby’s car, her shattered window, her . . . I tried desperately not to let my imagination go beyond that. Stop, don’t do that, don’t go there, this will not help. But it was like trying to hold back the rain with your hands before it hit the ground.
I got out of the car and walked toward her Honda. My mind flashed on the day she brought it home. I had taken a picture of her standing in front of it, holding the registration. The joy on her face was what I imagined birds felt when they discovered flight. How did that joy end up here? How do these things happen? If I had just done one thing differently. If I had just . . .
I was thinking like a victim.
I’d listened to its desperation for years as stunned casualties of crime tried to make sense out of violence by stringing a thread through time so it could be traced to a definable origin. I knew better. It was never just one thing. And even if it was, what would it matter? There was no going back, no fixing wrongs. It was a free fall in the dark with no idea when you would hit bottom.
I walked up beside her car and stopped next to the shards of safety glass that littered the pavement.
“All the doors are still locked,” Harrison said.
I tried to lean in to look through the shattered window, but my body resisted the way it does when approaching the edge of a cliff. I turned away.
“Take a few breaths,” Harrison said. “Real slow, nice and deep.”
Across the street the large leaves of a banana plant rustled in the slight breeze. Curious bystanders were on the curb watching. I closed my eyes and the sound of the rustling leaves was replaced by the shattering of glass.
“She was pulled out through the broken window,” I said.
Harrison nodded.
“God,” I whispered. My stomach began to heave and I turned and walked over to a hedge of rosemary and vomited.
“Oh, God,” I whispered.
I tried to let go of the image but it was too vivid. I could see the hands grabbing her hair and her shirt as she tried to fight them off. I could see her feet struggling to grip the steering wheel as she was pulled out.
I heard the crunch of gravel as Harrison walked up behind me. He stood there for a moment in silence, then spoke up.
“You all right?”
I nodded. I had been to a thousand crime scenes. I’d looked into the faces of countless victims’ relatives whose hearts had been shattered by violence. We told them we understood, we held their hands, but we never let ourselves feel, we never let ourselves see the world with their eyes. But now I was one of them. I could see it in the way the other cops looked at me. Be wary, don’t get too close. I had stepped across the yellow tape and was standing on the other side now—a victim.
Two more uniformed units pulled up. A young woman sergeant walked directly over to me.
“You’re Officer James?” I said.
She nodded. “I’m so sorry, Lieutenant.”
She motioned with her finger toward her lip. I reached up and wiped away some vomit from the corner of my mouth.
“We need more units to canvas
s for witnesses,” I said.
“They’re on the way. So is Crime Scene.”
“Put a tap on my phone in case . . .” I couldn’t finish the thought.
“We’ll take care of it,” Harrison said.
I looked into James’s face. She was probably late twenties but appeared barely older than Lacy. Her blond hair was tucked neatly behind her ears, which were pierced with a simple silver ring. She had bright blue eyes, two rings on her right hand, nothing on her left.
God, I was already a mother at her age.
“Whatever it takes, Lieutenant, we’ll do it,” James said.
It was what cops say when one of their own is down. I probably said it to Traver in his hospital room, but it just didn’t translate to my daughter. James reached out and gripped my hand. The sisterhood of blue. I suppose I was a role model to officers like her. First woman head of Homicide, first this, first that. But I still couldn’t protect my own daughter.
“You’ve been injured,” James said. “Do you need a paramedic?”
I shook my head weakly, and then she walked away to talk to the other uniforms who were stringing perimeter tape across the street surrounding Lacy’s Honda.
I felt lost and out of place. I didn’t know how to take the next step. What way, which direction? Some role model. I took a deep breath trying to steady myself. I felt as if the side of my face where the door struck me was glowing like a neon sign. The ground seemed to be opening up beneath me and swallowing me up. I couldn’t hold air in my lungs. My heart was racing out of control.
“Work it,” I whispered. Work the scene, the witnesses, work it, work it.
I struggled to take a breath.
“We need a witness,” I said, barely able to finish the sentence before I ran out of air. “Someone must have seen something, heard something . . . anything.”
Harrison looked back at the car. I could see in his eyes that he was working out something.
“What?”
“I was just thinking,” he said, hesitant to finish the thought.
“Think out loud . . . good or bad.”
He glanced once more at the car.
