Her partner softened, tears forming in his eyes. The room seemed to lack oxygen for a moment.
Hamill said, “I messed up, okay?”
Dana exhaled; she’d been holding her breath. “Okay. How?”
“That goddamn bar. I thought it was out-of-the-way enough, you know?”
“What are you talking about?”
“The gene pool. The fucking dating pool. Alright?”
She thought she was beginning to see. “Oh, Jesus, Rob . . . You’ve been sleeping with someone. A student?”
“I’ve been drinking. You know? Okay? It’s bad. I’ve been drinking a lot.” He turned and looked into the one-way mirror. “Alright? Okay? I’ve been drinking,” he repeated.
She opened her mouth but Hamill turned back to her and went on in a rush, “It’s not good when I drink. I make bad choices.”
“Who is she, Rob? Is she one of the girls on the list? Is she Angie Gilroy?”
“No,” he said vehemently. “No, she’s none of them. She’s just some student. And I’m not saying who. I don’t care what you do. It has nothing to do with the case.”
“It all has to do with the case now . . .”
“No!” He slammed a hand on the table. “It doesn’t. It’s my shit. I was in O’Sullivan’s and I vomited outside. Out for a smoke, I puked on my shoes. And the girl was there. And Perry Brady was there, and he saw it. Ho-tep, too, the bouncer. Someone called me a cab, sent me home, covered in puke. Sound good? Good times? How the fuck was I supposed to know that was where I’d be a week later, working this fucking case?”
He fell silent, his eyes pleading with Dana, with the cops on the other side of the glass, with the jury in his own head. Dana felt a knot form in her stomach. She thought of Hamill getting up to pee frequently. How she’d smelled booze on him.
It was amazing how people close to you could hide their addictions. And it probably had to do with you, and your own denial.
“Soon as I knew Sonia Taylor worked there,” Hamill said, “I called the bar. I told the bouncer to take a hike. I paid him to. I would have done the same for the bartender that night, too, but I was too far gone to remember who the bartender even was. I just remembered the bouncer. A name too weird to forget, I guess. And Brady. He was there again when we questioned Wayland Kimball that first night. I went to refill the pitcher of beer, and I saw him. Told him to leave. . .” Hamill looked at Dana and she saw the sadness — the helplessness — she’d caught a glimpse of in the convenience store. A man trapped, held fast by dysfunction, loneliness, addiction.
All creatures degenerate.
“But Perry Brady didn’t leave,” she said. “He hung around down the block. Then I saw him, tried to talk to him, and he ran.”
“I didn’t want anyone to know. That’s why. Okay? Ho-tep will tell you the same story.” He pointed at the wall. “I’m sure you got him wrapped up in the other room right now.”
Hamill sank back into his seat and stared off again, deflated. Dana sat back down. She didn’t know what to say. What the hell had just happened? Had she just pulled the chain on her partner? Why hadn’t she just talked to him?
Of course, there were still many questions. Where Hamill was for each of the crimes. Why the runner, Perry Brady, had led them near to the second victim.
“You wanted Brady from the start. You were convinced he was our guy.”
“I know,” Hamill said, shaking his head, looking down, his shoulders slumped. “I thought if we had him in the box, and he tried to say anything about me, it would fall flat. Like he was trying to save his ass. But we couldn’t pin him. He slipped away. Maybe he’s not our perp – I don’t think so anymore. Just some kid who saw a drunk, philandering cop.”
Hamill’s hands came up and Dana saw sorrow in her partner’s face like she’d never seen. It was true, you sometimes couldn’t see the people closest to you. Hamill was hurting. He’d been drinking hard, was maybe lonely, maybe looking to recapture his youth. Who knew. Covering it all up with his usual humor. Deflecting the focus from what was really going on. Well, IA would find out now. They’d have him psych-evaled and he’d surely go on leave for a while, or worse, his career was over. Dana had just shone a big bright light on her partner. Maybe it would be for the best in the long run; maybe this needed to happen. But as she looked across the table at her partner, it sure didn’t feel that way. It felt horrible.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT / The Oncoming Storm
She drove home. A winter storm advisory was playing on the radio. The region was expected to get hit with a foot of wet, heavy snow. Temperatures were then going to drop, turning the snow to ice. Blackouts were anticipated. The announcer advised people to stock up on water and candles at their local stores. Dana clicked off the radio.
She had the case file on the seat beside her. She’d convince Bouchard to let her bring it home, citing the impending storm. She peered out the windshield. The weather was as mild as milk. Not a snowflake falling under the baleful gray sky. Solemn evergreens sped past as she steered the serpentine course home.
Shawn and the girls were there.
He had his back to her, doing the dishes. It was four fifteen in the afternoon. She set down her bags on the kitchen table. She waited there for a moment, waiting for him to turn around. She heard music and laughter downstairs.
“The girls down there?” A fairly stupid question.
“Mmhmm.”
He soaped another dish.
“Rob’s been suspended, pending investigation,” she said.
“Really?” Rinsing some cups now, placing them in the strainer.
Dana glanced around the galley kitchen. The cantered wall featured a bank of windows which let in the sunlight on clear days, warming the place considerably. The house had been designed by an earth-conscious carpenter. Dana had always felt a little out of place here. She tried to be green, but knew she fell short. She just didn’t have the time. Whatever her environmental shortfall, her husband and daughter made up for. They weren’t a typical family. When you looked at Bouchard’s wife, the lieutenant’s wife, hell, almost every trooper’s wife, they were the same. They were “cop’s wives.” They shopped at Walmart and hosted Tupperware and jewelry parties and dutifully ironed shirts and picked up dirty socks.
Not that there was anything wrong with that. Shawn was just different. Obviously, he was a husband, not a wife. And he was from a different background than a lot of the people in the region. He’d liked this house, he’d been the one to choose it because it was where he’d decided to put down his roots. A house that could be converted to use only sustainable energy. Arable land around the property — he would scoop earth from beneath the bed of wet oak leaves that was dark and moist as good chocolate cake and show it to her, grinning. Shawn wanted to grow vegetables, build greenhouses; prepare for the collapse of modern civilization.
They’d met at a party, fifteen years ago. Dana had moved to Plattsburgh, where her sister was living. She had picked up work waitressing while preparing for the trooper training academy in Desiree. She’d finished college and had her BA. Though she had taken a few sociology courses while pursuing the criminal justice degree, it had never really clicked for her. But her husband could go on for hours about race and ethnic relations or behavioral economics. Dana held a simpler view of the world, one that carried over from her religious upbringing. There was good in the world, and there was evil, and the two were locked in a timeless struggle. Nothing was going to change that. That was life.
And now here she was with ideas she couldn’t place: notions about mystical diatoms, past lives, symbolism, all loosely connected to the maxim that a cycle of time on Earth was coming to an end. Psychic powers, maybe even some New Age occultism, at least in the mind of a killer. But, then, these ideas were in her mind, too. She felt untethered, floating away. She wanted to talk to her husband, let it all out, hear what he had to say. Yet the two of them hadn’t had a good discussion in years. She knew he had his friends he spok
e to, fellow carpenters and contractors who stood around and kicked the tires and talked politics. But her and Shawn’s dialog had become mechanical, a simple utility of the marriage used to convey information. Staying up until dawn talking about God was long gone. She missed it.
“Rob’s been drinking,” Dana said, still standing by the table, watching Shawn rinse the last of the dishes. “He’s off the case.”
He shook his head. “That’s too bad.”
Dana waited for more. He dried his hands on a rag on the counter and then turned and opened the fridge. He pulled out some plastic containers. He set these on the counter and then started after cooking gear.
“That’s it?”
Shawn halted. He met her eyes for the first time since she’d come into the room.
“What do you mean, ‘that’s it?’”
“I just told you my partner of ten years has been suspended. We’re in the middle of a serial killer case, biggest of my career. And you say, ‘that’s too bad?’”
He blinked, his eyelids remaining at half-mast after the blink. He folded his muscular arms. He was wearing jeans, stained with paint and caulk, socks with holes, and a T-shirt, the V-neck coming just to the top of his graying chest hair. Despite a few nominal lines around his eyes and mouth, he looked the same as when she’d met him fifteen years before.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked lightly.
His calmness irked her. She knew she was going through shit that had nothing to do with him, but she couldn’t stop herself. Her voice had a snarl in it. “I want you to say, ‘Man, Dana, that’s really messed up. Why was he drinking? How did it come out?’ I had to pull my gun today, Shawn. I pulled it on him. I called freaking 911 on Rob. Plattsburgh PD came into the store and cuffed him. They hauled him off like a criminal. So, you know, I want you to ask me how I’m doing, I guess.”
Her voice was loud, and she wondered if the girls could hear them through the floor, the way she could hear their music. Shawn looked back at her levelly.
“Dana, you’ve never wanted me to ask you how you’re doing. I used to. I used to ask and you’d blow me off. You were fine. Or, you couldn’t talk about it. Then you bring up this case a few days ago, for the first time in a long while. But that’s it. You dropped it after that. And you’re doing things . . . I have no idea what you’re doing. I see these books you’ve got . . . so I’ve just been respecting your space.”
He had her there. She had kept him out over the years. Sometimes it was due to confidentiality. Other times . . . she didn’t know. Maybe she didn’t want Shawn in there, poking around. Maybe she didn’t want any man in there, telling her how they would do it, criticizing her. David had never been like that. Plus, you had to stay detached; you had to treat it like a business.
“Well,” she started. “I guess this is different.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know this was different. You’ve shielded me from just about everything, especially on this case. And Rob is his own person.”
“I know he’s his own person . . .”
“You’ve got your own family to worry about.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“What does that mean?” He pointed beyond her. “That means your daughters. That means that Kayla has been getting in trouble in school for the past month — she’s now been sent to recess detention more than any other kid in the third grade. That means that Sarah now has a boyfriend, in case you wanted to know, who convinced her the other night that they were ready to ‘take it to the next level.’”
“Oh, great. But how does that—”
“That means that you missed Ria’s band concert, you missed it when Kayla woke up the other night crying, crying for you, not knowing where you were. That means I’ve seen their teachers this year without you once in the room with me. And you’re standing there acting like I’m not giving you enough attention.”
“She was crying for me?”
“Does that make you feel special?”
It was a real stab, unusual for Shawn. Dana just stood there, pressing her lips together, feeling that bitterness turn to anger, trying to diffuse it. He was pissed at her, okay; she hadn’t been around. And she was spoiling for a fight, and he knew it, and now he was agitated because she’d agitated him. But, this was something they’d talked about, many times, that her line of work would often keep her away for periods of time. He’d said he’d understood. That was the deal they’d made. He wanted a place to settle in, to stake his claim, grow food and bring up children, and she’d wanted to be a cop. Like she’d wanted since she was fourteen. The day she’d met Trooper Bouchard. The day David had died.
Back in the beginning, it was all big dreams and lots of understanding. But now it was an issue. Didn’t matter the pressures she was facing, didn’t matter the demands of the job.
“We talked about this.” She managed to keep her voice even.
“We did? I remember we talked about how your work was going to demand a lot of you,” he said. “And I agreed to that. I understand you put yourself out there, Dana, I do. You put your life on the line. And what you do is valuable. But I think you need to consider now what it has done to you. What the cost has been. What it has done to us.”
“How can you do that?” She was now close to yelling. “How can you in the same breath tell me you agreed to this and then fault me when it happens?”
He was finally rattled too, and shouted back at her. “Because things change, Dana. I’m not omniscient. I didn’t know what this was going to be like after ten years. And I’ve done everything, everything for this family . . .”
“Oh, don’t start with that martyrdom bullshit . . .”
His eyes widened. She’d just hit the red button. He came toward her, his, his face contorted by anger, and for a moment Dana thought Shawn was going to hit her.
She cut him off before he could say another word, or do something worse — like take a swing. “We’re getting it from all sides out there, Shawn,” she yelled, and her voice cracked. The girls could hear them now for sure. “We’ve got FBI breathing down our necks. No one wants another incident, another cop up for indictment, or another . . .”
He walked away from her.
* * *
Half an hour later, she found Shawn downstairs with the girls, folding laundry in Kayla and Ria’s room. He looked up as she came into the bedroom. She could see in his eyes the same regret she felt. He opened his mouth to say something but the two girls came streaming into the room. They were both complaining that Sarah had closed the door and wouldn’t let them back in.
“Well, let Sarah just have some private time now,” Shawn said, resuming the folding.
“But she doesn’t have to share a room,” Ria said, full of middle-child angst.
“Yeah,” Kayla echoed. “She doesn’t have to share a room.”
“You guys are lucky.” Shawn took a pile of clothes to a dresser and stuffed them in the top drawer. “You each get to have a roommate. That’s cool.”
“No it’s not,” Ria whined. “Not cool.”
The girls continued to hop around and nag at their father, who finished distributing the clean clothes. Dana saw how the girls disregarded her. Not in the way her husband had. She had been selfish, wanting to use Shawn as a sounding board when she usually kept it all from him. She realized now that it was because the case had become personal that she was looking to confide in him. But Shawn had no way of knowing that. He wasn’t psychic. And so she’d picked a fight.
But the girls. The girls didn’t seem to care she was there because she never was. She clapped her hands together in the air. The two brown-haired beauties looked around at her, suddenly silenced.
“There’s a big storm coming,” she said. They gaped up at her. “We’re going to need some supplies.” She met her husband’s gaze. “Right, Daddy? Candles, food, stuff like that. Ria, you want to go into the storage room and get some candles? I’ll let you guys light them. And Kayla, maybe yo
u can get the flashlights, and the batteries.” She grinned down at them. “Sound good?”
They were silent a moment longer, blinking. Then, almost in unison, they turned to their father and started nagging again, this time about it being too cold down here, and they wanted to switch rooms to the loft. They argued over who would get their parents’ bed all to themselves.
In the midst of it, Shawn looked across the room at her, and he smiled.
At least, Dana thought, there was that.
* * *
They talked late into the evening. It began at the kitchen table, after the girls went to bed. Dana had stayed around downstairs with the four of them, playing catch up with their lives. At first it wasn’t easy. After an hour of hanging in there, she was part of the conversation. When the power went out, they played with the flashlights. Then she tucked the two younger ones into bed and read Kayla a story. She sat for a while on the edge of Sarah’s bed and spoke quietly to her while Sarah pretended to listen, checking her iPad from time to time.
Shawn seemed to see it on her face as they drank tea at the table, and Dana blotted her eye with her handkerchief. “You can’t expect it all in one night,” Shawn said.
“I know.”
“I’m in their lives every day and still Sarah tunes me right out. She’s at that age, you know?”
Dana looked off wistfully into the kitchen, at the photos on the refrigerator, dancing in the light of several candles on the kitchen counter. On the wall nearby was the calendar. She pulled her gaze away from it. “I was sitting there with her,” she said, “and I was thinking about when Sarah was a baby, just a year old. That was a wonderful time. She was Mommy’s girl.”
DARK KILLS a gripping detective thriller full of suspense Page 19
