Come Twilight (22 page)

As I looked at the list, I felt an unexpected sense of relief wash over me. I couldn’t really explain it, but somehow looking back and remembering the darkness I’d been drowning in when I created the playlist seemed to make the darkness now less overwhelming. The hours I’d spent laying out the tracks, then revising the choices again and again, and the days I’d spent listening, still tweaking things, making adjustments here and there, had been a kind of boon for me, a way of figuring out how to climb out of the hole I had been wallowing in.

I could still remember the look on Jen’s face when I’d accidentally left it open on the desktop. The concerned sadness in her eyes when she thought I might be contemplating suicide. I’m not sure if I had been at that point. I don’t think I ever seriously considered it. Though I had thought it might not be that bad to die. But once I saw how deeply finding the playlist affected her, I stopped thinking that way. I knew it wasn’t just myself I was hurting, it was her too. It wasn’t that I didn’t realize my death would affect her, of course I did, but looking at her then made me feel it in a way I never had before. She tried to joke it away, but I knew. And that knowledge, more than anything else, was what gave me the strength to fight my way back.

After a bit of consideration, and knowing that I was likely to wind up changing it anyway, I decided to start the new, improved version off with Tom Waits. And I changed the name in case anyone saw it. I didn’t want to have that discussion again with Jen or anyone else.
Songs for My Funeral
became
Come Twilight
.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

DON’T THINK TWICE, IT’S ALL RIGHT

On the way to the hospital, Lauren asked if Jen had given me any news about the case when she got home. I gave her a brief rundown.

“Looks like things are coming together,” she said.

“It does,” I said. “Looking forward to getting back to regular duty?”

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “This is the most fun I’ve had since I got out of the academy.”

“I’ll try to get kidnapped and assaulted more often, then.”

She grinned. “You know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“How long did it take you to make detective?” she asked.

“It seemed like a thousand years.”

“That’s not what I heard.”

“I beat the average by a year or two,” I said, “but I had a couple of lucky breaks on big cases that sped things up.”

“Never heard that before. Everybody always talks about how hard they worked for it.”

“Well,” I said, rubbing the scar on my wrist, “if you’re able to work hard, you’re pretty lucky.”

The neurologist’s office was in a separate building across Atlantic from the main hospital. The doctor who’d evaluated me wasn’t available, so they’d squeezed me into the schedule of one of his partners, an Asian woman who seemed surprisingly happy to see me.

“Hello, Detective Beckett,” she said. “I’m Dr. Lee. You probably don’t remember, but I saw you in the ER.”

“Oh, hi,” I said awkwardly. “I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right. You’re several days early for your follow-up. What brought you in early?”

“My colleagues are telling me that I don’t seem to be behaving normally.”

“Do you think you’re behaving normally?”

“It seems like it, but I don’t know.”

“What do they say you’re doing?”

I didn’t know exactly. Jen didn’t tell me what Lauren said to her. Was I being more talkative? Less guarded?

“Well, I didn’t argue with my partner when she suggested I come to see you.”

Dr. Lee chuckled at that. “What else?”

“I guess I’m talking more, being more open, less resistant.” As I spoke, it occurred to me that maybe what was really happening was that I was being less of an asshole, but I didn’t mention that.

“Any other symptoms you’re noticing? Confusion? Dizziness? Mood swings? Forgetfulness?”

“No,” I said. “I still have a headache.”

“Let’s take a look, okay?”

She gave me a full neurological exam, checking my eyes, my reflexes, my balance, and my memory, and a doing bunch of other stuff that I didn’t really understand the purpose of. When she was finished, she said, “Everything looks okay.”

“That’s good,” I said.

“Tell me about how you’re feeling. You said you didn’t object to coming in today. That’s something you’d normally be hesitant about?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I usually feel like I know what’s best for me and I don’t like people telling me what to do.”

She chuckled again. “Well, that sounds normal. What’s different today?”

“You know I was abducted before the assault, right?”

Dr. Lee nodded.

“Well, I did something very careless when I knew I shouldn’t have. If I hadn’t done it, the attack wouldn’t have happened.”

“You shouldn’t blame yourself.”

“I’m not, but my partner is. It did a lot of damage to our working relationship and I don’t think she’s going to let me off the hook.”

“You had a serious injury and you’re reevaluating the actions that contributed to it. You’re behaving differently, but I don’t think it’s because of the injury. If I gave you a referral to psychiatry, would you use it?”

I might as well have told her about the playlist I’d worked on all night. “Yes,” I said.

The visit had taken less time than I expected, so Lauren wasn’t back to pick me up yet. I sat in the lobby and called Jen.

“What did the doctor say?”

“She said everything seems okay physically. I don’t need another CT scan or anything. Told me I should get more rest.”

“You didn’t go to bed until after four last night.”

It surprised me that she knew how late I’d been up. I was certain she had been asleep when I finally turned in. “I was thinking I might take a sick day today.”

“That’s a good idea.”

“Let me know if you need me for anything, okay?” I said.

“Of course. I don’t think we will, though. Have a good—”

“Patrick still looking at tomorrow to go at Joe?”

“Yeah, or maybe the next day. A lot of things are panning out.”

“What about Novak?”

“He lawyered up.”

“That’s not surprising. I knew the assault beef wouldn’t hold—”

“Danny.”

I stopped.

She let the silence hang for a moment. “The Glenlivet bottle in Denkins’s apartment? The third set of prints was Novak’s.”

“You sure you don’t want something to eat?” Julia asked.

“No, I’m okay,” I said. It was past lunchtime and I’d skipped breakfast to get to the doctor on time. “Why don’t I call down to Michael’s and order a take-out calzone for you? I can go pick it up.” We were sitting at her table drinking French-press coffee that I was too agitated to appreciate. She had her hair pulled back casually, with a few strands hanging loose. The way I liked it. There was an assortment of flowers in a vase on the table that looked a few days past their prime.

“She wasn’t even going to tell me.”

When Jen had ended the call in the lobby of the medical building, I was still stunned that there had been such a major development in the case and that she’d thought it better to withhold the information than to share it with me. I tried to see it from her perspective. But I couldn’t. I called Julia and asked if she was busy, could I come by and see her. I think she lied when she said she wasn’t. Lauren drove me downtown, parked in a loading zone, walked me into the lobby of Julia’s condo building, and told me she’d be waiting when I was ready to go.

“She was right not to,” Julia said.

“What?”

“Look how upset you are.” There was a level calmness in the sound of her words. I imagined it was her therapist voice, the one she’d used in her old job when she counseled people or led support groups.

“That’s not why. It’s because she was intentionally trying keep me out of the loop. I worked that case. It was mine.”

“But it’s not yours anymore. There’s nothing you could have done today except stay home and worry or go to the station and get in their way. I know it feels shitty. But wouldn’t you have rather had a day off and gotten some rest instead of feeling like you do right now?”

“You’re on her side.”

She laughed at that and I got even more angry. “You think that’s funny?”

“No,” she said. “I think it’s sad.”

That shut me up.

“There’s only one side, Danny,” she said. “And everybody’s on it.”

“What side is that?”

“Yours.”

After I finished the calzone, Julia told me she needed to get back to Trev’s gallery to continue planning the workshop she’d told me about. “Why don’t I come to Jen’s tonight?” she said as we rode down in the elevator.

“I’d like that.”

We said good-bye in the lobby, where Lauren was finishing a slice of pizza.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked.

“Your girlfriend bought it for me. She’s good people.”

In the car on the way back to Jen’s, Lauren said, “So, you think Novak did it?”

“Not my call,” I said.

“But you’re thinking about it.”

“You want to be a detective,” I said. “You even went to law school. Do you think he did it?”

“His prints on the bottle put him in the apartment along with Joe. They both had similar motives. Collect money from Denkins to square the debt. So unless one of them left before the murder, they’re both culpable.”

“Right,” I said. “But how do we find out which one pulled the trigger?”

She thought about the question. “If they’re acting in concert, it doesn’t really matter.”

“True, but that’s weak. What would happen if it went to trial? Would the jury buy that?”

Lauren knitted her eyebrows and checked the cross traffic before turning off of Broadway onto Ximeno. “Maybe.”

“Is ‘maybe’ good enough?”

She didn’t need to answer that one. “So it comes down to the interrogation?”

“I think this time it does, yeah.”

“But Novak’s lawyered up, so what will you get from him?”

“Probably nothing, but maybe his attorney will try to turn him against Joe to get a better plea deal. Then what?”

She smiled. “Then Joe’s screwed.”

“Joe’s already screwed.”

“Tell Joe,” she said, thinking as she spoke, “that Novak is selling him out, get him to go all in with his statement.” She tossed the idea around a bit more, then added, “But what’s to stop him from trying to put the whole thing on Novak?”

“Nothing at all. He’s almost sure to try to do that. He might even have something on Novak that’s worse than Denkins.”

“So how do you deal with that?” she asked, turning right onto Colorado.

“Mostly, you try not to ask any questions you don’t already know the answers to. They taught you that in law school, right?”

“Yeah. The difference between an interview and an interrogation.” She paused for a moment. “That doesn’t answer the question, though. How do you figure out the truth?”

“Sometimes you don’t,” I said.

We drove in silence for the last few blocks, then Lauren turned left into the driveway. “That was fun,” she said. “Right up until the part at the end when you depressed the shit out of me. I thought you had the answers.”

“If only.”