Red Light (37 page)

Inside she smelled
the familiar smells as she fumbled for the switch. The fire was out and the
house was cold. She stood for a moment; pictured herself there with Tim, Jr.,
Mike and Danny, remember clearly the happy gab of their little half-families
rolled into one almost whole family and she inhaled deeply, dizzily, realizing
how many thing Mike had killed along with Aubrey Whittaker.

She got the kennel
key from beneath a kitchen cabinet, where hung on a hook beside the coffee
mugs. Mike had kept the dog locked since some neighborhood kids climbed the
fence one day and let the dogs out to play. Polly had wandered two miles down
the canyon before someone found her and called.

Outside, the
bloodhounds started yelping, and Merci swore there was something mournful in
their voices but she knew she was eager self-punishment and if it took
personifying three dogs to beat her even lower she would leap at the chance to
do it.

"Hi,
doggies," she said quietly. "Hi. Mike couldn't make it tonight so I'm
going to be your server. My name is Merci."

She opened the gate
to the run, then let Dolly, Molly and Polly out of their cages. Dolly and Molly
shared a kennel space, but Polly, a true bitch, had to have her own. They
grunted and knocked up against Merci's legs, looking up at her with what she
believed were lugubrious expressions. She knelt and pet them, scratched behind
their ears, ran her hand along their soft shiny coats.

She collected their
bowls. The dogs—Mike always called them The Girls—followed her to the food bin,
where she used an old dog food can to which Mike had soldered a handle to
measure out the kibbles. She gave them each a little extra.

When she had lured
them back into their cages with the full bowls, she closed the doors and swung
the gate shut behind her. She locked it and took the key back inside. The whole
time she felt this thick wet lump in the bottom of her throat, just waiting to
burst out.

The great betrayer,
she thought: Rayborn the treacherous, Rayborn the false, Rayborn and her thirty
pieces of silver. Where, exactly, was that silver? It would not be found in the
faces of the people she worked with. It wouldn't line her pocketbook, her smile
or her soul. It's nowhere, she thought, because I didn't do it for money, I did
it because it was right.
Right.
She was beginning to hate that word.

A few minutes later
she was driving back down the dark canyon, her right hand dangling into the
space behind the seat. The treetops were capped in silver light, branches bare
and still. The stars were bright and there wasn't a cloud. The man in the moon
looked down at her like she should be hung for treason, and she agreed, almost
wholeheartedly.

She swung her arm
back to the wheel and commanded herself to get her shit together. It was harder
now to master her will, to make herself believe the things she wanted to
believe, to force that will upon the world. It used to be easy, but she was
younger then and more foolish.

She opened a window and
felt the cold wind on her face. She held the steering wheel with one hand at
twelve o'clock and punched the big V-8 up to eighty when she hit the
interstate.

Clark was watching TV when
she got home. He looked at her cautious as she walked into the living room with
a rather large Scotch on ice and sat down.

Earlier that evening,
when she'd told her father about Mike's arrest, Clark's face had gone pale.
He'd quickly agreed to miss his poker night appearance to watch Tim, Jr.,
though they both acknowledged—without comment—how hard it would be for Clark to
sit down at a card tablet with Big Pat.

Now,
hours later, at least he had his color back.

"Damn," she
said quietly. She leaned forward, sipped the power drink, let some time pass.
"I worked that case, Dad? You know, did the usual things? Went by the
book. Did what I do. And it led me straight to Mike. And no matter how hard I
tried to bend things, see over the tops of them, it kept coming up Mike. I did
something I shouldn’t have done—I went to his place, used my key and did a
search. I found threatening letters the girl had written him. I found bloody
boots in closet with the same sole print as her killer wore. I found a noise
suppressor to fit a forty-five. I even fired some brass from his gun to compare
against the crime-scene brass: match. I was looking for something that would
point me away, tell me I was off. But I
just...
buried him.

"Mike
buried Mike."

She drank again, sat
back. "So now, we make our case and Mike makes his. We got the search
warrant late today, so the judge covered my . . . overzealous police work.
Nobody will have to know what duplicitous bitch I am, if they don't
already."

"Merci, your
investigation led to an arrest. And who was being duplicitous?"

"Yeah,
I know."

"Then don't forget
it. This isn't the time for you to be pounding yourself down again, girl. This
is the time for you to hold your head high and take your shots. You are going
to take them. But you did what was right and you did what was hard. You could
have hidden behind the badge and no one would have ever known the truth."

She nodded. Clark's
words seemed to skip off her skin, like she was made of some ceramic that
nothing could pierce.

"You know what I
keep picturing? Me. Me, walking into work on the day when everybody's realized
that I was the one who busted Mike McNally. I can't do it, Dad. I can't walk
down that hall to the detective pen with everybody in the department hating my
guts. How am I going to do my job anymore? How am I going to get to do the
things I wanted to do?"

"You're
going to find a way. That's what people do."

She looked at him
steadily, understanding that his unconditional love was just like what she felt
for Tim. It was a beautiful thing, maybe the most beautiful thing she'd
witnessed on earth, but it could make fools of people and it often did.

"I'll
find a way," she said quietly.

"I
know you will."

"Listen to me,
whining about me. The me expert. You know what I wish? I wish I could wrap up
in a ball under the covers and could molt like a larvae, or a pupae, or
whatever in hell those worms turn into. Then hatch out into an
angel.
An
angel, but an angel with an H&K nine. And I could fly around catching the
creeps and everything I did would be perfect. And I wouldn't have to walk into
headquarters and look at two thousand sheriff's employees who think I betrayed
them, who'd like to have my heart on a platter."

She
wondered what Joan Cash would make of her little speech.

Clark chuckled.
"An angel with a gun. No. You'd miss your son too much. And I'd miss
you.
I never wanted an angel, just a daughter."

"Yeah,
well, you got one."

She stood, legs
heavy, head aching, her heart beating slow and hard like it was doing so
against its will.

Halfway across the
room she stopped and looked back at her father. "You want to know what I
kept thinking when I was finding that stuff in Mike's place? I kept thinking
that there was still one good thing that could come of it."

"What?"

"I
wouldn't have to marry him."

She
couldn't read the expression on Clark's face. He stood, walked over and put his
arms around her. He was a lean man, but tall, and even now his arms were
strong.

She felt the tears
burning her eyes but she didn't cry. She heard herself speak, tear-choked and
snot-clogged, a voice she hated because sounded weak and dependent and useless.
"I wish I could stop the things that come into my head."

"They'll
go away."

"Take
me out and shoot me."

"Take you to bed.
Come on, girl. It's been way too long a day."

• • •

She checked on Tim, made
sure his cap was on, got the blankets up nice and snug. He was the most perfect
living thing she had ever seen.

Then she went into
her room and sat up in bed with the lights on, thinking. She could hear the
creaks of the old house and the breeze outside. Twice, her father's phone rang,
and twice she heard the almost imperceptible murmur of his voice. It was close
to midnight.

She told herself that
she had done the right thing. She wondered why the right thing had to feel so
wrong. Then she slowly allowed herself to admit that her fall from grace within
the department was going to acceptable. She gathered this idea just one little
bit at a time, like sweeping table crumbs into a palm, careful not to get too
much all at once.

It doesn't matter,
she thought, that you won't be running Homicide Detail by forty, or Crimes
Against Persons by fifty, or be a viable candidate for sheriff by age
fifty-eight—those were the dreams of a different woman. Maybe it would be
better this way.

Maybe along with the
disrespect she would get from the rank and file would come a little bit of
freedom, too. Freedom for Tim, for herself, for whatever passions she might
find outside of work. Her self-pity crept in, and she wondered why a big,
strong woman like herself, innately wired for the task of law-enforcement, had
to fall victim to circumstance. Was it just bad luck? Would good luck follow?

Passions I might find outside of work.

She thought about
that and admitted she had none, except Tim. I had no hobbies, no interests, no
sports she played or art she loved; had no real desire to travel, learn a new
language or engage a culture other than her own. She watched movies for
diversion, TV as a sedative, read books exclusively for facts, went to the big
art shows up in L.A. because someone else always got the tickets.

She shook her head
and smiled unhappily. Wasn't she just exactly like Hess in this way? Wasn't his
single-mindedness and devotion to work what had first attracted her to him? She
realized it was. And she also realized that, even back then, when she looked at
the old warrior Hess she was looking at herself.

Admiring the great
lonely hero she wanted to become. That was part of why she had loved him.

When she took the
idea of work-as-life one step further, Merci had to admit that there was
something else about it that stole her heart: Work was something she could do
alone. Sure, she would always have a partner. Sure, she would always be part
of a team and a bureaucracy. But the essence of the work was individual effort,
you against them. You against the whole world. You devised the broad
strategies, made the mundane procedural calls as well as the split-second
decisions that could—and often did—save a life or end one. It was impressive,
really, the power that the world gave you when it issued you a badge and gun.
It was all up to you.

As she sat there,
Merci pictured herself sitting there: a dark-haired woman with a mirthless face
and a half-empty glass of Scotch in her hand. Alone. This was always how she
saw herself. Never connected to a department, a husband, a partner, a son, a
father, a family. Just alone.

What exactly is it,
she wondered, that makes you so special, so singled-out, so solitary and
self-sustaining?

Nothing,
she thought. Nothing at all.

After she had shot
and killed the murderer Colesceau, Merci had felt her willpower depart. It had
actually gone out of her, like breath. She had never told anyone. It was gone
for several months, though she disguised the loss as best she could.

It came back slowly,
piece by piece, and it was arranged differently than before. It was stiffer
now. It was brittle and less tensile. It was afraid of new things. It was
familiar but foreign, too, like a friend's face changed by surgery, like a twin
you haven't seen for fifty years.

And Merci had
understood since that day with Colesceau that you are not only what you make of
yourself but what the world makes of you.
This
world, the one you see
around you right now. If there was idea more humbling and frightening she had
yet to think it.

M
erci stood with Paul Zamorra in the back of the
conference room while Sheriff Chuck Brighton, County of Orange, told the press
and media that one of his own vice sergeants had been arrested for the murder
of a prostitute.

Detectives Wheeler
and Teague—one thin and one bulky—sat at a table behind the podium, trying to
look bored.

Assistant Sheriff
Melvin Glandis, taut with uniform, took over from Brighton to explain the
investigation and field questions.

"Thank
you," he said, stepping to the podium, though nobody had offered him one
thing to be thankful for. Brighton stood aside but not back. Glandis nodded
slightly, a man comfortable taking orders, his mouth set and grim.

Merci watched the
camera lights blanch their faces, saw that every pit and wrinkle was
highlighted by them, saw the sheen of sweat at Glandis's brow when he finished
his brief summary of the investigation. Glandis sighed when a reporter asked
how and when Sergeant Mike McNally became a suspect in the case.