A Reason to Live (Marty Singer1) (3 page)

"You said there were a couple of possibilities."

"Two. It's someone else entirely."

"It has to be Michael. I never told anyone about the flowers," she said. "You didn't even know."

"Sure, you never told anyone. But what if he did? He was such a smug prick, it's hard to believe he didn't confide in a buddy, a girlfriend, a coworker. This thing with the flowers didn't surface during the investigation or trial, so he knew we never found out about them. It would've been a tiny victory for him. Like he pulled one over on all of us. Guys like him would brag about something like that."

Her shoulders slumped. "So where does that leave me? It might be Michael or it might not. My life might be in danger or it might be a prank by some copycat sicko that wants to torture me about my mom's death."

I hesitated, then reached out and patted her shoulder. I'm not good at comforting people, but I've seen it done before. "First things first. You still at your apartment?"

She shook her head. "No. I freaked out as soon as I saw the flower. I packed a bag and spent the night at a friend's place."

"You've been there since?" I asked.

"Yes."

"All right, find another friend. Don't go there directly. Catch the Metro, grab a cab, whatever. Even better, switch a couple times. Don't just walk there. All right?"

She looked unhappy, but nodded.

"Next, can you take a break from classes?"

"Not really. And I have office hours, too."

I shook my head. "Show up for class late. Cancel a few, if you can. Don't move around alone, don't go anywhere after dark by yourself. Don't do office hours. Ask people to call if they need you. Posting the hours you'll actually be somewhere is, well, putting out a sign telling him where you're going to be."

Amanda was pale, but her narrow jaw jutted forward. "I can't stop everything I'm doing. I won't stop living. I refused to do that after Mom died and I'm not going to do it now."

I held up a hand. "You're not. We're just going to take some precautions."

She paused, then said, "We?"

"We. For now. Retirement is turning out to be pretty lousy and this gives me an excuse to leave the house. There are some things I can do, folks I can call. This is no accident. Someone is doing it. Therefore, we can make them stop." I smiled. "I still have a little juice."

"I…can't pay you much--" she began.

I stopped her. "Let's let my pension cover this. I think we owe you one. The least I can do is ask a couple questions, give you some advice. If you need me to break somebody's arm, then we'll talk price."

"I hope your rates are low," she said, her smile tentative. "What's your first move?"

"We've narrowed it down to Michael Wheeler or the rest of humanity," I said. "So let's start with Wheeler."

ii.

There were points in life, he'd come to realize, that offered moments of absolute choice. The proverbial fork in the road. Either you did this thing or you didn't. Life would be this way...or that way. Compressed intervals of time that, before they turned up, meant you lived and acted and suffered in one way and--after them?--in a completely different way. If you were lucky enough to survive, you popped out the other side utterly changed. With a different set of values. And a different set of goals.

He'd had his moment already. It had taken him time to realize that it had even occurred because he hadn't suffered right away. He'd paid later--fuck, yes, he'd been put through the wringer--but at the time, he thought he'd ducked and dodged his way out of the consequences. In the end, fate had caught up with him and he'd learned the hard way what value and power those moments of change possessed.

But who said you couldn't have another moment? To make one for yourself? That you couldn't grab the edges of your destiny and pinch them when you wanted to, bring the moments of your life together and force the world to give you another chance? To undo the worst that had happened and return to the beginning.

Maybe, given enough time, it would simply happen on its own. But he wasn't willing to wait to find out if the universe was ready to open a door for him. He was going to grab his past, pull it into the present, and carve out a new future.

I told Amanda to call campus security and fill them in on her situation, then made her promise to call me on the nines--once in the morning, once at night--to let me know she was okay. Like my other suggestions for her safety, they made her bristle, but I asked her if she wanted my help or not and that ended the protest. She took off and I headed home at a brisk walk, trying not to think about how little it took to put the jump back in my step these days. Back in the coffee shop, I'd been ready to tell Amanda to take a hike. Now, for the first time in weeks, I was looking forward to going home and doing something meaningful.

My slice of heaven is a three-bedroom Cape Cod with a decent-sized front porch, a backyard I can mow in thirty-two minutes, and neighbors to either side that change every few months. The furniture is decent and the decorations minimal. I'm cheap and unimaginative and generally buy things as Ikea sales dictate. It's five blocks from coffee shops, stores, and restaurants and not far from the major highways in the area, though given the Washington DC area's ubiquitous traffic snarl, that just means you get caught in a line of cars faster and closer to home.

When I got home, I headed straight for the kitchen, cracked open a can of food for my cat Pierre, and stepped back. He's large and has a temper. The smell coming from the food bowl was enough to put off even a healthy adult human, but he attacked it like it was his last meal, grunting and yowling while he ate.

"Easy, killer," I said. Pierre looked up at me like I was next. When he'd licked the last morsel out of the bowl, he ran his tongue around his teeth, then bounded out the swinging inside-outside door to commit atrocities on the local squirrel population.

Holding my breath, I rinsed his bowl out, then headed upstairs to my office. My house, built in the slap-dash optimism of the post-war forties, was small and probably meant to shelter a family of four, all of them apparently of smaller than average proportions and not put off by sharing bedroom or bathroom space. My office had been the kids' bedroom, with the slanted ceiling of the dormer interrupted by a solitary window overlooking the porch roof. I have to be careful I don't stand up too fast or I'll brain myself on the ceiling.

The room is austere. No computer. Just a typewriter, a stack of legal pads, and a Mason jar full of black pens sitting on a dented steel desk I rescued from a salvage pile. The desk is gunship gray, with a sticky vinyl bumper going around the lip of a slab top that would've looked more at home in a coroner's lab. Completing the décor is a battered office chair I filched from MPDC HQ and a filing cabinet. Five drawers are devoted to case files, one to personal items. Making it, I suppose, emblematic of my life.

We weren't supposed to do it, but I'd always made personal copies of all my work files when I was on the force. I never regretted it, at least not from a professional standpoint. Of all the cases I'd broken open in my career, I'd come up with the answers for half of them sitting in this office at three in the morning, leaning back in my scuzzy chair, my hands laced behind my head, staring at the ceiling.

After I'd retired, I hadn't been able to bring myself to throw the files out. I didn't know when I was going to do it, I just felt each day that
today
wasn't the right time. And now I was glad I hadn't been able to cross that bridge. I rummaged through the drawers, looking for the right folder. Since I filed cases under the victim's name, not the perpetrator's, Wheeler's well-thumbed file was in the fourth drawer under L for
Lane, Brenda
. The case file was an inch thick. Not the best sign. Most of my cases took two hands to pick up.

I threw the file on the desk and plopped down in the chair. A wave of irritation and depression hit me, catching me off guard. Old feelings of failure and lost opportunity welled up like the case was twelve hours, not years, old. I sat there and rolled the feelings around like they were flavors, savoring and tasting them again after the long hiatus. There was a lot of bitter and very little sweet. Things hadn't gone the way I thought they would, or should. Maybe this was my chance to make a difference.

Or maybe nothing could change what had happened.

I tamped down the surge of emotions and started flipping pages on the Lane case. The way I remembered it.

In the late-nineties, Mike Wheeler was a patrolman with three years in and a soft beat in the Palisades, a moderately wealthy suburb hugging the Potomac River in northwest Washington DC. It's an overlooked corner of the city, full of leafy oaks and broad lanes, all within spitting distance of the more posh and accessible neighborhood of Georgetown. Not that anyone would ever spit there. That would've been the worst crime ever reported in the history of the neighborhood.

Until, that is, Wheeler met Brenda Lane, a good-looking, thirty-something with a daughter and a cat in a nice, three-bedroom Tudor. Modest for the Palisades, a wealthy home anywhere else, it said that the Lanes were solidly well to-do. The missing piece was Brenda's husband, who had been killed in the Persian Gulf five years before. Single parent homes weren't the norm in the community, but a life insurance payout and Brenda's job as a team lead for a technology company on the cusp of the dot-com revolution kept the tiny family of two comfortable.

As Amanda had recounted, one evening after midnight Brenda thought she heard something downstairs and triggered the alarm using a bedside keypad. Inside eight minutes, Wheeler showed up like the cavalry, lights flashing and gun drawn. Crack investigative work revealed that the noise was caused by the cat doing cartwheels in the living room. All was well and the day was saved. Shaky laughter all around. Brenda Lane was justifiably grateful for the timely, heroic response of young Officer Wheeler and likely tripped over herself thanking him, her voice filled with equal parts relief and embarrassment.

She was less pleased when Wheeler showed up the next night. And the night after that. And continued to do so several times a week. He haunted their neighborhood, often staked out front sitting in the cruiser or walking up the drive and ringing the bell at dinner time. To check on them, naturally.

As the days and weeks progressed, she lodged complaints, trying to get the watch captain to take him off the beat, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what kind of priority it was for the MPDC. When I interviewed some cops at the station, I found out that Wheeler was talking a big game, telling everyone how he was nailing Brenda every other night. She was a cop chaser, he said, crazy about uniforms. And now she was trying to get back at him because she'd found out he had a girlfriend. That kind of talk gets around, trickles both up and down the ladder. They blew her off, nodding and doodling aimlessly when she called. A few of the cops even warned him to watch out she didn't start stalking
him
.

But the complaints kept rolling in, with Brenda getting more upset and more demanding. She mentioned she was going to hire lawyers and contact newspapers. Her ward representative got involved and began making waves. The brass was being pressured to do something and the word was on its way down to get Wheeler reassigned to another squad before something happened to embarrass the department.

But the next squad that he dealt with was Homicide.

A few months after Wheeler's first response, late on a weeknight, he called in that he was checking out another possible breakin at the Lane's. Dispatch asked for details since they hadn't received a 911. Wheeler didn't respond. Three minutes later, the switchboard got a frantic call from Brenda Lane that someone was at her front door, trying to break in. The woman was so frightened the operator could barely understand her. I listened to the tape many times. The garbled recording cut off with her high pitched voice screaming "
You?
" and then "Don't, don't, don't" followed by gun shots.

Ten seconds after making the call, Brenda Lane was dead.

It took me half an hour to get across town from wrapping up another homicide. When I got to the Palisades, the Lane's property was lit up like the President's tree at Christmas time. There were four MPDC cruisers with lights on, an ambulance, and a forensics team van, all of them pulled up to the curb in front of the house or on the lawn itself. Had it been a street corner downtown, it would've been routine. For the Palisades, it was a circus. Neighbors in bathrobes and wrong-buttoned shirts were crowded on the sidewalk, hugging their arms to their chest and standing on tiptoes, trying to see into the house.

I pushed my way through, looking for someone who knew what was going on, then did a double-take. My partner, Jim Kransky, stood next to a cruiser, his arms at his sides and his stance awkward, as though he'd been stopped in mid-stride on his way to somewhere important. His eyes were glued to the front door like he expected the devil to walk out.

"Jim, what are you doing here?" I asked, walking up to him. "I thought you knocked off early after that Logan Circle thing this afternoon. The stabbing."

He turned to me, looking pale and worn out, but wired. He was a thin man and his features had always been sharp, but tonight his face was all planes and points, like there were knives underneath the angles of his cheeks, jaw, and chin. Normally, his eyes would be moving, scanning, taking in the environment, the people, the situation, but right now he looked blank and hollowed out. It was obvious he didn't know who was talking to him.

He blinked and took a breath, as if coming-to. "Hey, Marty. Yeah, I went home for a little while, tried to get some sleep, couldn't. I heard this thing come over the wire and thought I'd check it out."