Red Light (18 page)

"Why
the black light?"

He looked at her. A
very small grin. "No reason whatsoever. A reason is what I was
searching
for."

"And
that passes for science down here?"

"Lady Dick, I
wanted to see what the ink would do in the UV, if it might bring up something
we can't see without it. It didn't, but here, have a look anyway."

Evan was
mid-twenties, lean and wiry, with a freckled face that often seemed amused.
Red-brown hair and a button nose. Single. Drew women without knowing it, Merci
had noticed. Sometimes she saw a solemnity come over his bright green eyes,
like there was something serious that occupied his thoughts between amusements.
She knew little about his personal life and was happy to keep it that way. He
was the most thorough, organized and intelligent CSI she'd ever worked with.

She thought enough of
O'Brien to write a letter of recommendation to Personnel earlier in the year,
endorsing him as a candidate for deputy. Three other deputies had written in
his favor also. Evan had been typically wry about his chances of acceptance,
describing himself as a three-to-one underdog because of a mild epileptic
condition. It was easily controlled by medication, but a condition nonetheless.
"They won't give a spaz a gun," he'd told her. "Even though
you
might. Besides, they need good Igors down here in the lab. Pay us less,
work us harder."

Merci assumed Evan
would get in because, as a working CSI, he was conspicuously well qualified. He
was young and fit. And it didn't hurt that his father had been a deputy in good
standing—just as Clark's standing had helped her, and Pat McNally's standing
had helped Mike. But the hiring committee had passed on Evan, just as Evan had
predicted they would.

Merci had been
typically pissed off about that because she believed in him. And because the
higher he went the more important an ally he could become.

It bothered O'Brien
considerably less. A bunch of them went out for beers the night of the
announcement, with Lynda Coiner nursing a similar rejection due to poor
uncorrected eyesight. Coiner ended up crying on Mike McNally's shoulder. Mike
had been good with her, doting on her like one of his bloodhounds. O'Brien had
laughed and cracked acid-wise all night and had driven Coiner home. Merci
believed the rejection had hurt him because he'd never once said anything else
about it, a reaction typical of the human male, and a quality she admired.

"All
I see is a shoeprint, Evan."

"That's
all it is. End of experiment."

He
clicked off the UV lamp and rolled back on his stool.

"What's
up, Evan?"

He shook his head and
she saw the humor leave his face. He to deep breath, let it out slow.
"There's some evidence missing. Evidence from the Whittaker scene."

"Explain."

His look was sharp
but his voice was calm. "It might have been misplaced around here. We're
busy, it happens. It might have gotten through out. That happens, too. We're
not perfect. I've looked at every inch this lab. So has Lynda. It's gone."

Merci
waited, met his now humorless green eyes. "What was it'

"Fibers from the
kitchen floor. Prints from the kitchen cabinet. A friendship card from the
bedroom dresser we kept for a handwriting sample. We got forty-nine items of
evidence out of that apartment. We've got forty-four of them here. Two fibers,
two print cards and handwriting sample—vaporized."

Merci thought it
through. It wasn't the first time that evidence gone missing. It always showed
up somewhere. That, or the collection logs were the problem, dicks and techs
and criminalists and CSIs coroner's investigators and DA investigators and
autopsy hacks pitching in to produce an occasional overlap, duplication or
omission, It was a wonder that it didn't happen more often.

More
to the point, was the missing card one of the several sent by Mike?”

"Well,
Evan. It'll either show or it won't."

"It's
the won't part I don't like."

He looked hard at
her, then stood up and took off his lab coat pulled a sport jacket off the
hanger and slipped it on.

"You're going to
have to ask me a question, Sergeant Rayborn. Because I don't say things like I
need to say to you right now, unless I have to."

"I'll
do that then."

"All right.
Look, I'm not supposed to know that Mike McNally's prints were all over
Whittaker's apartment. But I know
everything
that goes on in this lab. I
haven't said one word to anyone, except to you— right now. I won't. That's not
the problem. The fact of Mike McNally's prints isn't the problem. It's his
problem. It's yours. I just work here."

He
waited then, eyeing her with something that looked like anger.

It took her a moment,
but she got it. She understood the question she needed to ask. "Mike been
hovering around down here again?"

O'Brien nodded yes, put
his hands out and up as if trying to stop something coming at him—her words,
she figured—then turned and went out.

• • •

Ten minutes later Merci
was walking through the parking structure with a sharp alertness and a dull
anxiety inside. The wind whistled in and bounced off the concrete at her.

Parking structures
were on her to-fear list now, anything to do with cars, because that's where
the Purse Snatcher had gotten her—in her own car, her own county-issue
detective's Impala. She still dreamed of things that jumped from backseats. She
walked up next to the car, used a flashlight to check the backseat, opened the
door, then looked into the backseat again. Okay. All right. Don't be stupid.

She drove surface
streets to the UCI Medical Center. It wasn't far out of her way home. The wind
swayed and shook the streetlights.

The last thing she
wanted to do was to be a bother to anyone, but she wanted Zamorra and Janine to
know she cared enough to at least come by.

In the gift shop she
bought a small, overpriced flower arrangement. She also bought a card and wrote
a cheerful, get-well message inside.

She checked with the
desk and got directions to the neuro ward. The neuro-ward nurse gave her the
room number and pointed her down a hall.

Merci heard it before
she got to the right room—low, muffled moans rising to high-pitched screams
that sounded miles away. She wondered if they built hospital walls and doors
thick just for that reason.

She stopped outside
Janine Zamorra's room. The door was shut. Merci felt a cold weight falling in
her stomach, like an anchor racing down through dark water. Her arms and legs
went heavy. It was more wail than a scream. A woman's. More in terror than in
pain. In helplessness. Like she was seeing something horrible coming but couldn't
get away from it.

The nurse came up
behind her so quietly Merci's first thought was of the nine.

"I
can take the flowers," she said.

Janine Zamorra had
gone silent. Merci could hear a man's voice low and soothing, no words.

Merci looked at the
nurse's face and saw nothing but shame and fear tucked under a facade of
authority.

"I'll
make sure she gets them."

Then another low
moan, gaining intensity as it became a wail. Like an animal makes, Merci
thought. An animal caught by other animals.

"What's
going on in there?"

"She's
stable. You should go."

The nurse held out
one hand for the vase, and the other she clamp firmly on Merci's arm. She was a
small woman, but strong, and she began to pull.

Upon being touched,
Merci Rayborn's instincts were not violent but they contained the possibility
of violence. And not for the first time in her life she realized the hideous
insufficiency of such urges, the absolute certainty that the nine or a baton or
a chokehold or a set of sharp plastic cuffs would do nothing at all to relieve
Janine Zamorra's terror. Merci, who had once believed she had the answer to
almost everything, realized again, to the embarrassment of her soul, that she
had the answer to almost nothing.

And
certainly not to this.

She
handed the nurse the flowers and walked out. Janine's moan was on the rise as the neuro-ward doors swung shut
behind Merci and sealed it off.

• • •

Mike's truck was in her
driveway when she got home. Inside, she found him sitting in the living room
with Clark, watching the TV. Tim, Jr., was on his lap.

Her
son studied her like he always did when she came home, a wide-eyed stare that
seemed to gather so much. Then Tim slid off Mike's lap and waddled toward her,
his mouth a big smile, nonsense syllables bubbling out. She knelt down and he
crashed into her and she gathered him up in her arms. He smelled sweet and good
like always and she could see the flames from the fireplace reflected in his
bright gray eyes. Clark had put him in a fuzzy red jumpsuit with white plastic
soles on the feet. Merci loved jumpsuits that warmed his whole perfect body,
wished she could buy a few in her size.

She
nodded at Mike and her dad, then carried Tim into her bedroom where she could
say nonsense syllables back at him, and get herself changed. This was one of
her favorite parts of the day: home to The Men, change out of her trousers and
boots, get the H&K off her shoulder and the backup .32 off her calf,
blubber back and forth with her son. It was a time when her heart felt huge but
light. But tonight it just felt big and heavy.

When
she came back out Clark was in the kitchen and Mike was still in front of the
television. His face was thick from yesterday's Scotch.

"Can we talk,
Merci?"

"Let's go out
back."

She
got big down jackets for her and Tim, matching ones she'd found in a mail-order
catalogue, with black and yellow panels and hoods if you needed them. She
bought matching everythings, which Merci knew was silly but did
anyway—something to do with uniforms, colors, them and us.

They
walked out onto the patio. The security system went on and blanched the yard in
a cold white light. The cats eyed them.

"Can I start by
begging you to forgive me for what I did yesterday?"

"I
can do that, but it'll take some time. You
threw
me, Mike. And you
betrayed me."

Silence
then. She glanced at him and saw the breath vapor coming from his nose. Mike's
shoulders were slumped down into his sheriff windbreaker, his blond forelock
hung down like the tail of a submissive dog.

"I should never
have drank all that liquor."

"There's some
other things you shouldn't have done, too."

"I
know I was wrong."

She looked out at the
windbreak along the orange grove. The eucalyptus trees hissed and heaved back
and forth, the leaves flash silver facets in the moonlight. She knelt down and
watched Tim stare at the big trees, with something like awe on his face. Above
the treeline the stars twinkled and a jagged moonlit cloud slid by.

Mike knelt in front
of her. "If I could take a big black marker and draw a line across things,
I'd do it. And I'd take everything that happened before yesterday, cut it off
and throw it away. Merci, I've been trying awful hard lately to keep things
contained. Keep things alive. I… this is not. . . this is the hardest thing
I've ever said in my life, I'm not happy without you. I want you. I want a life
with you and Tim and Danny. I want to get us a big house with plenty of room
for everyone. I want to work hard, I need that, but when I come home I want I
want you to be there. I'll give you all the time and space you need. You could
do anything you want. You could work. You could maybe have a baby with me, if
you wanted one. I'll be okay either way. I'm thirty-eight now, and my career is
solid.
Was
solid. And I know who I am and what I want. I want you.
Because I love you."

He pulled something
out of his windbreaker pocket and set it on her knee. Gray, rounded edges, a
thin metal seam around the middle. Tim lured as always by small objects, tried
to take it. But Merci's hand reached it first and she could feel the velvet
against her cold fingers.

"I know you
can't answer now. But you can think about it. I
want you to think about
it."

She
looked at him. The wind ruffled his hair and he smiled.

"How afraid were
you?" she asked. "How afraid that Aubrey might do it? I read your
letters and cards. You know what I'm talk about."

In
the cold light she saw his face go red.

"Um . . .
worried. Yeah. I thought she might try to . . . expose me. When she started talking
about that I realized I didn't really know her all that well. I didn't know
what she would do. I realized that everything I’d done could be turned against
me, make me look real bad."

Merci
studied his puffy face, his tired eyes.

"Did
you love her?"

"I never touched
her. Except for those handshakes I told you about and one or two hugs. I
never—"