Ed clears his throat. But he can’t look up from the folder. He’s like a motorist passing a car accident, only every mangled body is his.
“Your father would never have—”
“People have very complicated feelings about the police right now, Ed. Don’t compel me to make this public.”
Ed lets out a small, unreadable grunt and closes the folder slowly.
“And what do you expect me to do in my new retirement?” he asks.
“You’ll go back up to LA, probably. Use your LAPD credentials to become the security director for a big celebrity. Preferably one who travels a lot and has multiple homes for you to worry about. I’ll write you a sterling recommendation if you want.”
“And what will this recommendation say?”
“Not one word of what you actually did here. Not one. And if you ever consider saying one word about it yourself, if you ever so much as think about consulting an attorney about the language of your confidentiality agreement, and so help me God, if you ever begin a speech in my presence that begins with the words your father again, I will flush your entire LAPD career down the drain, and you’ll spend your retirement on a boat in Lake Havasu cursing my name.”
“I hate Lake Havasu,” Ed says.
“Me too.”
“You haven’t answered my question.”
“Which is?”
“What will my recommendation say?”
“That you were steady, reliable. Loyal. That you stayed up to date on modern security and surveillance technologies. That you were someone I could count on, that my father could count on when he was alive.”
Ed laughs. He’s looking at the glass wall behind Cole as if there’s a punchline spray-painted on it.
“What’s so funny?” Cole asks.
“You’re firing me because you’re afraid I hurt her feelings.” Ed’s mirth has been replaced by stone-cold anger. “After my years of service to this company, you’re firing me because you’re afraid of how something I said made that crazy bitch feel. And if that isn’t the most limp-wristed, candy-ass—”
Ed falls silent as soon as Cole rises to his feet, fists planted on the glass desk in front of him. “I’m firing you because I’m sick and tired of your belief that the hundreds of Africans you and my father killed during secret drug trials is somehow less of a blight on humanity than what I’m trying to accomplish with Zypraxon. I’m firing you because you can’t take orders from a gay man, and you’re worse at taking them from a woman.”
“Your sexuality has never had a damn thing to do with my opinion of—”
“Thank you. My limp-wristed candy ass will take that to heart.”
“None of us should ever be taking orders from her, Cole. Especially not you. That’s the point.”
“The point of your shitty, insubordinate attitude, perhaps.”
“You took responsibility for her when you shouldn’t have because you let the psycho formerly known as Dylan Cody fuck your judgment. In more ways than one. So now, you’ve set up an untenable situation where she’s out in the world doing whatever she wants, exposing this company to God knows what risk, and you sit here lecturing me on my attitude!”
“I’m not lecturing you on anything. I’m retiring you.”
“Because I pointed out the recklessness of your actions.”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. I’m retiring you because if you had your way, Charlotte Rowe would be a prisoner for the rest of her life, and her life wouldn’t last very long because of it. I’m retiring you because you’re the last vestige of a depraved heartlessness with which my father ran this company, and I want you and it gone. And I’m retiring you because I’m determined that by the time my reign here is over, my limp-wristed candy ass will have murdered far fewer innocent people in the name of science than you and my father did during your long, sweet time together.”
Ed’s smile is slight and coy. “Not all of those people were killed in the name of science.”
Cole feels the anger coursing through his veins turn into something icy and solid that seems to slide earthward from the pull of its own sudden weight. He hears wind rushing through a clearing fringed with haggard pines, feels the echoing memory of a fiery pain shooting up the side of his nose and forehead from the spot where one of his front teeth was knocked out.
The only way to keep the evidence of these memories from his expression is to remain completely still, and so he does, even though Ed’s smile is growing wider.
“I know who you’re referring to.” Cole feels as if his voice is coming from someplace far away, propelled through his body by the breath of his father’s ghost. “They weren’t innocent. Neither are you.”
“Are you actually threatening my life?” Ed asks without a trace of fear.
“You have thirty more seconds with me. If you want to negotiate, do it.”
“Twice my severance.”
“Fine.”
“I want to keep the Benz.”
“No problem.”
“And one other thing,” Ed says.
“I’m listening.”
“I want you to repeat something after me.”
Cole just glares at him.
“Are you ready?” Ed asks. When Cole doesn’t answer, Ed starts slowly toward the desk. “I, Cole Graydon, put my father’s billion-dollar legacy at risk because I finally found a man who could violate me like I had no value at all, thereby distracting me from the fact that I’m too damaged to have what anyone would describe as a normal human relationship, even by limp-wristed, candy-ass standards.”
“Get out before I cut the brake line on the Benz.”
Cole’s alone once again, only now the emptiness of the surrounding offices doesn’t feel liberating. It feels vulnerable to infection by his memories.
Memories of what his father did years ago.
For me, he thinks against his will. What my father did for me.
The sharp smells of untended soil and pine work in concert to drown out the stink of fear-fueled sweat. The fiery face pain, the eye above his knocked-out tooth that’s still watering long after the tears have stopped, and the gentle feel of his father’s hands coming to rest on his shoulders as they watched the drug go to work. His father’s confident whisper. “Remember. No matter what happens to you, you will always be my boy.” Together, these memories are like echoes in his blood.
He’d much prefer the memory of being defiled, willingly, on the office floor by a man who was later revealed to be a con artist and a psychopath. But that memory feels remote now—a strange irony, given how well Ed just highlighted the connection between the two.
Once he manages to collect himself, he sits at his laptop and starts composing a bland email to his human resources director, advising the woman of Ed’s decision to retire and the terms they’ve negotiated. He tells her of his desire to promote from within, quickly.
Then, time seems to turn liquid.
He’s staring out the plate glass wall at the glowing fringe of mansions lining the southern cliff faces along La Jolla Bay. Their lights seem to twinkle, but it’s probably just the curtain of eucalyptus branches brushing against the glass in the ocean breeze.
He’s thinking of how much time he and Ed have spent together since his father died. Imagines what it would mean to spend that much time with someone in possession of the same attributes Dylan—Noah!—used to cause his so-called error in judgment, again and again and again.
The email sits unsent on his computer.
He adds a line asking that all headshots and related photographs be removed from the applicants’ personnel files before they’re sent over.
The right candidate for this job will be picked on the basis of his accomplishments, of his résumé, and not, like Dylan, the inviting, wolfish look in his dark eyes.
25
Luke’s cell phone is making that skittering sound that tells him it’s moving across his nightstand. He ignores it anyway.
There are probably a
few things in the world that would be harder for him right now than pulling away from Charlotte’s almost naked body.
Damn if he can think what they might be.
It’s his day off, a time to sleep in. But still, he’s startled when he sees how bright the fringe of sunlight is around the window shade. Is it already past ten?
Not that he should be surprised. Once they’d finished their shower, they ended up going several more rounds between the sheets. If memory serves, they didn’t nod out until after two. When sleep did come, it was the kind that crept up on you, knocking you out midsentence because you’d used everything short of caffeine pills to keep it at bay. Hell, he was so excited to have Charley back, he would have put on a pot of coffee and stayed up all night talking to her if she’d asked.
The phone stops vibrating, then starts up again.
Mona. It has to be.
He’s right.
“I know it’s your day off, but I need you down here for a bit,” she says.
“You need me to fill in?”
“No, something else.”
“Am I in trouble?” he asks, swinging his legs to the floor.
“I’ve been looking at videos of Lacey Shannon’s interview from the other night, and there’s some stuff I’m not getting. Can you come down?”
Not getting, Luke thinks. What does that mean?
“She walked. I thought we were letting it go.”
He spoke too quickly, with too much tension in his voice. The frosty silence from the other end tells him Mona feels the same way. She’s got no idea about the call from Cole Graydon. She’s probably only heard Cole’s name once or twice, if at all.
How do you tell your real boss that your girlfriend’s secret boss expects you to shut down a possible law enforcement investigation, especially when your real boss is a sheriff and your girlfriend’s boss isn’t even an elected official and does nine or ten possibly illegal things before breakfast? There isn’t an advice columnist on the planet who could help with this one.
“Maybe,” Mona answers, “but Henricks is a different matter.”
“What? He’s already making a stink?”
“Not yet, but he might. That’s why I need proof Lacey walked out because he threatened her.”
“Is there?”
“Do I have to send a limo, Luke? I said I need you at the station.”
“Sorry. Charley’s home.”
“That’s nice. Tell her you’ll be back in an hour or two.”
“On my way.”
A quick shower and some soft kisses on the back of Charlotte’s neck later, Luke is standing in Mona’s office staring at a familiar face that makes him nervous.
The last time he saw Dr. Marcia Brewerton was on the front steps of Marty’s trailer after she had examined Charley a few months before. Luke had still been reeling from his first exposure to Charlotte’s new drug-fueled power, but the good doctor had been clueless. Marty had wanted Charlotte to undergo some kind of examination to make sure her first three exposures to Zypraxon hadn’t messed with her heart rate or blood pressure, even if the exam was cursory and the doctor giving it had no idea what Charley had actually been through.
If Dr. Brewerton walked away from that strange afternoon with a bunch of questions, they’re not present in her expression now. But she’s a focused, stoic woman whose face doesn’t betray much emotion. Her pageboy cut looks the same, and while he’s not sure it’s the same color, he’s willing to bet the Ralph Lauren men’s dress shirt she’s got on is the same style.
Mona’s closed the venetian blinds over all her office windows. She’s also angled her laptop toward the front of her desk so all three of them can see it.
On screen is a paused image of Lacey Shannon, taken from the video footage of her visit to the station two nights before. The camera system in the interview room was upgraded a few weeks ago, a response to the room’s skyrocketing number of visitors. Lacey’s bruised and battered face assaults them in high-definition clarity.
“Walk us through that night,” Mona says.
Luke looks to the doctor. She just stares back at him.
“Marcia’s consulting,” Mona says.
Unsure what this means, Luke nods.
He walks them through everything that happened that night after Lacey stumbled into the station. As he repeats the details, his vague sense of alarm coalesces into something else—suspicion. Of himself. He’s hearing the story for the first time now that he’s repeating it. He’s hearing how little information Lacey gave them. How unjustified his arrest of Jordy actually was.
“Did I do something wrong?” Luke asks.
“That’s not the reason for this meeting.”
And that’s not an answer to my question, he wants to say.
Dr. Brewerton finally breaks her silence with, “Nobody hit her.”
“Excuse me?” Luke asks.
“Nobody hit her. She sustained her injuries in a fall.”
“You’ve examined her? Where is she?”
“No, I studied the tape, and it’s pretty clear.”
“There’s still no sign of her anywhere in town,” Mona says.
“Wait, seriously. You’re saying she fell down the stairs? That’s like a joke people—”
“Easy, Luke,” Mona warns.
“No,” the doctor says, “I’m saying her injuries are consistent with someone who fell from a great height and landed on her face.”
“She’s got defensive wounds on her hands.”
“She’s got abrasions on her hands that are consistent with someone who threw her arms out to brace herself during a fall.”
“Jesus Christ,” Luke mutters.
“Excuse me?” Dr. Brewerton asks.
“Don’t you volunteer at women’s shelters? I mean, you’re really coming in here to let Jordy off the hook for—”
“I’m not letting Jordy Clements off the hook for anything. For all we know, he’s responsible for her fall. But what I can tell you is that Lacey Shannon did not sustain her injuries in an assault to her face by anyone’s fists. Most of what she has are abrasions, and her black eyes don’t have a knuckle pattern. So if you’re going to investigate what Jordy did or didn’t do, you should probably know what actually happened to her.”
The doctor’s voice doesn’t rise above the level of calm during this entire speech, but Luke still feels like he’s been disrobed and probed. It might not be her intention, but there’s an implication in her diagnosis that cuts to the heart of his efficacy as a law enforcement officer.
He reacted too fast to the sight of Lacey, misdiagnosed her injuries out of ignorance. Went off to get Jordy before he had enough specifics about Lacey’s claim. No doubt that’s why Mona asked him to repeat everything that’s on the tape. If he realizes these things just from reciting his own actions, she won’t have to drop the hammer on him quite as hard.
“I apologize,” Luke says.
“No need,” the doctor says bluntly.
“Marcia, thanks for coming in.” Mona extends her hand to the doctor, and she shakes it.
Luke does the same and is relieved when Marcia accepts his outstretched hand without hesitation. “How’s Charley doing?”
“Good.”
“You know, she’s been back awhile now, and I haven’t seen her once. Might be good for her to visit a doctor now and then. I’m the only full-time physician in town, right now anyway. At the rate we’re going, we might have a hospital in a few months.”
“I’ll let her know,” Luke says.
He doesn’t tell her that on the outskirts of town, just north of Lake Patrick, there’s an old ranch house that’s been converted into a state-of-the-art trauma center. Cole’s ordered Charley to report there immediately if she suffers so much as a sneezing fit.
Now, he’s alone with Mona and his thudding heart and the frozen image of Lacey’s battered face on the computer screen.
“She wants to be our medical examiner so bad she’s practicall
y itching for a homicide,” Mona says.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if we have one soon.”
Mona doesn’t disagree.
“I fucked up,” he finally says.
“You moved a little fast, that’s all. And that’s not why I brought you in. Not the only reason anyway.”
“So you do think I fucked up.”
“Well, you did kinda let her blackmail you. You weren’t under any obligation to cave to her demand that you throw Jordy in a cell before she talked. But you didn’t have to tell her that. You could have fudged the truth a bit. Made it sound like somebody was on their way to get him. Suggest she start talking in the meantime just to get things rolling. That kind of thing.”
Nobody says anything for a bit.
“What time did you head to the Gold Mine?” Mona asks.
“About nine forty-five.”
“Someone used manual override on the camera system for the interview room just after ten.”
“He threatened her, but he cut the cameras before he did it.”
“I’m reasonably sure.”
“How can we be one hundred percent sure?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about the general security cameras?”
Mona gives him a confused look. He doesn’t blame her. She’s had plenty of distractions of late, and the station’s been forced to augment and improve what systems they can without consulting her every step of the way. If they don’t get a new building soon, the place is going to end up looking like the Winchester Mystery House.
“We have general security cameras now?” she asks.
“We added three in the main room after the brawl last month.”
“Do we have one on the entrance to the interview room?”
“No, but I’m pretty sure we covered the spot where the hallway enters the main room.”
“Well, shit.”
A few seconds later, Luke’s sitting at Mona’s desk as he accesses the station’s general security system cameras.
“I should know this,” Mona whispers.
“You’ve been busy.”
“Well, I won’t be for much longer.”
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