The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  Adams: Did Mr. Moe follow you upstairs?

  Witness: He always chased us. When we run, he gets madder.

  Adams: What happened upstairs?

  Witness: Sammy push me in the closet like he do sometimes to keep me from getting beat and he tried to get under the bed but Mr. Moe catched him and started whooping on him.

  Adams: How did Mr. Moe whoop on Sammy? With a closed fist, like this?

  Witness: Yes, sir. Then he used the strap.

  Adams: What strap? His belt?

  Witness: No, sir. The big strap he use to tie us to the bed at night.

  Adams: How many times did Mr. Moe hit Sammy?

  Witness: (Shrugs.)

  Adams: Ten times? Twenty times?

  Witness: Maybe one hundred times.

  Adams: Where were you while Mr. Moe was hitting Sammy?

  Witness: I told you, I was in the closet.

  Adams: Was the closet door closed?

  Witness: Not all the way.

  Adams: So you could see what was happening?

  Witness: I could see in the mirror.

  Adams: What mirror is that?

  Witness: The mirror on the inside of the door. If the door be open a little, I can see what’s going on in the bedroom. That’s how I seen Sammy get hurt.

  Adams: What happened after Mr. Moe stopped hitting Sammy?

  Witness: He call me out of the closet and told me to get in bed. Then he buckle us both down and he left.

  Adams: By buckle down, you mean tie you to the bed?

  Witness: Yes, sir.

  Adams: After Mr. Moe left, did you and Sammy talk?

  Witness: Yes, sir. Sammy was crying. He was bleeding all over and he couldn’t talk right. He couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom and he peed the bed.

  Adams: What else did Sammy say?

  Witness: He told me he wanted to die. I told him no one should ever want to die but he said that dying had to be better than living with Mr. Moe. He said his momma was in Heaven and he wanted to go be with her.

  Adams: What did you do?

  Witness: Sometimes if Mr. Moe don’t buckle me up right, I could get my foot out of the strap and get loose and that’s what I did. So I got up and get my coat and I opened the window.

  Adams: Where were you going to go?

  Witness: I was going to go the Dairy Queen and get Sammy a doctor. I didn’t want him dying.

  Adams: So you went out the window in the dark. How did you get down to the ground from the second floor?

  Witness: It was snowing I just slid down the roof and then I jumped.

  Adams: Weren’t you scared, Louis?

  Witness: No, sir, I been going out windows a long time. I’m good at it.

  Adams: Where did you go?

  Witness: I runned to the Dairy Queen but it was closed up. So I started walking but I got so cold I was going to go home but then I seen a police car.

  Adams: You approached the policemen?

  Witness: Yes, sir. They take me home and they call other policemen and then they arrest Mr. Moe but I didn’t see Sammy. They wouldn’t let me go back upstairs.

  Adams: Thank you, Louis. You can step down.

  There were no more pages. He sat there, sudden and unexpected memories filling his head. He remembered sliding down that icy roof and landing in a snow drift. Remembered running in the dark until his feet were frozen. Remembered crawling into the back of a warm car and into the arms of a police officer.

  And now there were memories of that day in court, too. The big green statue outside the courthouse. The itchiness of a stiff, new shirt. The rows and rows of white faces looking at him. The feeling of being big and important, sitting in a chair so tall his feet couldn’t touch the floor.

  But the memories felt distant, not as visceral as he would have thought, and he wondered if he hadn’t just conjured them up while reading. But then he thought about what Cam had said that day when they were talking to Weems.

  You have a gazillion memories in that head because the brain never throws any way.

  He had a feeling Cam was right about that. At least he hoped Cam was right. He wanted these memories to be real. He wanted them to be his.

  Louis slipped the trial transcript back into the envelope and straightened the papers in the CPS file before he closed it. As he reached for the rubber band, he noticed something he hadn’t seen when he sat down.

  It was a small message slip stapled to the front of the folder. The bold, squared-off handwriting was familiar. It belonged to Steele.

  Sammy Robinson

  2102 Hubble

  Detroit, Michigan

  Sammy was alive.

  A powerful wave of relief moved through Louis, but as he stared at the address, he had to wonder about Steele. Why had he made the extra effort to track down Sammy? How had he even known Louis was thinking about him? Dreaming about him?

  Louis looked over at Steele’s empty desk.

  Was Steele simply that perceptive, that good a profiler? Or worse, had Louis had a nightmare in the Pine Top Inn that night he shared a room with Steele? Hell, maybe one day he would ask him. But right now, he had what he needed.

  Louis pulled the slip of the paper from the staple and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he banded everything else together and went downstairs to the nave. He locked his file in the bottom drawer of his desk and grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair.

  As he pulled it on, he took a minute to look around. The only sound was the soft wheeze of the wind in the organ pipes. The only light was a rainbow of colors that crept across the walls, a reflection of the setting sun through the high stained-glass window.

  At that moment, it was easy to feel as if he were in a place of sanctity and grace. But the bulletin board and evidence boxes—like the 10-24 wall—were reminders that what they did here was a lot closer to Hell than Heaven.

  But there was nowhere else he wanted to be.

  His eyes moved to the clock on the wall.

  Except maybe Dagwood’s.

  He hoped the others were still at the bar and he hoped Emily had saved him a chair. He wanted a cold beer and a basket of fried pickles and he wanted to spend time with his cop friends.

  He hadn’t done that for a very long time.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Dagwood’s was dark and disorderly. Louis stood just inside the door, peering into the gloom and smoke haze. Friday night and the place was packed. Flannel-backed workers from the GM Assembly Plant. Waffle House waitresses in wilted robin blue uniforms. And dominating the front, a huge pack of frat boys celebrating a brother’s coming of age with screams to “chug the jug!”

  Louis’s spirits sagged. The team wasn’t here. He was about to leave when he saw a flash of copper hair in the farthest corner. It was Emily, standing up and waving him back.

  The three of them were seated in the last booth, Emily and Tooki on one side and Cam sprawled over the opposite booth. On the table between them were five beer bottles and two empty shot glasses. Cam was nursing a Strohs, Emily a glass of red wine, and Tooki . . .

  Louis wasn’t sure what he was drinking. A tumbler of orange juice with a cherry speared by a paper umbrella.

  “We were about to give up on you,” Emily said.

  “She wouldn’t let us order food until you got here,” Cam said. “Man, I could eat a friggin’ cow.”

  Louis wanted to sit down but there wasn’t enough room for both him and Cam in the booth. Emily let out a sigh and got up.

  “Move over,” she said, slapping Cam on the shoulder. Cam straightened, and she sat down. Louis slid in next to Tooki, who was tucked in the corner, transfixed by the Pistons-Hawks game playing on the TV over Cam’s head.

  “What took you so long?” Emily said.

  “I had paperwork to review,” Louis said. He had already decided that when he got up to Echo Bay, he was going to tell Joe about his file and his past. It was like a long-rusted-shut door had opened, and the awful black void he had alw
ays felt inside was now filling with light. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell Emily or anyone else. It was still too raw.

  And he still hadn’t processed Steele’s part in all this. Steele had known he was foster child, had known Louis would choose the boys in the box case. Steele had known each of the team’s pasts and had picked the scabs over their most tender places. The question was still there unanswered—why?

  Louis scanned his colleagues’ faces. Cam was flirting with the waitress as she took his order. Emily was playing with the stem of her wine glass, her gaze a million miles away. And Tooki had given up on the basketball game and was sitting ramrod straight in the booth with his eyes closed. The frat boys up front had started feeding the juke box and U Can’t Touch This blared out over the bar noise.

  The waitress took their orders—burgers all around with a side of fried pickles. After she left, Louis reached across, tapped Emily’s hand and nodded toward Tooki, who still hadn’t opened his eyes, even to order food.

  “Oh, he’s fine,” she said softly. “I cut him off after two drinks. He said he never touches alcohol, but tonight he wanted to celebrate closing the case.”

  “What’s he drinking?” Louis asked.

  “Harvey Wallbangers,” Emily said.

  “Girl’s drink,” Cam said and belched softly.

  Emily shot him a silencing look. Tooki didn’t open his eyes.

  The frat boys up front were getting rowdier, one of them trying to sing along with the juke box. The factory guys yelled at them to take it down a notch.

  “Any plans for your time off?” Louis asked, raising his voice over the din.

  Cam set his bottle down. “I was thinking of flying out to Phoenix. Got a half-sister out there I haven’t seen in a while.”

  Louis looked at Emily. “Play some golf, redecorate the beach house, get my hair straightened,” she said with a twisted smile.

  Louis knew she had no living family and doubted she had any close friends anywhere nearby. Tooki still had his eyes closed.

  “You going up to Echo Bay?” Emily asked.

  “First thing tomorrow morning,” Louis said.

  “Good for you,” Emily said.

  Emily looked away and took a drink of her wine. The table was quiet, and the music rushed back in. The song was R.E.M.’s Losing My Religion. Louis couldn’t help but smile.

  “Why do you think Steele did it?” Cam asked suddenly.

  “Gave us four days off?” Emily asked.

  “No, gave us those damn cases.”

  Louis met Emily’s eyes over the tops of the beer bottles. No one spoke for a full minute.

  “Okay, I’m going to fucking just say this,” Cam said. “My mother was a hooker. And I don’t think it was any fucking coincidence that one of the cases I had to choose from was about dead hookers.”

  Louis pulled in a slow breath and let it out. “I was a foster kid,” he said. “I had a foster brother I thought had died. Like the boys in the box.”

  “Jesus,” Cam said. He looked at Emily, waiting.

  It was a long time before she answered. “I’ve had an experience with suicide in my family,” she said.

  Louis knew that was as close as she would get to her own truth, at least for now. They fell quiet again. R.E.M. was heading into the chorus now.

  Every whisper of every waking hour, I’m choosing my confessions . . .

  Tooki stirred, opening his eyes. “The Buddha says there are three things that cannot be long hidden,” he said softly. “The sun, the moon, and the truth.”

  He took a sip of his drink. “I am gay,” he said.

  Louis glanced at Cam, praying that for once he could keep his mouth shut. Cam didn’t say a word. His expression didn’t even change. He just picked up his beer and drained it.

  The waitress appeared with a tray filled with drinks and plastic baskets of food. The awkwardness of the previous moment was dispersed by the business of doling out napkins and the squirting of catsup and mustard. Then the only sound was of eating and the satisfied grunts coming from Cam. Louis was hungry, but he ate slowly, thinking about Steele as the last lines of R.E.M.’s song rattled around in his head.

  But that was just a dream, just a dream, just a dream, just a dream . . .

  Cam pushed his empty plate away, grabbed his beer and slumped back in the booth. “I did some looking into Junia’s background,” he said.

  “Junia? Why?” Emily asked.

  “I always thought it was weird the way she just upped and quit,” he said. “She was real excited about this job and it just didn’t make sense that she’d get mad and leave.”

  Louis knew where Cam was going with this, but he wanted to see how much Cam had put together before he said anything.

  “Remember that first day when Steele told us to pick the cases we wanted?” Cam went on. “Junia was the first one to get up and she picked the Bay City Black Widow case.”

  Emily nodded slowly. “The abused housewife who murdered her husband.”

  “Yup.” Cam took a swig of beer. “I found out that about ten years ago, Junia went through a real nasty divorce and a few years later, she was the prime suspect in the murder of her ex-husband.”

  “I did an FBI search on her,” Emily said. “That never came up.”

  “She went back to her maiden name right after,” Cam said. “Junia put her husband through medical school, then the asshole left her for a younger woman. It was a small town and a lot of ugly shit got tossed out there, like the husband had abused Junia for years. Junia was cleared when they caught the real killer, but the damage was done.”

  “He beat her?” Tooki asked.

  They all looked at him.

  “My father beat my mother,” Tooki said softly. “And me sometimes.”

  Tooki’s voice was so soft, for a second or two, the moment froze. Then Emily spoke.

  “Because you were gay?” she asked.

  Tooki shrugged. “For that and other things. It’s why I left India so young.”

  Cam shifted uncomfortably. “Well, Junia’s husband never laid a hand on her. It was all playing with her head shit, I might come back, I might not, and then someone released a whole bunch of phone messages from him calling her fat and stupid.”

  Louis picked up his beer and took a long, slow drink. That was why Junia had quit the team so suddenly. It wasn’t just that the Black Widow case cut too close to the bone. It was also that she thought Steele was screwing with her head.

  “So I’m going to throw the question out there one more time,” Cam said. “Why did Steele do it?”

  “He wants us to face something in our past?” Tooki asked.

  “But why?” Cam said. "Who does that? Why would he even care?"

  Emily, who had been quiet, put her wine glass down. "He might be psychologically projecting."

  "What's that?" Cam asked.

  "It's a theory in psychology. In simple terms, you have a problem you can’t accept so you project it on others. It can be as simple as, I'm not stealing, you are. I'm not paranoid, you are. Or in this case, I don't have a problem with my past, but you do. And as a commander, Steele had five people to project onto—us."

  They all stared at her.

  "It's just a theory," she added.

  They were all quiet, lost in their thoughts. Louis realized the bar had gone quiet. The frat boys had left and only three guys lingered at the bar.

  “Well, maybe we should project shit right back at the boss,” Cam said. “Considering what he did to us, we have a right to know what his heavy baggage is. Any thoughts?"

  “A guy over at the computer lab told me something a couple weeks ago,” Tooki said. “He said the captain's uncle was a chief of police in some small town and was arrested and jailed for corruption.”

  Emily nodded. “Steele’s father died when he was twelve and his uncle pretty much raised him. And if you find out your father figure is dirty, it might explain why you end up in internal affairs busting other cops. Bu
t you’d think he would’ve worked that issue out.”

  “Then maybe it has something to do with this team,” Cam said. “Maybe he has something dirty on his own record and this team is his last chance to redeem himself.”

  Louis knew Cam was drunk and wanted to keep the conversation going just to throw some shit-rocks at the boss, but Cam had no idea how close he was. Whatever damage Steele had hidden deep inside himself had come very close to revealing itself that day up in Buddy’s cabin.

  I asked you a question, captain. Is that what we are about? Is this team just another line to your resume?

  No! It’s not about me. It’s about—

  About what, captain?

  It’s about her!

  It wasn’t nothing. And it wasn’t that Steele had just misspoken, as he had said. It was real, and it was so powerful that it had shaped and bent Steele into what he now was. A man alone with his work, always on the hunt, but a man with a wound. One old and scarred over, but so deep that the man couldn’t even bring himself to say her name.

  “So, what do we do now?” Tooki asked.

  Louis felt Emily’s eyes on him, as if she had read his thoughts about Steele and now was waiting for him to lead the team. But lead them where? On a mission to expose Steele’s past? Given their talents, they could probably do it, especially now that Louis had a good idea of where to start. But to what end? So they could all know something personal about the boss?

  The irony of it was too weird. Five years ago, Steele had destroyed Louis’s law enforcement career. Now Louis had the chance to wreak a little revenge.