Opening Moves

by Steven James

  His awareness space didn’t include it.

  We needed to find people who’d lived, worked, or attended college in the three states in question—but not in Indiana. Specifically, the metro areas of Milwaukee, Champaign, and Cincinnati. Looking more closely at the tip list and suspect list would be the place to start.

  I dropped from the climb and landed on my feet on the bouldering pads beneath the route. I wanted to get right at it, start looking into that, but Taci and I had apparently hit some sort of snag in our relationship, and I needed to iron that out first.

  Hopefully it wouldn’t take too long.

  In truth, I was somewhat anxious about what we might be discussing, but I assured myself that whatever was on her mind was something we’d be able to settle without too much hassle.

  As soon as I’d showered and changed, I gathered my things and walked down the street to Anthony’s Café.

  50

  The café was cheery and busy this morning, with people chatting, sipping lattes, or in some cases, working their way through a muffin or croissant while perusing today’s edition of the Milwaukee Journal—which, I noticed, had a front-page article about the crimes last night. Photos of Gein and Dahmer appeared in the right-hand column.

  Great.

  Well, you’re the one who suggested going to the media.

  Obviously, this was not the kind of private setting Taci had been intimating she wanted to meet in. However, there was a corner by the fireplace with a few empty tables. I stowed my things at one of them and when I went back to the counter, I saw Taci striding through the front door.

  She smiled. “Hey.”

  “Morning.”

  Her eyes went immediately to my hands, which I’d retaped since my shower, then to the rips in my leather jacket. “Pat, what happened?”

  “Fencing.”

  “Fencing? You were fencing?”

  “In a sense.” Somewhat awkwardly, I slipped my hands into my pocket. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “That’s what you always say.”

  “Always, when?”

  “You get hurt.”

  “I don’t get hurt. That much.”

  A half smile, hands on her hips, but it wasn’t a real reprimand. “How many times have you gotten injured while doing something on the city’s payroll?”

  “That’s not even a fair—”

  “How many times?”

  “A couple. Maybe. Over the years.”

  “Mm-hm.” She took my arm. “Let’s get some breakfast.”

  So. Good signs so far. She was in a pleasant mood. I was in a pleasant mood. I began to relax.

  She ordered a feta cheese and spinach bagel sandwich; I grabbed two chocolate muffins and two bananas so the health factor would even itself out.

  She had coffee. I had tea.

  Honestly, neither of us was good at chitchat, but we made our way through the obligatory small talk you’re supposed to have when you’re a couple catching up—she told me about her rounds at the hospital, I told her about driving to Fort Atkinson and back yesterday afternoon.

  “So you were the one who found her in the boxcar? You and the FBI agent?”

  I guessed where she’d heard it. “The news?”

  She nodded toward someone nearby who was reading the paper. “I glanced at the headlines on the rack outside.”

  “Yeah, that was me.”

  “The public relations officers said you guys arrived just in time to save her. They’re praising you.”

  “You learned that from glancing at the headlines?”

  “Okay, maybe it was a little more than a glance.”

  “At a little more than the headlines?”

  I saw the flicker of a smile. “Possibly.”

  “I’m just glad we got there when we did.” But as I said the words, I couldn’t help but think of the conversation I’d had with Ralph last night in which I’d said almost the same thing, and of course the second part of that conversation too: “But angry we didn’t get there soon enough to save Hendrich.”

  Taci sighed softly, then gave a small head-shake of exasperation. “Do you ever wonder, Pat, how these people, how they come to do these things?”

  “Sometimes, yes, I do.”

  “What he was going to do is just unthinkable,” she said. “How could you get someone to even consider maiming someone like that?”

  Actually, the answer wasn’t all that mysterious or elusive. “Make it seem natural, reasonable. Unavoidable. The only conceivable choice at that particular time.”

  She had a curious look in her eyes. It might have been concern.

  “Radar once told me,” I explained, “that no one does the unthinkable, because to them, in that moment, it seems like the most natural and logical thing to do—the inevitable thing. I think he’s right.”

  “But how could you make something like that inevitable?”

  “When people kill, when rapists rape, when people torture each other, they’re doing what seems perfectly reasonable to them in that moment. Nobody ever does something that, in his own mind, as he’s doing it, is unthinkable.”

  “So, they rationalize it?”

  That seemed like too mild a way to put it.

  I thought for a moment. “I’d just say that behind every unspeakable act is a person who is, in his own mind, completely justified in carrying it out.”

  She sipped at her coffee and let my words settle in.

  “So, how are you doing through all this, Pat?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “They said he was going to cut off her hands, her feet.”

  “Taci, I can’t really talk about the case. You know that.”

  “Pat, it was on CNN.”

  “I get that, but—”

  “No one’s saying much at the medical center. Is she going to be okay? You can tell me that much.”

  I didn’t even know she’d been in to work already this morning. “It looks like it. Yes.”

  “Good.”

  Silence, then: “Are you any closer to catching the guy who’s doing this?”

  “Really, I can’t…” I caught myself. Even after being together for a year and going through this type of thing before, I knew it was natural for her to ask these sorts of questions. I had the sense that I should avoid addressing them entirely, but I decided I could answer this one without necessarily divulging too much.

  “Honestly, I don’t know how close we are. There was some evidence there at the train yard that I think is going to help us; some things to follow up on, so that’s good. But right now we don’t have a name, a face, anything specific. Now, really—”

  “You can’t talk about it.”

  “Right. I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  For a few minutes we both ate our breakfast in a sort of strange, quiet limbo. The light mood that’d been present when we first met seemed to have been smothered by our discussion about doing the unthinkable.

  Finally, I decided to just go ahead and get to the point. “So, you mentioned…There was something else, something you wanted to talk about?”

  “Yes.” But instead of telling me what it was, she was quiet once again.

  She looked toward the counter and scoffed lightly, but it wasn’t derision I heard. When she went on, I sensed it was her way of, perhaps subconsciously, avoiding addressing what she’d come here to say. “See her? Over there? The tag sticking out of the back of her shirt? I’ll never understand that. A woman will spend an hour putting on makeup and getting her hair right and won’t bother to take three seconds to make sure that the tag isn’t sticking out the back of her shirt. It’s…” Her voice trailed off.

  “What is it, Taci, really? What’s wrong?”

  She set down her coffee, looked at me with a thread of sadness in her eyes, and said eight words, “I do love you, Pat. You know that.”

  Oh, that was not good.

  “Why did you put it that
way?”

  “What way?”

  “Why did you say ‘I do love you’ and not just ‘I love you’?”

  She took a deep breath and it seemed as if she was about to say something, but then she must have changed her mind, because she closed her mouth and just sat there, quietly staring past me at a spot on the wall that didn’t exist.

  The longer the moment stretched out without her replying, the less I wanted her to. Instead, I wanted to take back my question. I had the strange sense that finding out the truth was going to be far more painful than just pretending everything was okay.

  But in the end I had to ask. I had to find out. “What’s going on, Taci?”

  “I do.”

  “Love me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then stop putting it that way.”

  She brushed her hand across the table, slowly sweeping a few bagel crumbs to the floor.

  “What is it you’re trying to say?” I watched her. Didn’t lean any closer to her; didn’t edge any farther away.

  She strung the next words together, as if they were something she needed to say in one breath or she wouldn’t be able to say at all: “I love you, but being with you is only going to hurt you.”

  I felt the bottom drop out of the moment.

  “How is it going to hurt me? Your being with me?”

  Silence.

  “Taci, I have no idea where all this is coming from. We love each other. We’ve been in a relationship for nearly a year. We’ve talked about getting—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “About getting—”

  “Patrick—”

  “About getting married, Taci. C’mon, don’t pretend we haven’t. Don’t try to rewrite our past. Things are good, they’ve been—”

  “I’m not pretending anything. And I’m not talking about how things have been or how they are. I’m saying…it’s about who we are.”

  Despite myself, I could sense my words becoming sharper each time I spoke. “What does that mean—‘who we are’?”

  “Who I am.”

  I’d seen so many of my friends in the department struggle in their relationships, in their marriages, so many who’ve ended up apart, separated, divorced, alone. It’s the tired cliché of crime novels—the cop who struggles in a relationship because of—wait, here comes the big shocker—the pressures and obligations of his job!

  Wow. What an unexpected plot twist that was.

  Taci and I had talked about all that early on and I’d told her that if we ever came to the place where we were thinking about taking things to the next level, if it looked like I’d have to choose between her and the force, I would either leave her before we got serious, or I’d leave the force so I could be with her. And we had gotten serious. And she’d never asked me to choose.

  And it didn’t even sound like she was asking me to do that now.

  “Taci, if you’re saying my job is doing this, hurting us, I’ll quit.”

  She shook her head.

  “No. I mean it.”

  “I know. But that’s not the thing.”

  “Listen to me. I will. I love you more than—”

  “It’s not you, Pat. It’s me. That’s what I’m trying to…It’s…me.”

  Her words seemed like solid objects that were wedging their way between us, pushing us apart.

  “How is it you?”

  She touched away a stray tear and I wasn’t sure at all how to respond to that.

  I asked the question I had to ask. “Is there someone else?”

  She shook her head firmly. “No. It’s not that. There isn’t anyone. There’s never been. Not since we got together.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  Then, like the proverbial floodgates opening, she finally told me what she’d come here for: “I was in the hospital yesterday, on rounds with my attending physician. I hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before and I was on my fourth or fifth cup of coffee, I don’t know. Well, the doctor, he asked how everything was going and I said good, that things were good, and they were…They are. But he could tell how both tired and wired I was. ‘Get used to it,’ he told me. ‘It doesn’t get any easier.’”

  And with that, a weight lifted from my shoulders.

  So that was what this was all about. Work had gotten to her. The long hours of residency and the stress of putting in twenty-four-hour shifts, hundred-hour weeks, that’s what’d brought all this up.

  “But it will get easier, Taci. You know it will. When your residency is over.”

  “Pat, that’s the thing. I don’t want it to get easier. I want it to stay the way it is. With the adrenaline and the hours, the stress, and the trauma of life and death right there in front of me every day. The rush. Living on that sharp edge. That’s what I realized when the doctor said that. I’m not made for having kids and going to soccer games and chaperoning field trips. I don’t want the weekends off to go antique shopping. I don’t want to come home to a safe little life every day after work.”

  I stared at her. “And you think that’s how it would be with me? A quiet, safe little suburban life? Are you kidding me?”

  “I’m saying I don’t have what it would take to make our relationship work. It wouldn’t be right to treat you that way.” She paused as if to gain the courage to go on. “You’d always be in second place. There. I don’t know how else to say it. I don’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry. It took me a long time to figure this out, I know it did. Too long. I’m really sorry. I am.”

  I could feel the moment splintering apart like a piece of china that’d just been tipped off a table and shattered on the floor.

  “I can’t change who I am,” she said, “and I don’t want to—and I couldn’t live like that, with the knowledge that I was holding you back from being loved like you deserve.”

  “I’m a big boy, Taci. I can—”

  “Don’t say you can handle it. Love isn’t supposed to be something that needs to be handled; it’s supposed to be the thing that helps you handle everything else.”

  I had the sense that I was falling, that I’d just stepped off an escarpment and was now plummeting through a thin stretch of air toward the bottom of a cliff.

  “I love you.” It was all I could think to say, words that I knew, even as I said them, weren’t going to change anything.

  “Yes,” she said simply.

  The whole conversation seemed surreal. Two people who love each other, two single, available adults who respect each other, who’re committed to each other and care deeply about each other and have been together for this long being torn apart by nothing more than uncertainties, priorities that might change over time.

  At that moment I realized it: hope has the potential to dissolve right before your eyes. You can be looking at it, something golden and precious, like the way I felt when she was joking around with me when she first walked in here, and then suddenly it’s folding back into the air, leaving a dark trail behind—the dissipating smoke of the very things you used to gain strength from.

  “Taci, listen, things have been crazy for us both lately. I understand that. But there’s no reason to—”

  She clutched her purse in front of her now as if she was using it as an emotional shield. “I can’t.” And before I could stop her, before I could come up with anything to say that might salvage things, she rose. “I’m sorry. I just care about you too much to…to…Second place isn’t right. Not for you, Pat, not for anyone who’s in love.”

  I stood up as well, tried to think of a way to talk her out of this, but no words came to me.

  She made her way toward the door and slipped outside.

  My feet seemed like they’d been rooted there forever. Go! If you just let her walk away, you’ll always regret it!

  I hurried outside and made it to her car just as she was climbing in.

  “Taci, please. Let’s talk about—”

  “No, Pat. It’ll only end up hurting worse. Please.” These were
the words she said as she closed the door. Then she pulled onto the road and drove down the street.

  Those were the final words she said.

  Of course every relationship suffers fractures. I get that. Of course they do, but people work through them, especially when they’re in love.

  How is this happening? This cannot be happening!

  But it was happening.

  It had happened.

  She turned the corner.

  And then the woman I loved, Taci Vardis, disappeared out of sight.

  51

  As I returned to my car and drove to HQ, the questions hit me hard: How could she just let things end like that? Just abandon everything that’d been, the us we’d become, and say it was over? How can someone that important to your life, that central to all of your dreams and plans, so suddenly and unexpectedly walk away?

  It happens every day, Pat. People break up. They divorce. Just like that. It’s over. All the time.

  I thought it might’ve actually been easier if she were leaving me for someone else, but then it hit me that, ironically, she was leaving me so that I could find someone else.

  And she was doing it because she loved me.

  A tumble of clouds hung in the sky, lavender gray and still marred with the remnants of night. I left them, and the day they were ushering in, behind and rolled into the dark mouth of the police headquarters’ underground parking garage.

  Ten minutes later, at my desk, I was trying to focus on the case, but it didn’t feel like I’d ever be able to concentrate on anything again, only that I would feel numb and distracted and full of unanswered questions from now on.

  Ralph’s low voice rumbled through the room. “Just think…” I looked up. He was walking my way, holding up a manila folder. “As computers take over, there’s gonna come a day when these things disappear. Completely obsolete. Can’t wait for that.”

  To me it seemed like the more we used computers, the more things we printed out. Manila folders weren’t disappearing at all from the department; they were multiplying like rabbits.

  “Yes,” I acknowledged distractedly.

  He joined me at my desk. “So, how did it go last night?”

  “How did what go?”