Marked

by S. Andrew Swann

  I closed my eyes and desperately prayed that it was, and that when I opened my eyes, my room would be as I remembered it.

  Nothing happened.

  Almost nothing.

  I felt ghostly fingers trail the Mark on my back. Almost as if they urged me forward. I opened my eyes and took a step, and the room briefly blurred, and the lights went out.

  “What?” I whispered. I had the sense that something had happened, but I had no idea what. I reached over and flipped the light switch back on.

  “Must have brushed against it?” I said, even though I’d been standing three feet from the wall. I strained to listen to what my dad was saying to 911, but I no longer heard him say anything.

  I was going crazy. That was the only explanation I could think of. My parents had adopted a feral child so disturbed and wild that I barely remembered who she was—who I was. What if that dead-eyed child from the old pictures was coming back? What if she’d never left?

  “No.”

  I heard a car rolling into the driveway. The ambulance must be here. I ran to the window and looked out.

  It wasn’t the ambulance.

  Instead, pulling into the driveway was the same Buick Century my dad had been driving forever. Then the door opened, and my dad stepped out.

  He looked up, staring at the window. His eyes widened when he saw me.

  I stumbled back from the window.

  What’s happening?

  I heard him throwing open the door, and I knew that I was about to relive the conversation I had just had with him, and he would call 911 about the confused teenager breaking into his house. Maybe next time it would be Mom.

  Maybe I’d died, and my hell would be forever having my parents forget who I was.

  Even through blurred tears, I noticed the clock on the nightstand. It said quarter after eleven.

  That wasn’t right, it was just reading ten to twelve.

  I knew I hadn’t been in the shower seventeen hours.

  That was the first time I understood what the Mark could do, though I didn’t quite believe it. Questioning my own sanity seemed more plausible.

  But as I heard my dad running up the steps, I tested this new crazy idea. I willed the Mark’s fingers to touch me, and I took a step forward.

  The lights went out again, and I no longer heard Dad running upstairs. The clock now read 10:55.

  I didn’t understand what was happening, but I now had a path back home, to the room, and the life, that I remembered. I faced the clock, and willed the Mark to push me, and with each step the numbers shot backward.

  In five more steps the clock was gone, and my room was back. And from down the hall, I heard the shower running.

  * * *

  —

  I sat in the chair in my living room, thinking about my dad, and the version of him that had found me that first time in the shower. My dad, the Michael Rohan who had raised me from a feral six-year-old into a nearly normal adolescent, had been shot only two months after my first brush with the Mark’s power.

  His death was what pushed me to actually experiment with what the Mark could do. That first time had scared me so badly that I had avoided even thinking about it, much less using it. When Mom told me that he had been shot—I was no longer afraid of being trapped in some world where I had never existed.

  But I couldn’t save him. No matter how many pasts I went to, how many Michael Rohans I could warn, none of them were my dad. I’d come back to my home, and my Michael Rohan, the man who had raised me, was still dead.

  It was a uniquely cruel form of time travel.

  I stared at the badge on the coffee table. I still felt a near-crippling guilt; still felt I should have been able to do something.

  I wondered if I would ever manage to pay my dues for that.

  FOUR

  IT TOOK A couple of weeks, but my life pretended to settle back into normalcy. My misstep with the Kendal case was a constant pressure in the back of my mind, but that’s where it stayed. My extracurricular investigations, I kept to my own time. I tried to act as if nothing had happened.

  But Jacob knew something was wrong.

  Sixteen days after we left Asia FX, he finally asked, “Are you ever going to talk to me about what’s the matter?”

  We were downtown, eating lunch on the patio of a small Middle Eastern restaurant. The summer heat had broken, and the slight breeze made me comfortable in long sleeves again. I looked up from my falafel and felt everything seize up inside me. I wanted to tell him. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.

  He reached out to touch my hand, and inside I shuddered. “You haven’t been yourself since the funeral,” he said. “It hit you hard, didn’t it?”

  I closed my mouth and felt a shameful wave of relief. Very quietly, I told him, “It did. It still does.” I was telling him the truth, but it felt like a lie.

  Everything felt like a lie lately.

  “You know I’m here for you, right?”

  Why did he have to be so damn noble? I urged him silently, If you want to make things easier for me, couldn’t you just be a bit of an asshole?

  I reached over and put my hand on top of his, squeezing. “I know. I’m just not very good at this.”

  “Good at what?”

  Expressing emotions. Dealing with people. Knowing what to say. “Accepting sympathy,” I said.

  “I’m sorry if I’m being too personal.”

  “No. You’re not.” I stared down at my falafel. “I’m just too . . .”

  I lapsed into silence that felt as if it lasted hours, even though it probably only took him a few seconds to prompt, “Too what?”

  “You don’t have any idea what a mess I am.”

  “Name me a cop who isn’t.”

  I raised my head, looking into his eyes, and I squeezed his hand again. “You,” I told him.

  “Thanks,” he said quietly.

  “I—” Words were catching in my mouth again. Holding his gaze flustered me, so I turned away. I pulled my hands back and tried again, “I’ll be all right.”

  “I’m sure you will be, Dana. But you don’t have to bear everything yourself just because you can.”

  I stood up, ignoring the remains of my falafel. “We should get back to work.”

  Anyone else probably would have pushed me, or at least would have noted my abrupt change in subject. Jacob knew me too well to do that. We drove back to the station in silence. Four or five times, I found myself almost saying something. I would glance at his profile and bite the inside of my lip, trying to come up with a way to start talking about the real problem.

  How could I do it without it coming across as either a betrayal or an insane delusion?

  Even during the short drive back, it was painfully obvious that I was avoiding talking to him. It made me feel even worse. Jacob didn’t deserve that. I could imagine him wondering what he had done to piss me off. As we pulled into the parking garage, I managed to finally say something.

  “It’s me,” I said, the words coming out in a panic as the car slid into the garage. I was suddenly very afraid that the drive would be done completely in silence, and I had an irrational fear that, if that happened, something irrevocable would happen to my relationship with Jacob.

  He glanced over at me and asked, “What is you?”

  “I don’t want you to think I’m angry at you, anything like that.” I sucked in a breath. “I appreciate that you care about what’s going on with me. If I’m going to talk about this— If I talked to anyone—you would be—but I don’t know how. I don’t know if I can. There are things I don’t—can’t—talk about. It’s not your fault. You didn’t do something wrong. I’m not angry. Not at you. I’m such a mess.”

  Jacob pulled into a parking spot and looked at me, “That might be the longest non-work-related speech y
ou’ve ever made to me.”

  “I don’t want you to think it was something you did.”

  “I am touching a nerve, though, aren’t I?”

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  * * *

  —

  FOR over two weeks I’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop. This was the day it did.

  For the past two weeks I’d spent some time every day, behind my desk, looking through various criminal databases for recent arrests. I had to work them myself because for most of the cases on my desk, I had knowledge—names, addresses, license plate numbers—the source of which I couldn’t explain. I was looking for Roscoe Kendal without much hope, since the identity on the driver’s license I had seemed to be fictitious. The address didn’t exist, and the name wasn’t attached to any priors I could find.

  Today I found him.

  Kendal had been picked up for possession yesterday in Lindale after running a stop sign. Looking at the small mug shot on his on-line booking sheet, I knew it was the guy. He even seemed to be wearing the same hoodie.

  Lindale still had him in custody.

  I could have ignored it. He was in another jurisdiction, and without any obvious connections to the Asia FX robbery, he’d just go through for the possession bust and probably do some time. Letting it go would ensure that my mistake planting the gun would probably never be uncovered. They may have lifted Kendal’s prints from the gun. I hadn’t checked, but unless they had a suspect with whom to compare them to, they’d just stay in a file somewhere. Life wasn’t CSI.

  But if I left it like that, it would deny Mrs. Kim and her father any sort of justice or closure, just to cover my own screwup.

  So I called Lindale. While I waited to be connected to the arresting officer, I stared at Kendal’s face on the screen, wondering if the Kendal I had shot had managed to turn his life around in his world that wasn’t quite mine, or if some sort of felonious destiny led him to be busted for possession in his own version of Lindale.

  Someone on the other end of the line interrupted my thoughts, and I said, reflexively, “Detective Rohan, CPD.”

  “How can I help you?” The voice carried a hint of irritation, as if I hadn’t quite answered his question.

  I cleared my throat and continued. “This is a long shot, but I’m looking at a mug shot of a guy you arrested for possession about 3:30 yesterday afternoon. Roscoe Kendal?”

  “Uh-huh. File’s still on my desk.”

  “Well, looking at him, he could be a guy we have on video robbing a tattoo parlor two weeks ago. Killed the proprietor.”

  “You don’t say.” I heard a rustle of paper. “Did your guy make off with anything aside from cash?”

  “A whole display case worth of costume jewelry.”

  The guy busted out laughing. After a moment, he said, “Detective Rohan, this must be your lucky day. We were wondering what this guy was doing with a dozen nipple rings in a sandwich bag. Do you have someone who can identify the jewelry?”

  I gave him the contact information for Mrs. Kim. Then I had him send copies of the guy’s prints up to our lab. Even if the gun was eventually poisoned as evidence, they had a few prints from the display case. That, and the video, should be more than enough to seal the deal on the guy.

  I hung up the phone, feeling a small weight lift. Whatever my mistake cost me, Mrs. Kim would still see her father’s murderer put away.

  “Dana?”

  I turned to face the voice behind me. Jacob looked a little more concerned than usual. I smiled and tried to project an aura of mission accomplished. “I think we just found the guy from the Asia FX robbery.”

  “The tattoo place?”

  “Guy was picked up on a traffic stop in Lindale with six ounces of weed and a dozen nipple rings.”

  “I hope he wasn’t wearing all of them.”

  I was relieved enough to actually laugh at that. As I closed up what I was doing on the computer, I asked, “What’s up?”

  “We need to see Royce.”

  My hands only paused briefly when he mentioned Captain Royce’s name. I had the ugly premonition that my relief had been premature. “What about?”

  “Someone we’re supposed to meet.”

  * * *

  —

  THE “someone” turned out to be Jessica Whedon, a lawyer from the “Office of Civil Rights Enforcement” in the Justice Department. Captain Royce made the introduction and then informed us that we were to cooperate fully with Ms. Whedon’s investigation in a tone that suggested that we might have been inclined to do otherwise.

  She was a brunette nearly a head shorter than me, short enough that there probably weren’t many law enforcement jobs open to her. Most police departments, the FBI, and badge-bearing segments of the Justice Department would bar her for being barely over five feet tall.

  Very deliberately, Jacob asked her, “What are you investigating?”

  “My office does biannual reporting on law enforcement trends for the top twenty-five urban areas in the US. Statistically, your department is a significant outlier, and I’m here to develop background information to explain those statistics.”

  She smiled when she spoke, and her voice had the fluid cadence of a talk show host or a politician. Her face broadcast earnest warmth as genuine as the Yule Log they put on TV every Christmas. I felt an instant, almost visceral, dislike for the woman. It was only half due to the fact that I had some suspicion what those outlier statistics might consist of.

  I didn’t trust myself to speak, but Jacob asked the question for me. “What statistics?”

  “The typical metrics we track. Convictions versus arrests versus the general crime rate over time and allocated over various demographic groups. Your arrest record, particularly for violent crime, is impressive, and when combined with the rate of conviction, it happens to be rather astounding.”

  “We just try and do our job, Ms. Whedon,” Jacob said.

  “And in the past seven years, you’ve done it exceptionally well.” The insincere smile broadened a bit. “I hope my research will help benefit other departments. You’re obviously doing something right here.”

  “We appreciate that, Ms. Whedon.” Captain Royce beamed a smile that trumped Whedon’s for pure hypocrisy. “My people are at your disposal. Now, if you could excuse us, I need to talk to Detectives Hightower and Rohan about a few things.”

  “Certainly.” As she walked past us, she said, “Thank you very much for your cooperation.”

  The door was barely closed behind her when Jacob looked at our boss and said, in an even monotone, “With all due respect, sir. What the fuck is this about?”

  Captain Royce frowned.

  I finally managed to find my voice. “Sir, is someone accusing us of something?”

  Captain Royce walked around the desk and settled roughly into his chair. He picked up a manila folder on his desk and said, “‘There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.’ Mark Twain.” He opened the folder and pulled out a page that looked like a printout from someone’s PowerPoint presentation. “To someone who hasn’t been working in this department the past seven years, our arrest and conviction record is unusually good.”

  “Does the Justice Department routinely send out their lawyers to give people gold stars?” Jacob did not sound impressed.

  “And the Office of Civil Rights Enforcement?” I added.

  “A large proportion of the arrests and convictions are of minorities,” Captain Royce said.

  Jacob sighed. “They do realize the demographics of our jurisdiction?”

  Captain Royce shrugged. “Someone in the Justice Department wanted an investigation. It’s a pain in the ass, but I’m in no position to say no. That decision is above all our pay grades. You’ll give her anything she needs, and she’s going to go back to Washington with a glowing report on the
exemplary operation we run here. Right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Jacob said.

  “And,” the Captain added, “If there’s anything you think should be brought to my attention about our ‘exemplary’ record, now would be a good time to mention it.”

  The room became quiet and still, the only sound the soft buzz of a fluorescent light fixture above us. I felt cornered. Captain Royce looked at me, and for a moment I was convinced he had figured it all out; he knew what I was doing, how I had manipulated investigations, evidence— Then he looked at Jacob, and I realized I was being paranoid.

  “Nothing?” he asked Jacob.

  I said quietly, “Nothing that isn’t in the paperwork we fill out every day.” The lie came too easy.

  “Good,” the Captain said. “Keep it that way. I don’t like surprises.”

  * * *

  —

  BEFORE I went home for the day, I received a message from the Lindale Police department. Mr. Kendal had confessed to the Asia FX robbery. I should have been happy, but I found myself wishing they had found the other gun.

  FIVE

  I WENT THROUGH the next several days feeling as if I was in a room without any exit, one that kept getting smaller and smaller. I slept poorly, and I began to have odd sensations from the Mark. At seemingly random times, I would feel a new pressure, as if an unseen hand was almost touching the lines on my back.

  The sensation was not familiar, as if these unseen fingers belonged to someone—or something—different from the hands that pushed me through the fabric of time. The first time I felt it, I was in the car with Jacob, and I clutched the dashboard in a panic. I thought I might be using the Mark involuntarily, and I had a sudden nightmare of pushing myself into a world where this car wasn’t, to tumble face-first into the speeding concrete below me—

  “Dana? Are you all right?” He slowed the car and started pulling to the side of the road. I was hyperventilating, and my face was suddenly slick with sweat, but the world around me remained unchanged.