But that didn’t make much sense either.
Frustrated, I tossed the card back on the desk.
I was tired and my head ached. Exhausted, I decided to head across the hall to the Night Detectives’ Office. They had all gone home as I was coming in to work, and their office was dark and deserted.
I found an empty desk in the back and put my head down and tried to sleep.
I woke two hours later to my boss calling my name.
I sat up, groggy and still feeling like warmed over dog shit, but trying hard not to show it.
“Hey, Steve,” I said and wiped the drool from the corner of my mouth.
Sergeant Steve Hernandez was a big, heavyset man with a black mustache and a graying crew cut. Though he was the supervisor of an investigative unit, and therefore authorized to wear a suit if he wanted, he usually opted for the uniform instead. He rested his arms on his gun belt as he stared at me. “What are you doing, Alan?”
“Working my way through a migraine,” I lied. “The lights were hurting my eyes.”
Steve Hernandez had been an SAPD sergeant for twenty-two years. He’d been my sergeant in Homicide for ten of those years. He’d seen his fair share of broken policemen.
But he was good enough not to call me on the lie. “I’m worried about you, Alan.”
“I’ll be okay,” I said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Alan, you’ve had a rough time of it since the crash. I can’t even imagine what it must be like losing your family like you did, but I’m worried about you. You know that, right? I think about you and what you’re going through. I sit at my desk and I watch you come in. You share an office with the guys who are supposed to be investigating your family’s death, and everyday they’ve got nothing new to tell you. I see that. I may not get what you’re feeling, but I worry about how you’re doing just the same. You can see that I’m worried, right?”
“Don’t be,” I said. “I’m fine.”
He looked down at his feet and fidgeted some more. “Look, Alan…I’m sorry, this is hard for me to say. I know it must be hard for you to hear, but I really think you’re in trouble. You just haven’t admitted it to yourself.”
“Steve, I don’t want to talk about this. I feel better now. I’ll get back to work.”
“No, you won’t.” The iron in his words made me sit up and pay attention. Steve Hernandez was the pushover supervisor, the one you told to just go away, and he usually did, but this time he wasn’t giving in. “You’re not going back to work,” he said, and the note of finality in his voice sobered me up fast.
“But, I’m fine—”
“No, you’re not fine, Alan. Look, a man loses his wife and two kids in a car crash, it’s heartbreaking. I watch you every day when you come into work. You’re dragging all the time. Your eyes are always bloodshot and you slip off here nearly every day to sleep. I don’t know if you’re not sleeping at home or if you’re drinking heavily or what, but you’re going downhill fast. I’m about one step away from recommending you to the Officer Concern Program. You don’t want that, do you?”
“I’m keeping up on my cases, Steve.”
“Yeah, because I’m spoon-feeding you the easy ones.”
I started to object, but didn’t. What he was saying was actually the truth. In the year since Sheryl and the kids died, I’d handled the follow-up investigation on twenty-four suicides. I’d also handled three murders, but one of those was a murder-suicide and the other two came with on-sight apprehensions. From an investigative standpoint, I hadn’t done much. Just a lot of paper pushing.
“Go home, Alan,” he said. “Please. You didn’t take any time off after the crash. At the time, I thought it was just your way of dealing with it. Throw yourself into your work and all that. But whatever this is, it’s not working. And I think it’s killing you. You need some time off. You need to regroup.”
I didn’t like the tone of that. “Are you putting me on Admin leave?”
“No,” he said. “Nothing like that. You don’t deserve to get suspended. You haven’t done anything wrong. What you deserve is a few weeks off. Take the time, Alan. I checked the books. You’ve got nearly three hundred hours of vacation time due to you. You can afford it. And it wouldn’t hurt you to talk to somebody about what you’re feeling. There’s no shame in that.”
“I don’t need a shrink, Steve.”
“Fine. Then a minister or something. Somebody. Alan, you need help in pulling back from this. What you’re going through, it’s bigger than you are.”
Of that, he had no idea. I couldn’t help but agree to that. Since Sheryl and the kids died, I’d been going through the motions, but I was dead inside. I could barely sleep, except here at work, and even then I slept in fits. I felt weak and heavy, violent and confused. Sometimes I was so miserable I couldn’t get out of bed. In the car sometimes I’d just start balling my eyes out. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night, the sheets soaking wet, thinking I’d heard Nicole or Andrew crying in their rooms upstairs. Sometimes hearing them scared me. Other times, it just made me numb inside.
Finally, I nodded and got up. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll go home.”
“Good man. I’ll tell you what, I’ll drive you myself. You look like you shouldn’t be behind the wheel.”
I nodded again. No need to tell him my car was at a Park and Ride twenty miles away. “Let me go to the bathroom first,” I said.
“Okay, I’m parked out front. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”
After using the men’s room, I walked out to the lobby that Homicide shared with Sex Crimes, Financial Crimes, Traffic Investigations and the Records Division. During business hours, the lobby was usually packed, and today was no exception. There were at least eighty people standing around, waiting to speak with a detective. I went over to the Memorial Wall to wait for Steve Hernandez.
I’d passed that wall a million times over the years, but I’d never really looked at it. Set into the wall was a large shadowbox that contained row upon row of plaques, each one commemorating the death of a San Antonio Police Officer killed in the line of duty. All but the earliest plaques had pictures of the officers they celebrated. As I stood there my gaze slid over the pictures, just like a million times before, but then suddenly locked on one of them.
It was Officer Robinson, right down to the broken nose and the wide grin.
Glenn Patrick Robinson.
Entered service October 16, 1994.
Killed by a hit and run driver while on a traffic stop on August 17, 1997.
My legs turned to water beneath me, and I staggered away from the case, bumping into the woman standing behind me. She said something mean to me, but I didn’t hear her. The room swirled around my head and I couldn’t catch my breath. I couldn’t focus. The floor seemed to rock like the ocean. People were staring at me, but they were just a sea of faces, some of them watercolor smears, others twisted and grotesque with laughter. My heart felt like it was beating so fast it might explode, and the last thing I remember going through my head before Steve Hernandez caught me and guided me toward a wooden bench in the middle of the lobby was that Glenn Patrick Robinson was killed sixteen years to the day of the crash that took my wife and children.
*
I could have asked Steve to drop me off at the Park and Ride so I could drive myself home, but that would have brought up more questions than I was ready to answer. He was already looking at me like he wasn’t quite sure what to do with me, like he was seriously thinking of driving me to a hospital rather than leaving me alone at home.
He pulled into my driveway and said, “You sure you’re going to be okay? You still look a little pale.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thanks for the ride.”
He nodded. “Yeah, well, at least you’re not shaking anymore. You really had me worried, Alan.”
“You keep saying that.”
“And you keep telling me you’ll be fine. I don’t know if I believe you.”
I climbed out before he had a chance to say anything else. I waved once in thanks and then went inside.
I headed straight for the pantry and took down a bottle of vodka from the shelf, noting with an air of self-defeat that I’d need to buy more by tomorrow or face a dry spell, and I wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.
With vodka and Diet Coke in hand, I sat down at my computer and signed on to the City’s Citrix account, so I could access personnel records. I was still trying to get my head around what I’d seen, and now that I’d had some time away from that initial shock, I thought maybe I had just been seeing things. I accessed the SAPD’s Memorial Wall webpage and scrolled through the entries there until I came to Glenn Patrick Robinson.
I clenched up inside.
It was Robinson all right, and there wasn’t enough booze in all the world to change that.
“But how?” I said. “I don’t…”
I ran his name through the city’s archived personnel database and found him right away. Glenn Patrick Robinson, born in San Antonio, Texas, March 6, 1971. Date of employment, October 16, 1994. Date of separation from the Department, August 17, 1997.
All the dates matched.
I am not a superstitious man. I’m not a religious one, either. I am a man of facts. Being a detective, I’ve built my life and my reputation on the reliability of the facts I uncover. But the facts were right there in front of me, and I didn’t know how to process them. For the first time in my life, I felt like the facts were lying to me, and that was like being lost on the ocean. I refused to believe I had encountered some kind of ghost. I couldn’t make myself accept that. And yet I had seen his face, both in person and in that picture from nearly two decades before. They were the same. That I couldn’t deny.
I went to the master bedroom to get undressed. Sheryl had left me with the habit of putting my laundry into hampers in my closet, and after nearly fourteen years of marriage, it had become second nature. I stripped down to my undershorts and tried to sort the clothes into the right hampers. But being a serial drunk requires a little effort. Though a measure of sobriety had returned during my car ride home with Steve Hernandez, the first few sips of my vodka and Diet Coke had brought back that numbing warmth with a vengeance.
It had brought back the stagger as well.
I reached for the top shelf of my closet by habit, meaning to put my gun up there, where it’d be safe from little curious hands as Sheryl used to say, but only managed to sway wildly off balance and go staggering into a stack of boxes I’d put there to get them out of the way.
The contents spilled all over the floor.
I was about to cuss the work I’d made for myself when I noticed one of Nicole’s drawings on top of the pile of spilled papers and toys.
It was a globe. A globe drawn by a ten-year-old, the continents not quite right.
And a belt of stars surrounded it.
My mouth fell open and my legs couldn’t hold me. I dropped to the floor, fell back against the wall, still clutching Nicole’s drawing. I stared at it, simultaneously stricken by the horror that this was the same image I’d seen in Officer Robinson’s lightbar and cut down by the love that had been ripped from my chest.
It was too much.
I tried to fathom what it could mean, but only managed to break into sobs.
Nicole, I thought. My beautiful, sweet, innocent Nicole.
*
Nothing hits harder, or with less warning, than grief. I was wrecked by it. Sheryl and the kids, I missed them so much. Their passing had left a hole in me so deep there was no way it would ever be filled again. Without them, I had absolutely nothing. I looked at my future and saw a place I did not want to live in, a place I couldn’t live in. As a homicide detective, over the years, I’d handled hundreds of suicides. It was almost an everyday thing. But no matter how deep into somebody’s personal history I got, no matter how much I came to know him or her after their death, I’d never been able to truly understand why they’d want to kill themselves. I got the reasons. Fatal, painful illnesses. Deep depression. The collapse of a marriage. I got all that, I understood it in an academic sense, a clinical sense; yet even with that understanding, the idea of ending it all was so alien, so not right, that I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I was raised to fight to the end. You never give up, no matter how much it hurts, no matter what stands in your way. But in that moment, seated on my closet floor, my service weapon just inches from my hand, I nearly gave in to the dark.
I wanted to.
Only one thought held me back.
The star-belted globe in Nicole’s drawing was identical to the glowing image I’d seen in Officer Robinson’s lightbar.
Was it a coincidence?
I thought there was little chance of that.
She’d seen this image at some point before her death, and it had struck her with enough importance for her to reproduce it.
What did that mean?
Limbus had selected me to find this Gary Harper guy, which meant the DWI arrest with Officer Robinson had to have been a setup. And to do that, they would have needed to keep me under observation. I’d done undercover work before, and I knew from that experience that you could learn a lot of information about people real fast. It wasn’t hard, even if the person was paranoid. Cops are trained to spot someone watching them, and I knew what to look for better than most, but of course I hadn’t been on my game for a long while. If I was being watched by pros, they could have learned everything about my family and me in a matter of days. And all of that led me into some unpleasant conclusions.
I’d always thought my family was killed in a random hit-and-run accident. Sheryl had been driving them to school one morning. It happened at the entrance to our subdivision. A red Ford pickup had lost control on the curve on the main road and spun into the driver’s side of Sheryl’s Camry, killing her and the kids instantly. But what if the crash wasn’t random? What if somebody had targeted them? Or even Limbus? Could Limbus be behind the murder of my family?
Maybe this Gary Harper fellow was connected to their deaths.
Somehow that felt like a stretch, but nothing about what I’d experienced so far made sense. I didn’t know what to believe. All I had were a bunch of questions.
But I did know somebody who might have answers.
I called the number on the Limbus, Inc. business card Officer Robinson had given me. I knew he would answer even before it started ringing.
“What kind of game are you playing with me?” I demanded.
“This isn’t a game.”
“You’re damn right it’s not. I want to know what happened to my family.”
“I know you do.”
“Did you kill them?”
“No.”
“Did this Limbus, whatever it is, did they kill them?”
“No.”
“How can I believe that? Why all this secrecy? Why bother setting me up like you did?”
There was a long pause on his end. I was about to say his name when he finally spoke. “Which question would you like me to answer, Alan?”
“Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this to my family? Why did this happen?”
“There are no answers to those questions, Alan. At least, I can’t answer them.”
His tone was soft, almost apologetic, but I wasn’t about to let him off the hook. “Why not? What’s the truth here?”
“I’m sorry, Alan. You have to answer those questions yourself. I can’t do it for you.”
“Why not?” I was screaming into the phone now. “Why the hell not? You tell me, goddamn it! You tell me right fucking now!”
“Goodbye, Alan.”
I heard a click.
“No!” I screamed. “Robinson, damn you. Don’t you hang up on me. Don’t you…”
But he was gone. I was talking to dead air.
I held the phone to my ear until it clicked again and the connection closed. Only then did I put the phone and the business
card down on the dresser. I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the wall, my whole body humming with rage. I felt like a live wire, like I was ready to rattle myself to pieces.
And then the grief hit me again and the tears came and I was lost to everything but the pain.
*
Later that night, I went to get my car from the Park and Ride. It was dark by then and the lot was six miles away. There was no way I was going to walk that far in the dark and along the highway, so I called a cab. Though I’d done absolutely nothing all day but sit and wallow in my grief, I was exhausted. Riding in the back of the cab, my second ride in the backseat of a Crown Victoria in as many days, I could barely keep my eyes open. I let my chin sink to my chest and I was almost asleep when the cabbie started speaking.
“Huh?” I said.
“Which car is yours?” He was an older Hispanic man, lean and slight of build, with a thin, black mustache and black hair that looked like he used some sort of Just for Men product to color the gray away. He smelled of cigarette smoke and hair oil. Ranchero music played softly on his radio.
I shifted in my seat. My back was hurting again, the lingering memory of a rear end collision I’d been on the receiving end of twelve years earlier, back in my days as a patrolman. I pointed across the lot toward the back row. “I’m in that maroon Honda Accord over there.”
He pulled up next to my car and said, “Seventeen-sixty.”
I fished my wallet out of my back pocket and looked at the few miserable bills I had there. I did some quick figuring. Twenty for the cab ride, and I’d need another thirty for a bottle, because I was almost out of vodka at home. That’d leave about ten dollars for gas. That wouldn’t buy much, but seeing as I wasn’t going to work for a while, I wouldn’t be driving much. I saw myself sitting at home, watching TV, and trying my hardest to drown away any thought that dared to enter my head.
Does any of that change the fact that you’ve got sixty-three dollars in your property?
Hearing Officer Robinson’s voice in my head was like a punch in the gut and I groaned in pain.
“Hey mister, you okay?” the cab driver asked.
It took me a moment to answer. “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Limbus, Inc. Book II Page 15