Injustice

by Lee Goodman

  We hung up.

  Pop. Pop pop.

  Now ZZ was panting terribly. The trembling was getting worse, and he had a wild look in his eyes.

  “I don’t think this is going to work,” Tina said.

  “I love you, ZZ,” Barnaby said.

  “I’m going to take him home,” Tina said.

  “I can do it if you’d rather.”

  “No. You stay and wait for the others. I’ll go.”

  “But you’ll come right back?” I asked.

  “Of course, sweetie,” Tina said. “I’ll just get him settled. It’ll be quick.”

  “I’m going with Mommy,” Barnaby said.

  “No, you stay here with me, Barn. Mommy will be back soon.”

  “I’m going with ZZ. I’m going with Mommy,” he said.

  “Barnaby,” I said sternly. But he was gone, running after Tina, grabbing her hand, taking ZZ’s leash from her. The three of them—Tina, Barnaby, and the dog—disappeared through the crowd.

  I sat by myself on the blanket. It felt odd being alone, a little surreal, as the strands of music played through the low static of all the voices chattering around me, and the screams of children playing at the edge of the woods, and a quick deafening blast of resonance when someone brought the mike too close to a speaker.

  My cell rang. It was Lizzy, but when I picked it up, she wasn’t there. I tried calling Tina to remind her to leave a light on in the house for ZZ so the poor pup wouldn’t be left terrified and alone in the dark, but Tina didn’t answer.

  Pop pop pop.

  I waited, expecting any second to see Lizzy and Ethan approach through the crowd and plunk down on the blanket with me; to see Flora and Chip; to see Lydia.

  I mentally did the math of how long it should take Tina and Barn to weave through the crowd to the parking area, drive home, get ZZ settled, and then make it back here to be with me on the blanket . . .

  Pop.

  Pop.

  Pop.

  CHAPTER 5

  There was screaming.

  Then sirens.

  And later the nighttime mist was illuminated from within by the strobing of blue and red police lights.

  An announcement through the speakers informed us that the concert and fireworks were delayed. A little later, someone announced that the concert was about to begin. And there were rumors that seemed to spread across the crowd by invisible vectors. A shooting. A killing.

  All around me, families like mine sat on blankets with their loved ones. Children were wrapped fiercely in the arms of parents. Lovers had their four hands knotted tightly together. People were up and walking toward the woods, toward the blues and reds flashing through the trees. A cop took the mike and shushed the orchestra and announced that the area of “the incident” was off-limits; everything except the amphitheater was off-limits, and as soon as police had facilities in place for recording our names and identification, we’d be allowed to leave the park through designated exits. Until then, we would please all go back to wherever we’d been sitting.

  I’d never gotten up. I’d been clinging to my blanket on the grass, feeling it was the only place in the universe; that if there was any hope of my loved ones finding me in the chaos, I had to stay put. We had only this patch of ground.

  The orchestra had started playing again. There was a vocalist.

  . . . stand beside her, and guide her,

  Through the night with a light from above.

  Around me, families and couples huddled. I couldn’t spot anyone else sitting alone. Just me sitting by myself while everybody I cared about was adrift in the night.

  But if I was the only one whose whole family was at large, I was also about the only one who could walk right past the sentries and step over the yellow tape to part the crowd of responders, wading into the nucleus of medics and detectives and forensic technicians. I could go demand to know what had happened.

  I had my badge out and with it I scythed my way into the chaos.

  “I will comport myself with dignity,” I whispered—as if the formality of those words could somehow create the stoicism I might need.

  I had to go farther into the woods than I expected. I followed the paved path. It was lighted here and there with streetlamps, but they were few and dim enough not to overwhelm the feeling of woods and nighttime. The path wound through the trees. It led through a tunnel where another path crossed overhead. Whenever I was approached by a cop, I fended him off with my badge: “DOJ,” I said, or “U.S. Attorney’s Office.”

  There were police vehicles and unmarked cars and an ambulance. I recognized many of the enforcement personnel, but I beelined toward my target. The body was just beyond another culvert tunnel, maybe twenty yards from the trail, suggesting that the perp had muscled the victim off into the woods.

  A foil blanket covered what needed covering.

  When I stepped from the trail, I was again stopped by a uniformed cop. My badge failed to work its magic.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the guy said, “just the evidence response team beyond here.”

  “But I’m—”

  A strong hand encircled my arm, and a voice beside me said, “It’s okay, Officer, I’ll escort Mr. Davis.”

  This was a guy I knew. Captain Dorsey of the state troopers. He walked me forward and we stopped. Whatever the blanket covered, it was too big to be a four-year-old boy.

  “Do you know who it is?” I asked.

  “Adult female,” Dorsey said.

  One of the technicians looked up, saw Dorsey, and raised an eyebrow questioningly. Dorsey nodded, and the guy pulled the blanket back from the victim’s head. She lay turned away from us and facedown in the dirt.

  My first thought was Lizzy, but her hair was the wrong color. Lizzy is a honey blonde. The victim’s hair was auburn.

  Comport myself with dignity.

  The color and texture of her hair, the shape of her head, the way she lay—it was all so familiar.

  In a roar of unreality, I watched the crime scene tech squat down and, with gloved hands, gently cradle her head and lift her face from the dirt. The woods breathed with electric pulses of blue light.

  “Tina,” I said aloud, and the sound was odd to me and I wondered for a moment if I’d misremembered my wife’s name. “Tina.” But now the technician turned her head and set it back down on the dirt facing us, and my first thought was that people must look younger in death than when they’re alive.

  And I realized she was younger because it wasn’t Tina. It was Lydia.

  CHAPTER 6

  That night exists in strobing pulses of blue and red. In my memory, I see stop-action tableaux. Crime scene techs placing things in plastic bags, a detective pointing out something about the geography of the crime, EMTs sliding a gurney into the ambulance.

  And sound: After the ambulance moved slowly down the bike path toward the amphitheater, its siren burped once, not because it was in any hurry but to clear a path through the gawkers.

  Everyone was waiting for me at the blanket in the amphitheater. The crowd swirled toward the gates. Some of the disgruntled concertgoers tried to step over the shin-high chain separating the amphitheater from the access road, but the uniformed officers were all over it.

  My family: Did I tell them, or did they simply guess because they saw my face and saw Dorsey at my side with one hand gently on my bicep? It was a shock and a profound sadness for all of us, but for Tina and Henry, it was a horror beyond measure. And while I wrapped Tina into my arms, I noticed that it was Lizzy, my selfless daughter, who went immediately to Henry.

  “Let’s get you folks home,” Dorsey says. “We’ll get the information we need from you there.”

  Escorted by cops and leaking the sounds of grief, we skirted the crowd. I imagined that those who were so impatient to leave would catch a glimpse of how unimportant their own impatience was. But no: Some jerk tried to tag along, attaching himself to us. I hoped they’d shoot him, but one of the cops simply steered
him away. “I’m sorry, sir, you’ll have to—”

  And then we were gone.

  In the morning I drove over to police headquarters to speak with Dorsey.

  “Nick. Nick,” he said in a voice that strived for intimacy. He guided me to his office just as he had guided me the previous night. “You should be home with your family. We’ll take care of this.”

  “What the hell good am I, Captain, if I can’t even get my loved ones a little special attention? Thirty years as a prosecutor . . .”

  “Believe me, Nick,” he said, “this is getting plenty of attention.”

  “What do you have?”

  “We’re thinking it was random. Sexual assault and robbery. Her underclothes were . . .” He stopped.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “You sure you want to know this, Nick? Maybe you should just be family on this one. Let us be the cops.”

  “Tell me,” I said. It came out louder than intended. I shouted it, actually. Dorsey isn’t the kind of guy you shout at, but he just smiled. When he smiled that way, it wasn’t wide and happy, but a sad expression, the tight line of pained lips disappearing into the black of his bear-rug mustache.

  Dorsey put a cup of coffee in my hands. “You like anything with that?” he asked, and the way he said it made me feel forgiven. He seemed almost as eager to give me some kind of solace as I was to give it to Tina.

  “No, thanks,” I said, “I like it black.”

  He poured himself coffee. “I like a little cream,” he said, and he tipped a dollop into his cup. He sat and neither of us said anything. Then he said, “Her jeans were ripped open at the zipper, but that’s as far as it went. The perp must have been scared off. Her mouth was bloody, like he punched her or pushed his hand into her mouth to keep her quiet. She was apparently too much trouble for the guy, so he just shot her, took her bag, and fled. We found the bag in a trash can at the far end of the park. Money and credit cards gone. Cell phone, too.”

  “Just a woman alone at night,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “Do you have anything yet?”

  “Leads, you mean? I don’t know. It depends on what you call a lead. We’re interviewing people. We have the usual suspects, and we’re working a shitload of data from everyone we talked to last night. We’re bringing a few guys in for questioning. The lab is still working the physical evidence we brought back.”

  “What guys? What guys are you bringing in for questioning?”

  “Just guys, Nick. Ones who hang out in the park, guys known to us. Guys with records. Pervs with a tendency for violence.”

  “Good. That sounds good,” I said. “I was also thinking we could get a couple of undercovers, a man and a woman, maybe, and they could—”

  “Nick, stop.”

  “But I was just thinking—”

  “You’re not part of this investigation, Nick. It’s not federal, and you’re too close.”

  “—we could set up a sting. You know, lure the guy in.”

  “Listen, Nick, I’m kind of acting as a liaison of sorts because of my friendship with you.”

  “Who’s heading up the investigation? I’d like to—”

  “Let us do our jobs, Nick. Okay?” The bear rug twitched, and he ran a hand over his bald head. It was shiny, and I wondered if that was natural or if he used baby oil or something. I wanted in on the investigation, not a real hands-on job but something to keep me on the inside. I didn’t want to wait at home trying to keep Tina and Henry from falling apart. I grabbed the arms of my chair. I wanted to surge to my feet and start demanding.

  “So, listen,” he said after we’d stared at each other a few seconds, “as long as you’re here, tell me about”—he consulted his notebook, “Henry Tatlock.”

  “Henry? They’re engaged.”

  “Did they fight?”

  “Lydia and Henry? I thought you said it was random.”

  “It looks random. But we need to cover our bases.”

  “I don’t know, Captain, it’s hard to imagine Henry fighting with anybody.”

  “Does he have a temper?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, life can’t have been easy for him, the way he, um, you know, looks. So maybe he has some buried anger, and maybe sometimes it . . .”

  “Everybody has some buried anger, Dorsey. I do. Don’t you?”

  “Nick, we’re just trying to cross people off the list. Honest. Henry isn’t a . . .”

  “I mean, what made you go into police work, Dorsey? Smart guy like you, you could have been, I don’t know, a dentist, maybe, making a few hundred thou a year with regular hours and no bullets coming at you.”

  “Nick . . .”

  “Or investment banker. Or surgeon. Or lawyer. But no, you’re going out in the night to look at murdered girls in the park. You got issues, Dorsey? You like that shit, do you? You like carrying a piece and looking at dead people in the park? Maybe you have some buried anger, Captain. Let’s put your name on the list of suspects.”

  The bear rug twitched. I saw him recalculate. He was silent a moment, mentally flipping pages in the manual, finding the section on dealing with difficult witnesses.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” he finally said.

  “Not my loss, Captain. It’s my wife’s loss. It’s Henry Tatlock’s loss. I am saddened, but they are undone. They are destroyed.”

  “I just meant—”

  “No,” I blurted, “I have seen no signs of demons in Henry Tatlock. Between you and me, Captain, I don’t think he’ll make it as a trial lawyer for just that reason. Sweetest guy in the world, but he’s milquetoast. Kind of a loner, actually, and he lacks the vortex of rage that drives a trial lawyer toward the jugular.”

  Dorsey considered. “Do you know where he was at the time of the murder?”

  “He was at the U.S. Attorney’s Office, reading over a memo I wrote for a case we’re working on.”

  “Yes, well.” The bear rug twitched again. “I’m sure it will all check out. You understand, Nick, this is part of my job. Okay?”

  I shrugged.

  “And I know that part of your job, as family, is to feel resentment at any suggestion—”

  “I’m pissed that you’re asking, and I’d be pissed if you weren’t. No win for you. But listen to me very carefully: Henry didn’t kill Lydia. Okay? And I’m sure you want to ask about Lydia too, so I’ll make it easy for you: She had no enemies that I know of, but she was passionate. Emotional. Might have rubbed someone wrong.”

  “Would you know if she had any jilted lovers?”

  “I’d be surprised if she didn’t.”

  “Do you have names?”

  “My wife might.”

  He nodded; he sighed. I saw his eyes move distractedly around the room, looking for the next thing to say. Dorsey knows things about me. He knows I lost a son at nine months old, he knows I was once sweet on a woman who got murdered before I had a chance to get close to her, and he knows I have a foster son in prison for murder. Maybe Dorsey wanted to say something that wasn’t from the procedures manual, but he didn’t really know how. Maybe he wanted to say it’s hard to fathom how sad life can be. Something like that.

  Dorsey’s desk phone rang. “Dorsey,” he said.

  Pause.

  “When?”

  He hung up and stared at me.

  “What?” I said.

  “We’ve just apprehended someone who tried to use one of Lydia Trevor’s credit cards over at MicroGiant. They’re bringing him in for questioning.”

  “Can I watch?”

  Dorsey stiffened. He wanted to say no, but I was head of the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office. He had to let me.

  We watched on a monitor from a separate room. The suspect looked about twenty years old, skinny with a scraggly beard and stringy hair. He sat waiting, showing no apparent fear or concern. Maybe he was on meds. He wore torn jeans with a dirty undershirt.

  Two detectives walked into the int
errogation room and introduced themselves. One was a large guy, the other a tiny woman. The suspect smiled happily. “Hi,” he said.

  The male detective spoke first. “Mr. Crane. Can I call you Tom? So, Tom, you were caught using a stolen credit card. You’re in a bit of trouble here.”

  “Not stolen,” the suspect said, “it was given to me.”

  “By who?”

  “The Lord.”

  “Really?”

  “I told him I needed computers. So he gave me the credit card.”

  “Did he hand it to you?”

  The question seemed to make Tom Crane sad. “You don’t know Him very well, do you? He led me to it.”

  “How . . .”

  “On the sidewalk. I stepped on it.”

  “Stepped on it?”

  “I had just said I need to buy computers. Said it inside my head, I mean, not out loud. Not to someone else. I just said inside my head, I need to buy computers, and right then I step on something, and I look down and there’s this credit card.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I thanked Him.”

  “With the credit card. What did you do with it?”

  “I picked it up.” Tom Crane laughed. He was pleased with himself. “Praise the Lord.”

  “Why computers, Tom? What did you need computers for?”

  “I need many of them.”

  “Okay, but why?”

  “For the children.”

  “What children?”

  “Rivertown children. To teach them.”

  “Teach them what?”

  “Everything. Everything about computers.”

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Not to us.”

  “To propel them.”

  “Propel them?”

  “On life’s path. Toward learning. Toward the Lord.”

  The detective doing the questioning glanced up at the other and rolled his eyes.

  Dorsey looked over at me and shook his head. This wasn’t our guy.

  The door of the observation room opened, and a cop handed Dorsey a file. Dorsey scanned it. “No criminal record,” he said. “And it seems Mr. Crane was at MIT until about a year ago. He didn’t graduate, just left.”