“Not in the seconds I had. I’m sorry.” Don’t apologize.
“So you chose to shoot,” Tom said, like that was an established fact.
“I chose to survive.”
“You were sure he was going to attack you?”
“I thought so.”
Tom exchanged a look with Jackson and took a slug of bottled water. “Let’s stick with this idea of an attack for a minute. I want to go back to Justice. He must have known right away that Christopher was in your yard.”
“Soon after Justice got out of the car, he barked and ran at him.”
“Did that threaten him?”
“Officer Brady can’t know what was in Christopher’s mind,” Hausmann said.
“Justice was just warning him. He stopped barking when he reached him,” Andie said.
“Why was that?”
“Speculation. Officer Brady can’t know what Justice thought, either,” Hausmann said.
“Maybe Justice knew him,” Andie offered.
“How did your dog know him if you say you didn’t?” Tom asked.
Andie blinked, confused. How was she supposed to explain? “I don’t know. Justice saw me wave at him now and again.”
“But Justice did bark at him that night, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Could Christopher have thought he was attacking him?”
“I’ve told you that Officer Brady can’t read minds,” Hausmann warned.
“The Vanderwaals claim Christopher loved dogs and would never have hurt Justice. They think he attacked Christopher—and if Christopher did stab him, it was in self-defense,” Tom explained to Hausmann. “I want to know how Brady responds to that accusation.”
“I’ll tell you how I respond.” Andie leaned forward, her elbows on the table, the closer to Tom the better to make sure he got the point. “The Vanderwaals are flat-out wrong. Justice didn’t attack anybody. I was there. I saw what happened.” Her tone contained a dash of cayenne pepper.
“Would you say Justice is reliable? Well behaved?”
“Absolutely.” Justice’s refusal to come that night when Andie had called him flashed through her mind. Still, she said with confidence, “He’s impeccably behaved.”
“Some people might disagree with that.” Tom set another document in front of Andie. “Will you explain this complaint filed against him at the Nisqually County Humane Society? He got rough with your neighbor’s dog.”
Andie shrank back, cornered. “That dog came into my yard and attacked Justice. He was defending himself. You can’t blame him for that.” Red splotches of irritation appeared on her cheeks.
“But according to this report, Justice did grab the dog by the throat.”
“Justice didn’t hurt him!” Andie said, too loud. “The dog was fine. There wasn’t a tooth mark on him. And there won’t be one on Christopher!” Stephanie rested her hand on Andie’s arm. To warn or reassure her? To calm her down? “You can go after me, but it’s not fair to go after my dog!” Andie said.
“We’re not here to decide what’s fair, Brady. We’re here to get the facts,” Tom said. Another swat to Andie’s wrist.
She closed her eyes to regain her aplomb, but it lay shredded around her feet.With an iron will, she sat up straighter and told herself that she would not let Tom Wolski see how much he upset her. She ducked behind her granite wall.
* * *
Three hours later, Stephanie hugged Andie good-bye and Ron Hausmann walked her to the station’s parking lot. Rain was pouring, but she was too exhausted to drag her umbrella out of her tote bag. As they passed her requisitioned police car, an insult to her injury, her legs became rubber that at any minute might buckle under her. Psychologically, Andie felt as if she’d been trampled on by hooves.
“Good work in there.” Hausmann jingled coins in his pocket.
“Wolski’s tough” was all Andie could reply.
“Don’t let him worry you. He knows the score. Your use of force was a reasonable response.”
“I’m not sure anymore.”
Hausmann opened her Honda’s door, and she climbed behind the wheel. Rain spattered his glasses. “Wolski can’t twist a perfectly rational action into an irrational one. I dare him to try.”
It looks like he’s trying. And you’re shoring me up just because this investigation has miles to go. It stretched out before Andie like a road through a war zone, and her only weapon for self-defense was a dandelion puff.
* * *
As the wipers squawked across her windshield, Andie turned into her driveway. Before going to see Justice, she wanted to change out of her sweaty clothes and take a shower. Otherwise, he’d smell her anxiety, and it could distress him when he needed all his strength to recover.
For the last four years, she’d parked in front of her house. But today she pulled up to its south side, opposite the north part of her yard where Christopher had hidden. Now the house shielded her from that nightmare spot, the crime scene, which had once been a peaceful place with her vegetable garden, apple trees, and rhododendron bushes. She went inside and closed the curtains on windows looking out to it. Because it was too painful to see, she mentally cut it off and pretended it didn’t exist. She’d never recover enough emotionally to park there again—one more change, thanks to Christopher.
CHAPTER 13
ANDREA
A plaid sofa and reclining leather chair furnished the family room in Dr. Vargas’s clinic, but Andie chose to sit on the Berber carpet so she could visit Justice eye-to-eye. Though limping, he burst into the room and threw himself at her. As his wagging tail thwacked the sofa, he licked her face. But then he hobbled to the door leading to the waiting room and pressed his nose against the knob. Get me out of here! I want to go home! In this pernicious clinic, they do heinous things to innocent dogs!
“He’s getting stronger.” Dr. Vargas’s technician, Wendy, her arms weighed down with woven friendship bracelets, guided Justice away from the door. “He has to be careful. If he gets too rowdy, he’ll rip out his tubes and stitches.”
“You hear that, Sweet Boy?” Andie asked.
Justice relented and sat on the carpet, but his dark look let her know in the starkest terms, I have done nothing to deserve incarceration. I do not belong in this barbarous place.
“I’m so sorry, Justice,” Andie said. “But it’s great that you’re more alert today!”
“Dr. Vargas wants to watch him for infection a little longer, but he thinks Justice is going to be all right,” Wendy said.
“All right” was a feast for Andie’s hungry ears. She felt like she could take a deep breath for the first time since that night. For two interminable days, she’d hoped for this good news. It took the edge off her morning with Tom Wolski, whom she would not mention to Justice for fear he’d sense how hard it had been.
Careful of his wounds, Andie hugged him. “You’re going home soon. We’ll have a party with Rosemary. In a few weeks, we can go for w-a-l-k-s.” Andie spelled the word so he wouldn’t leap around again.
Justice’s tail thumped against the carpet.
When Wendy left, Andie handed him his squeaky carrot, his second-favorite toy after Bandit, his teddy bear. Normally, Justice squeaked whole symphonies of joy, but now he managed only one paltry squeak before he dropped the carrot on the floor.
“It’s your carrot! You love it,” Andie reminded him. Determined to make him happy, she dug a packet of iceberg lettuce leaves out of her bag. She’d brought only the crunchiest ones from deep inside the head because he turned away from flaccid leaves as if they were too vile to consider. “Here.” Expecting unbridled ecstasy and a snap of teeth, she handed him a crisp leaf.
He sniffed cautiously, bit into it, and dropped it. P-tooey!
Justice was too honorable to sulk about not going home, but he was not himself. Andie wondered if pain medication was dragging him down, or if he might be suffering from emotional as well as physical wounds. He was the kind of dog who’d run
into a burning building to rescue strangers, but he was also sensitive. Perhaps he needed time to recover psychologically. Maybe he had to work out in his own mind what had happened to him.
Ignoring the spit-out lettuce, Justice lay on his good side, rested his head in Andie’s lap, and moaned a deep, expressive moan. As she stroked his ears and listened to his quiet breaths, he slowly shut his eyes. His and Andie’s bond was so close that sometimes she felt as if they lived inside the same skin. Just as she’d do anything for him, he’d do the same for her. They belonged together. They’d worked so hard to become a team.
After Meghan’s unsuccessful search for Justice’s people, Andie had claimed him for life and taken him to meet Chief Malone. “Look!” She held out a tug toy—a rope with a knot on one end and a rubber handle on the other—and Justice grabbed the knot with the conviction of a snapping turtle. No matter how hard she yanked or where she dragged him around the Chief’s office, Justice held on. “See how focused he is? Nothing can distract him.”
And when Andie told him, “Leave it,” Justice dropped the knot. “He also knows obedience. He could be a champion drug sniffer,” she said.
“Maybe.” The hard-boiled Chief would take a while to agree that the Earth was round. “Take him for testing.”
Justice had passed the entry tests at the State Patrol Academy’s Narcotics Canine School. Confident of his olfactory prowess, Andie took him to the Academy’s gym for two months—220 hours—and taught him what and how to sniff.
First, they completed what seemed like six thousand “fetches” of his treasured tennis ball. Then out of his sight, she tucked it and a small tin of cocaine into a canvas bag and set it with four empty bags onto the floor. She called Justice and said, “Search!”
Justice looked up at her, cocked his head, and relayed to her as forthrightly as he’d ever relayed anything, I don’t speak English.
“Search!” She pointed to the bags. “Go find the ball! Get the ball!”
The sun rose on Justice’s mental landscape. He dashed to the first bag and shoved his pointed nose into the canvas opening. He rushed to the second. At last in the third bag he sank his teeth into the ball and brought it back to Andie. She grabbed it and said, “Sit!” When he sat, she told him he was the smartest, most wonderful dog ever born and she threw the ball for him. He bounded after it, brought it back, and dropped it at her feet.
After doing this exercise what also seemed like six thousand times, Andie hid only the drug; when Justice found it and sat, she threw the ball. Being a brilliant and cooperative dog, he understood that his job was to locate drugs and sit, and he learned the smells of cocaine, heroin, and meth.
In the last couple of years, Justice had sniffed drugs in houses, cars, and the county jail’s cells, where incarcerated dealers had unsuccessfully tried to fool his blue-ribbon nose by concealing their stash in hot chocolate mix or ground coffee. He’d found drugs wrapped as Christmas gifts, hidden behind a car door’s interior panel, and mailed in suspicious packages at the post office. And he’d alerted Andie to dealers’ secreted cash because the smell of drugs was on the bills.
Whenever Andie said “search,” Justice searched with ebullience, never hesitating, never grousing, always eager. If he’d been a person, human resources officers across America would have fallen all over themselves to hire him. Because of that joy, Andie grieved to see him now, too badly injured to do the job he loved. She ran her hand over the fluffy fur on his neck and gently patted his unhurt shoulder. She whispered, “I’d have given anything for Christopher not to hurt you.”
It had been so unexpected. That was the thing about life. Lightning bolts struck out of the blue and rattled your teeth. The first time had been when Andie’s mother picked her up at school and broke the news of her father’s death. The second, when she’d come home from work and found her husband Rich’s note informing her: “I don’t want to be married to a cop anymore.” Now the third was Christopher’s attack, which had emotionally razed Andie to the ground. It had also chipped away at her sense of safety so she felt vulnerable and small, an ant crushed under an elephant’s foot.
Thank heavens for Justice. She stroked his chest. A rampant hedonist even in infirmity, he flopped out his unshaved front leg to give her better access. “You’re honorable and good, Sweet Boy. You don’t deserve your hurt.”
Yet Andie wondered if she deserved hers. Sometimes she felt that she was being singled out for shocks and tumult. Or maybe she was being punished. But for what? Inadvertent misbehavior? Bad karma from a former life? How could that be so when she’d always tried to be a good person and do the right thing? If she believed in justice, she had to trust that decency’s reward would not be pain.
“We can believe all is well. But it’s never true,” Andie whispered to Justice. “Everything can change in a finger snap. Life isn’t fair.”
She closed her eyes and let his soft fur and steady breathing slow her racing thoughts.
CHAPTER 14
TOM
Tom scooted his spine-torturing metal chair to the computer. The cubicle he called an office was barely large enough for him, and the only personal touch was a wood-framed photo of Lisa jumping on a neighbor’s trampoline. Tom would never know why he kept that picture when one bad bounce and Lisa could have ended up at Wilson Hospital, where two years before that photo was taken he’d spent agonizing days with her. Remembering them still gave him the shivers.
He turned on his computer, the slowest on this side of the Cascades, and waited while, as usual, it would grind on before icons showed up on the screen. While Jackson and Murphy had been working their way down the Valley Road neighborhood interview list compiled from Google Earth, Tom had gone to San Julian High School, searched Christopher’s locker, and found only dirty gym clothes and a few paperback books. No clues. No stash, laptop, or cell.
Tom had talked with Christopher’s counselor, a plump woman in Birkenstocks, with hopes she might know about his drug use, which would be the easiest explanation for what he’d allegedly done. But she was barely aware of him. She said, defensively it seemed to Tom, “It’s a big school. He didn’t stand out.” Once the press got through with Christopher, Tom bet he’d stand out in glowing Technicolor.
At last on Tom’s computer screen, the e-mail icon appeared. He clicked on it. Good. There was a message from Nisqually County Central Communications, also known as CENCOM. Tom had requested a recording of Brady’s radio call. Though probing it for answers could be a waste of time, it might shed some light. You never knew what someone’s words or tone of voice could tell you.
As of now, Tom did not trust Andie. She’d answered his questions, but sometimes he’d gotten the feeling that she was evasive or manipulated facts, such as when she’d claimed the raffle ticket was her only contact with Christopher. Justice would have kept barking if Christopher had been a stranger, and Brady’s suggestion that Justice knew him from waving on the road didn’t cut it. Tom couldn’t shake the suspicion that something had gone on between her and Christopher. It could have started the whole deal.
Andie had also gotten riled up about the complaint against Justice. Tom had watched those pretty cheeks turn red. He’d bet she’d gotten angry when Christopher stabbed her dog too. Tom could understand that; he’d be mad if anyone hurt Sammy, his golden retriever—though not mad enough to fire a shot. As every cop knew, anger could cloud your mind and goad you into using too much force. When you were emotional, you got sloppy. Andie could have done that.
Tom leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. The Vanderwaals might have put their finger on it: Maybe Justice attacked Christopher and he stabbed the dog in self-defense. Maybe Andie overreacted and shot the kid. Tom would have to figure that out.
He clicked on CENCOM’s file and listened to her give her police ID number. She said, “Shots fired. I need help at my house. One on the ground at gunpoint. Eight-one-five just stabbed.”
He pressed his fingertips together and stare
d at the gray wall. By necessity, an emergency required Andie to be short and to the point. When so many snoopers scanned police calls nowadays, she couldn’t give away much more than she had. And she had to be quick in case another cop needed the airwaves to call for help. Tom had to hand it to her: She’d kept her cool and followed protocol.
Tom played Andie’s words again. Five times. He listened for her feelings. Beneath her control, he picked up heavy breaths, like gasps, and trembles in her voice. A cynic might say she was stressed about getting her story straight before backup arrived, or anxious because shooting a kid could derail her life, or angry that Christopher had attacked.
But a more empathetic person could understand that she was scared if she’d just seen Justice stabbed and come so close to getting killed herself. Her knees could have been knocking together; she could have struggled to be coherent and keep from breaking down. Any woman cop in Andie’s situation would have felt that fear.
Any man cop too.
He picked up a pencil and rested its eraser on his desk, then flipped the pencil and rested the point. He rotated the eraser and tip again. And again. Thump, tap. Thump, tap. Thump, tap.
Once on a midnight shift in Seattle, he’d gotten scared and mad enough to understand every tremble in Brady’s voice. He and his partner, Cliff, were checking out a possible intruder in a Queen Anne apartment. Nice neighborhood, but that didn’t mean squat. Whether you were called to a penthouse or an outhouse, you never knew what you might be getting into. A lone sadistic killer could blast you from a window with his semiautomatic, or Charles Manson and his family could be waiting, hopped up on LSD, ready to bludgeon you to death. On any call, you had to deal with that underbelly of courage: fear of the unknown.
Cliff had parked the car a block downhill from the apartment building. He rushed into the main entrance and climbed the interior stairs to the fourth floor. Tom circled around to the back and started up the fire escape in case anybody tried to flee. On the third-floor landing he looked up. Under the building’s exterior light, a handgun barrel protruded through a crack as someone slowly opened the fourth floor’s emergency door.
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