Well aware that Andie needed bolstering, Justice came to her and presented himself for her to cling to. His steady presence let her know, Don’t worry. I’m here. As she draped her arm across his back, he leaned against her leg.
“It feels like everybody’s after me,” Andie told him. She’d expected media coverage of the shooting to distress her, but Sid King was more brutal than she’d imagined. It hurt that the Islanders for Collaborative Policing, whom she’d willingly have risked her life to serve, now wanted her behind bars.
She’d had a mere second to deliberate before aiming her gun at Christopher. Shoot and she’d be called a murderer; don’t shoot and she’d have a knife stabbed in her heart. Yet for weeks—maybe months—everyone, including the vulture press, would leisurely pick over the carcass of her decision to use deadly force. They’d not bother to give her the benefit of the doubt.
What nobody seemed to understand was how badly she’d wanted not to shoot Christopher. No police officer wanted to shoot anybody. No sane person wanted to take a life. Nobody would believe that in Andie’s own way she was as grief stricken as the Vanderwaals.
“I’m out there now, public property,” Andie told Justice. “I can’t let the press see I’m upset, or they’ll win. They’ll own me.” Don’t let the jerks get you down.
They already had.
Justice rested his head in Andie’s lap.
CHAPTER 19
TOM
The Nisqually County morgue cornered the market on “grisly.” The rooms were cold and sterile, and, were it not for the formaldehyde smell, you might think you’d walked into a hospital. But a sensitive person might wince at the blood and tissue samples tucked inside the specimen refrigerator, or at the saws, mallets, shears, and goggles hanging on the Autopsy Suite’s walls. Or at the cooler’s drawers, half at forty degrees and half below thirty-two, to accommodate the varying lengths of time that bodies would be stored—bodies of every age, gender, and stage of decomposition.
Tom had been here for the start of Christopher’s autopsy, and now he’d returned to pick up the coroner’s formal report. Eager to get home to study for his sergeant’s exam, he parked at the back of the building and walked through the ambulance’s unloading area, the Decomposition Suite, its fans humming, and the Autopsy Suite, its concrete floor slanted to a drain below the autopsy table. He finally entered the office of Lowell Burden, the Nisqually County coroner.
Burden was dressed in desert boots, black slacks, and a shirt that seemed too crisp and white for his profession. He pried his heft off his swivel chair and gripped Tom’s hand for a shake that might have brought a weight-lifting champion to his knees. He pulled a folder from a pile on his desk. “Here.” He handed the report to Tom.
“The kid had no heart or brain disease. His last meal was a hamburger,” Burden said. “One bullet shattered his humerus. The other hit his quadriceps fermoris. If that bullet had gone half an inch lower, the kid would be at school today. Cause of death was bleeding from the femoral artery.”
“Tox screen have any surprises?” Tom asked.
“One.” Burden half-sat on his desk’s edge, one desert boot dangling and the other planted on the floor. “You said you didn’t find drugs in the kid’s bedroom, but you suspected they might be involved.”
“Yes.”
“You were wrong.”
Tom’s eyebrows arched at this news. “Nothing? Not a trace of anything?”
“Zip. No drugs or alcohol in his system at the T.O.D. He was clean.”
Tom exhaled, slow and ragged. So Christopher hadn’t wigged out on something and gone after Brady. Tom’s hope for that simple explanation was dashed. “There went that theory.”
“Sorry to make it harder for you,” Burden said.
“We’re back to square one.”
Burden, about fifteen years older than Tom, gave him an encouraging football-coach pat on the back. “Remember, he was a teenager. Hormones hopping. Peer pressure through the roof. Major life changes. Those have caused plenty of kids to do crazy things.”
In high school Tom and his friends had toilet papered their share of trees, unhinged a few restroom doors, and had pizzas delivered to dorks. Those pranks had been wrong, of course, but nowhere near the league of stabbing a K-9 and attacking an armed police officer. “If Brady’s story is true, I have no idea what was going through that kid’s head.”
Burden nodded. “Motive can be the hardest part of a case. You know better than I do how much can ride on it.”
“Unfortunately.”
* * *
At home, Tom’s computer made the bonging tones for his nightly Skype call from Lisa, the best part of his day. When he talked with her, he had the pleasure of looking into her funny little face: big brown eyes, teeth that were about to cost him a fortune to straighten, a ponytail that had been known to thwack his cheek when she turned her head. She had toothpick legs and a pipestem neck, from which her shoulders extended like bunny slopes. Her giggles made him think of champagne bubbles.
He loved that kid so much it scared him sometimes.
“Dad, it’s forty-one degrees Fahrenheit. It’s supposed to get down to thirty-four tonight. Precipitation zero.”
“Very good, kid.” Tom grinned at his junior weather fanatic. He planned to give her a barometer for Christmas. When she grew up, she wanted to be a Channel Five forecaster.
“The wind velocity is fifteen miles an hour out of the north-northwest,” she said. “Did you see the clouds this afternoon?”
“Can’t say I did. I was busy at work. Forgot to look at the sky.”
“Da-ad.” Two syllables always registered dismay. “You should have looked. They were stratocumulus.”
In clouds, some kids saw a sheep, or a shark about to chomp a fish, but Lisa saw the scientific types. How cool was that? “I’ll check out the clouds tomorrow,” Tom promised.
“Where’s Sammy?” Lisa asked.
“Right here. She wants to talk with you.” Tom herded his golden to the computer and lifted her up high enough for Lisa to see her face. Sammy sniffed the screen.
“Hi, Sammy!” A champagne bubble or two.
Tom stooped to waving Sammy’s paw at Lisa. Ridiculous, but anything for my kid.
“Can I keep her next week? I want to take her to school. We’re having a pet show,” Lisa said.
Whoa. “Sammy lives here.”
“She could stay with Mom and me for a couple of days.”
Not when I don’t trust your mother as far as I can throw her. Sometimes that lack of trust kept Tom up at night, blinking in the dark. How he’d ever married Mia he’d never know, except that he’d been young and she’d had long blond hair and a knockout body. Hopping hormones, as Lowell Burden said.
But when God handed out maternal instincts, spoiled Mia had been at the end of the line. Tom worried that she wouldn’t bother getting up to feed Lisa breakfast or lock the dead bolt to keep her safe at night. Mia might forget to put down Sammy’s food and water. If Sammy got stabbed like Justice, Mia would leave her to die. Even for Lisa, Tom couldn’t let Sammy stay with his ex-wife.
“Honey, we’ll work it out,” Tom told Lisa. “Maybe I’ll bring Sammy to meet you at school before the show. While I’m there, I could talk to your class about being a sheriff ’s deputy.” Kids love learning about law enforcement. “Let’s discuss Sammy when you’re here this weekend. We’ll make a plan, okay?”
“Okay, Daddy.” When Lisa looked up at someone standing behind the computer screen out of Tom’s sight, he knew that Mia was hovering around. “I have to go, Dad. It’s time for Orange Is the New Black.”
Mia can’t let her watch that! Resentment crept through Tom, followed by mind-clogging guilt. Maybe having a weekend dad wasn’t enough for Lisa and he should never have divorced. Maybe when Mia ran home to her parents seven years ago, he should have gone after her and tried to work things out.
The day before she left, she’d called Tom at his new Sheriff’s
Department job. “You’ve got to come home. There’s this awful thing. I can’t stand it. It’s on the deck.”
Nothing could persuade her to lock the doors and stay in the house till Tom got home from work. So in the middle of a busy day, he drove twenty-four miles to investigate. The “awful thing” was an errant slug, minding his own business; maybe he was a little slimy, but no big threat. Tom scooped him off the deck floor with a garden trowel and dropped him into the bushes.
“Look, we live in the woods. So do slugs. They’re a fact of life,” Tom told Mia.
“I don’t care. I don’t want slugs on my deck. I don’t like it here,” she said.
Tom had quit the Marines because Mia hadn’t liked being a military wife, and he’d left Seattle because she hadn’t liked the traffic and his police job’s long hours. There had been no pleasing her. About much of anything. Tom knew he had tried.
CHAPTER 20
ANDREA
Back in the station’s conference room, the flickering fluorescent light made Andie jittery. Her stomach was churning. Tom Wolski had called her in to discuss new “issues,” and she had no idea what they were. She’d be flying blind in unfamiliar territory.
Ross Jackson, for whatever reason, was absent. In order to attend today, Stephanie had offered to cancel her interview with a mattress company for a night job as a professional sleeper, but Andie had said that she already had enough support. The reassuring sleeve of Ron Hausmann’s herringbone sports coat brushed her arm. And stretched out in his library lion position, Justice was blocking the room’s only exit and keeping a careful watch on Tom.
She and Tom faced down each other across the conference table’s no-man’s-land again. He read her the Garrity Warning, folded his hands on the table, and said, “A new witness saw TV coverage of the shooting and came forward. She was walking her Chihuahua down your road and heard you yelling. She thought you were arguing with someone.”
“I wasn’t arguing. I was trying to get Christopher to put down his knife,” Andie said.
“She said you sounded angry.”
“You’d be upset if someone hurt your dog, wouldn’t you?”
“We’re not talking about me here,” Tom said. “And there’s a difference between upset and anger.”
“Okay, then I was angry. I couldn’t help it. I love Justice. It broke my heart to hear him shriek in pain.”
At the sound of his name, Justice pricked his ears. His bristled eyebrows told Tom as plain as day, Back off. Don’t pressure her.
“Did your anger make you lose perspective? Make you too quick to shoot?” Tom asked.
“No!” Um, maybe. Could that be true? Doubt took a flying leap at Andie’s churning stomach.
“Officer Brady, would you say you have an anger problem? Are you hotheaded? Short fused?”
“No.” Well, once in a while.
“What about this complaint filed against you last year?” Tom tossed a piece of paper on the table and pointed to the name of Mrs. Emily Zidd. “Her son was skateboarding down Ranier Street, and you confronted him in what she claims was an unprofessional manner. She says you were furious.You lost it.”
Andie’s exhale was heated with scorn. When her cheeks warmed, she knew they were flushed, and she wished she could hide her telltale sign of annoyance. “There was traffic. Anybody with a pea brain would know skateboarding on that street was dangerous,” she said, prickly as holly.
Tom stared at her, clearly taking note of her red cheeks. “So you’re huffy about a complaint about your anger? Looks to me like a short fuse working overtime.”
Andie clamped her teeth together as her annoyance ratcheted up to resentment. She’d played right into his hands and let him goad her into anger—he’d weaseled behind her wall. Get a grip. You cannot let him manipulate you. “Mrs. Zidd’s complaint irritated me at the time, and it still does.” Andie spoke slowly, as if she were talking with someone who was learning English. “She should have been grateful to me. Her son could have been killed.”
“You couldn’t have asked him to get off the street? You had to yell at him, and apparently for some time?”
“I did ask him to get off the street, but he ignored me and skated away. I had to stop him. I was justified to yell.”
“I’m seeing a pattern, Brady.”
“We’re not here for psychoanalyzing,” Hausmann warned.
“Addressing Brady’s anger is important. She admits she got angry when Justice was stabbed. I want to know if she flew off the handle,” Tom told Hausmann.
“I was protecting myself.” Andie’s response sounded as if she’d bitten it off a hacksaw blade.
Surely picking up the emotions flying around the room, Justice got up, flashed Tom a withering look, and wriggled under the table. He rested his chin on Andie’s toes and announced unmistakably, I am here to protect you from that vile buzzard. Don’t be afraid. His velvety ear against her ankle soothed her.
“All right, let’s leave anger for now.” Tom set another piece of paper between him and Andie. “I’ve got to say this report surprised me. On September thirteenth, 2012, you arrested Franz Vanderwaal for DUI. Anything to say about that?”
Hausmann coughed. He backed his chair away from the table and gestured for Andie to follow. His hand cupped around her ear, he whispered, “You didn’t think to tell Wolski—or me—about that arrest?!”
“It wasn’t important. I just wanted it to go away,” Andie whispered back.
“It’s not going anywhere.” Hausmann’s usual calm seemed to have hitchhiked down the street to the corner of Shock and Pique. “If there was some problem about the arrest, tell me now.”
“No problem. It was fine.”
Hausmann’s exhale was long and weary. “Okay, answer his questions.”
Andie scooched her chair back to the table. “I arrested Mr. Vanderwaal after his car jumped a curb and hit a fire hydrant downtown. He claimed he’d dropped his cell phone and was reaching for it at his feet. You know, a typical lie.”
“You’re sure he was lying?”
“I was sure when I shone my flashlight into his red, watery eyes and the alcohol on his breath almost knocked me over. He claimed he’d only had two beers—you know that one.” Andie scoffed. “He couldn’t stand on one leg, and he sucked in breath instead of exhaling into the Breathalyzer. After I called him on that stunt, he inhaled like he planned to blow up an air mattress with a single breath, then exhaled just a tiny puff. Who did he think he was kidding?”
“I read that his blood alcohol level was .05 over the limit and he was cooperative, so the D.A. knocked the charge down to reckless driving,” Tom said.
“Right, and I didn’t have to appear in court.”
Tom leaned back and crossed his arms over his chest. “I have one main question about this whole deal. Why didn’t you think to mention something so important as arresting the father of a teen you’ve killed?”
“I didn’t think it had any bearing on Christopher’s attack.”
Wolski scowled. “Surely you’re not serious.”
Andie scowled back. “The DUI was four years ago. I arrested Mr. Vanderwaal. I didn’t have to testify in court. End of story.”
“No, the story hasn’t ended. How do you think the arrest might have affected Christopher?”
“She can’t know that,” Hausmann said.
“I’ll turn the question around, then. Brady, has it never occurred to you that Christopher could have hated you for what you did to his father? He could have been trying to get back at you?”
“It took him four years to get around to it?”
“I don’t intend to argue with you.” Tom pressed his pen’s point on the file that had contained the arrest report. “But the witness said you sounded angry shouting at Christopher. There was obviously a conflict. It could have been connected to the DUI or something else.”
“It was only connected to getting him to drop his knife!” Andie snapped.
“Just so you
know, yesterday I talked with the Vanderwaals. They’re adamant that something more was going on than meets the eye. They’re sure you had an inappropriate relationship with Christopher. If that’s true, I’m going to figure it out eventually, so you may as well save us a lot of trouble and tell me the whole story now.”
Andie reared back like she’d been slapped. “Here’s what I’ll tell you now. You’re supposed to be impartial, but you’re biased—you’ve made up your mind that I’m a criminal, and you’re out to prove it. You’re coming at me like Christopher did. It’s an attack.”
Hausmann’s hand landed on Andie’s arm and squeezed. She shut her mouth to stop herself from saying more.
A muscle tightened in Tom’s jaw. “That comment doesn’t deserve a response,” he told Andie calmly.
As she crawled behind her wall, she heard a muffled conversation in the roll-call room and made out just two words: “hour” and “trap.” She wanted to ask Tom Wolski, Do you have an anger problem? Are you mad I broke our date a gazillion years ago? Is it payback time for that? But he’d deny it, and now wasn’t the time to get personal. She felt like a sinking ship.
CHAPTER 21
ANDREA
Andie’s father used to say that work was the best antidote for worry. You had to stay active till your world could right itself. Since Tom Wolski’s inquisition—Andie had quit thinking of it as an investigation—she might have put a bee to shame with all she’d done to keep busy . . . and to chase Tom’s suggestion of an “inappropriate relationship” out of her mind. She’d done nothing to deserve the accusation. It sullied and infuriated her.
To divert her anxious and resentful thoughts, in the last three days Andie had reorganized drawers, cleaned out closets, dusted books, defrosted the freezer, cleaned the oven, and waged war on the shower grout’s mold. She’d made Liver-Cheese Humdinger treats for Justice and Sardine Surprises for Rosemary. She’d baked and frosted legions of turkey-shaped Thanksgiving sugar cookies for San Julian’s senior center and soup kitchen.
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