Roger said the body was in the process of recovery even as we talked. Doc, the medical examiner, and his crew and the evidence techs had been able to get to the site by four-wheelers.
As for the SAR team, Nate said, “I think our mission is about wrapped up.”
That was our cue to exit. Susan and Emily were all too happy to leave. I followed behind them but stopped as Nate called out to me.
“Hey, Jess, you doin’ all right?” he asked.
I looked over my shoulder in the hallway and stopped. “I’m fine. I was worried about you.”
“Once that shootin’ stopped, me and Sprite found a good place to set up. Lit a fire. Made dinner.” He smiled. “It was good. Peaceful.”
Peaceful. Seriously?
“Then Cooper joined us.” Nate nodded behind me. “Speaking of which …”
I turned. Cooper walked toward us. Immediately, the muscles in my jaw tightened. I wondered why he hadn’t stayed in the room with the other officers.
“You asked some good questions, Jess,” he said.
I didn’t like the way he was looking at me. I shrugged. “I’m an investigator.” Then I turned to Nate. “How’d Sprite do?”
While he told the story about his dog and their night together, I could still feel Cooper’s eyes on me. Pressure built in my back muscles, like a big lizard was climbing up my spine. I knew any minute my body would start trembling.
“What made you think about what kind of scope was used?” Cooper said, interrupting Nate.
My heart thumped in my ears. Luke must have sensed my stress, because he shoved his muzzle in my hand. “I thought it was important to know. He could have been lying. I mean, if he had a good scope, he would have seen what he was shooting at.” I jutted out my chin to convey confidence. “I’m surprised you didn’t think of that.”
I turned back to Nate, hoping he’d pick up the conversation again, but he was staring at Cooper. The pause in the conversation seemed like a yawning black hole. I felt myself slipping in.
I had to get out of there. “Well, I’ll see you later,” I said, gathering Luke’s leash. I turned to leave.
“Jessica!” Cooper said.
I turned. His face was flush.
“Jessica Chamberlain! I remember now. I know who you are. You’re that cop—the Fairfax County detective. The one who let the suspect slip his cuffs and kill your partner. How in the world did that happen?”
A bomb went off inside me, blowing out my guts and scrambling my brain. I looked at him, horrified, and then at Nate. I turned and ran. I heard angry voices behind me. I could barely breathe.
My feet hardly touched the ground. Luke scrambled to keep up. I opened the back of the Jeep, ordered him into his crate, and slammed the liftgate. Then I jumped in the driver’s seat and cranked over the engine.
Nate emerged from the building, running toward me. “Jess! Jess!” I heard him call. I jerked my Jeep into gear and pulled away, burning rubber. He pursued me, but I kept driving. Anger raged in me.
Anger and panic are a volatile mix.
I hit the state road at about sixty-five, well above the posted speed limit, and careened down the mountain blindly. All that I feared had come upon me. I was exposed. I trembled so hard I could almost hear my bones rattling.
I went too fast around a curve, crossed the centerline, and nearly hit an oncoming SUV. I overcorrected and felt my tires slip off the road’s edge. I gripped the wheel with both hands, pulled back onto the road, and felt the Jeep fishtail. Somehow, I got it under control again.
The vehicle was under control. Not me.
Shame poured through me, sizzling like lava as it hit my blood. The voices of accusers screamed in my head. Lee Park had died because of me. Me! It was my fault. My incompetence. I’d never live that down.
Cooper knew. Nate knew. Now everybody knew.
My tires screeched around another curve. I was still headed down, down, down toward the foothills. I felt the car rock, nearly breaking its grip on the road. Another curve lay ahead of me. Straight ahead stood a gigantic, solid tree. A thought flashed in my mind. Why not drive straight into it and stop the pain?
Yes!
Then Luke banged in his crate, and I knew that, although I could kill myself, I could not kill my dog.
I let up on the gas. My Jeep settled.
Tears gushed down my face. I sobbed. I groped for a napkin.
How I managed to see well enough to drive, I’ll never know. I steered toward home, missed my exit, and kept going for an hour more, only half paying attention to the highway, my thoughts coming in short bursts, my tears still streaming down my face. The whip of shame drove me relentlessly.
When I realized I had driven in a large circle, when fatigue blurred my vision, I gave up. I had to go home. There was nowhere else to go.
I found my way down familiar backcountry roads and pulled into my driveway. I released Luke from his crate. I didn’t bother to go inside. Instead, I curled up in one of the Adirondack chairs in the yard. Luke sniffed around for a while as I stared blankly ahead. He found a ball somewhere and brought it to me, but I didn’t feel like playing. I wrapped my arms around my legs and rested my head on my knees. I wished I could just go away.
My mother’s words rang in my head. Why in the world did you want to be a cop anyway? Didn’t you know things like that could happen? Look what happened to your father!
Visions of that dreadful night played over and over in my head—the darkness, the rain, the suspect, the fatigue, the pain, and my partner’s dead eyes. I put my hands over my ears to block out the screams. My screams.
A car drove into the driveway. Nate got out along with Sprite. I buried my face in my knees. By the time he got to me, I was sobbing again and shaking.
He didn’t say anything. He just sat down in the chair next to me. I could smell his Old Spice cologne and see the mud on his boots, and in one single unselfish moment, I wondered if he’d gotten any rest at all.
“Go away,” I said. I knew he wouldn’t. Instead, he reached over and took my hand.
We must have sat there for twenty minutes before I finally stopped shaking and I finally spoke. My voice broke. “He was right.”
“Tell me about it.” Nate gently squeezed my hand.
“My partner …” I hesitated and shook my head, unable to finish my sentence.
“Let’s go inside.”
I followed him into my apartment and curled up on the couch. He made tea. He was good at making tea.
The dogs flopped down near each other. Nate put a steaming mug on the end table next to me, then sat on the floor with his back leaning against the couch. It was like he knew the telling would come easier if we weren’t face-to-face.
He was right. The story spilled out. “We were both detectives. Lee was the old pro; I was the young hotshot.” My mind went back to that time, to Lee Park’s kindness, his humor, and my enthusiasm. I loved going to work every day.
“So we go out one night to interview a witness on a homicide case. We’re talking to this woman when her live-in boyfriend shows up unexpectedly. He’s immediately hostile. He asks us to leave. So we do, but we hesitate on the front porch, because we can tell this guy is really angry.
“Next thing you know, we hear her screaming. So we go back in, and he’s choking her. She’s blue, her eyes rolling back, and we intervene to stop him. Once he’s facedown on the floor, I cuff him. We decide not to wait for the uniforms and take him in ourselves.
“The guy was maybe five feet ten and strong. We put him in the back of our unmarked car. No cage. We’re on a four-lane road in a wooded area, and I’m driving in the pouring-down rain. Suddenly, I see motion out of the corner of my eye. I hear a gasp and turn. The suspect is choking Lee! Somehow, he had gotten his cuffs out in front. He’s killing my partner!
“I pull to the right shoulder, throw the car in park, and reach for my gun. Then I hear brakes screeching and a crash and … and we roll over and over. When I wake up,
I’m all bloody. My arm is broken, and my partner Lee is staring at me with these … lifeless eyes.” I started shaking again, weeping softly.
“It took them fifteen hours to find us. Fifteen hours of drifting in and out of consciousness, aware of two things—my pain and Lee’s lifeless eyes.”
“What happened to the suspect?”
“He got away. He’s still on the run. He had lied to that woman about his name, where he worked, everything. She’d met him in a bar and invited him home. I’ve spent the last two years wondering—did I secure the cuffs correctly? Did I pull off the road all the way? What happened? Why didn’t the truck that hit us stop?
“My partner died, and I hate myself for that. He had a wife and an eight-year-old boy. And a dog.”
“Luke?”
I burst into tears again. “Yes!” It took me a bit to get control. “Luke flunked out of tactical training. He wouldn’t bite. Lee found out about him and wanted to try him on search and rescue. He loved that dog! Talked about him all the time. But Luke was too much dog for Lee’s widow. When I went to visit her, Luke was confined in a small backyard run. She didn’t know what to do with him. When I saw that, I volunteered to take him. It was the least I could do.”
“You eventually went back to work?”
“Yes and … it was bad.”
“The other cops?”
I nodded. “Lee was popular. But the guys, they resented me. Like I had jumped the line. Gotten promoted unfairly.”
“They blamed you for Lee’s death.”
I nodded.
“But the internal review didn’t.”
“No, it cleared me. But I couldn’t get away from the notes in my locker, the talk, the rude comments. And if things weren’t bad enough, somebody posted the part of the report that said my blouse was ripped open, as if the suspect …” I couldn’t finish. It was too obscene. Too humiliating. I shivered and sat up straight, horrified by my own recollections. I had never, ever told anyone else about that. Not even my mother.
I blew my nose. “Six months later, I left. I’d wanted to be a cop since I was twelve, and I failed.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Jess. Suspects get loose. It happens.”
“It was my fault! It was. What’s more, I’m not tough enough. I couldn’t cut it.” I started sobbing. “I couldn’t handle the harassment.”
I braced myself for more comforting words, words I would fight. But that’s not what happened.
Through my tears, I saw Nate drop his head. Then he rose to his knees and turned toward me. I shut my eyes. My heart trembled like an aspen leaf.
“Breathe deeply, Jess. In through your nose for four, hold it for seven, blow it out for eight.”
I followed his instructions.
“In for four, hold for seven, out for eight,” he repeated.
I felt him put his gentle hand on my head, felt its warmth, like a helmet protecting me. I heard his voice and realized he was not talking to me, he was praying. Too upset to follow what he was saying, I concentrated on the breathing. In for four, hold for seven, out for eight.
He put his thumb right between my eyes in the spot where I’d seen him rub Sprite and Luke. His hand on my head, his thumb between my eyes, his voice—they were conduits of peace. I could almost feel it flowing into me like warm syrup. My heart beat slower.
In for four, hold for seven, out for eight. I leaned into Nate’s compassion, wrapping it around myself like a quilt. As my tears subsided, he took his hand off my head and rocked back on his heels. But he didn’t quit praying. I was amazed he could find so much to say.
But then, I was a mess.
25
Nate slept on my couch that night. I offered him the bed and said I’d take the couch, but he would have none of it. The next morning over breakfast I thanked him for helping me.
“When you bring something like that into the light, it diffuses the power of it,” he said.
I cocked my head.
“I told you. I’ve been through it. I tried keeping it all in, hidin’ how much I was hurtin’. I wore an angry mask until I couldn’t anymore.” Nate shifted his jaw, measuring his next words. “Then when I started speaking what was in here…” he placed his fist on his chest, “it helped the healin’ start.”
I quickly rejected his analogy. “But Nate, you didn’t do anything! You got hit with an RPG, that’s all.” I reddened immediately. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. What I meant was you weren’t guilty, not like me. I as much as killed my partner.”
“Did you intentionally fail to cuff your suspect properly? Did you intentionally wreck your car? Hurt your partner?”
“No, of course not.”
“Then that’s false guilt, same as I was carryin’. False guilt and shame.” He rose to his feet. “We all got plenty to feel guilty about, but what happened with Lee, that ain’t part of it for you.”
Plenty to feel guilty about?
He didn’t explain further, and I didn’t ask. Instead, he made it very clear to me that if I thought about hurting myself, I was to call him at once. I rolled my eyes as if he were being dramatic.
I didn’t tell him about the tree.
He stopped me with a look. “I been there, Jess. I know. Sometimes the devil puts it in your mind your life ain’t worth livin’. That’s a lie. A damnable lie.”
I watched as Nate cleaned my little kitchen area, washing dishes, putting food away. Sometimes he was a puzzle. He simultaneously drew me to himself and scared me.
Nate stayed pretty close over the following few days. I didn’t want to leave the house, and he seemed to know that. He ran the dogs and brought me groceries. Best of all, he let me take the lead on initiating conversations, some of which were deep.
“Do you still have them, the dreams?” I asked him one day.
“Once in a while, when somethin’ reminds me,” he responded.
“Like what?”
“Fire.”
“But you burn wood.”
“I mean fire out of control—a house fire, a car fire, a forest fire.” He took a deep breath. “Once we responded to a search for human remains in a fire. That set me back weeks. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat.” He shook his head. “You never forget the smell of burning flesh. Especially, when it’s your own.”
I shivered thinking about that.
“I b’lieve it was the sound of those cars crashing that set you back that night we did the training.”
I nodded. “Yes.” I stared off to the side of the room, seeing that night, envisioning my panic. “I was okay as long as I had something to do. When I stopped, that’s when it hit.” I looked at him. “How do I get past that? Or will I?”
He eyed me as if considering what to say. “For me it was Peter’s friendship, counseling, and finding God.”
“I had counseling.”
“We can always use more. Plus, you didn’t have a friend you could open up to. Now you do.”
He left out the God part. I decided to add it for him. “And the whole God-thing, I know.” I ran my hands down my jeans. “I need practical help, not some pie-in-the-sky talk about an invisible being.”
Nate’s jaw tightened. My glib comments had offended him. I looked away, unable to face him. When I looked back, instead of anger, his eyes brimmed with compassion.
He stood up and gestured. “It’s time you get out of this house. Let’s go for a run.”
At the word “run,” both dogs jumped up, and Luke barked twice. I didn’t move.
“Come on,” Nate said. “Get your shoes on. You can’t stay inside forever.” He grinned. “You said you wanted practical help. This is it. Get up! Let’s go.”
Luke came over and nudged me. I muttered a protest, but I launched myself to my feet.
That was the first of what would be many runs. Nate would come before work, after work, whenever he could get away and drag me out in the woods to run. And we’d talk. He’d share some country story or a bit of wisdom, tell a jo
ke or make some crazy comment that was sure to get me riled up.
He was slowly drawing me out of my shell … until something made me clam right up.
We were sitting in my Adirondack chairs on a beautiful evening after a five-mile run. The dogs lay sprawled out on the grass, happily panting. Now and again, one would lumber over to the water bucket I had set out for them and slurp noisily.
The sky at dusk was a beautiful, deep blue, and stars were popping out here and there. A gentle evening breeze caressed my skin. I was actually feeling relaxed when I heard a car pull into the driveway. I assumed it was my landlord Bruce. It was dark enough I couldn’t see past the headlights, even shading my eyes, but when the car pulled toward us and not around to the front, I knew it was not him.
Nervous, I glanced at Nate, but he appeared calm. The door opened and the dome light came on. Scott Cooper.
I started to get up, but Nate put his hand on my arm. “Just wait,” he said gently. He stood up. “Scott,” he said, shaking Cooper’s hand. “Have a seat.” He offered his own chair.
I did not want to be alone with that man! I stood to my feet, then Cooper gestured. “Both of you … sit,” he said. “I won’t be here long.”
Luke sensed my stress. He got up from where he’d been sleeping, came over, and lay down at my feet. The warmth of his body was a comfort to me. I crossed my arms, hoping to stop the trembling before it started.
Thump, thump, thump. My heart beat like a bass drum, sounding out my fear, my shame, my anger.
Cooper cleared his throat. “Just a couple of things.” He squatted down so he was more on eye level with us. “Jessica,” he said, shaking his head, “I’ve been accused of having no filter. I say things I shouldn’t. I was blunt and rude to you. I assumed what I heard was true and that wasn’t fair. I’m sure I hurt you, and I am sorry.”
His words hit my ears like horseflies buzzing and bouncing off. I wanted to swat them away. Why did he think my wounds could be healed with cheap words?
Scott reached down and plucked up some grass, fingering it. “I was wrong. This friend of yours,” he said, gesturing toward Nate, “nearly decked me for talking to you that way.”
All That I Dread Page 14