Inside, they sat in the living room of his apartment, a room Hailey hardly remembered seeing until after John’s death. Before that, they barely made their way through the door before stumbling into the bedroom. But here, among the sleek, minimalist furniture, Hailey felt as though Bruce was someone she was meeting for the first time. “My ex picked it out,” he’d told her once when she asked about the décor, though Hailey knew nothing about the ex, either.
Bruce handed her a glass of wine. “Malbec,” he said, “From Argentina.” He sat beside her, still in his shirt and suit slacks, still in his shoes, while Hailey slipped hers off, pulling her feet onto the couch. He rubbed her foot and nodded to the wine. “Like?”
“It’s nice.”
“Never touches oak. All stainless. Has kind of a clean taste, doesn’t it?”
Hailey smiled. “It does.”
“What’s so funny?”
“Clean wine. I don’t know.” She thought again of the cork they’d found in Fredricks’s coffin, and the laughter went stale in her throat.
Bruce moved toward her on the couch, draping her legs across his as he settled into the cushions. “No leads on the senator’s shooting, I hear.”
“None.”
Bruce took a sip of wine, his expression thoughtful. “I heard Scanlan has got the CAP guys working with O’Shea on it.”
CAP was Crimes Against Persons. The department handled assault, battery, robbery—any crime against a person aside from those that involved sex or death.
“They’re trying to link your father-in-law’s shooting to John’s murder. All of it’s on the hush-hush.”
Hailey sat up and glanced at the wine as though it was the cause of her shortness of breath. “Really?”
Bruce pulled her feet back into his lap. “That’s good, isn’t it? Another lead.”
First Hal, now Bruce. Neither would leave the subject of John alone.
She set the glass down.
“You don’t want to talk about it,” Bruce said.
Hailey lifted the glass and took a sip. “I don’t.”
He narrowed his gaze the way he did when he was working out a motive. “It makes you nervous, the idea that someone broke in again. Why do you stay there?”
This again. “I stay for the girls. Because Jim and Liz are their grandparents.” How could she move? Who would help her raise Camilla and Ali? But Bruce didn’t understand. He didn’t have kids. But she wasn’t just there for Camilla and Ali. She stayed for herself too. In her in-laws’ home, she got to avoid thinking about where her life was headed.
First and foremost, she avoided dealing with her relationship with Bruce.
She drank from the glass, as much for the moment of reprieve from the conversation as for the warmth of the drink.
He was still watching her, waiting, and what she felt wasn’t empathy or compassion, but simply frustration. She set the glass down, a little harder than necessary, and the wine sloshed over the edge, splattering the shiny tabletop.
Hailey thought of the rug, and saw that the drops hadn’t reached that far. She stood to get a towel, but he caught her hand.
“I don’t care about it.” He pulled her back as she averted her gaze. “What’s going on, Hailey?”
“Nothing. I’m tired. The case.”
He tugged her hand, shook his head. “Not that stuff.” He leaned forward and gently tapped her head. “In there. What am I missing?”
“You’re not missing anything, Bruce, but Christ, the girls, the job. It’s a lot. I’m living with my in-laws, my dead husband’s parents. It’s not easy to tell them I’m sleeping with another man.”
“But you’re not. We haven’t been together in weeks.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Actually I don’t, Hailey. I don’t have any idea what you mean. I’m not sure you do, either,” he said, the fierceness of his gaze relentless. “There’s something else,” he pressed. “What is it?”
She shrank back on the couch. “What do you mean?”
“Something changed after he died. Is it guilt? About us? Because he’s dead?”
The wine had crept into her head and softened the edges of her thoughts. She reached for the glass again and took another sip. “There’s guilt, sure.”
Bruce edged forward as though narrowing in on a witness. “Because you loved me before he was dead?”
Tears filled her eyes. “Yes.”
Bruce pulled her to him, continuing as though speaking from the inside of her own mind. “If you’d known he was about to die, you would’ve tried harder. You would’ve confronted him.”
“Yes. Yes.” Would it have helped? Could she have done anything to save them? If he’d insisted on a political career, could she have been the wife he needed? She had to believe they would have found a way.
He hadn’t even seen the bruises. Didn’t even notice that his wife had been assaulted. Or that she was with someone else. And he hadn’t cared one bit about her plans for the future—for her future. It was all about him.
How would that ever have changed?
“Death makes us rethink everything,” Bruce said. Then he gently narrowed in on the heart of it. “But you don’t have a choice about it now, Hailey. You supported John the best you could, in a way he didn’t support you.” He tilted her chin toward his, wiped her tears with rough, flat fingertips. “He didn’t support you.”
“He just got caught up in the idea of a candidacy,” she said.
Everything Bruce said was true. Still, she couldn’t hear it—not from him. She didn’t want to hear her lover criticize her dead husband.
“Okay, and maybe you could’ve made it better. You probably could have. You’re amazing, and if he’d known how you felt, he’d have been an idiot not to fight for you. And John wasn’t an idiot.”
John had certainly acted like an idiot. She had to stop trying to rewrite the past. But every time she thought of the way their marriage had fallen apart, how distant he was, how cold … She remembered the night he died.
“I can wait,” Bruce told her. A few moments later, he spoke again. “I’ve been looking at places in the paper.”
“Really? You’re moving?” Hailey asked, thankful for a change of subject.
He pulled her feet into his lap once more and began rubbing them as though he could rewind the evening to where they’d been ten minutes ago, before either of them had brought up the subject of John. “Thinking about it. Looking for something bigger.”
With one finger hanging in the air above the rug, Hailey traced a black triangle in its pattern. “Bigger?”
“I’ve got some feelers out at the Department of Justice.”
“Wait. Now you’re leaving the department?”
“We can’t be together if I stay,” he said.
Together. Did she want to be together? Bruce had never even met Cami and Ali. They were too young. Their dad had only been dead a year. Hailey stood and crossed the room to the window, gazing through it as though she could step out into the ether and drop down the three stories to the sidewalk, like Batman.
“Hailey …”
She didn’t respond, watching the back of a sedan driving by Washington Park, the left taillight dark, wondering if the cops in the city had time to stop people for brake lights anymore. Couldn’t imagine they did.
Behind her, Bruce remained on the couch as though he, too, was afraid she might be headed out the window.
He knew her as well as anyone, and still he tiptoed around her a year later, as though she’d become a fragile crystal vase, balanced on a table with only three legs.
Like Hal, Bruce let her get away without answering for the changes in their relationship. The less they asked, the less she felt an obligation to tell them anything.
“Okay. It’s still too soon,” Bruce conceded, and Hailey wondered when she had stopped thinking of him as Buck, the way she had when they were first lovers. When had he dropped from the pedestal she had put him on?
After a moment, he said, “I’d just like to be able to take you out, to go to a restaurant.”
She turned from the window. “We can do that without you changing careers or moving.”
“Maybe I’m ready for a change.”
“Maybe you are.” She returned to the couch, to her wine. “But it has to be for you. Not because of us.”
“Agreed.” Bruce reached for her hand, and she hesitated before giving it to him. Then she let him pull her back to the warm leather and press himself on top of her. She closed her eyes as his mouth opened against hers, his tongue, both familiar and tentative, gently exploring until she met it with her own.
“Buck,” Hailey whispered, as though testing out an old emotion.
His lips left her mouth. Then he kissed her nose and sat up to look at his watch. “We should get you home. Are you okay to drive?”
It felt like being shooed out, by a teacher or a parent, and Bruce did this sometimes. Took on this selfless, caretaking role, leaving her wishing she’d stayed.
If John hadn’t come up in conversation, she might have simply taken his hand, led him to the bedroom, and sought out the simple connection they’d had when this was an affair, rather than a relationship.
Buck was fantasy, the unattainable, painted in a light that was brighter than reality. But now he was transformed to reality, to Bruce, and in the white, hot spotlight stood John.
Dead John.
Bruce was right. Maybe things could’ve been better for her and John if they’d tried.
But he was right, too, that it was no longer a choice.
What he couldn’t fathom—what Hailey couldn’t explain—was that in the last minutes of John’s life, she forgave him for every bad thing that had happened in the years before. Every harsh word, every cruel judgment and every selfish demand. Eleven months after his death, the memory of John that played was rarely any other than those last words he’d spoken, “Take care of the girls. Make sure they’re okay.”
The single memory made John incandescent.
No one else created even a glimmer of that light.
Chapter 8
Hal could have used a workout, but he couldn’t find the energy. Instead, he had gone straight home from the station. He’d pulled files on Dwayne Carson, who hadn’t said a word after he lawyered up, and Jeremy Hayden, the gunrunner who was found dead in the upstairs closet during the sting operation. The two had similar rap sheets, but it was impossible to say if they ran in the same circles.
What was stranger yet was that neither one had weapons charges in the past. They’d been arrested for burglary, breaking and entering, a few assault charges, and a drunk and disorderly.
Nothing suggested they were involved in organized crime.
Hal brought the files home to look at again. He was too beat to stay at the station. He wanted a beer and his comfortable chair.
Inside his apartment, Wiley greeted Hal by wrapping herself around his leg and mewing for dinner. He lifted the calico under one arm and carried her inside, bolting the door behind him and walking through the dark living room into the kitchen. The red light on the home phone was blinking, alerting him to a voicemail.
It would be his ex-wife. Probably calling twice, if not three times. Sheila never called just once. Maybe his mother had called too. Once in a while one of his sisters checked in with him, but they never called his home line. Only his mother and Sheila did that.
Plus, Sheila had already called his cell phone a half dozen times today.
He set the cat on the counter and pressed the play button. Inside the refrigerator was half a container of Tunalicious cat food. The home phone tucked under his ear, he spooned the food into Wiley’s bowl and waited for the message to start.
The first thing he heard was Sheila’s standard hesitation, as though she was shocked that she had been connected to his number. As though her phone had rung too and some force was trying to pull them together.
“Hey, Hal, sweetie. It’s me. Call me when you get in. I thought we could grab a drink or something. Old times, you know?” She waited again, maybe for him to pick up the phone, then said, “Okay. I’ll talk to you soon,” and hung up.
She never left her name.
Not that she needed to.
A man didn’t forget the woman who charged up $40,000 in credit card debt in his name—after they had separated. It still rubbed him wrong, that she didn’t say who she was. Maybe she assumed she was the only available woman who ever called him.
Maybe what bothered him was that she was the only woman who called him, unless he counted his mother or sisters, or Hailey.
A computerized voice told him the time of the message was five-seventeen. The next one came at five forty-seven. Her voice was looser this time, the background noise louder. She was calling from a bar somewhere. At the end, someone called her name, a man, and she stopped midsentence and told him he knew how to reach her.
“That’s it,” she said, slurring her words. “I’m going to have to come over there.”
“Shit,” he said, wondering where she’d been calling from, how long he had to get out of his place before she showed up. According to the clock on the microwave, she’d left the final message twelve minutes ago. The last time Sheila came over, he’d refused to let her in and she’d spent the night in the hallway.
He set the cat food on the counter, filled the other dish with fresh water, and dialed his neighbor, Ken.
“Yeah.”
“Ken, it’s Hal. Any sign of Sheila out front?”
“Hang on.”
Hal waited while Ken looked out. His neighbor’s apartment was on the same floor as Hal’s but faced the narrow alleyway of Natoma Street. Hal’s apartment was on the west side, where only six feet of empty space lay between his building and a nicer-looking brick one next door. The alley was just wide enough for the garbage cans on the street below.
When it rained, his sill caught enough water to fill a Dixie cup. When it was hot, the alleyway grew stale, and as the air quivered behind the window glass, waves of garbage and tar smells rose from below. When it was cold, he hardly noticed it. Wind was the one thing that didn’t fit between the buildings. Tonight, it looked like rain, but sometimes Mr. Tatsumi above him overwatered his plant, and what Hal mistook for rain was actually fern runoff.
“She still drive the white blazer?” Ken asked.
Hal rubbed his face. “Far as I know.”
“I don’t see her down there yet, man. You want to come hide out here? I got some beer.”
“Your place be the first one she’ll come to when I don’t answer.”
“Probably true, man. You best get out of the building.”
“I intend to.” Hal hung up, grabbed his coat and keys, and cracked the apartment door, listening to the hallway for sounds of Sheila.
Most likely she’d be drunk by now, and she wasn’t quiet when sober. The only sounds coming from the hallway were from the upstairs neighbor’s television. This was the time when his show came on, the one he liked to watch without his hearing aids. Down the hall, Frank and Angie Rossetti were fighting again.
Hal left the apartment and closed the door, taking the back stairs to the street, half running to his car. He took off down 20th Street, away from Dolores and Guerrero, the direction Sheila would come from, if she did actually come. But as soon as he turned right on Church, he found himself heading back toward the station. Better a night digging through clues than one spent listening to a drunk Sheila banging on his door.
He called in and asked to be connected to Holding. When the desk answered, he inquired about Dwayne Carson.
“They’ve got him back in interview. Neill, I think.”
“Can you patch me through?”
“Sure. Don’t know if anyone’ll answer, but here goes.”
The phone rang four times. Hal was ready to hang up when someone answered. “Inspector Neill.”
“Mike, it’s Hal Harris from Homicide. I’m calling ab
out Carson.”
“Yeah. We’re about to cut him loose. His attorney never showed, but the DA’s office doesn’t think we have enough to make a case.”
The only lead they had, and it was a dead end. Hal wasn’t ready to give up. “You know where he’s headed?”
“No idea. Lives with his mother and four siblings in a one-bedroom apartment in Hunters Point. Father’s AWOL.”
Hal hated the statistics about the percentage of black men who weren’t involved with raising their children. “Lot of ’em are.”
“Right. Mom works two jobs. You know how it goes.”
Hal thought about the business card Carson had for Martin Abbott. “The high-priced attorney bailed on him?”
“According to the jail, Carson never talked with him, but who knows? Maybe Abbott got a message to Carson another way.”
Hal rubbed his head. “I was sure Roger would find something.”
“None of the prints on the weapons in the trunk matched Carson’s,” Neill said.
“Defense would argue Carson was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Hal said.
“DA’s office suggested we push him to give us something and cut him loose.”
“Did it work?” Hal asked.
“He did give us another name, the guy he said picks up the guns.”
Hal turned down 14th toward Harrison. “Who’s that?”
“Name’s Willie Redd. He’s the one who held Matthews at gunpoint.”
“I remember,” Hal said, his chest tightening again at the memory.
“Yeah. I’ll bet.” Neill paused a beat. “Since Redd can’t talk from the grave, we don’t have much left.”
“It seem weird that Carson knew Martin Abbott? You ever heard of Abbott taking on a case like this? Doing pro bono or something?”
“Pro bono? I don’t think you can even have dinner with Abbott without paying his hourly.”
That matched what Hal had heard too. Why would Abbott suddenly take interest in a kid like Carson? “So it seems weird, right?”
Neill paused, sighing. “Yeah, it does.”
There was no way Hal was going back to his apartment until a couple of hours had passed.
The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set Page 37