J. Bertrand - Nothing to Hide

“Well,” Lorenz says, “it was worth a shot.”

As we head out, I fall a little behind him, pulling Cavallo closer. “Are you sure everything’s all right? You seem a little-”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Tense.”

She repeats the word, tight-lipped: “ Tense .”

“Is everything all right at home? We haven’t seen you guys in a while-”

“March,” she says. “What’s the deal? You walk in out of nowhere and decide I’m acting strange? You’re the one who asked for help, not me. As always.”

“Is that what this is about? It seemed like a good lead to follow up, if you ask me.”

“Never mind.” She touches my arm. “Forget I said anything. You’re right. I’m all worked up. It’s nothing to do with you-and it’s nothing to do with my personal life, okay?” She smiles. “But your fatherly concern is duly noted.”

“Fatherly. Ouch.”

“Anyway, how is Charlotte? You’re right, we haven’t seen each other since. . It was the party, right?”

I nod. “Charlotte’s out of town again. The new job.”

“Ah.”

My wife, Charlotte, after nearly a decade of working from home, marking up legal documents for her old partners, accepted a new position at one of the big law firms, almost doubling both her salary and the amount of time she spends on the road. She’s traveled so much in the last six months that we went to the Galleria on her birthday and bought all new luggage, a shiny set of ribbed aluminum rolling cases like something out of a sixties science fiction movie. And we bought new phones as well, with cameras front and back so we can talk face-to-face from opposite ends of the globe, something we tried once or twice early on before lapsing into the occasional old-fashioned phone call.

Over by the exit Lorenz taps his watch.

“The clock’s ticking,” Cavallo says.

“It always is.”

I catch up with my partner, giving Cavallo a last look from the threshold. She’s standing where I left her, but with her back resolutely turned. Something’s not right between us.

The afternoon grinds on, one false lead after another. Then the shift ends and the next one starts and it’s the same all over again. We have a body without an identification, no witnesses, and no likely avenues to pursue. So we pursue the unlikely ones, roping in the rest of the squad in twos and threes, exhausting leads, exhausting detectives, exhausting the patience of my long-suffering lieutenant.

“There’s always the DNA,” Lorenz keeps saying.

Yes, there’s always that. The long shot chance that somewhere in the FBI’s massive computerized index, there’s a strand of chromosomes waiting to be matched. Even that would only get us so far. Knowing a victim’s name doesn’t automatically unmask his killer. It might, though. Why bother making the identification so difficult, removing the head and mutilating the hands, if having a name won’t make any difference?

By the end of the week I’m starting each day with a conference in Bascombe’s office.

“Whatever you need,” he says. “Anything at all. ‘You have not because you ask not.’”

Which is the first time I can remember him quoting anything other than the criminal code.

“All I need is a hit on those test results.”

“You’re making the calls? I’m making them, too. Believe me, the pressure’s on to push this thing through the system. I don’t know what the holdup is, but I’ll call again right now if you think it’ll help.”

He reaches for the phone, then waits for my answer.

“It can’t hurt,” I say.

But it doesn’t help. He puts the phone down five minutes later, giving me a shrug. “We’ll get the results when we get the results. Maybe something by shift’s end.”

So I check back with him a few hours later before clocking out, just to see if anything’s come through. He looks me up and down, deciding what to say. “Get a good night’s sleep. We’ll go at it fresh again in the morning.”

“All right.”

He glances at the monitor on his desk. “I’m thinking, while we’re waiting on the DNA to come back, it’s not a bad idea if you and Lorenz catch up on your other open cases. We’re not giving up on this, March. We just need to use our time as efficiently as possible.”

“Yes, sir.”

In other words, barring intervention from on high, JD will keep clocking time in the refrigerator while Lorenz and I move on to other cases. It’s not the first time I’ve had to put a victim on the back burner, not the first time a case has gone cold on me. They say there are things you don’t get used to, like seeing a headless corpse or an autopsy in progress, but the fact is you get used to them just fine. They even become a little fascinating from a professional standpoint. What I can never get used to is this: giving up. Gathering all the paper and filing it away for what might be the last time.

Whoever he was, this man was strapped to a chair and tortured, was put through such agony that his young healthy heart finally gave out. What would he have thought if he’d known in those final moments that after a handful of days, I’d be consigning him to a cardboard filing box and preparing myself mentally to move on?

I take the elevator down to the secure garage, tracing the way back to where I left my car. Sliding between two vehicles, my foot catches on a drain grate and twists. The old pain, fading steadily every day since the night of my fall, stabs through me. I steady myself against the hood of a car and try to shake it off. It feels just like a knife, or maybe a surgeon’s scalpel. And then it dulls down to a throb. I take a step and it’s still there. There, but manageable.

Not so bad that I can’t function.

A pain I can live with.

When I’m not working, I don’t know what to do with myself anymore. The house is too empty, too quiet with Charlotte gone. The first time she left-a weeklong stay on the East Coast-I’d find myself opening drawers and checking that her things were still there. An hour later, one of her silk slips would still be clutched in my hand, or a little piece of jewelry, and I’d be sitting in the dark thinking about. . nothing.

“Go visit the Robbs,” Charlotte would say over the phone, sensing something wasn’t right, but not wanting to probe too deeply into what. Her new position made her happy, more than she’d ever anticipated, and by instinct she steered away from any conversation which might call the decision into question.

In front of the muted television I try calling Charlotte. She’s in London now for some kind of high-level negotiation meant to last through the weekend, after which her plan is to pick up her sister Ann, Bridger’s wife, who’s flying into Heathrow for a couple of days of sightseeing. It’s hard to imagine what the two sisters will do alone together in a foreign land. They can hardly get through dinner together without some kind of argument flaring up. My call goes to voicemail, but I don’t leave a message. She’ll get back to me when she can.

I check the time, then try to watch the History Channel for a while. Back when they ran Hitler documentaries all the time, I could tune out in front of the tube for hours. Now there are too many reality shows with only a tenuous connection to the past. I switch off the TV and go to the bookshelf, taking down the thick middle volume of Shelby Foote’s The Civil War , which I’ve been reading intermittently for about ten years, hoping to finish before I’m dead. Not tonight, though. After flipping a few pages, I put it back.

In the old days on nights like this, when I wanted desperately to shrug off the pressures of work, I’d end up in the parking lot of a bar called the Paragon, wondering what it would be like to take a drink. Sometimes I’d go inside and order one, then let the glass sweat untouched on the table, testing myself. But the place changed hands a few times and finally closed. Now there’s just a darkened storefront.