Joel Goldman - The Dead Man

"You can make it sound crazy, Jack, but it's what you taught me. Collect the evidence. Follow where it leads. Let someone else higher up the food chain decide what to do with it."

We stared at each other, her face impassive, our friendship trumped by the job, another thing I had taught her. I nodded, conceding the moment.

"Let's go," I told Lucy.

We gave Walter Enoch's gargoyle death mask a last look.

"He was somebody's nightmare," Lucy said. "Glad he wasn't mine."

"What was that about?" she asked me when we were back in the car.

"The dead guy was a mailman who stole mail instead of delivering it."

"What's that got to do with you?"

"He stole my mail-at least one letter anyway. The envelope was found on his body but it was empty. Ammara Iverson, the agent you pissed off, thought I might know what was in it."

"Did you?"

Weak light filtered through the car as we passed strip centers, street lamps and oncoming traffic, shadows flickering across her face like a grainy silent movie. The effect was jarring, fogging my brain.

I was used to the visual triggers that could unleash spasms or inexplicably weaken my legs, sending me to the floor unless I grabbed on to someone or something. Two hours at the movies watching the latest action flick or five minutes in the florescent lighting aisle at Lowe's was a ticket to the funhouse. I'd have to add a black and white strobe light show to my list of things to avoid in the twenty-third hour of a day when my daughter speaks to me from the grave. I closed my eyes. Lucy let her question drop.

I declined the arm she offered me when we got home, using the banister to steady myself on the stairs going up to my bedroom. Ruby followed behind me, scratching the cushion of the easy chair where she slept, curling up without complaining that I was out late and without asking questions I didn't want to answer.

The dog had her bedtime routine and I had mine. One of the last things I did was check my gun even on days when I never took it out of its case. Guns are one of the few things it pays to be obsessive about because they do not forgive mistakes. Mine was always loaded, the safety always on, the case in the corner of the eye-level shelf in my bedroom closet, one end against the wall, the other flush against a stack of books laid flat with the spines facing out that I promised myself I would read before I die. I wedged the gun against the books, making it impossible to retrieve the gun case without disturbing the books. Wendy's stuffed animal, Monkey Girl, claimed the other end of the shelf.

After checking the gun and putting it away, I always restored the alignment of the books, the precision reassuring me that no one else had touched my gun. It was a safety habit I'd developed when my kids were young and curious about a father they sometimes confused with heroes on TV and in the movies who ate bad guys for breakfast and spit them out with the bullets they caught in their teeth.

The second book from the bottom, a Doris Kearns Goodwin biography of Lincoln, was angled away from the ones above and below. The angled book was a small thing, something I may have dismissed in my fatigued state, except for the gun case. It too was an inch out of place, the dust outline marking its spot on the shelf a testament to my housekeeping skills.

I opened the case, the smell of gun oil reassuring and familiar. The magazine of my Glock 23 was full, the safety on; the barrel smooth and polished as if I had just cleaned it. Except that I hadn't. Not since I'd last fired it two weeks ago at the Bullet Hole shooting range. Since then, I'd checked it every night, not concerned that I'd left smudged fingerprints all over it.

I put the gun away, unanswered questions worming their way into my head like snatches of song lyrics that burrow in your brain and won't stop playing. Lucy Trent was the only person who could have been in my closet. What was she doing with my gun? Why did she ignore my instruction to stay in the car? Why did she take pictures of the crime scene at Walter Enoch's house? And, as long as I was making a list of things to keep me awake, how did she get into the house when I was the only one with a key? I lay in bed in the dark as a final flurry of shakes had the last word, forcing me to put these questions off until tomorrow.

Maggie Brennan's name tugged at me in the halfway house between consciousness and sleep. I heard a voice say her name, calling her unbelievable. It was Tom Goodell, a retired sheriff from Johnson County, one of the beer-drinking cold case crew. He'd presented his case at lunch one day last year. It was about a couple that was murdered in their sleep and the daughter that survived. Though I couldn't summon the details, I was glad to have solved the puzzle of her name. Even if she weren't the same Maggie Brennan, I'd at least have an icebreaker to use when I met her.

My last waking thoughts turned, as they did most nights, to my lost children: Kevin, dead at the hand of a predator whose last and only decent act had been to blow his brains out, and Wendy, whose drug overdose had been a long-time-coming self-inflicted death. After all these years, my memories of Kevin were a comfortable touchstone from a better time when nothing seemed out of reach. My memories of Wendy, always hovering behind my eyes, were a raw reminder of how I had failed her.

Tonight, Walter Enoch's warped face was the last one I saw, whether he died of causes natural or felonious, why he was holding Wendy's envelope when he died, and what had happened to the envelope's contents were the last unanswered questions of a too long day.

I'd spent my life answering questions such as these, chipping away at the mystery of murder. The one thing I had learned was that the real mystery was not about who lived and who died or even who did it. It was about how we lived, why we died, and what difference we made.

Lucy's purse was on the kitchen table when I wandered in the next morning, bleary-eyed, blinding sun glancing off the snow in the backyard, ripples of liquid light washing over the windows. A bag of fresh bagels stood next to her purse. The binder Milo Harper gave me was next to the bag, spread open, poppy seeds trailing across a page titled Executive Dysfunction Using Behavioral Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome in Parkinson's Disease. Reading it made my hair hurt.

Ruby went outside through the doggie door from the kitchen to the backyard, excavating snow and chasing latent scents and stray birds. I watched her for a few minutes then walked to the foot of the stairs, listening for Lucy, running water rattling in the pipes telling me she was in the shower. I opened the front door. She had shoveled the walk and the driveway, leaving only the packed tracks the car had made the night before, the car now parked on the street, steam rising off the still-warm hood.

It was seven thirty-five and Lucy had already accomplished more than I probably would the rest of the day. I went back to the kitchen, bit into a bagel, and stared at her purse, last night's questions demanding answers, glad that I didn't need a warrant to get them. I emptied her purse onto the table.

She had a Maryland driver's license, the address in Gaithersburg. Her birthday was April 10, thirty-two years ago. She was five-seven, a hundred and twenty pounds, the photo on the license capturing her in one of those is-it-a-smile-or-is-it-gas grimaces.

I found a library card, a Costco card, a photograph of an older couple holding hands, the woman a future image of her, and four twenties, two fives, and a one. There was a receipt from a Starbuck's at Baltimore-Washington International Airport dated yesterday, a pack of Stride chewing gum, a pen, an assortment of other odds and ends, and a single key on a steel ring.