Ridley Pearson - No Witnesses

In the midst of a silent scream, Betty Lowry glanced over her shoulder and met eyes with Boldt through the window, and though only a fraction of a second, he saw that her pain and hope had given way to the disbelief of acceptance.

The boy’s final heartbeat was followed by a series of straight green lines in a race across the screens-chasing the next patient.

The doctor turned and offered apologetic eyes filled with sympathy and compassion.

Boldt imagined this boy huddled over his model of the Space Shuttle, eyes curious and sparked with challenge. He imagined the excited expressions in his own son’s eyes, and hoped never to lose him, never to count him among the statistics.

“No more,” Boldt whispered aloud, his promise fogging the glass, his right hand gripped in a fist. A promise made from the most sincere, the most private place in his heart.

A promise soon to be broken.

Boldt arrived home sometime after four. His entrance awakened Miles. Liz rolled over in bed and admonished, “You caused it. You handle it.” She gathered the sheets around her like a cocoon and her head sank back into the pillow, and he felt a desperate urge to make love with her. To erase the death of that young boy.

For forty-five minutes Miles would have nothing of going back to sleep. He finally did so, clutched in the warm arms of his father, who subsequently fell asleep sitting up on the living room couch. At six-thirty Boldt was once again awakened, this time by his son struggling to be free. Late, he rose quickly from the couch and crashed to the floor when his legs and back failed him. Miles ran into their bedroom. Liz appeared in her underwear and said in a groggy voice, “If you’re alive, please move your right hand.” She pulled off his shoes, rubbed his feet, and helped him to stand.

He made coffee and toast for her and poured himself a bowl of granola, waiting for his pot of tea to steep. Miles was assisted by his father in smearing part of a banana and some instant oatmeal over most of his face. Liz appeared at twenty to eight wearing jeans and a T-shirt-weekend clothes. Boldt felt tempted to explain his evening to her but didn’t know where to start. He was a mass of confusion, fatigue, and frustration. He glanced at the wall clock. Late.

“I miss you,” he heard her say sometime during his frantic efforts to change shirts and shave. He had been a lousy father and an even worse husband these past four days, and though he wasn’t keeping score, he feared maybe she was.

Back in the kitchen with her, the two of them talked over each other as they hurried through a running list that included shopping that had to be done, oil that needed changing, the plumber that had overcharged for shoddy work, a dental appointment Boldt had missed, and then, dropped as a bombshell, Liz said, “I’m two months late.”

“Late?”

“My period. I’m two months late.”

“Months?” he asked, stunned.

“That’s the usual way it happens.”

“Two months late.” He made it a statement.

Liz wiped her son’s chin.

“And?” Boldt asked.

“And what?”

“When are you going to the doctor?”

“I’m going to buy one of those in-home kits first.”

“When are you going to do the test?” He had unknowingly stepped closer to her. They stood only inches apart, their voices gentle. He took her by the waist. The world seemed a miraculous place to him. A place where one child lost was so quickly replaced by another.

“When would you like me to?” she asked.

“Will you wait?”

“Of course I will.”

“I’ll bring Chinese.” Her favorite. “And beer,” he added.

“Better make it nonalcoholic.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“I’m thirty-eight, love. It’s a long road between here and there. It may be nothing, don’t forget.”

“I love you,” he said.

“Those are nice words to hear.”

He squeezed her waist. “I miss you, too.”

“You don’t look very good,” she said honestly. She meant that he was old for this. She meant that he belonged behind a desk with regular hours, or maybe she was suggesting that he might have to quit the department-again-if a child came.

“Never felt better,” he lied.

“Go on,” she said, amused, shoving him gently toward the door.

“Chinese,” he reminded her. “Seven o’clock. I’ll call.”

“Like last night?” She obviously couldn’t resist saying this, and he couldn’t blame her-but he did.

“I’ll call. I promise.”

Her eyes apologized to him. And there seemed in this expression of hers an appreciation of him-of their shared feelings, of their mutual efforts to define and maintain some semblance of a life together, and perhaps even for his part in creating the child that might be within her at this very moment.

“Seven,” she confirmed.

“And if it’s a boy,” Boldt added, “I have a name for him.”

Following the eight o’clock shift change, when Boldt’s skeleton crew, weekend squad replaced Pasquini’s, inheriting a gang shooting and an assault-with-intent in a bar-fight-turned-knifing, Boldt was officially detailed to the Tin Man. His duties as squad leader were to be passed to Chris Danielson, his squad’s newcomer. Boldt needed LaMoia and Gaynes for his own purposes; Frank Herbert was available to Danielson. Guccianno was on vacation leave for another ten days.

They called Danielson “Hollywood” because of his Vuarnet sunglasses and ostrich boots. He was a handsome black man who carried a chip on his shoulder the size of Rhode Island because he owned the highest individual clearance rate ever recorded in the books. Danielson kept to himself, rarely socializing in any of the cop bars or at functions. He was ambitious, maybe too ambitious for his peers. The complaints were that he avoided the phone, avoided the Book, allowing others in the squad to pick up his slack. Pasquini had passed him off to Boldt’s squad for this very reason, but Boldt was glad to have him. Danielson liked black holes . He thrived on attempting to clear those cases where others had failed-and he was good at it, which also accounted for his unpopularity: a newcomer beating the veterans at their own game.

“I’d rather be assigned to whatever it is you’re on, Sarge,” he complained.

“I’m giving you the entire squad,” Boldt said.

“Don’t want it.”

“You got it,” Boldt informed him sternly.

“You could use me on this,” Danielson attempted.

Danielson had no way of knowing what case Boldt was being detailed to, other than by rumor, and this attempt to milk the sergeant for information fell on deaf ears.

“You’re a problem solver, Chris. We all are, but you especially. Some guys come by it naturally. Women, too: Gaynes is a natural. You pick up the black holes other people drop-some of them you even clear. Well, now you get all the black holes you want, and a lot you don’t. You run a squad and every case is yours. You problem solve on a magnitude, on a level that I think is important for you to see.”

“What’s more important, solving this case of yours or shuffling a lot of paper? You need me, Sarge. This is my kind of case, this one you’re on.”

Danielson had a nose for it, that was all. He understood the look in Boldt’s eye and he knew from the hours that Boldt was keeping, from the long meetings with Shoswitz behind closed doors, and most of all from the lack of any entry in the Book that this was one of the ones that came around once in ten years, this was a career maker. Boldt could tell all this by just looking at him. “It’s a ball-buster, Chris,” he advised him. “This is one of those that if you don’t clear it, it breaks you. You put a month, six months, a year, six years into it, and it never goes down. Guys eat barrels over cases like this. Believe me: I’ve had them before.”