April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

We were talking with heads averted, so everybody knew something was going on. By now a lot of people packing guns had crowded into the room, including Andrew’s lieutenant, Barry Loomis, who wore a walrus mustache and a Superman tie, and Officer Sylvia Oberbeck, impassively chewing gum. She looked put together, just going on shift: heavy mascara and a freshly braided bun. At one point I tried to make eye contact, but she did not seem to remember who I was. There was the rustle of seashells, and Margaret Forrester suddenly pushed through, swinging the water bottle, stepping over legs.

“Damn! Computers still out?” Fanning herself at the collective menthol-scented body heat. “What did I miss?”

“Case closed, go home,” someone replied disagreeably.

“There’s been another development, Rick,” interrupted Special Agent Todd Hanley. He was a reliable sort. Narrow-faced, with horn-rimmed glasses, achingly serious, he wore tweedy sport coats and spoke only when it was relevant.

Maybe he was a spy.

“It also concerns the dad.”

Rick: “We are so past the damn dad.”

Nervous giggles. Bored, cynical looks.

“Just so you know, legal says Mr. Murphy has threatened to sue. Claims he sprained his back during the altercation with Special Agent Grey.”

Thirty sets of eyes went my way, including Andrew’s.

“What altercation?” I said defensively. “He tripped on a rug.”

Rick now was ratcheting the handcuffs with a rhythmic, grating sound.

“Oh, please,” I went on, “I admonished him about the cell phone, he took a swing at me and slipped on a Chinese rug. He was fine.”

“When he was barricaded in the rest room,” Rick seemed to have to ask, “why didn’t you call for backup? There was a surveillance team outside.”

“What were the ladies supposed to do?” cracked Andrew. “Bring in the artillery because the guy was taking a good, long shit?”

Amazement. Big laughs. Margaret squealing: “An- drew ! I’m going to kill you!”

I wanted to crawl under the table. Don’t make this a fight!

Andrew must have stuck his head under the shower in the locker room because he looked refreshed. His thick dark hair was slicked back; he wore his shield on his hip, a hand-tooled leather gun belt and a fresh lilac blue shirt with a monogrammed cuff through which you could see the sculpted moves of his shoulders.

Still, I wanted to throttle him, especially when, as I pushed away from the table to leave, he said, “Where are you off to?” as if we were the only two people in the room.

“Back to the office.”

“What about ‘Arizona?’” It sounded like a code. People were watching us.

My gut clenched. “It’s premature to talk about ‘Arizona.’”

Margaret shook her hair and took a long throaty draw on the water. “Sounds like Ana doesn’t want to share.”

“It’s a promising lead but needs to be developed,” I said dismissively.

Andrew replied, “Bullshit.”

“It is bullshit,” I repeated, now confused. We had not discussed this. I was not ready to present some half-baked theory based on the statements of a crazy homeless person.

Rick: “Could you two clue us in?”

“Sure,” said Andrew. “The source is a transient named Willie John Black.”

It was a bad moment, as I feared it would be. Andrew’s own people guffawed and began offering comments on their encounters with Black, who apparently was famous in the world of social services for his movable collection of wire hangers, coils of nylon tied with the precision of a yachtsman, cereal boxes, gloves, strips of fabric, milk cartons and the occasional flag mounted onto a trio of bicycles tied together, upon which he had somehow secured a full-sized camping tent. They didn’t let him take it on the Promenade so he kept the thing parked in an alley across the street.

“Black puts the victim with a young white male,” said Andrew, who seemed the only one at ease in the room. He held a small investigator’s notebook, to which he did not need to refer, and spoke with an authority that held the respect of a bunch of disbelieving, overtired cops.

“We know Juliana went there to buy marijuana. I make the suspect as a dealer. He has a camera, which he uses as a cover. Black says the guy is from Arizona, so I want to use narcotics investigators on the local level to identify this individual. We should reach out immediately to law enforcement in Arizona.” Nobody spoke. Margaret Forrester — peacekeeper and liaison — was mouthing the water bottle, big eyes gone bland, as if she had nothing to do with any of this. My heart was jackhammering; I was hoping Rick would not force me to make the call.

“Sounds like a poor use of resources,” he said. “Mr. Black is obviously a questionable source.”

“That’s your judgment.”

“Of course it’s his judgment,” I said nicely. “This is an FBI investigation.”

Andrew shut me down with a cold-blooded look—“Now you’re telling me who’s in charge?”—and my overbeating heart clutched at the shock of his anger.

His lieutenant intervened: “We’ll employ our own resources to follow up on Detective Berringer’s recommendation.”

“Thank you, Barry,” said Rick.

The pager went off again.

“This is whack,” I cursed under my breath, quickly shouldering handbag and canvas briefcase.

Rick had given up on the handcuffs, which lay splayed upon the table. The mood was suddenly wilted and depressed. There was no more oxygen left in the room, and what did we have? No new ransom demands. A half-assed boyfriend and a schizophrenic.

“Keep me informed,” said my boss. “And watch your back.”

I went out through the kitchen exit to avoid passing close to Andrew.

The fog was a surprise, but along the coast it often comes up quickly. When I left the police station, sometime after six, everything smelled of water. The air wasn’t air but cold humidity that had congealed. From inside the car, the windshield was impenetrable. I let the defroster blow. According to the dashboard readout, the temperature had fallen to thirty-seven degrees.

Someone was rubbing a clear circle in the driver’s side glass. Fingernails scratched and a round face peered close, spooking me. When I lowered the window I saw that it was Margaret Forrester. With hair frizzed out by the mist and some kind of seashells on a thong around her neck, she looked like a creature hauled out of the sea, a siren, regarding me with dark eyes that seemed to shine with strange compassion. Steam curled and vanished from her small-sculpted nostrils as she considered what to say.

Finally it was just, “Drive carefully.”

“I will. You, too.”

She smiled sympathetically and reached in and patted my hand on the wheel. I grinned like a cat until she had withdrawn and the window rose again and sealed off the vaporous outside.

What was her concern? Was it for Juliana, disappeared into the dark psychic stink of America? The fog was blanking out the street lamps, making the night unnaturally dim, a guttural gray through which they shone just faintly. But sometimes the fog would be a lens, diffusing a pair of headlamps passing behind a tree so its outline would spring out, monumentally visible, each twig and leaf in flashing silhouette as if etched by a laser.

I wished for that same shocking clarity in our search for Juliana, even as I fought a growing instinct it would not occur. There was uncertainty beneath the frenzy of the briefing, a stain of helplessness that seemed to be numbing Rick. We were all giving in to the fear that we had failed. Look at us, Andrew and me, fighting in public like dogs over territory.

I dialed his pager: Code 3-AG.