Hardy put a flat palm on the table between them. “If you’d have thought,” he said. “But there was no reason you should have. Nothing like that had ever happened before. Next time, okay, you’ll think to put the helmet on first. But not thinking of it then wasn’t negligence, Abe. It was a freak accident. You could do everything exactly the same a thousand times and nothing bad would ever happen again. It wasn’t your fault.”
Glitsky sat hunched forward over his plate. Their table was by a window and he glared out at the blustering day. Finally, he came back to Hardy, seemed to force the words out one at a time. “How can it not be my fault when he was my responsibility? If it happens on my watch, I’m at fault.”
“This isn’t police bureaucracy, Abe. This is your life.”
“Being a cop is my life.”
“Don’t give me that shit. Being a cop is what you do. The rest of you is your life. The problem you’ve got here is this really happened to you, to your boy. So you’re both victims of it. And since the one thing you won’t do, ever, is be a victim, that leaves you holding the bag and taking responsibility for it. ’Cause that’s who you are. That’s what you do. It’s automatic.”
Glitsky spit it out. “It’s not wrong either.”
“I’m not saying it is. Not all the time, not usually. But this once, this one time, it’s beating you down when you’re going to need to be strong, when Treya and Rachel and even poor fucking attorneys like me need you to get over it so your troops don’t go riding roughshod over their cases. You didn’t do this. You didn’t cause it. It happened, that’s all. You’re a victim of that, okay, fine. Legitimately. But that doesn’t make you any kind of unworthy human, not if you don’t let it.”
Glitsky’s scar burned white through his lips. His heavy brows hung like a precipice over hooded eyes, which remained fixed on the plate before him and refused to meet Hardy’s, who thought it wasn’t impossible that his friend would suddenly either physically explode at him across the table or throw something and storm out. Instead, though, the eyes came up. “You done?”
“Pretty much.”
Glitsky nodded. “I’ll give it some thought.”
It was a bit of an extra drive-several other churches, and even St. Mary’s Cathedral, were closer to her house-but Maya Townshend felt a special energy connecting her with St. Ignatius, the church at the edge of the USF campus, and it was where she had driven now. She needed all the divine intervention she could get, and here is where she most often came to pray for forgiveness. Those prayers she had prayed here had, for the most part, been answered.
Answered in the form of Joel and her life with him. Their healthy family. Their wonderful home and financial security. If God had not forgiven her, surely he would not have showered such beneficence upon her.
Or so she had come to believe.
But now she was suddenly not so sure. She knew that killing was a mortal sin and wondered if God’s apparent acceptance of her penance and prayers was really just the first stage in a punishment that would strip from her all that she loved and cherished. If, because of all this, if she lost Joel now, or the children, or even their home and fortune, it would be far more devastating than if she’d never known such love and contentment. God demanded justice as well as he dispensed mercy. The Church taught that there was no sin that God would not forgive, and that the failure to believe that was the worst sin of all-despair. God’s mercy was infinite. But the key to any claim to that mercy was confession. And she could not confess.
She could never confess.
And that truth, she believed, stood to damn her for eternity.
A regular here, she went to her usual back pew and knelt, making the sign of the cross, then bringing her hands together and bowing her head.
But no prayers would come. Her mind kept returning to the lies she had told Joel just last night; the lies she’d been living now for so long; the truths that were even worse.
The padded wooden rail on which she knelt had a gap in the middle of the pew, and after only a minute of attempting to pray she moved down and again went to her knees, but directly onto that gap now, putting all of her weight onto it, offering up the pain even as it shot up her leg and became nearly unbearable.
“Please, God. Please, please forgive me. I am so, so sorry.”
She raised her head and through tearful eyes tried to focus on the crucifix above the altar far away up front, on the suffering of Christ.
But Christ had never done what she’d done. Christ knew that God’s mercy would save him.
After the events of the past few days she no longer harbored that hope for herself.
14
Not two hundred yards away from where Maya suffered and tried to pray, Wyatt Hunt turned another page in the yearbook, thinking that private investigators in the future would have an easy time of it. All they’d have to do with kids who were going to school now would be call up their MySpace or Facebook accounts, and they’d have a blow-by-blow account of everything their subjects had done from about sixth grade on.
Maya Townshend, though, at thirty-two, was just a bit too old for that approach. So Hunt was reduced to searching for clues in the hard copy of her college years. Of course, first he’d Googled her and her husband, and though there had been three thousand or so hits, the majority of them by far concerned Joel’s business and their philanthropy. For such a politically connected couple there was very little about either local or national politics, nor were they particularly active in San Francisco’s high society. Hits for Bay Beans West appeared a whopping four times-all of the stories variants on the Little Local Coffee Shop That Could standing up to the Starbucks giant and making it work.
Not a whiff of marijuana or, indeed, troubles of any kind.
On a whim Hunt had done a search for Dylan Vogler, and the coffee shop manager had come up completely empty except for references to his death recently-one of the country’s very few invisible men, Hunt thought.
Maybe Craig Chiurco, he thought, checking the criminal data-banks, would have more luck.
His next stop was the library at USF, where he started on the 1994 yearbook and found the standard posed picture of Maya Fisk looking about fifteen-fresh-faced, perfect hair, big smile. She was one of her class’s representatives in student government her freshman year, on the debate and IM soccer teams, active in music and theater, appearing in two student productions. She was also a cheerleader. Sophomore year was basically freshman year redux.
The change must have occurred late in her sophomore year or in the succeeding summer, because her picture as a junior was so different from the others as to be nearly unrecognizable. Though the hair color had turned light and the style more untamed, the main change from Hunt’s perspective was the facial expression. In place of the adolescent with the sunny smile of the previous two years, now a young woman stared defiantly at the camera with a bored smirk. Seeking another view of this chameleon, Hunt turned to the club and team pages, but here again something drastic had changed-Maya had stopped taking part in extracurricular activities.
In her senior year her photo placed her more closely with the girl from her first two years-she wore a passive toothless smile and she’d combed her still-light hair-but it was a more formal portrait than the others had been. And again, she’d joined nothing.
Pretty much striking out with the yearbooks, Hunt turned to the microfiches of the student newspaper, the Foghorn, for the first couple of years, when Maya was still active, and might have appeared in some captioned photographs with other students. In this he was luckier right away. Here was Maya, in her freshman year, mugging for the camera with three other cheerleader friends at a pep rally. Hunt took down all the names. And three others that he found captioned throughout the rest of her freshman year. Obviously, at the beginning, Maya had been a popular and involved student.