She could almost see the barker dip his tanned hand into an old bowler and draw forth a slip of paper and read it and shout, “Congratulations, Donna Leland!”
The EMTs slid the gurney into the back of the ambulance and climbed in alongside. One of the young men shot a freckled look toward the detective and asked,
“You want to ride along to the hospital?”
Leland heard the question only after the EMT had stopped speaking it. “Um, you think you – you think you need me?”
He laughed. “Nah. Between the shackles and the straps and the gunshot wounds, he’s not going anywhere. ’Sides, I got first at State as a Demon wrestler.”
Detective Leland nodded numbly. Demon wrestler? It was hard to make small talk when everything was so big.
“Oh, you mean the BHS Demons – the wrestling team.”
“Well, yeah.”
Leland nodded. “Sorry. You just seemed more of a Catholic Central kid to me.”
“Kid?” His eyes popped wide, and he pointed at her.
“Hey, didn’t you used to be Officer Friendly?”
“Yeah. Used to be.” Enough small talk. Leland turned and began walking toward her squad.
“Woo! You kicked ass tonight, Officer Friendly!” he shouted, sounding just like the barker. “Look out, world! It’s Officer Kick-Ass!”
The other cops cheered briefly before going back to their excited chatter about the murders, the suspect, the newsman, the hospital escort. Leland wished she could hand out balloons and kettle corn.
The detective opened the door to her squad, sat down, closed the door, turned off the scanner, turned down the radio, breathed in the silence. Insanity.
I’m in love with him, but he’s a… I don’t even know what. Killer? Accomplice? Liar? Lunatic? All I know is I love him, and he – I thought he loved me…
God, was he going to kill me?
The ambulance began to pull away from the curb, and squad cars jockeyed for positions around it. Sighing deeply, Leland shifted into drive and pulled out onto the street and joined the rear of the procession. And what a procession! It was as if the Chocolate City Parade had come early. With lights flashing and sirens blaring, the ambulance and its escort of six squads rolled through the heart of Burlington. Storefronts reflected the strobing lights, and the windows of second-floor walkups produced amazed faces that flashed blue and red and white. A few kids came from an alley and ran along the sidewalk, maybe hoping the cops would throw Crunch bars.
And the festival didn’t end when they reached Memorial Hospital. The emergency room was crowded with edgy paramedics, doctors, deputies, and the occasional reporter. These last were as violently ejected by Blake Gaines as by the police. In the midst of blood and bandages, there were thousands of questions, thousands of non-answers, the staring blanks in the booking form matching the staring blanks of Azra’s eyes. Leland gave up. She listed his aliases – Azra Michaels and Samael – beside the name John Doe. She’d thought she’d known him. She didn’t even know his name. Donna arrived home at 3 a.m. She kicked the latest Gazette off the doormat, fought a swarm of moths away from the porch light, unlocked the door, and staggered alone into a cold, dark house.
Keys on the counter, gun on the table, clothes on the floor – she crawled into bed. It felt small, as if it had shrunk, never again to admit the man who had shared it with her, and only begrudgingly to admit her. Not that she could sleep. Thoughts of Kerry and Azra warred in her mind. Two lost souls – one gone forever, and the other receding quickly into oblivion. Didn’t you used to be Officer Friendly?
Yeah. Used to be.
She’d followed McHenry in the job, just after Kerry’s suicide. She’d hoped to counsel troubled kids, to let them know they had someone they could talk to, never had to feel alone, never had to do anything desperate. Donna’d tried to be a one-woman juvenile crime-prevention unit, but not a single troubled kid had come to her. Apparently, she hadn’t been cool enough – just a mascot, like Sergeant McGruff. She hadn’t known how to reach them.
Or how to reach him…
Azra. Talk about a troubled soul. But what was he, really? A sociopath – calculating, unfeeling, manipulative, incapable of recognizing another person’s humanity, incapable of love? Or a psychotic – delusional, schizophrenic, unable to distinguish reality from fantasy, ill and alone in a brutal world?
That’s what Kerry had been.
“He needs me.” Tears pooled in her eyes and ran down her face and onto her pillow. “I can’t just let him go. I can’t lose him like I lost Kerry.”
The next morning, Detective Leland turned into the alley off Jefferson and pulled her squad into her parking space by the police department only to nearly run over a giant, horseshoe-shaped arrangement of flowers that bore the banner “Leland” and beneath it the slogan,
“Winning at the Wire.”
“Mother of God.”
The onslaught continued inside, where the dispatcher made her give a high-five through the bulletproof glass before buzzing her in. A gantlet of colleagues waited in the hallway beyond, their eyes bright, their cheeks shining, their hands reaching out to shake hers or pat her back or give her a thumbs up. And after greeting each and nodding and thanking them and assuring them that “it was a team effort” and “I couldn’t have done it without you,” she reached the case room. Another oversized bouquet waited on her desk, and above the smiling heads of the flowers hovered a plastic arch that declared “A Job Well Done! ” Worse yet, the night shift had apparently taken it on themselves to devise clever CNN-style crawls and print them out in landscape format in giant type on letter-sized paper and string them along the walls.
“LELAND TAKES DOWN SERIAL KILLER.”
“SERIAL MURDER WAREHOUSE RAIDED.”
“POLICE ESTIMATE OVER 75 VICTIMS.”
The farther down the wall she read, the worse the crawls became.
“BURLINGTON NABS HAND-JOB SLAYER.”
“OFFICER FRIENDLY? OFFICER KICK-ASS!”
“KILLER ONLY WANTED TO GET A HEAD.”
Leland pretended to like the hoopla only because her colleagues hovered around her in an eager throng and the two young authors of the crawls jabbed questions at her: “Did you read the fourth one down?” and
“Don’t you get it?” and “C’mon, that’s funny, right?”
“Very nice,” Leland said, pushing past them to reach her desk. Beside it stood her boss.
“Front page news!” Chief Biggs said, rattling a special edition of the Gazette. The main headline read, “LOCAL
COP NABS NATIONAL KILLER,” and the picture beneath it showed Detective Leland with her feet braced and her Colt leveled at the kneeling figure of Azra Michaels. A closet full of skulls leered faintly behind him.
“Wow,” was all Leland could muster, reaching to take the paper. The moment her hand touched it, ten flashes went off, and Blake Gaines stepped out of the crowd, lowered his camera, and grinned.
“Not just front page,” Gaines enthused. “Second page. Third page. Damn, it’s a whole eight-page special edition, with my copy and my shots and your perp!”
Sure enough, as Leland flipped through, she saw dozens of articles about the case. She was invariably described as a larger-than-life hero, a cross between Agatha Christie and Wyatt Earp. Likewise, the articles cast Azra as an absolute demon. The main headline might as well have read “ANNIE OAKLEY NABS
BEELZEBUB.” There were also plenty of interviews with sharpshooters and canoe men, sidebars about known victims, and even a contest asking readers to vote on the honorific that Leland should enjoy (including “Officer Kick-Ass”) and the horrorific that should be assigned to Azra (including “Dahmer Squared”). The pictures and articles focused solely on the case, though the paper did take the opportunity to plug some hot deals on cool cars and notify readers of seventy-five cents savings on Charmin.