“What do you think?” Lucas said in a low, wobbly voice, not meeting his eyes.
Nick stared, disbelieving. “What are you trying to say?” he whispered, summoning all the calm he could muster.
“Forget it,” Lucas said, making a little buzz-off gesture with his left hand.
“What are you trying to say?”
“I wouldn’t know, Dad. I wasn’t there.”
“What’s gotten into you, Lucas?” The windshield wipers ticked back and forth, back and forth, and he could hear the regular clicking of the turn signal that hadn’t gone off. He reached over, switched off the signal. The rain sheeted the car’s windows, making it feel like the two of them were inside a cabin in a terrible storm, but it wasn’t a safe place. “Look, Luke, you don’t have Mom anymore. You just have me. You wish it were otherwise. So do I. But we’ve got to make the best of a bad situation.”
“It wasn’t me who made that situation.”
“No one ‘made’ that situation,” Nick said.
“You killed Mom,” he said, so quietly that for a moment Nick wasn’t sure Lucas had actually spoken the words.
Nick felt like someone had grabbed his heart and squeezed. “I can’t deal with this right now. I can’t deal with you.”
You Conover men. Better defended than a medieval castle.
“Fine with me.”
“No,” Nick said. “No. Scratch that.” He was breathing hard, as if he had just done an eight-hundred-meter sprint. “Okay, listen to me. What happened to your mother that night-God knows we’ve talked about it…”
“No, Dad.” Lucas’s voice was shaky but resolute. “We’ve never talked about it. You refer to it. You don’t talk about it. That’s the house rule. We don’t talk about it. You don’t. You talk about what a fuck-up I am. That’s what you talk about.”
The windows had begun to fog up. Nick closed his eyes. “About your mother. There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t wonder whether there was anything I could have done-anything at all-that might have made a difference.”
“You never said…” Lucas’s eyes were wet and his voice was thick, muffled.
“The truck came out of nowhere,” Nick began, but then he stopped. It was too painful. “Luke, what happened happened. And it wasn’t about me and it wasn’t about you.”
Lucas was quiet for a moment. “Fucking swim meet.”
“Lucas, don’t try to make sense of it. Don’t try to connect the dots, as if there was some kind of logic to it all. It just happened.”
“I didn’t visit her.” Lucas’s words were slurred, whether from the pot or from emotion, Nick couldn’t tell, and didn’t care. “In the hospital. Afterward.”
“She was in a coma. She was already gone, Luke.”
“Maybe she could have heard me.” His voice had gotten thin and reedy.
“She knew you loved her, Luke. She didn’t need reminding. I don’t think she wanted you to remember her like that, anyway. She wouldn’t have been sore that you weren’t there. She would have been glad. I really believe that. You were always attuned to her feelings. Like there was some radio frequency only the two of you could hear. You know something, Luke? I think maybe you were the only one of us who did what she would have wanted.”
Lucas buried his face in his hands. When he spoke again, his voice sounded as if it were coming from a long way off. “Why do you hate me so much? Is it ’cause I look like her, and you can’t deal with that?”
“Lucas,” Nick said. He was determined to hold it together. “I want you to listen to me. I need you to hear this.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “There is nothing in my life more precious to me than you are.” His voice was hoarse, and he got the words out with difficulty, but he got them out. “I love you more than my life.”
He put his arms around his son, who at first stiffened and squirmed, and then, suddenly, put his own arms around Nick and clasped him tightly, the way he did when Lucas was a little boy.
Nick felt the rhythmic convulsions of grief, the staccato expulsions of breath, and it took him a moment before he realized that Lucas wasn’t the only one who was weeping.
87
The phone rang, and Audrey picked it up without thinking.
“Is this Detective Rhimes?” A sweet, female voice, the words slow and careful.
Her heart sank. “Yes it is,” Audrey said, although she was sorely tempted to say, No, I’m afraid Detective Rhimes is on vacation.
“Detective, this is Ethel Dorsey.”
“Yes, Mrs. Dorsey,” she said, softening her voice. “How are you doing?”
“I’m doing as well as could be expected with my Tyrone gone and all. But I thank the good Lord I still have my three wonderful sons.”
“There’s so much we can’t understand, Mrs. Dorsey,” Audrey said. “But the Scriptures tell us that those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy.”
“I know he records our tears and collects them all in his bottle.”
“He does. That he does.”
“God is good.”
“All the time,” Audrey said, her response a reflex.
“Detective, I’m so sorry to disturb you, but I was wondering if you’ve made any progress on my Tyrone’s case.”
“No, I’m sorry. Nothing yet. We keep plugging away, though.” The lie made her ashamed.
“Please don’t give up, Detective.”
“Of course not, Mrs. Dorsey.” She hadn’t given the case more than a fleeting thought in the last several weeks. She was thankful that Mrs. Dorsey worshipped in another church, the next town over.
“I know you’re doing your best.”
“Yes, I am.”
“May the Lord keep you strong, Detective.”
“You too, Mrs. Dorsey. You too.”
She hung up filled with sorrow, ashamed beyond ashamed, and the phone rang again immediately.
It was Susan Calloway, the bland-voiced woman from the state police lab in Grand Rapids. The firearms examiner in charge of the IBIS database. She sounded a little different, and Audrey realized that what she was hearing was excitement, in the woman’s tamped-down, squelched way.
“Well, I do think we have something for you,” the woman said.
“You have a match.”
“I’m sorry this has taken so long-”
“Oh, not at all-”
“But the Grand Rapids PD certainly took their time. I mean, all I was asking them to do was to check the bullets out of Property and drive them all of seventeen blocks over to Fuller. You’d think I’d asked for a human sacrifice or something.”
Audrey chuckled politely. “But you got a match,” she prompted. The technician sounded positively giddy.
“Of course, the real problem was that it wasn’t anyone’s case anymore. I mean, it was from six years ago, and both detectives are gone, they tell me. There’s always an excuse.”
“Tell me about it,” Audrey laughed.
“In any case, the bullets they brought over matched the ones in your case. They’re copper-jacketed Rainiers, so the ammunition is different. But the striation markings are identical.”
“So it’s a positive match.”
“It’s a positive match, yes.”
“The weapon-?”
“I can’t tell you that for absolute certain. But I’d say it’s a safe guess it’s a Smith and Wesson.380. That’s not legally admissible, though.” The woman read off the Grand Rapids PD report number for the bullet.
“So Grand Rapids should have all the information I need,” Audrey said.
“Well, I don’t know how much more they’ll have than I already told you. Both detectives on the case are off the force, as I say.”
“Even so, those names would be a help.”
“Oh, well, if that’s all you want, I have that. The submitting detective, anyway. Right here in the comments box.” The technician went silent, and Audrey was about to prompt her for the name, when the woman spoke again, and Audrey went cold.