"Like what?"
"I don't know. A name."
"My name?"
"That'd be a start."
He thinks it over. "I can't. Not yet. You'll contact my friends and family and when this gets out…" He shakes his head.
"Then the victim. The person…" She thinks about the tentativeness of his phrasing earlier. "The person you… did this to."
He covers his mouth and lines form around his good eye.
"Look," Caroline says, "you should know that this is a complete violation of how I'm supposed to do my job." She's leery of admitting as much to him, but she keeps talking. "I'm trusting you here. I need to know this isn't bullshit."
"I'm afraid… it'll get away from me. I'm not ready. Not yet." He looks down at the legal pads in front of him. "Not until I'm done."
"I won't do anything with the name. I'll sit on it until you finish."
"You won't do anything?"
"No."
"I can trust you?"
"You can," she says without thinking about it.
He reaches out and takes her hand. His hand is big and warm and she lets her hand be enveloped; it's been a while. "Really?" he asks. "I can trust you?"
"Yes," she says, and it's true.
He lets go of her hand, sits back in his chair, and stares at her until she feels her own face drift away and he is staring at some point beyond her. "Pete," he says.
"Pete."
"Pete Decker. His name is Pete Decker. The man I… the man who…"
"Decker." She lets a moment pass, but he doesn't say any more. "Okay. Pete Decker. That wasn't so hard, was it?"
"No," he says. "It wasn't."
2
The truth hurts only if you're comforted by lies. That's what Caroline has always believed. She doesn't spend much time deluding herself: believing there is a reason things happen, that Mr. Right will come along, that people will change. She wonders, Is this me – this unleavened cynicism – or is it the job? Could be the job. You have to be a realist to be a cop, otherwise, the shit you see… it blackens your heart.
After Rae-Lynn Pierce died, Caroline forgot that for a few days. She went around re-creating Rae-Lynn's last six weeks, hoping she'd find some meaning there. Maybe Rae-Lynn had saved some child's life. Or reconciled with her family. Six weeks. Forty-two days – six of them spent in drug rehab, before she walked away from that; the rest spent on the street, getting high and fucking strangers for money to get high. Her two-year-old daughter was taken away during those six weeks, and a few days later Rae-Lynn was arrested for soliciting. She spent the night in jail, and four days after that she was found dead, curled around a warm-water drainpipe in an alley behind a Thai restaurant.
No, it was better not to know. Otherwise you find yourself staring at people on the street, wondering when you might attend their deaths. She's tried to joke about it, slough it off, duck behind her old shield of cynicism, but she lacks the strength to hoist that defense, as if the weight of her old self is too much to bear.
Maybe that's why she's letting herself be drawn in now, because this Loon's case is still theoretical and clean, a totally hypothetical crime – the idea of homicide, the idea of confession, of contrition and punishment. Usually this job begins and ends with the corpse: its rigor and stench, hypostatic pools, smallness of an unanimated body. But with no body…
D-E-C-K-E-R, P-E-T-E. She types the letters into the computer to check against local and national crime databases. It occurred to her that the Loon might be lying as soon as he gave her the name, but she could also see that the name Pete Decker wasn't random, that it had meaning, and she could see the Loon was giving her something, and that's all she wanted, she sees now, some excuse to keep listening, to allow the Loon to keep writing. Or maybe to keep from going home. Maybe he could've given her any name and she would've left satisfied that she wasn't being taken in by this guy, that she wasn't being seduced by his line of confession and trust, by the misery in his right eye and the mystery of his left. She wonders for a moment if the Loon's name might not be Pete Decker, but she doesn't think so. He didn't say it that way, not the way you'd say your own name, but like a name that had been in your head for some time, one that you didn't say aloud very often. Like an incantation or a name chanted at a sйance. Like someone you've killed.
On her computer screen, Peter Ralph Decker's Greatest Hits scroll down in front of her: petty theft; auto theft; battery; second robbery; a whole range of assaults – third, second, and first, employing everything from his fists to a roofer's nail gun; two DUI's, two possessions – one with intent to deliver; four probation violations; two noncompliance findings, and a couple of protection orders. And that's just as an adult. He has a nine-count juvenile record that she doesn't even bother with. By her count, he's spent fourteen of the last nineteen years in some kind of correctional facility.
She checks to see if Pete Decker is in the can even now. He's not. In fact, he's just finished his longest stretch – four years on the possession with intent to deliver. She reads the details. Stupid bastard had only been out of prison for two months when the cops stopped his car and found almost a half-kilo of coke in the backseat. Claimed he "found" the drugs outside his apartment. Hard to imagine how that story didn't fly.
Caroline writes down the address that Pete has on file with his probation officer. She finds herself hoping that Pete Decker is the victim in this case. A decent lawyer might manage a case for justifiable homicide or self-defense by doing nothing more than presenting Pete Decker's long record in court. There could even be scenarios in which her Loon was protecting himself, or maybe protecting other people, from the impending violence of this drug dealer Pete Decker.
She jots down Decker's last known and sends the report to the printer. At her desk she grabs another blank legal pad, and continues on to the interview room. She unlocks the door and sticks her head in. The Loon is still bent over the legal pad, mouthing words as he writes them. He looks up, already in midapology.
"I'm sorry, Caroline. I know this is taking too long, but I'm really…"
She tosses the new legal pad before he can finish the sentence.
He catches the pad and smiles. "Thanks," he says. "I'm getting close. Really."
"It's almost six," Caroline tells him. "I'm gonna go out for some breakfast. You want something?"
"Some more coffee would be great. Maybe a cinnamon roll." He rubs his mouth. "I… uh… I wanted to tell you…"
Caroline steps inside and waits.
He looks embarrassed. "That name I gave you?"
"Pete Decker?"
"Right. That's not it. That's not the person…"
"So who is he?"
"Nobody," the Loon says. He's lying. "I just wanted to give you a name. I need to get through this and then I'll tell you everything… I promise. You have to believe me."
"You want black coffee again?"
"Sure. Thank you."
"I'm going to have someone from patrol check in on you. And… I'm gonna need your belt and your shoes."
"My belt and my shoes?"
"I can't leave you in here with anything you might use…"
"Use for what?" She doesn't answer, and it takes a few seconds to register on his face. "You think I'm going to hang myself." He makes it sound like a decent idea.
She just holds out her hand. He removes his belt and shoes and slides them across the table. She looks at the shoes but sees no blood on them. When she looks up he is smiling and she sees it again, that nagging familiarity.
"Are you sure we haven't met?" she asks.
"I'm sure."
"You just… seem familiar."
"Trust me," he says. "I would remember meeting you."
She is embarrassed and slightly confused by how good this makes her feel.