Even more so this weekend, he realized. For some reason.
He found himself wondering whether Lindsey liked the zoo. Or Sea World. His mind flashed on an image of the three of them-him, Chelse and Lindsey-strolling the wide, eucalyptus-shaded avenues of Balboa Park. Just a flash, and then his mind said, Nope. Bad idea. Are you nuts?
All the same, he was glad it was Chelse’s weekend. And, he reminded himself, if anything interesting popped up in her parents’ backgrounds, he would have a real reason to call Lindsey.
Maybe Sunday.
As it turned out, none of the things he’d planned on doing with his weekend came to pass. He didn’t take Chelsea to the zoo or Sea World, didn’t see her at all, in fact. Nor did he go home to his empty house, call Lindsey Merrill, or even check back to see what his search had turned up. Because the shooting of Juan Miguel Alviera was only the opening salvo in what came to be called, in the news media, at least, the East Village War.
At six-thirty Friday evening, two carloads of Alviera’s homies from the Eastside Diablos armed with automatic weapons shot up a fast-food restaurant where the suspected perpetrators of the Alviera homicide, members of the rival East Village gang known as the Calle Reyes Amigos, were enjoying dinner. One of the Amigos was killed, the other escaped unharmed. Seven innocent bystanders were wounded, three seriously. And the city’s barrios-which had been enjoying steadily declining gang violence rates since the horrendous highs of the early 90s, thanks to the combined efforts of the SDPD’s gang suppression unit, the DEA and the FBI-erupted.
All patrol personnel, plus the gang and homicide units, were called out in force in an effort to nip the flare-up before it could escalate into all-out war. Alan called Chelsea’s mother to tell her he wouldn’t be able to take her for the weekend, and prepared to bed down on the couch of a friend who lived in the central city. Chelsea’s mom wasn’t happy about having to cancel the plans she and her current husband had made to go away for the weekend, and made sure he heard all over again each and every one of the reasons why she’d divorced him in the first place, and why nobody in their right mind should ever marry a cop. But what could he do?
On Saturday, the Amigos retaliated against the Whataburger shooters by crashing a wedding of one of the shooter’s sisters, at which the shooter was the best man. The hail of automatic weapons fire did manage to take out the best man, and also sent the groom, three wedding guests, and the six-year-old flower girl-the bride’s niece-to the hospital with major injuries.
Whether it was the shock of that tragedy-augmented by photos splashed all over the media, of the little girl in her blood-soaked flower girl’s dress-or the SDPD sweep that hauled in off the streets every known affiliate of the two rival gangs that could be found, by Sunday night things had settled down. The thinking behind the sweep was, by the time the collars had all been sorted out and processed-most back to the streets of their respective neighborhoods-passions would probably have cooled off some. At least for the time being.
Sunday night, home for a shower and change of clothes, Alan called the hospital to check on the flower girl. He was told she was “critical but stable-holding her own.”
Lindsey couldn’t decide what to do. At least a dozen times she’d picked up the card with the penciled phone number on the back and stared at it. And a dozen times had put it back on her desk without dialing. She’d done it so many times, the number was now etched in her memory. Why couldn’t she bring herself to call him?
It was true that Alan-Detective Cameron-had told her to call him if she found out anything that might help narrow down the location of the traumatic events in her mother’s past. But this was such a small thing. Would he think it significant enough to warrant bothering him on a weekend? He had made it pretty clear he was looking into this without much enthusiasm or real hope of success. And he had said he would call her if he found anything. Which meant, since she hadn’t heard from him, that he didn’t have anything to tell her. She didn’t want to be a pest.
Oh, grow up, Lindsey. At least be honest with yourself. You know the real reason you can’t let yourself call the man is because you want to so badly.
There. She’d done it-spoken inside her head the truth she’d been trying not to acknowledge. She wanted to call Detective Alan Cameron. Wanted to hear his voice again. Better yet, wanted to see him again.
His face hovered in her mind wherever she went, whatever she did, always there, following her the way she used to think the moon followed her when she was a little girl. His eyes…the unexpected softness that came into them when he spoke to her mother, in such stark contrast with the hardness, the speculation, the cop look that was there all the rest of the time. She wondered what it would be like to see that softness when he looked at her.
Silly, of course. So very junior high school. She’d just barely met the man. Ridiculously, demoralizingly stupid to have his voice, the words and phrases he’d spoken, playing over and over in her mind like a song that had gotten stuck there.
She wasn’t sure what she was going to do about it, but one thing she was not going to do was make an idiot of herself over a man she didn’t even know. And a cop, for God’s sake!
It had been such a long time since any man had made an impression on her-why did it have to be a cop?
Needing to get out of the house, away from the phone and the temptation it presented, she changed her clothes and went out for a run along the cliffs, taking her house key on a chain around her neck as she always did and leaving everything else, even her cell phone, behind.
Tomorrow, she told herself as she ran. Monday, a work day-will be better. I’ll have plenty of things to distract me-with any luck, a flood or a hurricane or some sort of disaster. You know I don’t mean that, God, right? And if he hasn’t called by the end of the work day, well, that’s a reasonable length of time to wait.
She felt better, somehow, having made that decision. Stronger. More disciplined. If he hasn’t called by five o’clock Monday, I will call him.
Monday morning when Alan reported in, police headquarters was still a zoo. But at least there hadn’t been any more shootings overnight. No more bodies. Thank you, Lord.
By around four o’clock, with the short November afternoon already sliding toward dusk and the lights in the squad room turning the windows to mirrors, he finally found a moment to see what the make he’d run on Richard and Susan Merrill had turned up. He wasn’t expecting much-was pretty sure he knew what he was going to find-nothing. No warrants, no arrests, no priors. The Merrills were undoubtedly exactly what they seemed to be: Two nice, law-abiding, upper-middle-class Americans with no more than the usual number of skeletons in their family closets. Sad about the wife’s Alzheimer’s, but, those things happened, even to nice people.
For a few minutes after he brought up the screen, his sleep-deprived mind refused to process what he was seeing. He read through the results for Susan Merrill, then for Richard, scrolled back to the beginning of Susan’s and read through both again. Nope-he hadn’t missed anything. He tipped back his chair and gazed at the data neatly boxed and itemized on the screen, frowning and tapping a pencil on his desktop. He straightened abruptly and reached for his phone, but hung it up without dialing and shoved back his chair instead. A few minutes later he was knocking on the door of his captain’s office.
Getting the answer he usually did-an unintelligible growl-Alan opened the door, stuck his head through the crack and said, “Sir, got a minute?”