Get it over with now, she told herself.
Kat sat down and once again brought up YouAreJustMyType .com. When she signed in, she saw that she had “exciting new matches.” She didn’t bother. She found Jeff’s profile, clicked the picture, read his personal statement yet again:
Let’s see what happens.
How long, she wondered, had it taken Jeff to come up with something so simple, so enticing, so relaxed, so noncommittal, so engaging? It was no pressure. An invitation, nothing more. Kat clicked the icon to write him a direct message. The box came up. The cursor blinked impatiently.
Kat typed: Yes, let’s see what happens.
Ugh.
She immediately deleted that.
She tried a few others. Guess who; Been a long time; How are you, Jeff?; It’s nice to see your face again. Delete, delete, delete. Every utterance was lame to the nth degree. Maybe, she thought, that was the nature of these things. It was hard to be smooth or confident or relaxed when you’re on a site trying to meet the love of your life.
A memory brought a wistful smile to her face. Jeff had a thing for cheesy eighties music videos. This was before YouTube made it easy to watch any and all at a moment’s notice. You’d have to find when VH1 was running a special or something like that. Suddenly, she pictured what Jeff would be doing now, probably sitting at his computer and looking up old videos by Tears for Fears or Spandau Ballet or Paul Young or John Waite.
John Waite.
Waite had an early MTV classic, a quasi new-wave pop song that never failed to move her, even now, if she was flipping radio stations or in a bar that played eighties hits. Kat would hear John Waite singing “Missing You,” and it would bring her back to that truly cornball video, John walking alone in the streets, repeatedly exclaiming, “I ain’t missing you at all,” in a voice so pained it made the next line (“I can lie to myself”) superfluous and overly explanatory. John Waite would be in a bar, drowning his obvious sorrows, flashing back to happy memories of the woman he will forever love, all the while still chorusing that he wasn’t missing her at all. Oh, but we hear the lie. We see the lie in every step, every movement. Then, at the end of the video, lonely John goes home and puts his headphones on, now drowning his sorrow in music rather than drink, and so, in a tragedy reminiscent of something Shakespearean by way of a bad sitcom, he can’t hear when—gasp—his love returns to his door and knocks on it. In the end, the great love he was meant to be with forever knocks again, puts her ear against the door, and then walks away, leaving John Waite forever brokenhearted, still insisting that he doesn’t miss her, lying eternally to himself.
Ironic in hindsight.
The video became something of a running joke between her and Jeff. When they were apart, even for a short while, he would leave messages saying, “I’m not missing you at all,” and she might even comment that he could lie to himself.
Yeah, romance isn’t always pretty.
But when Jeff wanted to be more serious, he would sign his notes by the song title, which right now Kat found her fingers almost subconsciously typing into the text box:
MISSING YOU.
She looked at it a moment and debated hitting SEND.
It was overkill. Here he was being wonderfully subtle with the Let’s see what happens and she comes on with MISSING YOU. No. She deleted it and tried one more time, quoting the actual line from the chorus:
“I ain’t missing you at all.”
That felt too flip. Another deletion.
Okay, enough.
Then an idea came to her. Kat opened up another browser window and found a link to the old John Waite video. She hadn’t seen it in, what, twenty years maybe, but it still held all the sappy charm. Yes, Kat thought with a nod, perfect. She copied and pasted the link into the text field. A photograph from the video’s bar scene popped up. Kat didn’t stop to think about it anymore.
She hit the SEND button, stood quickly, and almost ran out the door.
• • •
Kat lived on 67th Street on the Upper West Side. The 19th Precinct, her workplace, was also on 67th Street, albeit on the east side, not far from Hunter College. She cherished her commute—a walk straight across Central Park. Her squad was housed in an 1880s landmark building in a style someone had told her was called Renaissance Revival. She worked as a detective on the third floor. On television, the detectives usually have some kind of specialty like homicide, but most of those subspecialties or designations were long gone. The year her father was murdered, there were nearly four hundred homicides. This year, so far, there had been twelve. Six-man homicide detective groups and the like had become obsolete.
As soon as she passed the front desk, Keith Inchierca, the sergeant on duty, said, “Captain wants to see you pronto.” Keith pointed with his beefy thumb as though she might not know where the captain’s office was located. She took the steps two at a time up to the second floor. Despite her personal connection with Captain Stagger, she was rarely called into his office.
She rapped her knuckles lightly on his door.
“Come in.”
She opened the door. His office was small and rain-pavement gray. He was bent over his desk, his head lowered. Kat’s mouth suddenly went dry. Stagger’s head had been lowered that day too, eighteen years ago, when he had knocked on her apartment door. Kat hadn’t understood. Not at first. She always thought she would know if that knock came, that there would be a premonition of some sort. She had pictured the scene a hundred times in her head—it would be late at night, pouring rain, a pounding knock. She would open the door, already knowing what was to come. She would meet some cop’s eyes, shake her head, see his slow nod, and then fall to the ground screaming, “No!”
But when the knock actually came, when Stagger had come to deliver the news that would cleave her life in two—one person before that moment, another thereafter—the sun had been shining without hesitation or care. She had been heading uptown to the campus library at Columbia to work on a paper about the Marshall Plan. She still remembered that. The damn Marshall Plan. So she opened the door, preparing to head to the C train, and there was Stagger, standing, his head lowered, just like now, and she hadn’t had a clue. He didn’t meet her eyes. The truth—the weird, shameful truth—was that when she first saw Stagger in the hallway, Kat had thought that maybe he had come for her. She had suspected Stagger had a little crush on her. Young cops, especially those who considered Dad something of a father figure, fell for her. So when Stagger first popped up on her doorstep, that was what she thought: that despite knowing she was engaged to Jeff, Stagger was about to make a subtle move on her. Nothing pushy. Stagger—his first name was Thomas, but no one ever used it—wasn’t the type. But something sweet.
When she saw the blood on his shirt, her eyes had narrowed, but the truth still didn’t reach her. Then he said three words, three simple words that came together and detonated in her chest, blowing her world apart:
“It’s bad, Kat.”
Stagger was nearing fifty now, married, four boys. Photographs dotted his desk. There was an old one of Stagger with his late partner, Homicide Detective Henry Donovan, aka Dad. That’s how it was. When you die on the job, your picture ends up everywhere. Nice memorial for some. Painful reminder for others. On the wall behind Stagger, there was a framed poster of Stagger’s oldest, a high school junior, playing lacrosse. Stagger and his wife had a place in Brooklyn. It was a nice life, she supposed.
“You wanted to see me, Captain?”
Outside of the precinct, she called him Stagger, but when it came to professional matters, she just couldn’t do that. When Stagger looked up, she was surprised to see his face ashen. She involuntarily stepped back, almost expecting to hear those three words again, but this time she beat him to it.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Monte Leburne,” Stagger said.
The name sucked the air out of the room. After a worthless life of nothing but destruction, Monte Leburne was serving a life sentence for the murder of NYPD Homicide Detective Henry Donovan.