But what did Shoswitz know? And when the hell was he just going to march up to the slightly raised platform and “Deliver us from evil,” as Boldt thought of it.
It was either a pardon or a pattern. Boldt was resolved to it being either. But the waiting. God…the ninety-minute set had never-not ever-dragged on for this long.
This was pain.
The call that came into the Seattle Police Department’s Broadway substation set off a controlled series of events that echoed through the halls of the sound-dampened Public Safety building, bouncing from one department to another over a series of three days that would later be put onto the official books as a period lasting precisely forty-nine hours. It wasn’t often the clocks were adjusted inside SPD, and it would take weeks for the adjustment to be made, but by then “the damage had been done,” as Lou Boldt put it to the press. Boldt, who had nothing to do with making three days look like two, could only reflect on what might have been had his department been informed of the missing person some twenty hours earlier. Perhaps nothing, he mused. But then again, maybe several lives would have been saved.
“What are you doing here at this hour?” the woman asked from the open doorway to his lieutenant’s office, one of two such offices in Crimes Against Persons. It was day three since the call had come in-the exact hour that the report had first appeared on Boldt’s desk. “I thought you were playing happy hour.”
“Was. Yes.”
“But you headed back downtown.”
“I did.”
Daphne Matthews had a radiance about her. His compass pointed to her true north; always had, always would. He’d sensed her before she’d spoken, the way a bird knows to signal dawn before the night sky lightens a single lumen. Some of this he could put off to her unusual, though plain, beauty-a combination of girl-next-door and smoking hot babe that she could ignite with a look or a stance or a new texture to her sultry voice. But only some. Most of the attraction came at a level that neither of them understood well enough to voice, something subcutaneous, like an agreeable infection.
“Is it going to be twenty questions?” she asked.
“The lieu was there,” he said, referring to Shoswitz by his former rank; Boldt had never fully adjusted to his own role of lieutenant, nor to Shoswitz having moved upstairs.
“I’m sensing anxiety. Hostility. You’re closed off from me.”
“Once a psychologist…” he said.
“Too close to home?”
“Don’t leave.”
She had turned to go.
“Please,” he added.
“You sure?”
“It’s not directed at you. None of it is meant for you.”
“For Phil?”
“I’m to take Reamer’s place,” he told her.
“Reamer,” she said. Her eyes rolled as she scanned her mental Rolodex. “Your Reamer?” She had a look like she’d been punched.
He felt that same thing in his belly.
“My Reamer.”
“Kansas City?” she asked.
“St. Louis,” he answered. “Which leaves his desk open beginning next week.”
“Reamer’s a sergeant,” she said.
“Now you’re catching on.”
“No way,” she said more boldly, now stepping inside.
“I’m told it’s never happened at my pay scale,” he said. “I think that was intended to make me feel better, but it didn’t work.”
“You’re moving back to the sergeant’s desk?”
“If I want to stay on, I am. I could have taken my twenty nearly a decade ago. We both know that. They know that. They obviously want me to take it now.”
“And you?”
“I don’t golf. I have two kids in elementary school who will go to college someday. If I sit around at home, I’ll eat my service revolver. So what do you think?”
“Jesus, Lou.”
“Yeah.”
“Are you seriously going to take it? You could get a rep to-”
“No. This is their ruling. No more hearings. No more of this.”
“But they’re false charges. We all know that. There’s no way they ruled against you in this.”
“They just did. Of course they’ll say they ruled in my favor. Phil…he can’t say what he’s thinking, but he all but did. They want me out. While respecting the record, they don’t want the baggage.”
“It’s because so much of the force looks up to you. Hell, you’re a living legend. That must scare the pee out of them.”
“You know I hate that. Why do you do that? You, of all people?”
“You are what you are. You can swim in de Nile, or you can make for shore and climb out. But don’t lay it on me. I don’t mean ‘legend’ in the sense of superhero. I mean, the rank and file looks up to you in a way few, if any around here-I would say none-are looked up to. That’s your burden, and that’s a threat to everyone above you. Everyone but Phil because he gets it.”
“I’m not saying I’m buying that.”
“I’m not selling,” she said. “And as to that, you’ve never bought in to it, but that’s because you can be as blind, deaf and stubborn as a mule at times. Brilliant at others. Right now you’re sitting on the pity pot, and it’s your pot to sit on, but dammit, Lou, when people around here fear you, you’re doing something right. Carpe diem.”
“I was never comfortable looking out the window.”
“You invented ways to get yourself onto investigations. The brass knows that about you. They’re doing you a favor. Long-term, this is a favor. You just can’t see it yet.”
“Nearly a thirty percent pay cut.”
“That hurts. That’s supposed to keep you from accepting it.”
“Shorter vacation. Back to a pool car.”
“Ditto and ditto.” She stepped even closer to him. It felt dangerous and warmer at the same time. “Did Phil give any opinion? Did he steer you one way or the other?”
“He said he wished they’d let him take my desk. That the only real police work is on the streets. Always has been. Says it’s more like a corporation upstairs every day.”
“That’s a nice compliment, don’t you think?”
“LaMoia and I the same rank,” he said. A loaded statement because she’d been living with LaMoia for nearly a year now. The world’s oddest couple, and yet they were still together. A rocky year, he thought, looking on from a distance. They’d struggled with Social Services to maintain guardianship of a young girl. There was no way it was going to happen. They weren’t married. They weren’t in the system for adoption. But LaMoia knew enough judges and had enough friends to keep pushing back the decision a week here, a month there. It was all thumbs and toes in the dike at this point. They were about go get washed downstream and he had a feeling the whole thing would go if the child led the way.
“He won’t treat it that way. You know that. You walk on water for him.”
“Anything but.”
“It’ll be your squad. Both teams. I pity the lieu who comes in above you.”
“You make it sound as if my decision’s been made.”
“Hasn’t it?”
There were times, like right now, that he wanted to take her by the hips and pull her close to him. He wanted to experience her. Not so much sexual as just a physical contact to bridge all the words that flowed between them. Liz, his wife, would never understand. LaMoia would never understand. But he felt they would-he and Daphne. They would get it. They wouldn’t abuse it, or misuse it or push it. But it wasn’t to be. Not today. He’d learned to contain it, like locking up the neighborhood dog. He muzzled its bark. He tried not to feed it, hoping it would just roll over and die. But it never did.
Not ever.
“Yeah,” he said. “I suppose it has.”
“Can I help you move your things across the room?”