She moved from them, across the room, sat down. Her non-cigarette-smoking hand ran over her face.
"We're sorry for what happened to you." Raddatz, his tone was calm. Assuring. "We're sorry other people didn't take action."
"Other people." Hand still manipulating her face, buffing her agitation, Ramona's words were slurred. "Always has to be other people. Nobody wants to take responsibility."
Addressing Ramona, but talking of things more sizable than her: "That's not always the case," Raddatz said,
"Yeah? Are you here to do something about what Marty did to me? Is that why you came around?"
It wasn't. Ramona knew it wasn't. Raddatz knew there was no point in lying that things were otherwise.
"I, you know, I stood by him." Ramona was cooling. Winding down. Her emotional fission had left her spent. "It was always about, our whole marriage was about what he wanted. Being a cop; that's what he wanted. Never mind what I… It wasn't about money. He could've been a FedEx guy for all I cared. What I cared about: that he came home every night. I cared he didn't have gang thugs taking shots at him because they were high, and that's what they do when they're high. But Marty wanted to be a cop.
He wanted to be a. cop, so I was there for him. Had an accident after a high-speed chase, fractured his pelvis-" Eddi: "Mrs. Carlin-"
If she heard Eddi trying to cut her off, Ramona didn't care. "When I went to the hospital, I would not cry in front of him. Wouldn't. Would not. I wasn't going to let him know how I worried. I wasn't going to, I wasn't going to let me being scared for him keep him from what he wanted. And then he wanted… the day he came home and told me he wanted to be one of those antifreak cops… I just, I sat there and I stared at him… When do you ever get it in your head you want to do something like that? You read the papers, you see what's going on, how people are dying going after those…," repugnant as she could make it, "things, and the person you love tells you that's how he wants to make a living?"
A long drag killed her cigarette. Ramona stubbed out the butt. Took another from the pack. Did not light it.
Ramona said: "You just… I mean, I shut down. I did. Might as well have told me he was going to kill himself. Somebody tells you that, how do you not turn off a part of you to them?"
Raddatz wondered. If somebody asked Helena, would she say the same about him?
Ramona: "But for a while I went on, like, okay, maybe he's going to be all right. Maybe nothing's going to happen to him. It wasn't even… maybe it was two months before…»
Ramona put the cigarette in her mouth. Took it out. It remained unlit.
"That thing," Ramona said, "whatever it was, it gave Marty third-degree burns over fifty-seven percent of him. I remember that. I remember the doctors telling me what percent of him was burned, and I remember thinking: How do you even measure that? That they knew how much of him was… how do you calculate that when so much of him was beyond just burned. Anyway, he lived. Obviously. But Marty, he should've died 'cause that was the end of him. As a human being he was done. He didn't even look human, and that's me, that's his wife saying that. He got moody and he got angry and he started… " Ramona touched her left occipital lobe. Then, finally, she lit up her smoke. "Called the cops, but you all didn't do anything."
Raddatz, Eddi; they remained settled. Made sure Ramona had gotten it all out, had let all her emotion spill.
She sat. She smoked. Seemed as though she was done.
Raddatz looked to Eddi.
Eddi said: "I'm sorry for what happened to you. I'm sorry the right people didn't get involved."
Ramona nodded. Sarcastic. "Yes. You said."
Eddi said: "But your husband, your ex-husband-"
"Still is. Never put the papers through."
Ramona took a drag on her cigarette.
"Do you know where he is?" Raddatz asked.
Ramona looked at her cigarette. Rolled it in her fingers.
That bit of active inaction, Ramona's irresolution. It was something Raddatz on domestic violence calls… as a cop he'd seen it before. But every time, in every circumstance, he could not process the divide between logic and emotion. Her husband had treated her like a punching bag. Her body, and mentally too. She'd screamed for help, screamed for it. Claimed she had. Now when someone comes around looking to wrap the bastard up, someone offers her the payback she'd been wanting… she rolls her cigarette in her fingers, has to think about things?
Eddi got it.
Eddi was blunt with it: "You still love Him." Ramona asked: "Are you in love?" In exchange of the question Eddi gave hesitation.
Ramona gave a bit of a laugh, a bit of a sneer, "You can come in here and ask me what you want. I ask you something simple…»
"We're asking what we're asking as part of a police investigation." Raddatz put authority behind a statement that was mostly false.
"Do I look like I give a damn?" To Eddi: "Yes or no; are you in love?"
"There was a guy. A cop. He was killed."
"But you still love him."
"I think the circumstance is extremely different."
"The hell it is. If it was death, or a well-placed blow, emotions don't care. They stay with you. Your man died. How you feel about him is unkillable. A guy like Marty… he hit me, and I felt it. I don't mean it hurt. I felt his touch. So what'd he do wrong? This time."
"At this point," Raddatz said, "he's only a person of interest. We just want to talk with him."
Ramona wasn't going for that. "Yeah, right. You just want to talk, so I should just give him
up."
"You should give him up because it's the right thing to do."
Ramona nodded, but it wasn't like she was acknowledging agreement.
"When he hit you," Eddi said, "maybe you felt something, and it was… I don't know. You took it. For whatever reason, you took it. Your choice. There are people being hurt and they don't have a choice about it. They're dying. They're being murdered. If your husband's got any information, we need it."
"You know what I said to him when it was over." Ramona talked on like whatever Eddi had to say wasn't worth listening to. "I told him he was a waste. I told him everything he thought he was, was nothing. He wanted to be a freak cop, and all he ended up was a freak not even good enough for going after his own kind. And he told me, you know what he said? He told me I was right. Said that, and just walked out that door. As many times as he hit me, when it came to it, I knew just how to hit him. That's the thing about being so in love with somebody. It gives you the secret knowledge you need to destroy them. You know the queer thing? Whatever you want Marty for, I think he's just trying to prove he's not nothing."
Eddi and Raddatz couldn't argue the point.
"We don't talk much. Every once in a while he sends me a letter, a little note. Tells me how sorry he is about what happened. That's what he calls beating me, abusing me. 'What happened.' I don't write him back. I'm not afraid of Him, you know. I'm not." Ramona let that hang for a moment, then: "I think if I did, I think if I talked to him… love; it's just unkillable."
Eddi rolled the paper around in her fingers. A talisman. Carlin's address.
"How you want to play it?" she asked. "Go after Carlin or take a run at Tynes first?"
"Finish up with Carlin."
"Can we get any kind of backup?"
Raddatz shook his head to the negative. "We get it by telling MTac we know what we know how?"
"Same way DMI always gets backup."
"By presenting a chain of investigation. Look, if we were going after a freak, maybe we could count on the review being lax. But to go after a normal, an ex-cop who's killing freaks, you don't think questions are going to get asked? And that's if we could even put Carlin on this for sure. All we've got now is a guy who's hinky."