Just Cause (46 page)

'Christ. Don't you even want to sleep?'

'Sorry. No.'

'Give me a second.'

She waited, hearing a muffled explanation to his wife. She made out the words 'It's her first big case before the conversation was obscured by the sound of running water. Then silence, and finally the voice of her partner, laughing.

'You know, dammit, I'm the senior detective and you're the rookie. I say sleep, you're supposed to sleep.'

'Sorry,' she apologized again.

'Hah,' he replied. 'No sincerity. Okay, what's on your mind?'

'Matthew Cowart.' When she spoke his name, she! made up her mind: Don't play your hand quite yet.

'Mister I'm-Not-Telling-You-Everything Reporter?'

'The same.' She smiled.

'Boy, that sonuvabitch has me frosted.'

It was easy for her to envision her partner sitting at the side of his bed. His wife would have grabbed his pillow and jammed it over her head to drown out the noise of conversation. Unlike many detective partnerships, her relationship with Michael Weiss was businesslike and impersonal. They had not been together long – long enough to share an infrequent laugh, but not long enough to care what the joke was.

He was a sturdy man, unimaginative and hotheaded.

Better at showing pictures to witnesses and thumbing through insurance company records. That he'd acquired ten years of experience to her few months was thought she dismissed rapidly. Leaving him behind was easy for her. 'Me, too.' 'So what do you have in mind?'

'I think I ought to work him a bit. Just keep showing up. At his office. His apartment. When he goes jogging. When he takes a bath, whenever.' Weiss laughed. 'And?'

'Let him know we're going to sit on him until we learn what he really has to tell us. Like who committed that

'Makes sense to me.'

"But someone's got to start working the prison. See if someone there knows something, like maybe that guard sergeant. And I think somebody'd better go through all Sullivan's possessions. Maybe he left some- thing that'll tell us something.'

'.Andy, couldn't this conversation have waited until, say. eight A.M.?' Exhaustion mingled with wry humor in Weiss's voice. I mean, hell, don't you want to sleep a bit'

'Sorry, Mike. I guess not.'

'I hate it when you remind me of myself. I remember my first big case. I was breathing fire, too. Couldn't wait to get on it. Trust me. Take it slow.'

'Mike'

Okay. Okay. So you'd rather muscle the reporter than start interviewing cons and guards, right?' 'Yes.'

"See' Weiss laughed, 'that's the sort of intuitiveness that will get you ahead in this department. All right. You go bother Cowart, I'll go back to Starke. But I want

" to talk. Every day. Maybe twice a day, got it?'

'Absolutely.'

She had no idea if she intended to comply. She hung up the telephone and started to straighten her desk, sliding documents into files, organizing reports into neat stacks, clipping her own notes and observations onto the folders, placing pens and pencils into a cup. When she was satisfied with the order imposed on her working surface, she allowed herself a small surge of anticipation.

It's all mine, she thought.

She headed back to Miami beneath a midday sun that burned off the hood of the car, humming to herself, snatches of Jimmy Buffett tunes about living in the Florida Keys, daydreaming as she drove fast.

She was new to homicide work, only nine months out of a patrol car and three months from working burglaries, elevated by ability and an equal opportunity suit brought on behalf of all the women and minorities in the department. She was consumed by ambition, filled with energy and the belief that she could defuse her lack of experience with hard work. That had been her solution to almost all problems, since she had been a lonely child growing up in the Upper Keys. Her father had been a Chicago police detective, killed in the line of duty. She had often reflected upon the phrase 'the line of duty,' thinking how impoverished a concept it truly was. It pretended to give some sort of military importance to what she had come to understand was a moment of extraordinary mistake and bad luck. It was as if something necessary had been achieved by his dying, when she knew that to be a lie. Her father had worked bunco, usually dealing with cheapskate scam artists and confidence men, trying to stem the never-ending tide of retirees and immigrants who thought they could get rich by investing in one bizarre idea after another. He and his partners had raided a boiler-room operation one morning. Twenty women and men at desks work- ing the telephones, calling folks up with a gold- investment scheme. Neither the scheme nor the raid were anything unusual, just part of daily business for both the criminals and the police. What had been unforeseen was that one of the men working the phones was a hotheaded kid with a concealed gun, who'd never taken a fall before and so never learned that the criminal justice system was going to let him go with nary a whimper. A single shot had been fired. It'd penetrated a partition made out of cheap wallboard and struck her father in the chest on the other side, where he'd been writing down the phony names of the people being arrested.

Useless, she thought. Just useless.

He'd died with a pencil in his hand.

She had been ten, and her memories were of a burly man who'd roughhoused with her incessantly, treating her boyishly when she was young, then taking her on trips to Comiskey Park to see the White Sox as she grew older. He'd taught her to throw and catch, and to appreciate physical strength. Life had seemed extraordinarily ordinary. They'd lived in a modest brick house. She'd gone to the neighborhood parish schools, as had her older brothers. The short-barreled pistol her father wore to work had seemed somehow less important than the jackets and loud ties that he affected. She had kept only one picture of the two of them, taken outdoors after a snowstorm, standing next to a snow-man they'd constructed together. They had flung their arms around the snowman as if he was their friend. It had been early April, when the Midwest was trying to shake the long winter, only to be rewarded with a final blast of cold. The snowman had had a baseball hat, and rocks for eyes, broken branches for arms. They'd tied a scarf around its neck and sculpted a goofy smile on its face. It had been a terrific snowman, almost alive. It had melted, of course. The weather had turned rapidly and within a week it was gone.

They had come to the Keys a year after his death.

Miami had actually been the target; there were relatives there. But they had slid south when her mother had gotten a job managing a restaurant next to a sportfishing dock. That was where her stepfather had come from.

She liked him enough, she thought. Distant yet willing to teach her what he knew about the business of hunting fish. When she thought of him, she thought of the deep, reddish brown the sun had turned his arms and the precancerous white specks that cluttered his skin. She had always wanted to touch them but had never done so. He still ran his fishing charters out of Whale Harbor and called his forty-two-foot Bertram sportfisher 'The Last Chance,' which his clients all thought referred to fishing, rather than the tenuous existence of the charter-boat skipper.

Her mother had never told her so, but she believed she had been a child of accident, born just as her parents entered middle age, more than a decade younger than her brothers. They had left the Keys as quickly as age and education would allow, one to practice corporate law in Atlanta, the other to a modestly successful import-export business in Miami. The family joke was that he was the only legal importer in that city, and consequently the poorest. For some time she had thought that she would follow first the one brother, then the other, while she treaded water at the University of Florida, keeping her grade-point average high enough for graduate school.

She had decided to join the police after being raped.

The memory seemed to blister her imagination. It j had been the end of the semester in Gainesville, almost summer, hot and humid. She had not intended to attend the frat-house party, but an abnormal psychology final had left her drained and lethargic, and when her roommates pressed her to join them, she had readily agreed.

She recalled the loudness of everything. Voices, music, too many people jammed into too small a space.

The old wooden-frame building had shaken with the crowd. She'd gulped beer fast against the heat, rapidly losing her edge, dizzying into a casual acceptance of the night.

Well after midnight, hopelessly separated from her roommates, she'd started home alone, having rejected a thousand efforts at imposed companionship. She was just drunk enough to feel a liquid connectivity with the night, unsteadily maneuvering beneath the stars. She was not so soused that she couldn't find her way home, she remembered, just enough so that she was taking her time about it.

An easy mark, she thought bitterly.

She had been unaware of the two men coming out of the shadows behind her until they were right upon her. grabbing at her, tossing a jacket over her head, and pummeling her with fists. No time for screaming, no time to fight her way free and try to outrun them.

She hated this part of the memory more than any other.

I could have done it. She felt her calf muscles tighten. High school district one-mile champion. Two letters on the women's track team. If I could have just gotten free for one second, they would never have caught me. I'd have run them into the ground.

She remembered the pressure of the two men, crushing her with their weight. The pain had seemed intense, then oddly distant. She had been afraid of being suffocated or choked. She had struggled until one had punched her, an explosion of fist against her chin that had sent her head reeling far beyond any dizziness created by liquor. She had passed out, almost welcoming the darkness of unconsciousness, prefer- ring it to the awfulness and pain of what was happening.

She drove hard toward Miami, picking up speed as she plunged through the memory. Nothing happened, she thought. Wake up raped in a hospital. Get swabbed and prodded and invaded again. Give a statement to a campus cop. Then to a city detective. Can you describe the assailants, miss? It was dark. They held me down. But what did they look like? They were strong. One held a jacket over my head. But what did they look like? They were strong. One held a jacket over my head. Were they white? Black? Hispanic? Short? Tall? Thickset? Skinny? They were on top of me. Did they say anything? No. They just did it. She had called home, hearing her mother dissolve into useless tears and her stepfather sputter with rage, almost as if he were angry with her for what had happened. She spoke finally to a rape-counseling social worker who had nodded and listened. Shaeffer had looked across at the woman and realized that her compassion was part of her job, like the people hired at Disney world to wave in friendly fashion and false spontaneity at the tourists. She walked out and returned to her home and waited for something to happen. It didn't. No suspects. No arrests. Just one bad night when something went wrong on a college campus. Frat-house hijinks. Swallow the memory and get on with life.

Her bruises healed and disappeared. She fingered a small white scar that curled around the corner of her eye. That remained.

There had been no talk in her family of what had happened. She returned to the Keys and found that everything was the same. They still lived in a cinder-block house with a second-story view of the ocean, and paddle fans in each room that shifted the stalled humid air about. Her mother still went to the restaurant to make certain the key lime pie was fresh and the conch fritters were deep fried and that everything was in place for the daily arrival of tourists and fishing mates, who rubbed shoulders at the bar. A routine gradually cut from life by the passing of years stayed the same. She went back to work on her stepfather's boat, just as if nothing had changed within her. She remembered she would look up at him stolidly riding the flying bridge, staring out from behind dark sunglasses across the green waters for signs of life, while she labored below in the cockpit, fetching clients' beers, laughing at their off-color jokes, baiting hooks and waiting for action. She adjusted her own sunglasses against the highway glare.

But I had changed, she thought.

She had taken to writing her mother letters, pouring all the hurts and emotions of what had happened to her onto pages of slightly scented lilac-colored notepaper purchased at the local pharmacy, words and tears staining the thin, fragile sheets. After a while, she no longer wrote about the violation she felt, the hole she thought those two faceless men had torn at the center of her core, but instead about the world, the weather, her future, her past. The day she went for her preliminary police exam, she had written: I can't bring

Dad back… but it made her feel better to give this silent voice to the feeling within her, no matter how predictable she thought it was.

Of course, she never mailed any of those letters or showed them to anyone. She kept them collected in a fake leather binder she'd purchased at a crafts show in suburban Miami. Lately, she had taken to writing synopses of her cases in the letters, giving words to all her suppositions and guesses, keeping these dangerous ideas out of official notes and reports. She wondered sometimes whether her mother, if she'd actually read any of those letters ostensibly addressed to her, would be more shocked by what had happened to her daughter or by what her daughter saw happening to others.

She pictured the old couple on Tarpon Drive. They had no chance, she thought. They knew what they'd produced. Did they think they could bring Blair Sullivan into the world and not have to pay a price? Everyone pays, Shaeffer thought of the first time she'd raised the heavy.357 magnum Colt revolver that was the standard sidearm of the Monroe deputies. Its heft had been reassuring: a solidity in her grasp that whispered into her ear that she would never be a victim again.