“Could you tell me what happened, Mr. Harrington?”
If I could get my voice to work and my brain to stop running on a continuous loop through what I’d seen, I might be able to make sense of it.
“Can you hear me, Mr. Harrington?”
I nodded.
“What happened to you and Mr. Weaver?”
“Nothing happened to me,” I answered flatly. “I was just there.”
What wasn’t helping was that I felt bad. Guilty. I hated Senan Weaver. He was rude and arrogant, and it wasn’t just me who thought so. Everybody hated him. The guy was a real prick. But I didn’t want him dead. And now he was.
“What did you see, Mr. Harrington?”
I had seen him, and then there was blood. That was the beginning and end of what I saw.
“Can you hear me?”
“Of course he can hear you,” Nura snarled at him. “We’re both right here. How the hell is he missing the sound of your voice?”
I was honestly just stunned over this development. Our ballet mistress was normally stoic. She concentrated on making all her dancers as close to perfect in our execution as humanly possible. Her focus was legendary, her teak-black eyes and how she could take you apart with a look something others spoke about in awe. She was teacher, mentor, disciplinarian, and could cut out your heart with a single word of displeasure. But right now she was playing a part I’d never seen her take on—that of protector. She had made the detectives back up, give me air and room. When Brewster had first tried to squat down beside me, get on the same level as me, near the ground, she’d shaken her head and told him no.
“Stay back,”she ordered, and he didn’t dare get closer.
“We need to talk to him.”
“Maybe when he’s not covered in blood,”she retorted.
I could tell Brewster was sick of her; that was evident from his huff of frustration that he was letting me hear now. “We’re going to need you to come down to the station.”
“You want him walking around outside like this?” Her tone was not getting any warmer.
“No,” Brewster answered. “We’re going to need to collect all his clothes. Do you have something else he can wear?”
If I didn’t want to be talked about like I wasn’t there, I needed to speak. But I couldn’t. Not quite yet.
The detectives watched me strip and put my clothes that had Senan’s blood all over them in brown paper bags I always asked for at the grocery store. They didn’t need to take me to the hospital like they did in all the cop shows I watched. There wasn’t any other evidence for them to collect. It was straightforward. Senan Weaver had been shot, and when the bullet tore through the left side of his head, leaving a crater in his skull, blood and brain matter got on me because I was close enough to him. I was yelling at him. He was yelling back when it happened. That was the extent of what I could say if I could get my voice to work.
7
ELI
Iwas in my office when Cel’s name popped up on my phone. Just seeing his picture, I felt warmth in the pit of my stomach. “Hey,” I greeted him happily, “how would you like to actually have burgers tonight and watch a movie?”
“I would—would love that,” he said in a thin voice, “but I’m at a precinct and—”
“District,” I corrected automatically, as did someone I could hear in the background.
“District,” he amended quickly, “and they want to put me in protective custody.”
“What?” That fast, there was an ache in my heart.
“They want to put me in protective custody, but even after we told them about the other stuff, that doesn’t seem right. I don’t think this and that are the same.”
“You lost me. I don’t understand.”
“I had a place, you know, my place, every morning, on the barre at practice, and everyone knows I—I…”