He stood up from his desk and stretched his back. His coffee mug was empty. He walked into the squad room. The lights were still off. He turned them on as he made his way to the kitchen.
Ben Walker, Jeffrey’s predecessor, had kept his office at the rear of the station, just off the interrogation room. His desk had been the size of a commercial refrigerator and the seating in front had been about as comfortable as a Judas Chair. Every morning, Walker had called Frank and Matt into his office, doled out their daily assignments, then told them to shut the door on their way out. That door only opened at noon when Walker went to the diner for lunch and at five when he hit the diner on his way home. When Walker had finally retired, the desk had to be cut into two pieces to get it through the door. No one could explain how he’d managed to cram it into the room in the first place.
There were a lot of unexplained things where Ben Walker was concerned. The desk alone was an object lesson in how not to be a chief. Jeffrey had spent his first weekend on the job moving his office to the front of the squad room. He’d cut a hole in the wall to make a window so he could see his team and, more importantly, so they could see him. There were blinds on the glass that he seldom closed. The door stayed open unless someone needed privacy. In a town this small, there was a lot of need for privacy.
The phone rang. Jeffrey picked up the receiver on the kitchen wall. “Grant PD.”
“Hey there, buddy,” Nick Shelton said. “I hear you got some trouble brewin’ down there.”
Jeffrey poured some fresh coffee into his mug. “News travels fast.”
“I got me a spy at the Macon Hospital.”
Jeffrey had heard a definite period at the end of that sentence, but he could tell there was more to it than that. “What’s up, Nick?”
“Gerald Caterino.”
“Rebecca Caterino’s father?” Jeffrey had set the alarm on his phone to call the man at 6:30. He could tell by Nick’s tone that he should rethink that plan. “Should I be worried?”
“Yeah, the old boy left a message on the service last night. I picked it up this morning and thought I could run some interference for you.”
“Interference?” Jeffrey asked. “I didn’t realize I needed any.”
“It’s the timing.”
Nick was being careful, but Jeffrey got his meaning. Someone at the hospital had told Gerald Caterino that his daughter was presumed dead when Lena had arrived at the scene. That was the kind of detail that could end up in a lawsuit. “Thanks for the head’s up.”
“No problem, hoss. Lemme know if you need anything.”
Jeffrey hung up the phone. He felt a headache working its way up his neck. He should’ve taken his own order and grabbed some sleep. At the very least, he would’ve been able to process the next steps he needed to take. Make sure everyone was on the same page about yesterday morning in the woods. Re-read Frank, Lena and Brad’s notes. Make sure his own notebook lined up with their recollections. Call the mayor to warn him that something bad might be coming down the pipeline. Give Kevin Blake at the university a warning about the hell that was about to rain down.
He stared down into the blackness of his coffee. The liquid rippled against the rim. His body was still holding onto the memory of bones cracking beneath his hands. Rebecca Caterino had spent thirty extra minutes lying on her back in the forest. Jeffrey had thought seconds had passed while Sara was finding a way to make the girl breathe again, but according to her resuscitation notes, almost three minutes had gone by.
Thirty-three minutes in total, all on Jeffrey’s clock.
What he wanted to do was apologize to Gerald Caterino. And to Beckey. He wanted to tell them exactly what had happened, that people had made mistakes, and some of them were stupid mistakes, but all of them were honest mistakes.
Unfortunately, lawyers were not known to settle for apologies.
“Chief.” Frank grabbed a mug off the hook. “Anything on Leslie Truong?”
“No sign of her.”
“Not surprising.” Frank hacked out a cough. “You know how hysterical these young co-eds get. She’s probably crying in a treehouse or something.”
Jeffrey had given up trying to teach this old dog even one new trick. “I need you to memorialize yesterday morning from the moment you got the call about Caterino to right now.”
Frank didn’t miss much. “Lawsuit?”
“Probably.”
“Sara can tell them how hard it was to find a pulse. Who knows whether or not the girl was going in or out. That kind of injury, she could’ve flatlined a couple of times.” Frank topped off Jeffrey’s mug before filling his own. “Makes me feel sorry for Sara. The upside of divorcing you was she’d get to stop saving your sorry ass.”
Jeffrey was not in the mood. “You gonna break my balls about that for the rest of my life?”
“I assume the natural order of things will have me keeling over well before you.”
“I think you mean natural selection,” Jeffrey said. “Are you telling me when you go to Biloxi every other month for your gambling trips, you’re not getting your pecker wet?”
“Every other month is your take-home message. Pigs get fat. Hogs get slaughtered.” He raised his mug before taking his leave.
Jeffrey threw the rest of his coffee down the sink. He was too jittery for more caffeine.
In the squad room, he found Marla Simms, the station secretary, taking the dust cloth off her IBM Selectric. Jeffrey had bought her a computer, but as far as he knew, she had never turned it on. All of his missives were either written out in her perfect Palmer Method or pecked onto the typewriter. Some of the younger cops cringed every time she fired up the machine. The ball punching into the paper sounded like a gunshot.
The saloon doors squeaked. Lena Adams was shifting her utility belt around her waist.
“Lena, my office.”
She looked up at him like the proverbial deer in the headlights.
Jeffrey sat down at his desk. His eye caught the bookshelf, which was filled with textbooks and manuals and, worst of all, an old photograph of his mother. “Fuck me.”
“Sir?”
“My—” Jeffrey waved off the subject. He had forgotten to call the florist yesterday. Now he was going to be dealing with a screaming phone call from his mother about missing her birthday. “Shut the door. Sit down.”
Lena sat on the edge of the chair. “Is something wrong?”
He could hear Sara’s nagging voice warning him that Lena always assumed she was in trouble because she had usually done something wrong. “Give me your notebook.”
She reached for her chest pocket, then stopped. “Did I do—”
“Just give it to me.”
The notebook Lena handed to him was just like every other notebook every other cop carried because Jeffrey bought them by the hundreds and kept them readily available. Technically, that made them the property of the police department, but he hoped to God that technicality never had to be tested in a court of law.
He flipped past the back pages that detailed last night’s failed search for Leslie Truong. He could read about that in Lena’s official statement. He found what he was looking for at the front of the notebook.
Lena had crossed through JANE DOE and written REBECCA CATERINO. She had not changed the original assessment—accidental death.
Jeffrey checked that her notes matched what he had sworn to in her official statement.
5:58: 911 call received at HQ.
6:02: L.A. dispatched.
6:03: L.A. met witness Leslie Truong in field behind houses.
6:04: B.S. arrived and with L.A. and Truong located body.
6:08: L.A. verified victim deceased at neck and wrist. Body positioned as noted.
6:09: L.A. called Frank.
6:15: B.S. set up perimeter.
6:22: Frank arrived.
6:28: Chief on scene.
He asked Lena, “Brad arrived when you were talking to Leslie Truong. Did he check for a pulse when you got to the body?”
“I—” Lena had stopped being defensive. Now, she was strategizing. “I don’t remember.”
Lena was the senior officer on scene. If she told Brad not to double-check behind her, then Brad would not have dared to double-check behind her. “Next time you run that bus over another cop, make sure you give it enough gas.”
Lena looked down at the floor.
Jeffrey studied the notebook. He had lied to Sara about confirming the details yesterday. Each line of text took up one line on the page. The ink was the same color. Either Lena was incredibly prescient, or she had done exactly what she had told Jeffrey that she had done.
He turned the page. Lena had drawn a rough diagram of the position of the body. She had noted that the clothes were in place. Nothing had looked disturbed or unusual. She had been very thorough, except for leaving out one thing.
He asked, “Why did you turn off the iPod?”
Lena looked trapped.
He dropped the notebook on his desk. “You’re not in trouble. I just want the truth.”
She finally shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I was … I was trying to do things right, but I did it kind of accidentally, like, I have an iPod Shuffle I run with, and I don’t charge it like I should so the battery runs down and …”
“You did it out of habit,” he said.