“Sergeant.”
“Lieutenant.” He still didn’t look at her, didn’t take his attention from the name carved in that perfect white cross. “I want you to know I’m carrying. I don’t want to harm you.”
“I appreciate that. You should know I’m carrying, and I don’t want to harm you, either. I need to talk to you, Sergeant. Can I sit down here?”
He looked at her then. His eyes were dry, but she could see he’d been weeping. There were still tracks of the tears on his cheeks. And she saw, too, that his weapon, the same make and model as her own, was in the hand resting in his lap.
“You’ve come to take me in. I don’t intend to go.”
“Can I sit down?”
“Sure. Sit. It’s a good spot for it. That’s why we picked it. But I always thought that Thad would be the one to sit here, to sit and talk to me and his mother. Not that I would be the one to sit. He was the light of my life.”
“I read his service record.” She sat on the opposite side of the grave. “He was a good cop.”
“Yeah, he was. Oh, I was proud of him. The way he carried himself, the way he took to the job like he was born to it. Maybe he was. I was always proud of him, though, from the first instant they put him in my arms and he was squalling and wriggling. All that life in one little package.”
With his free hand, he brushed at the grass that grew over his son. “You don’t have children as yet, do you, Lieutenant?”
“No.”
“I’ll tell you that whatever you feel for anyone, however much love’s inside you, there’s more of it when you have a child. You can’t understand it until you’ve experienced it. And it doesn’t change as they grow into men, into women. It just grows with them. It should be me in there, and not my boy. Not my Thad.”
“We took Ricker.” She said it quickly, because she’d seen his hand tighten on his weapon.
“I know it.” And relax again. “I heard it on-screen in the little room where I’ve been staying. My hidey-hole. We all need our hidey-holes, don’t we?”
“He’s going down for your son, Sergeant.”
She used his rank, and would use it, again and again, to remind him what he was.
“I want you to know that. Conspiracy to commit murder. The murder of a police officer. And he’ll go down for the others, the same way. With everything else we’ll nail on, he’ll never get out of a cage. He’ll die there.”
“It’s some comfort. I never thought you were part of it. Not in my gut. I can’t say I’ve been clear in my mind for the last bit of time. After Taj . . .”
“Sergeant—”
“I took that boy’s life, a life as innocent as my son’s. Made a widow of his sweet wife, and took away a good father from those babies. I’ll carry that regret, that shame, that horror to my own grave.”
“Don’t.” She said it quietly, urgently, as he lifted his weapon and placed it to the pulse at his throat. It would be lethal there. And on maximum setting would end it instantly. “Wait. Is that the way you honor your son, by taking another life on his grave? Is that what Thad would want? Is that what he’d expect from his father?”
He was so tired. It showed in his face now, in his voice. “What else is there?”
“I’m asking you to listen to me. If you’re set on this, I can’t stop you. But you owe me some time.”
“Maybe I do. The boy who was with you when you came to my door, when I knew you knew. I panicked. Panicked,” he said again like an oath. “I don’t even know who he was.”
“His name’s Webster. Lieutenant Don Webster. He’s alive, Sergeant. He’s going to be okay.”
“I’m glad of that. One less stone to carry.”
“Sergeant . . .” She fumbled for the words. “I’m a murder cop,” she began. “You ever work Homicide?” She knew he hadn’t. She knew it all.
“No, not as such. But you deal with it wherever you are if you’re a cop. And you deal with it too much if you’ve been one as long as me.”
“I work for the dead. I can’t count the number of them I’ve stood over. I don’t think I could stand to try. But I dream of them. All those lost faces, those stolen lives. It’s hard.”
She was surprised she was telling him this, surprised it seemed the way. “Sometimes it’s so hard to see those faces in your sleep, you wake up hurting. But I can’t do anything else. I’ve wanted to be a cop as long as I can remember. It was my one clear vision, and it’s all I can do.”