“C’mon”—I waved them off—“let’s wait for the inquiry.”
“The inquiry? What’s that gonna prove?” he said. “Do the honors.”
“L.T.,” said Cappy, his eyes clear and proud, “we’ve been saving it. For you.”
“Do it, L.T.”
Maybe for the first time since Mercer promoted me, I felt like the head of Homicide, and that all the doubts of worth and rank I’d carried with me my whole career were markers on an old journey, miles behind.
I went over to the board where our active cases were listed and I brushed Tasha Catchings’s name off the board. Art Davidson’s, too.
I felt filled with a quiet but exultant joy. I felt relief and satisfaction.
You can’t bring the dead back. You can’t even make sense of why things happen. All you can do is the best you can to let the living believe their souls are at peace.
The detectives circled around me and watched.
I wiped Earl Mercer’s name off the slate.
Chapter 105
I FIELDED PHONE CALLS for the next couple of hours. But mostly I just sat at my desk, giving some thought to my deposition. There was an inquiry pending on the Coombs shooting, standard practice whenever a police officer fired a gun.
The whole incident was still a blur to me. The doctors had told me it might be like that for a while. A kind of repressed shock.
I had a flash of that out-of-date uniform, and Coombs’s eyes burning into me. His arm extended, the orange spurt of his gun. I was sure that someone had shouted my name, probably Cappy or Jacobi, then someone else said, “Gun…”
And my own Glock, flopping up in slow motion, knowing I was a beat too late, seeing the spurt of his gun. Then the gunfire—from all directions, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop… Finally, I put it out of my mind and went back to work.
About an hour later, I was leafing through the file on one of our new outstanding cases when Claire appeared at my door.
“Hey!”
“Hey back at you, Lindsay.”
I knew Claire…. I knew her look when she’d found what she expected and had put doubt to rest. And I knew the look when it was not so kosher.
This time, she was definitely wearing that not-kosher look.
“You didn’t find any tattoo, did you?” I said.
She shook her head. Her expression couldn’t have been more troubled if she had found something culpable about Edmund, or one of her sons.
I motioned her in and shut the door. “Okay, so what did you find?”
She shrugged somberly. “I guess I found out why Coombs missed.”
Chapter 106
CLAIRE SAT DOWN and started to explain. “I was doing a routine histology, in the substantia nigra—”
“In English, Claire,” I cut in. “S’il vous plaît? Por favor?”
She smiled. “I scooped some cells, mid-brain. Coombs was hit nine times. Eight from the front. One from the rear. That one smacked into his cervical spine. It’s the only reason I would have been in there in the first place. I was looking for a specific cause of death.”
“So what did you find?”
Her gaze bore right through me. “A marked absence of neurons… live nerve cells.”