“You sure you’ve never been to Texas?”
“Positive.”
“That’s where mesquite began.”
“Really?”
“Absolutely. Cattle coming up from Mexico ate the mesquite bushes. They couldn’t completely digest all the seeds, so on cattle drives across Texas, the seeds were scattered. Fertilized at the same time, too.”
Leslie made a puckering motion with her mouth and cut her eyes up to me. “So that’s where mesquite gets its rich flavor. Comes from a long line of cow pies across Texas, or is this a little bit of O’Brien bullshit?”
“That’s where it began, in bullshit, but I’m sure today’s mesquite harvest is a few generations removed.”
“You’re quite the historian.”
“I’m full of needless information.”
“Watch the steaks, I’ll get the plates.”
Even though the steaks didn’t need turning, I yielded to the call of a hundred thousand year old carnivore gene, speared the meat, and flipped the steaks.
We refilled wine glasses and ate slowly, tasting, talking and laughing. The more I got to know Leslie, the more I liked her. She told me about her childhood, the fights her mother and father had, especially as she was in her early teens. The battles escalated to the point that she saw her father draw back his fist to hit her mother, stopping before he did, but more angry with himself than her. The next day, when Leslie got home from school, she found a note on the kitchen counter. It was a two-sentence goodbye he had written to Leslie’s mother. Two years later her father had remarried and moved to Seattle, completely severing contact with Leslie.
She said, “Maybe it’s why I got into criminal investigation. Learn how to track down my father to ask him why he never called me. Not even on my birthdays. Then I got to the point where I didn’t care anymore.” She sipped the wine, her voice disconnected, like it came from a documentary film flickering against her heart. “At least he’s alive. When you told me the other day that your father had been murdered, I could feel your pain.”
I was silent.
“Want to talk about it?” she asked.
“On routine patrol, he radioed in that he’d pulled over a car with a burned out taillight. The driver opened fire on my father. Dad was shot in the stomach. He died trying to crawl back to the car to call for help.”
“I’m so sorry. Was the perp caught?”
“He’s doing life at Starke.”
“Why’d he shoot? Couldn’t have been the taillight.”
“Investigators told my mother they found drugs, cocaine, and about a grand in loose bills near my father’s body. Press had a field day. The next thing we knew is that people were not quite so sorry that a cop was killed in what some believed was a drug deal gone bad. Many officers in his department didn’t attend his funeral.”
“Dear God…and your mother was suffering from depression, and you became her caregiver. Your childhood—”
“More wine,” I said, interrupting her.
She sipped the remaining bit of wine from her glass, closed her eyes for a long moment, and then looked straight into my eyes and said, “Sean, stay the night.”
FORTY-TWO
I thought about my swim in the ocean earlier in the day. Thought about Sherri’s voice in the soft roll of the breakers. Sean, find your peace.
Mesquite crackled in the grille. I said to Leslie, “A pop and a hiss, and you thought the mesquite cow pie story was all bull.”
We both laughed, and she sipped more wine. Then the look on her face was of concern. Compassion. She swirled the wine in her glass, her face filled with thought. “Your childhood was robbed.”
“Maybe.”
“Things that happen to us as children, those of a traumatic nature, such as sexual abuse, the suicide of a parent, can be the stuff of nightmares for a long time.”
“That’s why the Irish invented whiskey.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“About what?”
“About how all of that tragedy at such a young age can leave scars.”
“When you bury something, it’s not smart to keep digging it up.”
“Maybe,” she said softly, “but sometimes things just don’t stay buried until you understand all the circumstances and come to terms with them. You were only a child and there was absolutely nothing you could do.”
“This isn’t the time or place to resurrect old ghosts. My demons are my private demons. Just like the first Gulf War, did what I had to do. Not much of a topic for a dinner conversation, though.”
Leslie smiled and inhaled deeply. She moistened her lower lip, searching for the right words. “As corny or presumptuous as this might sound, Sean, I only want you to know I’m a pretty darn good listener. I’m here if you ever feel like talking to someone…someone who cares.” She looked at the coals glowing in the grille, the flames iridescent in her wide pupils. “Maybe, in an odd sort of way, your circumstances made you a good detective.”
“I’m not sure how good of a detective I really was.”
“What do you mean?”
“The criminal mind is an insane place to enter. To hunt them, I had to program myself to become like them, at least in terms of motive. What’s the line between justice and retribution? It was always clearly marked for me, until one night I’d tracked down a serial killer. The guy was a pedophile who started off by giving his oldest daughter a pair of high heels and lipstick when she was seven. She killed herself at age twelve when her father sold her a few times to pay for his gambling depts.”
“Oh my God. Where was her mother?”
“She was there, in denial. Her senses short-circuited on pills and cheap wine. The perp had gone way beyond his daughter, and left a string of bodies. When I found him in an abandon warehouse on Miami’s eastside, he had just killed his seventh victim. A little nine-year-old-girl he’d taken from her bedroom. Her bloody body lay there on the cold concrete floor of a former banana import company. The perp got up and off her when he saw me approaching. I’ll never forget his lurid face, the blood on his hands, his eyes mocking me like a hyena rocking its head above dead prey. ‘You’re not going to shoot me,’ he yelled. I told him he was right. Then I charged, knocking him to the floor, and I beat his head senseless against the same concrete where the child lay dead. There was an open freight elevator shaft a few feet away. I dragged him to it and dropped him down the shaft. I don’t know if I beat him to death or whether he died when he hit the floor below. In the report, I wrote we’d fought, he lost his balance and fell.”
Leslie was quiet, the pop of firewood the only sound. “Sean, you stopped a child killer. I’m not going to try to justify what you did. You’ve gone though that over and over in your mind. But anybody can understand it.”
“Doesn’t make it right. If every man has a breaking point, I’d reached mine, and I didn’t like what I saw. I’d promised Sherri I would try to regain whatever it was in me she found and loved unconditionally. I’m still struggling with it. And now I’m chasing another serial killer. The question that haunts me is what will I do when I find him?”
She touched my hand. “You’ll do what you have to do. You’ll arrest him, and in a few years the state of Florida will do the killing.”
Over hot apple pie, vanilla ice cream and coffee, the conservation turned to the murders and the DNA linked to Silas Davis. She said, “Although the DNA on the toothpick is a definite match for the traces found under the vic’s fingernail, there’s no DNA match between that and the hair on the duct tape you found. We didn’t get a hit from CODIS on duct tape hair. We’ll pick up Silas Davis tomorrow.”
“What kind of backup are you taking?”
“You worried?”