“Fuck,” Reyes interrupted. “You see that all the time? I mean, that was normal for you?”
“People find all kinds of interesting ways to kill each other,” I said.
“I seen bodies before. But they were shot, like, just lying there,” he continued.
“Let her finish,” Moretti said.
I took a deep breath. I couldn’t remember telling anyone this story in so much depth, not even Stephen.
“I put on a surgical mask. There’s a trick where if the stench is really bad, you smear a little menthol jelly on the inside of the mask. I did that. I walked over and kneeled down by the chair, looking up and trying to get a good look at the body’s face. And… and it all fell apart.”
“What, the body?” Moretti said. I could hear the image in his incredulous voice.
“No. Me. I recognized the face. A guy I started at the Agency with. He was just out of school then, like me, and had the psychology background. But he was leaning toward field work, clandestine intelligence collection.”
“You knew him. Shit, man,” Reyes said.
“I got it together, barely. I finished my work and headed back to Norfolk. Wrote a draft of my report on the airplane. In other circumstances, it would have been, you know, intellectually interesting. The documents were a red herring, the body was left where it would be found… but none of that was really important. I just kept seeing his face. Whenever I closed my eyes.”
“What was his name? The guy in New Orleans, I mean,” Reyes said.
Moretti shifted a little bit. Even though he still wasn’t looking at me, I could sense his discomfort.
“John Smith. No, I’m totally serious. He had the perfect name for his job. I didn’t even know him all that well, but it was enough, you know? It was enough to make it matter in a way that other cases didn’t. And I must have gone through two packs by the time I got back to my house, where my fiance was waiting.
“He had made dinner. All I wanted to do was try to get some footing and pull myself back together. But you know what he did? Before I could even really figure out what to say to him, he told me that we weren’t right for each other and that he was leaving me. I started crying. Then he walked out.
“I stood on the back patio, dinner cooling on the table, smoking the last couple of cigarettes I had. But he was a smoker, too. It struck me that I wanted to be done with this day, with this feeling, forever. So I quit, cold turkey. Started wearing a rubber band, and whenever I had a craving for a nic fix, I’d snap myself. I guess I got kind of used to having it on because now I wear one all the time, and I play with it when I’m thinking or when I’m nervous. It’s like my version of biting my fingernails. And that’s it. Boring story, right?”
“How the fuck did you get this job?” Reyes blurted.
“I was looking for work after college. Government jobs have good benefits. I started in profiling-I don’t know, it seemed really interesting and challenging. And it is.” I stopped myself. It was too glib, too easy for this conversation. “Look. I feel like… for basically my entire life, I’ve been dealing with my mom’s psychological damage. Exit wounds, really. I’m used to trauma, and I know I’m no good at helping people get over it. But I’m great at figuring out why it happened. If you want a deeper explanation, you need to hire someone to psychoanalyze me. Now come on, ask me something I really have to think about.”
Moretti dived back into the conversation. “A treehouse. You have a treehouse when you were a kid?”
The abrupt change in direction was refreshing. I could remember the vibrant green leaves of the tree outside my bedroom window. An oak, I think. It was like being in a treehouse, sometimes, sitting there in my room, reading a book, watching the sun make dancing patterns on the floor.
“No. There were plenty of trees around the house, but most of them were either too close to it or too small to build in. We climbed them all the time, though.”
“Tomboy?” Moretti said. “I kinda figured that, too.”
“Not really. It was just me and my brother playing, most of the time, because my school friends lived too far away to walk to. So I guess I was a little more rough-and-tumble, maybe, just because I hung out with him so much. Mom made sure I knew all the social graces.”
“It was just you and your brother, huh? Kinda like me,” Reyes said. “You know, he wanted to join the Navy, too. All those recruiters came to the high school all the time.”
I could hear something in his voice, a seed of wistfulness that he tried to cover with bravado.
“But he didn’t join?”
“He got killed.” If Reyes had been looking at me to begin with, he would have glanced away, fastened his attention on something else. “After that, Mom and Dad was like, ‘You’re getting out of here.’ So as soon as I was eighteen, I joined up. Worked my ass off. Now here I am.”
“Where’d you grow up?” I asked.
“L.A. We lived in Silver Lake, but my pops had a, like, a convenience store in Carson. Jose-that’s my brother-and I, we would go help him out. You know, put shit on the shelves, mop the floors.”
“Cheap labor,” Moretti said.
“I know, right? But we was there the first two times the place got robbed, man. I saw a guy stick a Magnum in Dad’s face. And after that Mom was like, ‘they ain’t working there anymore.’ Pops hires a couple of dudes, they turn out to be gangbangers. But he didn’t know that at first. They started shaking him down, like making him give them cash out of the drawer or they’d all come back at night and burn the place down. He was scared to fire them. Shit, I would’ve been too. He ended up closing the store ’cause of those fuckers.”
Reyes snapped back to the present. “Anyway, they’re still there, in the same house. Mom’s got her Navy flag hanging out front, every day. I don’t worry about them anymore. Mom, though, she worries about me. All the time.”
“I know what that’s like,” I said. “Where you from, Chief?”
“I’m from New Jersey. I’m twenty-eight and have a middle-management position with a world-class troubleshooting and demolitions firm. I’m a Pisces, I like soft music and loud romps on the beach, and I’m disease-free.” Moretti was getting into the spirit of this. “Can I buy you a drink?”
I laughed at his remark, but the joy dried up inside me as an image sprung into my mind. That kid-Patterson’s aide-trying to make small talk in the Humvee. The scene pulled at my heart with its normalcy. And its distance.
“Sure. Make it a double,” I said, trying to mask the sudden ache with more frivolity. “What’s a nice guy like you doing in a place like this?”
“Ah, you know.” Moretti showed no indication of having noticed my mood. “Couple years of community college, I was bored, broke and completely directionless. So I did what any sane person would do in that situation: I joined up.”
“You really from New Jersey?”
“Yep. Hoboken. Nice place, if you don’t mind all the concrete and garbage. You played in the woods? We played in the alleys.”
“I bet the chief would rather have grown up in your ’hood,” Reyes said. “He’s into all that outdoorsy shit.”
“Can you blame a guy for wanting to enjoy nature every once in a while? I’m daydreaming about a nice trout stream right now.”