But with Darryl not talking and his mother playing the same tape over and over again, there didn’t seem to be much hope of a confession before we had to formally charge him based only on my ID and the fingerprints on the bracelet. The sergeant on duty patted me on the back and sent me home.
Jeannie was asleep when I got home. She was gone the next morning when I woke up. It was late. But I had been given that day off.
I made dinner reservations. I was looking forward to having a normal life again. Maybe recapturing something with Jeannie, before it was too late. That’s what I was thinking.
But then it turned out she had a late class that evening. I had totally forgotten about it, and she didn’t want to skip it. I told her I understood. We made a makeup date for that weekend. She told me she was proud of me. She told me that she loved me. That was the last time she’d ever say that.
That was the last day of June, meaning I was rolling over to nights. At least this time I wasn’t doing it coming off a short shift. But when I got to the precinct for the midnight roll call, there was a little surprise waiting for me.
“Bateman got it,” Sergeant Grimaldi said to me. “He got the confession.”
“What are you talking about?” I said. “I thought we had given up.”
“What can I tell you? He took one more shot at it.”
“Did somebody think maybe they should call me and let me know?”
“If Bateman didn’t do that,” he said, “then I should have. I apologize.”
“It’s all right. Can I see the confession, at least?”
“Sure thing. You know what? Detective Bateman will be here when you get back from your shift. So go find him and make him play the tape for you. I don’t think you’ll have much problem getting him to relive his big moment of glory.”
I could tell Sergeant Grimaldi was still feeling bad about how I’d been left out of the loop when the case was closed. So he made sure I got a big round of applause at the roll call. I tried to wave it off, and then I stood up and told everyone that Franklin deserved some of the credit. Which was the absolute truth. I had driven us there, but I was just about to drive away. Then Franklin saw the shirt with the torn sleeve being put on the clothesline.
“You didn’t have to do that,” he said to me when we got in the car.
“Yes, I did. Maybe it’s about time for you to get a gold shield, too.”
He smiled and shook that off. As we rolled out, we knew we had a long eight hours ahead of us. That first night was always the hardest, whether you were short-shifting or not. You’re trying to fool your body into staying awake and alert through eight hours in the dark. Your body knows a lie when it hears one. So you just try to pace yourself, deal with everything that comes up, talk to the knuckleheads, try to keep a lid on things and have as peaceful a night as you can possibly manage.
It was yet another hot summer night. There would be nothing peaceful about it.
There was a disturbance at the hospital on Woodward Avenue. The place was already the epicenter of that city’s hot summer, with gunshot victims being wheeled into the ER every night. It was a job I couldn’t even imagine, dealing with that over and over. Now there was apparently a Code 35 wandering around the ER waiting room. A Code 35 is a mentally disturbed person.
What happened next is a story that changes a little bit every time I tell it. It was all too much to take in when it was actually happening. Years go by and I’ll remember little details for the first time.
We went into the lobby. We talked to the receptionist. She told us that the man had been bothering the inpatients all night. At one point he had tried to hide behind the plants.
She had heard this man lived down the street, in a high-rise apartment building. It was a building Franklin and I had visited, more than once. It was one of those addresses you knew immediately, as soon as you heard it on the radio. Oh great, this place again.
The elevator was broken. We had to take the stairs. Franklin complained with every step. His knee was hurting. We had gone back to the sports banter that night, everything back to normal. Football versus baseball, the endless argument.
The man was named Rose. We went into his apartment and sat him down at his kitchen table. There was aluminum foil on the walls.
In the middle of our pleas for him to stop bothering the people at the hospital, he took out the Uzi from beneath the table. It had been taped to the underside. In that endless minute he had the gun pointed at us, ready to shoot the second either of us moved, he told us he had found it in a Dumpster. Not an unusual find in a summer filled with gun battles over the crack trade.
I hate thinking about what comes next. It’s something I replay in my head and I always try to make turn out differently. But of course it never does.
He shot Franklin five times. He shot me three times. That’s what you can do with an Uzi, before either one of us could even get our revolvers out of their holsters. I lay on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, which Rose had neglected to line with aluminum foil. I can still see that ceiling when I close my eyes at night.
Franklin died on the floor next to me. He left behind a wife and two daughters. I was still in the hospital when they held the service for him, then put him in the ground.
Jeannie told me she would stick it out, but the wife-of-a-cop thing had already been wearing her down. This was much worse, and I can still remember that expression on her face as she looked down at me in my hospital bed. Like this was all just too much. When I finally got back on my feet, I spent a lost year drinking and taking painkillers, and one day, a few weeks into that dark period, Jeannie left me. Although I suppose you could argue that I had already left her, in my own way. I guess it doesn’t really matter in the end.
I was off the police force on two-thirds disability. I never went back.
When I was pulling myself back together after that year, I came up to Paradise to sell off the cabins my father had built. I’ve been up here ever since. But if I thought I could run away from my past, I was sorely mistaken. It always finds you, even in the most remote little town you can imagine. Even in a town called Paradise.
Even now, when I think I’ve finally come to terms with everything that happened in my life, I find something new. I can look back on that last summer in Detroit, past the shooting, to that one last big case I helped solve. All these years later, and somehow it’s just coming to me that I never did get the chance to see that confession, and that this young man may have been innocent of the crime for which he was charged. And worse, that the real killer walked free. Possibly to kill again. Possibly all because we missed something that would have pointed to him.
We could have stopped him then. That was the one thing I couldn’t get over. If we were so goddamned smart, we could have charged Darryl King with robbery and maybe tampering with a crime scene, put him on probation, given him back to his mother, and then gone out and found the man who really killed Elana Paige.
I was cut down by a madman myself, after all. A madman who got caught just a few days later and put away forever. So how could I live with myself now, knowing that in that same hot summer, I may have missed my chance to catch an even bigger monster?
PART TWO: THE FALL