Beckett thought that was a lie. The way he said it. The play of his eyes. Looking more closely, he saw singed fingertips and patches on both arms where hair had been cooked away. “You said people grieve in different ways. What, exactly, are you grieving?”
“Do you have children, Detective?”
“Two girls and a boy.”
“Girls.” Shore leaned against a heavy desk and smiled ruefully. “Girls are a special blessing for a father. The way they look at you, the trust that there’s no problem you can’t handle, no threat in the world from which you can’t protect them. I hope you never see that look of trust disappear from your own daughters’ eyes, Detective.”
“I won’t.”
“So certain.”
“Yes.”
Another difficult smile bent Shore’s face. “How old are they now, your daughters?”
“Seven and five.”
“Let me tell you how it happens.” Shore put down the glass and stood on the broad base of his trunklike legs. “You build your life and your redundancies, and you think you have it covered, that you know best and that you’ve built the defenses necessary to protect the ones you love. Your wife. Your child. You go to bed believing yourself untouchable, then wake one day to the realization you haven’t done enough, that the walls aren’t as strong as you think, or that the people you trust aren’t trustworthy, after all. Whatever the mistake, you realize it too late to make a difference.” Shore nodded as if seeing Channing at those same, young ages-seven and five, and full of faith. “Bringing a daughter home alive is not the same as bringing her home unchanged. Much of the child we knew is gone. That’s been difficult for us, and for Channing’s mother, in particular. You ask why we grieve. I’d say that’s reason enough.”
The message seemed heartfelt and sincere, yet Beckett wasn’t sure he believed the performance. It felt a little practiced and a little pat. The sternness and disapproval. The jaw tilted just so. What he’d said was true, though. People grieved in different ways. “I’m very sorry for what happened.”
Shore dipped his large head. “Perhaps, you could tell me why you’re here.”
Beckett nodded as if he would do just that. Instead, he walked along a wall of books, then stopped and leaned in. “You shoot?” He pointed at a row of crackled spines. The books were old and well thumbed. Tactical Marksmanship. Surgical Speed Shooting. USMC Pistol Marksmanship. There were others, maybe a dozen.
“I also skydive, kitesurf, and race my Porsche. I like adrenaline. You were getting to the point of your visit.”
But Beckett didn’t like being rushed. It was the cop in him. Situational management, he called it, though Liz claimed it was alpha-male bullshit. Button pushing, she’d say. Pure and simple. Maybe, there was some of that, too. Beckett tried not to go too deep. The job and his family, old regrets and thoughts of retirement. Usually, that was enough. But he didn’t much care for lies or liars. “What it comes down to, Mr. Shore”-Beckett pulled a few of the marksmanship books and started flipping pages-“is that I’d like to speak to Channing.”
“She doesn’t want to talk about what happened.”
“I understand that. But, your daughter’s not the only one who came out of that basement changed. Perhaps, others grieve as well. Perhaps, there are larger issues.”
“My responsibility is to my daughter.”
“Yet, it’s not a zero-sum game, is it?” Beckett closed the second book on shooting, riffled through another, then leaned into the shelf where a Kama Sutra manual caught his eye.
“Detective Black is your partner?”
“She is.”
“Family of a sort.” Beckett nodded, and Mr. Shore put down his glass. “Your partner killed the men who took my daughter, and part of me will always love her for that. But even she doesn’t talk to Channing. Not her. Not the state cops. Not you. Do I make myself clear?”
The stare between them held. Big men. Serious egos.
Beckett blinked first. “The state police will compel her testimony. It’s only a mater of time. You know that, right?”
“I know they’ll try.”
“Do you know what she’ll say when the subpoena comes?”
“She’s the victim, Detective. She has nothing to hide.”
“And yet truth, I’ve learned, can be a fluid business.”
“In this case, you’re wrong.”
“Am I?”
Beckett opened three of the shooting manuals and left them spread on the desk. The inside jacket of each one showed Channing’s signature, beautifully made.
“Those are my books.”
The father choked as he said it, and Beckett nodded sadly.
That was a lie, too.
Elizabeth woke unable to remember the dream that haunted her; only that it was dark and hot and close. The basement, she guessed.
Or prison.
Or hell.
She shrugged off a weight of blankets and felt cool wood under her feet. At the window, she saw trees like an army in the fog. It was early, barely light. The road ran off into the mist, black and still, then fading, then gone. The stillness reminded her of a morning with Gideon six years ago. He’d called her after midnight. The father was out, the boy alone and sick. I’m scared, he’d said, so she’d collected him from the porch of that tumbledown house, brought him home, and put him between clean sheets. He was feverish and shaking, said he’d heard voices in the dark beyond the creek, and that they’d kept him awake and made him afraid. She gave him aspirin and a cool cloth for his forehead. It took hours for him to fall asleep, and as he drifted, his eyes opened a final time. I wish you were my mother, he’d said; and the words were light, as if raised from a dream. She’d slept in a chair after that and woke to an empty bed and wet, gray light. The boy was on the porch watching fog roll through the trees and down the long, black road. His eyes were dark when he looked up, his arms wrapped across his narrow chest. He was shivering in the cool air so she sat on the step and pulled him against her side.
I meant what I said. His cheek found her shoulder, and she felt the warm spot of his tears. I never meant nothing so much in all my life.
He’d cried hard after that, but it was still a favorite memory, and Elizabeth kept it close every day of her life. He never said the words again, but the morning was a special thing between them, and it was hard to look at fog without feeling love of Gideon like a pain in her chest. But this was a different day, so she shook off the emotion and focused on what was coming in the next few hours. Adrian would face court, and that meant media, questions, familiar faces from better times. She wondered if he would seem as torn, and if the cops would have enough to hold him. The trespass charge was weak. Could they charge him with murder? She rolled the footage of his life and knew what she was doing as she did it, that it was easier to worry about Adrian’s future than her own. Large as he stood in the halls of memory, his suffering would remain his alone, at least until she faced her own conviction. Yet, that risk was out there, too, and it could happen now: cars in the mist, cops with weapons drawn. What would she say if Hamilton and Marsh suddenly appeared? What would she do?
“You should run.”
Elizabeth turned and found Channing awake. “What did you say?”
The girl pushed up in the bed, her eyes catching light from the window, the rest of her dim and shapeless in the gloom. “If we’re not going to tell the truth about what I did, then you should leave. Maybe, we should leave together.”
“Where would we go?”
“The desert,” Channing said. “Some place we could see forever.”
Elizabeth sat on the bed. The girl’s eyes looked so kaleidoscopic that anything seemed possible. Escape. The desert. Even a future. “Did you know what I was thinking just now?”