“I said, BACK OFF, Lieutenant!” My friend’s voice raised a pair of notches in volume and filled the room to capacity.
“Or what, Detective?” She placed heavy emphasis on his title as she turned to face him.
“Let’s you and me go have a talk,” he instructed, jerking his thumb over his shoulder in the direction of the door.
“I think perhaps we should,” she retorted. “You seem to be forgetting who is in charge here.”
He stepped back and aimed a hand at the exit. “After you.”
As Albright brushed past him, he turned to the medical examiner who had been shuffling about in silent discomfort during the entire exchange. “You wanna get them outta here, Doc.” The words were more a command than a question. “I think they’ve seen enough.”
Doctor Friedman nodded and muttered a quiet “yes” in acknowledgement. Ben then brought his eyes to rest on us and pointed at me. “You stay on this side of the never-never-land county line, got me?” He shifted his gaze to Felicity without waiting for me to answer. “And you make sure he does. I’ll be with ya’ in a few minutes.”
“Ben, it’s not worth…” I started.
He cut me off as he turned and stalked after the lieutenant. “Just go with the doc, and do what I tell ya’ for a change. This ain’t gonna take very long.”
Ben’s voice carried.
Even with several walls and closed doors between us, it carried, and it did so beyond anything I’d expected. It rode up and down as if someone was repeatedly twisting a volume knob back and forth just to see what it would do. You couldn’t really make out everything he was saying, but at the peaks, you definitely picked up on the expletives. He even used a few that I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard before, but I was positive I wouldn’t be attempting to repeat.
Lieutenant Albright’s stern voice fell into the low volume valleys between, inching up an octave or so in pitch but never even beginning to approach my friend’s elevated level of animated expression. There were enough snippets of both voices to get the general gist of the argument and that it was yours truly who sat at the center of the conflagration. No big surprise there, but still, between the both of them, within the past five minutes my name had been mentioned seventeen times. Actually, a more accurate statement would be that it was mentioned by Ben and taken in vain by Albright.
“He’s screwing up his career.” I tossed the comment out as nothing more than an idle observation. I didn’t really expect an answer.
“Aye, but better him than you,” Felicity replied, giving me one anyway. “At least it is his choice this time.”
We were sitting in the lobby of the medical examiner’s office, occupying a pair of seats against the wall opposite the reception desk. Doctor Friedman had not seemed entirely sure what to do with us once Ben and Albright left, so he had parked us here for lack of a better place.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“It wasn’t all that long ago that you were ready to do it for him, then. Remember the reporters?”
“Oh, yeah, that,” I replied with mild embarrassment in my voice. “I wasn’t really thinking about the various consequences at the time.”
“We noticed.”
“That would have been manageable, though,” I offered. “He could have done some damage control. Thrown it all on me and distanced himself.”
“Aye, Rowan, we’re talking about Benjamin Storm,” she outlined. “He’d never abandon you like that. The man is more loyal than a Saint Bernard.”
“You’re right,” I acknowledged. “I think he still could have found a way around it though. But this, I don’t know…”
“Aye, maybe so, but I’m betting it’s moot now,” she said.
She tilted her head back and closed her eyes, then let out a heavy sigh. Her face was still flushed from her recent bout of weeping as well as the attempt to contain it. Her composure had returned for now, but the emotional burden remained, for both of us.
“Probably,” I muttered, then finally asked, “So, what about you and me?”
“Aye, what about us?”
“I had the impression that I pushed a button or two earlier.”
“You did,” she acknowledged.
“So?”
“So, that was before the bitch in the other room got under MY skin.”
“Not wanting to choose between being the pot or the kettle?”
“Aye, let’s just say I gained a thorough understanding of how you felt.”
We fell quiet as the argument down the hall continued for another round. I rolled my arm up and pushed back the sleeve on my coat to glance at my watch. I frowned when I saw that the bezel was shattered, and what I could make out of the display was mostly a darkened splotch where the liquid crystal had cracked and burned out. I looked at it for a moment, puzzled by what I saw. I quietly shifted in my seat, slightly twisting left then right as I mentally reenacted being forcibly shoved into the van.
Without a doubt, I remembered my left shoulder striking the doorframe, but I couldn’t recall anything happening on the right. Still, it was the only explanation, and cliche as it was, it had all happened too fast for me to remember for sure.
“What are you doing, then?” Felicity asked.
She must have sensed my gyrations in the seat because her eyes were still closed.
“Trying to figure out how I broke my watch.”
“Aye, it probably happened when Ben tossed you into the van.”
“That’s kind of what I was figuring.”
She lifted her arm and held it out to me. I reached up, pushed back the cuff of her leather jacket and looked at the timepiece that encircled her delicate wrist. I found myself stopping to think about the jumble of lines on the display before remembering to mentally flip them over. The lack of sleep was catching up with me.
“Remember to subtract fifteen,” Felicity reminded me about her penchant for setting her watch fast, ostensibly so she would always be on time.
I didn’t bother to point out to her that she was still habitually late.
The calculation worked out to the time being 8:15 a.m. It had been a little over four hours since we’d first arrived at the crime scene with Ben, but it already felt like it had been a week. Unfortunately, I knew from experience that it was only going to get worse. One of these days I hoped to be able to experience the other side of that coin-the one where it actually got better after the getting worse part.
I lowered my wife’s arm back to her lap and turned my head to look out the entrance foyer. The sun had officially peeked over the horizon something around an hour ago, give or take a few minutes. Still, the cloud cover that layered itself over the city wasn’t about to relinquish its hold. The muted light that managed to filter downward took on the grey pallor of dusk and oozed in to bring illumination, though not necessarily to brighten the landscape.
I heard my wife rummaging in her pockets as I stared through the windows at a wintry morning in Saint Louis. From where we sat, I could see the upper edge of the city hall parking lot on the opposite side of Clark Avenue. Cars were already filling the spaces as people went about their routines, oblivious to the horror going on behind these walls. To them, Randy Harper was no more than an unnamed victim of an atrocity that had been reduced to a ten-second breaking-story byte-and even that was only for those who actually caught the morning news.
A part of me wanted to be angered by their apathy, but for once this morning logic prevailed, and I knew they couldn’t be blamed. Still, it hurt. It was a throwback to the whole “misery loves company” thing. I was in mourning. In my heart, I wanted everyone else to mourn as well.
What pained me even more, however, was the fact that I wasn’t entirely certain that Lieutenant Albright was far off the mark in hanging me for the crime. Perhaps I was an unwitting accomplice in some bizarre, convoluted sense of the concept. People were dying; friends were dying. Moreover, for all the horrors I saw in my mind, I was powerless to stop it. In fact, I seemed to be at the center of it.