“Did she belong to any religious groups?”
He looked at her and nodded. “Yes, of course she did.”
“I’ll need to know which ones,” she stated.
He shrugged. “My mom can probably tell you better than me.”
“Okay.” Kate wrote down a note. “Keep going.”
“There’s nothing else,” he stated. “We never found out who did it, outside of them saying I did it because I went and said I did.” He shook his head. “I didn’t think at the time that, by confessing, by saying it was my fault, which is what my guilt was telling me to do, that they would stop looking for the real killer.”
“But, in their heads, they had already found the real killer,” she stated, looking at him.
“And I didn’t think that far ahead,” he explained. “And, all this time, this asshole has been free and living large, and I’m the one who’s been locked up.”
“Not only that,” she added, “now he’s come back around to bite you in the ass again.”
*
Simon never didgo back into the interview room. That was definitely her domain, but, at the same time, it was fascinating to watch Kate work. She was both compassionate and a hard-ass, and the combination was fascinating. It was also difficult to watch in many ways. Simon headed outside, then stopped and took a deep breath. Something was just so very sad and dirty about the kid’s tale.
Simon hadn’t heard it all; he hadn’t sat in the interrogation room or even in the viewing room to the side. It’s not like it was his job or his area, and he didn’t want Kate to get in trouble for having him there. His curiosity was pretty strong, but he’d seen tales like Rick’s time and time again. Kids looking for excitement, something different, the call of drugs, and then a young woman left alone for the predators of the world.
Didn’t have to be just women. It just had to be somebody vulnerable, as Simon well knew. He shook his head, knowing how something like that would have torn apart the Lord family and how little there was to recover from it. Changes like that were permanent—the pain, the torment, the guilt, the what-ifs—all permanent. And, although you did the best you could to try to move forward and to recover, it was largely impossible to do so. He hoped Mr. and Mrs. Lord and Rick could get past this, but, with another crime to dredge it all up again, and this kid being the obvious suspect, Simon didn’t know how they would survive.
Across the street, a taxi sailed past. He hailed it, and, when it stopped, he raced forward, hopped in, and ordered a ride back to his house. There was something about that muscle car. Simon knew that there would be a big search going on for it. But where did it come from, and why was it after them? Was it just because of the kid? That made the most sense, but, at the same time, it was a stupid move.
Nobody knew anything about this guy driving the muscle car, so what difference would it make? Unless he was trying to kill the kid before he talked, in which case the kid actually knew something. But what the hell did Rick actually know that was that important? Because that was half the problem. The kid didn’t seem to know anything about this latest murder. Hell, he didn’t seem to know much about his sister’s murder, just probably what others had told him.
But the other half of the problem was, when someone still thought you knew something, still were afraid that somebody, like Rick, would turn around and cheat or snitch or lie or do something that would get the driver of the muscle car into trouble, but Rick didn’t even seem to know anything about the muscle car or its driver.
Simon had seen that a couple times too. Not everybody was following everybody else’s business. You just thought they were, and it was guilt that pushed you in that direction. And still, where were the answers to this? Where was the answer to any of it? There really wasn’t any, in Simon’s opinion. It was just another sad case of bad decisions, bad judgment.
If that kid had been home to help out his sister, would he have ended up dead too? That’s one of the things that Simon wondered if anybody had ever considered. Maybe it was just dumb luck that Rick wasn’t there because there could have been two dead bodies. But, of course, being stronger, Rick might have had a chance, and maybe just his presence would have chased away the killer, and his sister would have survived.
This was one of those endlesswhat ifscenarios that would never go away. You would be constantly plagued by the worry that you could have done something to change the outcome. Whether there actually was something the kid could have done to stop his sister’s murder or not wasn’t the issue. Simon sympathized in so many ways and wondered how Kate could do this day in and day out. That she could continue to do it with compassion and strength and humor just blew him away.
But the fact was, it was a hard life as a detective, and it would wear on her, particularly when she had no cushion, no release, no way to diminish some of this pain. He thought about all the things in her world that she had suffered through personally and had just pushed past, instead of finding a way to deal with it in some sense of normality.
She needed holidays; she needed to find some way to seek something else in life that wouldn’t kill her like this. And yet he knew it would be almost impossible to talk to her about it because she was so adamant about doing things her way.
In that moment, he realized that he himself was just as bad.
How many times had people told him that he needed to get help before he cracked under the pressure and stress of what he was doing? Sometimes it was good, and sometimes it was just crap. In her case, what she really needed was somebody who cared—and so did he. With that, his ride pulled up in front of his place. Simon paid the cabbie and hopped out.
As he walked into the lobby, Harry, the doorman, looked up and smiled.
“Did you forget to bring dinner again?”
Simon stopped, looked at him, and asked, “What time is it?”
Harry shook his head. “Man, you need a keeper.”
“Hell no,” Simon snapped. “And, for the first time ever, I’m wondering about taking on that role myself.”
Harry looked at him in shock. “Seriously?”
Simon shrugged. “I know somebody who spends so much of her time trying to fix things and to help others that she doesn’t look after herself properly,” he noted.