There also hadn’t been any numbers connected with this latest vision, as seemed to be prevalent with his previous sightings, at least he didn’t think so. He didn’t know if numbers were even part of this case.
As he waited, studying the traffic that came and went around him, he kept a close eye on the front of the station. It’s also possible she’d go out the back, in which case he was completely screwed, or rather had just wasted his time. But anytime something like this happened, it wasn’t necessarily a waste of time, but maybe he needed it anyway as a break. Maybe he needed a few moments of resting time, either before he headedoff to another job in order to keep himself busy, or went home alone. When a woman called out to him, he looked up, startled to see Kate standing across the street, glaring at him.
“Off to a great start,” he muttered to himself, as she walked over to the corner, waiting for the traffic light to change, and crossed. When she reached his side, she sighed. “You know that you could tell me that you’re here.”
“I know,” he said, “but I like sitting here.”
“That’s creepy,” she announced.
He snorted. “Given what I do, and what you do, you findthisto be creepy?”
She stared at him. “Why are you here?”
“I wondered if there was any news,” he replied quietly.
Immediately her shoulders sagged, and she plunked herself down beside him. “Not enough. And I’m not done for the day.” He looked at her in surprise, and she shrugged. “I’ll go see the husband of the other victim. He’s at work. Apparently he went to work even though his wife just died.”
“Sometimes people need work to bury themselves in,” he suggested, thinking of himself. “It helps to turn the focus away from something you can’t change.”
“And a lot of people just like to grieve too,” she reminded him, “because they are so shocked and so horrified by what’s happened that they can’t even begin to function.”
“And sometimes people go into auto-pilot mode,” he argued, defending this nameless guy. “And they just go on in a robotic way because that’s what they can do. You can’t take that away from him, if it happens to be his coping mechanism.”
“If it’s his coping mechanism, then fine,” she replied in exasperation. “I’m not judging him.”
“Yes, you are,” Simon snapped.
She glared at him. “Is that what this bench-sitting is for you, a coping mechanism?”
He shrugged. “Probably. I don’t know why the hell else I’d be here when you’re cranky.”
“You didn’t know I was cranky before you got here.”
“You’re pretty much always cranky,” he snapped back. She stared at him, and he saw the hurt and realized how quickly they’d slid into a destructive pathway. He reached over and gripped her fingers gently. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” she admitted, “you’re probably right. That’s exactly why I don’t get along very well with a lot of people.”
“You get along fine with people, when you want to,” he reminded her. “It’s just that, a lot of the time, you don’t seem to care.”
Her lips twitched. “Not with the work I do. I want people to give me the answers, and too often they’re just sitting there, being stubbornly silent about it. Or they’re lying or cheating.”
“Sure, but they’re also trying to outwit the cops, so they don’t spend the rest of their life in jail.”
She shrugged. “I’ll get to the truth anyway. Wouldn’t it be easier to just give it up right away?”
At that, he stared at her in shock and started to laugh. “Do you really think it’d be easy if they thought that way?”
She frowned. “Why are you laughing at me?”
“I have this image in my head of your expectation that criminals should see you coming and say, ‘Oh, here she comes,’ then lie down and hold out their hands and say, ‘Take me away, Officer.’”
Her lips twitched in spite of herself. “Okay, so it sounds pretty stupid when you say it that way.”
“Besides, you wouldn’t have a job then. If there wasn’t a need for somebody to sort out the puzzles, there wouldn’t be any need for people like you. You could just have officers walk over and pick up all the criminals who are standing there, with their wrists out, saying, ‘I’m guilty.’”
She groaned, slumped into the bench seat, and stated, “Okay, so it’s a stupid idea.”
“No, not stupid at all. I mean, if we live in Heaven, we might as well dream what we want,” he added. “I personally would like to have no crime, but, if you want the criminals to just walk over and say they are guilty and roll over, that’s a different story. Maybe that’s something we could stop, before it got to that point.”