“Why are you?” she replied, her eyes going wide.
He smiled. “Deflecting a question with a question, huh?”
“Are you a lawyer now?”
“No, God help me,” he said. “That would not be what I would choose to do. Not in this lifetime.”
“Neither would I,” she said. “In some ways it was simpler in the olden days. Guilty was guilty, and they were swiftly handled,” she said, shaking her head. “Now the lawyers get in on it, delaying justice, and criminals carry on with their lives, without ever being punished, filing one appeal after another.”
“It doesn’t sound like you have much faith in the judiciary system.”
“Oh, I have a lot of faith in it,” she said. “It’s the process that I struggle with sometimes.”
He nodded slowly. “It’s got to be frustrating when you keep taking bad guys off the streets, only to see them there again, free to commit more crimes. Then it’s up to you to go back out and hunt them down once more.”
She looked over at this man, someone she was struggling to keep at arm’s length. But the more she tried to do that, the less it worked. After all, she’d found her way to his corner of the world, hadn’t she? As if her body had a mind of its own. She sipped her coffee and studied him over the rim of her cup. “Why are you up so early?”
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said. He spread his arms along the back of the bench, studying her. “Why are you?”
She shrugged. “I was awake already and heard news on the scanner about a jumper.”
He winced. “That’s always tough, isn’t it?” Then his gaze sharpened. “But you’re a homicide detective,” he said. “So surely suicides don’t come under your domain.”
“All unattended deaths are investigated.”
“So you just follow police scanners for fun? Don’t have enough cases now, so you have to go find new ones?”
She laughed.
“You’re just not ready to tell me.”
She shrugged. “It’s probably nothing. I guess I’m wondering if there’s anything to be done for the mental health problems we have in town,” she murmured, giving him a partial answer.
He looked over at her, then reached a hand across to cover one of hers. “You know that you can’t help everyone, right?”
“Wasn’t planning on it. Yet I care about a lot of things,” she said, “and kids are number one.”
“Missing kids, you mean.”
She glared at him. She still couldn’t believe she had opened up enough to tell him about Timmy. Then, given Simon’s history, it had seemed like a good idea at the time.
“That’s better,” he said, with a nod. “I was wondering what was going on that made you look so maudlin.”
“I wasn’t,” she protested.
“Were too.”
“Was not,” she snapped back. He left it at that. After a moment, her shoulders eased. He was right. “I guess just seeing another jumper…” she said. “I mean, it’s like there’s one every day right now.”
He looked startled at that. “Is it really that high?”
“Not quite. If I were to count all the bridges on the Lower Mainland, it’s especially bad,” she said. “It seems much higher than normal.”
“Well, last year was bad overall, and this year has been a pretty ugly one so far too.”
“I know,” she said, “and I get that people are losing their loved ones, their businesses, their homes, plus their families are breaking up. We didn’t even need the pandemic for all that to happen, yet just so much else is going on all the time. The pressures of today’s world are immense, and handling it all seems to be a special skill set that a lot of people don’t have. And, all too often, I think drugs and other enabling issues help bring it all down too.”
He shrugged. “And again, there’s only so much you can do.”