At Risk

6

Monique stands in the middle of the examination room, the white blanket wrapped around her.

“Get us out of here,” she says to Win.

“It’s not us,” he says. “I can’t be involved….”

“I want you in charge of this. Now come with me,” she says, her face calm, masklike. “Get us out of here. Stay with me until I know I’m safe. We don’t know who’s behind this. I must be safe.”

“You’ll be safe, but I can’t be your protection.”

She stares at him.

“I’ve got to let them investigate this, Monique. I can’t be involved in a deadly-force case and go about my business as if nothing happened.”

“You can and you will.”

“You’re not really expecting me to be your bodyguard…?”

“That would be your fantasy, wouldn’t it,” she says, and she stares at him, something in her eyes he’s never seen before, not from her. “Get me out of here. There must be a basement, a fire exit, something, get me out of here. Doesn’t this goddamn hospital have a rooftop helipad?”

Win calls Sammy on the cell phone, says, “Get one of the choppers in and fly her out of here.”

“To where?” Sammy asks.

Win looks at Lamont, says, “You got some safe place to stay?”

She hesitates, then, “Boston.”

“Where in Boston? I need to know.”

“An apartment.”

“You have an apartment in Boston?” That’s news to him. Why would she have an apartment less than ten miles from her house?

She doesn’t reply, doesn’t owe him any further explanations about her life.

He tells Sammy, “Get an officer to meet her when she lands, escort her to her apartment.”

He gets off the phone, looks at her, has one of his bad feelings, says, “Words aren’t enough, Monique, but I can’t tell you how sorry…”

“You’re right, words aren’t enough.” She gives him the same disconcerting stare.

“I’m out of commission for a few days, starting now,” he says. “It’s the best thing to do.”

Her eyes bore into him as she stands in the small, white room, the white blanket wrapped around her.

“What do you mean, the best thing? I should think I’m the one who decides what the best thing is for me.”

“Maybe this isn’t only about you,” he says.

Her scary eyes don’t leave his.

“Monique, I need a few days to take care of things.”

“Right now, your job is to take care of me,” she says. “We have to do damage control, turn this into something positive. You need me.”

She stands perfectly still, her eyes staring. Behind them is a darkness seething with hatred and rage.

“I’m the only witness,” she states in a flat tone.

“Are you threatening to lie about what happened if I don’t do what you say?”

“I don’t lie. That’s one thing people know about me,” she replies.

“You’re threatening me?” He says it again, and now he’s a cop, now he isn’t the man who saved her life. “Because there are more important witnesses than you. The silent witnesses of forensic science. His body fluids, for example. Unless you’re going to say it was consensual. Then I guess his saliva, his seminal fluid are irrelevant. Then I guess I inadvertently interrupted a tryst, some creative sex scenario. Maybe he thought he was protecting you from me, thought I was the intruder, instead of the other way around. That what you’re going to say, Monique?”

“How dare you.”

“I’m pretty good with scripts. You want a few more?”

“How dare you!”

“No. How dare you. I just saved your goddamn life.”

“You sexist pig. Typical man. Think all of us want it.”

“Stop it.”

“Think all of us have some secret fantasy about being…”

“Stop it!” Then he lowers his voice. “I’ll help you all I can. I didn’t do this to you. You know what happened. He’s dead. He got what he deserved. The best revenge, if you want to look at it that way. You won, made him pay the ultimate price, if you want to look at it that way. Now let’s repair what we can, get things on the right track as best we can. Damage control, as you put it.”

Her eyes clear. Thoughts move in them.

“I need a few days,” Win says. “I need you to refrain from taking this out on me. If you can’t do that, I’ll have no choice but to…”

“Facts,” she interrupts him. “Fingerprints on the gas can. DNA. The pistol — is it stolen? My missing keys, probably a coincidence unless they were on his person, in his residence. If so, why wasn’t he waiting inside my house?”

“Your alarm.”

“Right.” She paces, wrapped in her white blanket like an Indian chief. “How did he get to my house. Does he have a car. Did someone else drive him. His family. Who did he know.”

Past tense. Her attacker is dead and she thinks of him as dead already. It hasn’t even been an hour. Win looks at his watch. He calls Sammy. The chopper’s nine minutes out.

The Bell 430 lifts off from Mount Auburn Hospital’s rooftop helipad, hovers and noses around, flies off toward the Boston skyline. It’s a seven-million-dollar bird. Lamont had a lot to do with making sure the Massachusetts State Police has three of them.

At the moment she doesn’t take much pride in that, doesn’t take much pride in anything, isn’t sure how she feels except heavy, stony. From where she sits in back, she can see frantic journalists on the ground, their cameras pointed in her loud, dramatic direction, and she shuts her eyes and tries to ignore her desperate need for a shower and clean clothing, tries to ignore areas of her body that were invaded and violated, tries to ignore nagging fears about sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy. She tries to concentrate on who and what she is and not on what happened hours earlier.

She takes a deep breath, looks out the window, looks at the rooftops passing below her as the helicopter beats its way toward Massachusetts General Hospital, where the pilots plan to land so some state policeperson can pick her up and transport her to an apartment no one is supposed to know about. She’ll probably pay for that mistake, doesn’t know what else she could have done.

“You all right back there?” A pilot’s voice sounds through her headset.

“Fine.”

“We’ll be landing in four minutes.”

She is sinking. She stares without blinking at the partition that separates the pilots from her, and she feels herself getting heavier, sinking lower. Once when she was an undergraduate at Harvard she got drunk, really drunk, and although she never said a word about it to anyone, she knew that at least one of the men she was partying with had sex with her while she was unconscious. When she came to, the sun was up and the birds were making noise, and she was alone on a couch and it was obvious what had happened, but she didn’t accuse the suspect she had in mind, certainly didn’t consider an examination by a forensic nurse. She remembers how she felt that day — poisoned, dazed. No, not just dazed, maybe dead. That was it, she recalls as she flies into the downtown skyline. She felt dead.

Death can be liberating. There are things you don’t have to care about anymore if you’re dead. People can’t injure or maim parts of you that are dead.

“Ms. Lamont?” A pilot’s voice sounds in her headset again. “When we land, it will take us a minute to shut down and I want you to sit tight. Someone will open the door for you and get you out.”

She imagines Governor Crawley. She imagines his ugly, smirking face when he hears the news. He probably already knows. Of course he does. He’ll be sympathetic, heartbroken, and degrade and destroy her in the election.

“Then what?” she says, pushing the mic close to her lip.

“The state police officer on the ground will tell you….” one of the pilots answers.

“You’re the state police,” she says. “I’m asking you what the plan is. Is the media there?”

“You’ll be briefed, I’m sure, ma’am.”

They are hovering over the hospital’s rooftop helipad now, a blaze-orange windsock whipping around in the rotor wash, some state policewoman in a blue uniform bending her head against the wind. The helicopter sets down, goes into flight idle, and Lamont sits, staring out at the unfamiliar, plain-looking woman officer, someone low on the food chain who’s supposed to get the traumatized and besieged DA to safe asylum. A damn escort, a damn bodyguard, a damn woman to remind Lamont that she’s a woman who has just been violated by a man and therefore most likely doesn’t want to be escorted by a man. She’s damaged. A victim. She imagines Crawley, imagines what he’ll say, what he’s already saying and thinking.

The engines go silent, the blades whining quietly, winding down, then braking to a stop. She takes off her headset and shoulder harness and imagines Crawley’s smarmy, pious face looking into the camera and offering compassion from the people of Massachusetts to Monique Lamont. Victim Lamont.

Victim Lamont for governor. Any crime, any time, including mine.

Lamont opens the helicopter door herself before the officer can, climbs out herself before anybody can help her.

Any crime, any time, including mine Lamont.

“I want you to find Win Garano for me. Right now,” Lamont says to the officer. “Tell him to drop everything he’s doing and call me right now,” she orders.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m Sergeant Small.” The woman in blue offers a handshake, does everything but salute.

“An unfortunate name,” Lamont says, walking off toward a door that leads inside the hospital.

“You mean the investigator, right? The one they call Geronimo.” Sergeant Small catches up with her. “If I was fat it would be a really unfortunate name, ma’am. I get made fun of enough.” She removes her radio from her big black belt, opening the door. “I’ve got my car downstairs, hid out of view. You mind some stairs? Then where can I take you?”

“The Globe,” she says.

Jimmy Barber’s basement is dusty and mildewy with nothing but one low-wattage bare bulb to illuminate what must be a hundred cardboard cartons stacked to the rafters, some labeled, most not.

Sykes has spent the past four hours pushing aside boxes of miscellaneous crap — ancient tape recorders, scores of tapes, several empty flowerpots, fishing tackle, baseball caps, an old-style bulletproof vest, softball trophies, what must be thousands of photographs and letters and magazines, files, notepads, the handwriting horrible. Crap and more crap. The man was too lazy to organize his memorabilia so he just threw it into boxes, packed up everything short of fast-food wrappers and what was in his wastepaper basket.

So far, she’s been through plenty of cases, ones he probably thought were worth saving: a fugitive who hid in a chimney and got stuck, a deadly assault with a bowling pin, a man struck by lightning while sleeping in an iron bed, an intoxicated woman who stopped in the middle of a road to pee, forgot to put her car in gear, ran over herself. Cases and more cases that Barber shouldn’t have decided were his to carry home when he retired. But she has yet to find KPD893-85, not even in a box that contained a lot of papers, correspondence, and cases for 1985. She calls Win’s cell phone for the third time, leaves another message, knows he’s busy but takes it personally.

She can’t help thinking that if she were someone really important, maybe like that Harvard-educated woman DA he complains about so much, he’d call back promptly. Sykes went to a tiny Christian college in Bristol, Tennessee, flunked out her second year, hated school, didn’t see a practical reason in the world why she should learn French or calculus or go to chapel twice a week. She’s not the same caliber as Win and that DA and all those other people way up north who are part of his life. She’s practically old enough to be his mother.

Sykes sits on top of an overturned five-gallon plastic pickle bucket, staring at stacks of cardboard boxes, her throat scratchy, her eyes itchy, her lower back aching. For a moment she is overwhelmed, not merely by the task before her but by everything, sort of the way she felt when she began the Academy and on day two, the class was taken on a tour of that notorious University of Tennessee research facility known as The Body Farm, two wooded acres littered with stinking dead bodies in every condition imaginable, donated human remains rotting on the ground or under concrete slabs or in car trunks or in bodybags or out of bodybags, clothed or naked, anthropologists and entomologists wandering around day after day, taking notes.

Who could do this? I mean, what kind of person does something this disgusting for a living or graduate school or whatever? she asked Win as they crouched down, looking at maggots teeming over a partially skeletonized man whose hair had slid off his skull, looked like road-kill, about three feet away.

Better get used to it, he said as if the stench, the insects didn’t bother him at all, said it as if she didn’t know squat. Dead people aren’t nice to work with and they never say thanks. Maggots are good. Just little babies. See? He picked one up, put it on his fingertip, where it perched like a grain of rice, a wiggly one. Snitches. Our little friends. Tell us time of death, all kinds of things.

I can hate maggots all I want, Sykes said. And I don’t need you treating me like I just fell off the turnip truck.

She gets up from her pickle bucket, surveys layers of boxes, wondering which ones contain more old cases that walked out of the office with Detective Barber. Selfish, pinheaded idiot. She lifts a box four layers up, grunting under the weight of it, hoping she doesn’t pull something. Most of the boxes are open, probably because the old goat couldn’t bother re-taping them shut after going in and out of them over the years, and she starts rummaging through charge-card statements and phone and utility bills going back to the mid-eighties. It’s not what she’s looking for, but the funny thing about bills and receipts is that they often reveal more about a person than confessions and eyewitness accounts, and she entertains an idle curiosity as she imagines August 8 twenty years ago, the day Vivian Finlay was murdered.

She imagines Detective Barber going to work that day, probably as if it were any other day, and then getting called to Mrs. Finlay’s expensive riverfront home in Sequoyah Hills. Sykes tries to remember where she was twenty years ago in August. Getting divorced, that’s where. Twenty years ago she was a police dispatcher in Nashville and her husband worked for a recording company, exposing himself to new female talent in a way that turned out to be a little different from what Sykes thought was acceptable.

She pulls out files sloppily labeled by month and sits back down on the pickle bucket with credit-card receipts and utility and telephone bills. The address on the envelopes is the one for the house that belongs to this hellhole of a basement, and as she looks over MasterCard charges, she begins to suspect that Barber lived alone back then, most of his charges made at places like Home Depot, Wal-Mart, a liquor store, a sports bar. She notes that throughout the first half of 1985, he made very few long-distance calls, in some months no more than two or three. Then in August, that abruptly changed.

She shines the flashlight on a phone bill and recalls that twenty years ago cell phones were these big, cumbersome contraptions that looked like a Geiger counter. Nobody used them. Cops didn’t. When they were away from their desks and needed to make calls they asked the dispatcher to do it and relay the information over the radio. If the information the detective needed was confidential or involved, he returned to headquarters, and if he was on the road, he charged the calls to the department and then had to fill out forms for reimbursement.

What cops didn’t do was make case-related calls from their homes or charge them to their home numbers, but beginning the evening of August 8, when Mrs. Finlay was already dead and in the morgue refrigerator, Barber started making calls from his home phone, seven of them between five p.m. and midnight.