Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 129, No. 6. Whole No. 790, June 2007

Lost and Found by P. J. Parrish

© 2007 by P. J. Parrish

Kelly Nichols, aka P.J. Parrish, is the author of the critically acclaimed Louis Kincaid mystery series, coauthored with her sister, Kristy Montee. The books have made the bestseller lists of the New York Times and USA Today, and been nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Shamus awards. Their latest novel, A Thousand Bones (Pocket Books, July) is the debut of their spin-off series featuring Miami homicide detective Joette Frye.

He sat alone in the dark cruiser, staring out the windshield into the shimmering darkness. It was just starting to rain, more of a mist really, tiny glittery drops that seemed to fall from nowhere and disappear before they hit the ground.

He turned off the wipers and after a few moments the glass began to blur, the rain working like a slow silver paintbrush to erase his view of the bridge and the man on it.

A.J. sighed softly, tiredly. The car was a comforting coc-oon of drifting shadows, blinking red radio lights, and the familiar hug of the old leather seat on his back.

There weren’t many moments like this, so he held on to it for a while, maybe another full minute, before he hit the wipers again. In the wet glow of the cruiser’s headlights, the bridge and the rookie standing on it came back into focus.

The rookie was young, with an awkward, bent-stick way of walking. His face, with his crooked Alabama smile, was eager, anxious, and hopeful. Not a whole lot different from the last rookie A.J. had. Or the one before him or the one before that one.

The bridge was old and plain, too big, really, for the trickle of brown water that flowed beneath it. The bridge’s face, a stretch of plain, bleached concrete, was chipped and scarred by too many drunks, and smeared in more recent years with red and yellow slashes of gang graffiti.

The bridge seemed to be the only thing standing still in the drifting night. Maybe it was just the distant city lights as they played off the underbelly of the low-hanging clouds. Or maybe it was the fog slithering around the rookie’s feet. Whatever it was, it was the kind of night that held something A.J. had felt before. It was the kind of night he always thought could crawl inside you and suck something out, something you couldn’t see leaving but you could feel.

A.J. glanced out the side window, his mind drifting with the trickle of raindrops down the glass.

Lorraine liked these kinds of nights, but she never saw them like he did. He recalled her saying more than once, usually on one of their anniversaries, that it had been raining like this — this weird glittery kind of mist — when he proposed to her.

He smiled slowly. It was like they were being sprinkled with love dust, she said.

She had a special word for this kind of night, but right now he couldn’t remember that, either. What had she called it?

Londonesque. Yeah. That was it. Must be what London is like, don’t you think, A.J.? Do you think we could go there on our honeymoon, A.J.?

He never understood the word Londonesque, but he didn’t tell her that. Never told her he didn’t understand most of her fancy words. Didn’t tell her he suspected she even made some up. They didn’t go to London on their honeymoon. In fact, they hadn’t gone anywhere on their wedding night. But Lorraine kept planning other “honeymoons” to other places. Places, like her made-up words, that she thought could make her someone or something else. Something smarter or prettier or better than what she was. A cop’s wife.

A.J. had never been much farther than St. Louis, but for the moment, in this weather, and maybe because he was feeling a bit lonely lately, and a bit kindly toward Lorraine right now, he could imagine, if things had gone differently, that he and Lorraine might be in England. Strolling around the outside of one of those grand old castles, taking pictures of the stiff-lipped, fuzzy-hatted guys standing guard outside.

He sighed softly.

She’d been gone a long time now. Left him, married her dentist, and moved to Knoxville, where he knew they had no castles, but he guessed they had a few pink-bricked houses with big backyards. A few years later, he heard that the dentist had bought her a bigger house with a bigger yard. He didn’t know where she lived now. Didn’t know if she had ever gotten to England.

A.J. looked back at the rookie on the bridge.

His name was Andy. The leather jacket squared off his shoulders, making him look tougher and beefier than A.J. knew he was underneath the stiff leather. Andy’s blue trousers were knife-creased, and speckled with rain and mud from the climb down the hill. They were a might short, too, and every time Andy leaned on the bridge, A.J. could see a flash of his bright white tube socks.

Andy’s eyes, A.J. had noticed earlier, were a pale brown, the color of beach sand. Kind, trusting eyes, but eyes that held no sense of command. A.J. knew that people — bad people — noticed things like that. A nervous gesture, a tremor in the voice, a wrong step in the wrong direction, all those small things that told the bad guy who was in charge and who would win if it ever came down to it.

Andy would have to lose that look if he was going to survive.

A.J. shifted in his seat to ease the stiffness in his lower back and glanced at the clock, wondering where the detectives were. It was almost midnight, shift’s end. Usually he could gauge the time pretty well without looking, and he was surprised it was this late. He raised his hand to the flickering computer screen to check his watch. The crystal was a little fogged and he blew on it to clear it. Sometimes that worked.

The watch was probably in its final days, but it had been a good watch, the kind a cop needed. Something that could get smacked against a wall, dropped in a lake, and even stepped on, and still just keep on ticking, like the old commercial said. When it died, he wouldn’t throw it away. He would lay it to rest in his jewelry box along with all his old service pins and outdated badges.

It had been his daughter Sheila’s last gift to him, given to him in June of 1998. He had thought it was a Father’s Day gift until he realized it was wrapped in Christmas paper, left over from six months earlier when he hadn’t shown up in Knoxville at the dentist’s house like he promised he would.

Sheila didn’t understand too many things back then, like how long it took to remove crumpled cars, wet Christmas presents, and dead bodies from a freeway interchange. She didn’t understand that he had called the next morning to apologize and wish her a good Christmas. And she didn’t understand that ex-wives had their own reasons for not giving daughters messages from their fathers.

He supposed most sixteen-year-old girls didn’t understand stuff like that. They saw the world only through their own narrow, selfish prisms, and sometimes one tiny mistake could be that one thing they thought ruined their life forever. His not being there that Christmas was that one thing for Sheila.

He hadn’t made it to Knoxville the following Christmas, either, but he had called and asked Sheila to come see him. The day before, she canceled, leaving a message on his answering machine telling him she had places to go and cool people she wanted to see over the holidays. A.J. wasn’t one of them.

He tapped on the watch. The crystal was still clouded.

He wondered if the Seikos clouded up. Probably not. Those beauties were sterling silver, emblazoned with the police department logo, and inscribed with the officer’s name on the back. They were given to officers after twenty-five years of service, presented in a satin-lined case by the chief at a ten-minute ceremony that the wives and children could attend.

A.J. reached down and picked up a half-eaten Hershey’s bar off the console and broke off a square of chocolate.

The department had stopped giving out the watches last November. Said they couldn’t afford it anymore, what with all the recent pay increases, EEOC-mandated promotions, lawsuits on excessive force, worker’s-comp injuries, and the high cost of computers, radar guns, patrol cars, tin badges, and gasoline.

A.J.’s twenty-fifth anniversary was next month. He had mentioned that to Andy a few days ago, and Andy had asked why he didn’t just buy a watch and have it inscribed to himself.

Don’t ya think it loses just a little meaning that way, kid?

He looked back at Andy, hitting the wipers again to clear his view.

Suddenly Andy leaned over the railing and lost the rest of his country-fried steak dinner into the river. He coughed a few times, drew himself tall, and with trembling hands used a neatly folded handkerchief from his back pocket to wipe his mouth.

A.J. peered up at the sky. It was still raining, the drops floating from the sky like Lorraine’s love dust, but not hard enough, he guessed, to drive the kid back inside the cruiser. He’d let him stay out there awhile.

In the pale glow of the lone streetlight, A.J. studied Andy’s slender face. It looked ghostly and pained, and A.J. knew the ghostly part came from what lay under the bridge. But the pained part, well, that was something else.

It was embarrassment, something A.J. understood. No one wanted to lose their cookies in front of a senior officer. It was pretty damn undignified to puke all over your crisp blue trousers and your just-out-of-the-box Rockports.

A.J.’s eyes drifted along the empty bridge. Maybe there was something that happened to men when they stood on bridges, like standing in the middle of a bridge put them halfway in-between something good or bad. Or weak or strong. Or between yesterday and tomorrow.

He had stood on a bridge once. A high-arcing overpass near the airport. It had been his assigned post back in — when was it? — nineteen eighty-seven? Eighty-eight?

The ice had started dripping from the sky about nine A.M. By nine-thirty, two cars had slid off the overpass into the snowy banks below.

A.J. had been sent to the bridge to monitor traffic, slow speeders, and call ambulances for idiots who still thought they could race their way across a high patch of ice fifty feet in the air.

He had a ride-along passenger that day, some woman from a neighborhood-watch committee who the chief thought needed a tour of duty in order to gain a greater awareness of how hard the police were working on community relations.

It would have been a fine day, normally, with the ice storm a perfect setting to allow an epic display of police compassion. Except for the fact that A.J. had a touch of the flu that had settled in his intestines and he knew the moment he stopped the cruiser next to the overpass guardrail that it was going to be a long morning.

The stomach cramps started around ten, and by noon he was covered in a suit of ice, his fingers so frozen he could barely key the radio to ask to be briefly relieved.

The request was denied. Three times. He was needed, they said. There was no one else.

So he had toughed it out. Four hours, standing on the side of the overpass, waving his flashlight at the foggy, slow-moving headlights, his body shivering uncontrollably, shoes frozen to the road, and watery, burning shit running down the back of his legs.

The neighborhood-watch woman never asked what the smell in the cruiser was. But there was a look of disgust in her eyes as they made their way back to the precinct, like she thought he was some sort of animal who was too lazy or too uncivilized to use the toilet like decent human beings do.

The easy chatter of the radio pulled him back to the moment. Andy was still bent over the concrete wall, head in his hands. A.J. thought about going to him, but decided not to. He’d come back when he was ready.

The car was growing cold. A.J. reached over to flip up the heat. The fan rattled and the vent puffed out lukewarm air.

He was tapping on the vent when out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of a folded paper on the passenger floorboard. He picked it up, and in the dim light he unfolded it. It was Andy’s paycheck stub.

A.J. knew how much money Andy made. Because of the union, starting salaries were common knowledge, and were even posted on the department’s Web site. But still, A.J. wanted to look.

Thirty-two thousand, one hundred and seventy-four dollars and three cents. Awful lot of money for a rookie who didn’t know shit about what he was doing, or why.

His gaze moved to the deductions.

A hundred-buck automatic deposit to the First Bank of Tennessee. Union dues. Federal taxes. Social security. 401k contributions. Payroll-deducted equipment costs. The kid had bought himself a Kevlar vest.

A.J. looked to the dashboard, at the picture Andy had clipped there earlier tonight. The photo was of Andy’s wife and baby. The woman, a wide-eyed beauty, looked a lot younger than Andy did, and the baby was so new it was still wrinkled.

He folded the check stub and set it on the seat. Thirty-two thousand was nowhere near enough.

A.J. made decent money now, decent enough, he guessed, for a single guy long past child support. But in the early years, when Lorraine was young and raising Sheila and trying to make a home for them, it had been a struggle. Later, after he lost track of Sheila, he had started sticking almost a third of his paycheck into a savings account. He had found a nice little cabin on Lake Arkabutla down in Mississippi and he wanted to buy it.

Eight grand into the plan, he met Spider Jackson, a trash-talking street germ with a big attitude and a bigger father who wielded one of the sharpest legal swords in the city and who had other political attachments, like the mayor’s sister.

Spider had been caught red-handed selling stolen guns and, as all dirtbags do when they’re high and scared, he resisted arrest. Bit a chunk of flesh out of one officer’s hand, kneed another in the groin, and sliced open the abdomen of a third before he found himself in the back of the patrol car, alive but hurting.

A.J. never hit Spider. Didn’t get there in time to do anything except drive him to the jail and escort him inside. All the way in, Spider was hollering how his daddy was going to sue everyone, but A.J. had heard it all before, and hadn’t given it another thought until a few weeks later when his name showed up on a subpoena in a brutality lawsuit.

The car was too warm now. A.J. reached down and turned off the heat and used his sleeve to rub the condensation off the glass so he could keep an eye on Andy.

In the old days, people sued the city. Nowadays, they could sue officers, and that’s what Spider’s father did. In the end, the city settled their part of the lawsuit, and the jury divided the balance of the settlement up among the officers.

Later, the lawyer explained that since all the officers denied any culpability, the jury had no reason to believe that A.J. was the only one who was really innocent, and besides, he said, you know better than anyone that to some people you’re all just white faces in blue uniforms.

The court took the eight thousand in one lump sum, and set up a payment plan for the rest. His final payment was due in August of this year.

A.J. reached down to pick up his coffee cup. His fingers had stiffened up again and he couldn’t grab the cup the way most folks grabbed things, so he picked it up with his index finger and his thumb, transferring it to his left hand to drink it.

He looked down at his hand. His pinkie finger was gone, shot off by a punk-ass armed robber firing blindly as he tumbled his way down a fire escape. The bullet had ripped through A.J.’s palm, mangling the tendons and severing the pinkie.

Another cop had been on the fire escape that day. His partner, dead from a shot to the head, lying there on the black iron, his blue eyes open toward the sky, his gun still in his holster.

A.J. had seen it happen. But even now, he couldn’t remember it well. All he could remember feeling at that moment was his pain and his fear and all those other selfish emotions that come when you think you’re going to die.

He could remember the funeral a few days later. The long line of police cars crawling along the freeway and the smell of the white mums and the saddest damn music he ever heard at a grave site.

And he remembered the endless rows of uniforms, and the stiff, solemn faces looking at him from the other side of the casket, silently wondering why two veteran cops hadn’t been able to catch one sixteen-year-old dirtbag. Wondering why A.J. hadn’t managed to fire off one single round from his weapon, because he was, they knew, the first one out the window. Wondering all of that, but never saying a word.

A.J. laid his head back against the seat and took a second to close his eyes.

His dead partner had four ex-wives, but not one came to the funeral, so it had been A.J. who had accepted the folded American flag afterwards. Lorraine had put the flag on the top shelf of the closet. Said she put it there so she wouldn’t have to look at it and be reminded every day of just how suddenly she could be a widow, too.

Right after, the department had stuck A.J. behind a desk in the traffic division, saying that because of the finger, he couldn’t shoot accurately anymore. Maybe afraid, too, he couldn’t pull his gun quickly enough to keep from getting shot himself. That year they had paid out three hundred grand in widow’s pensions, they said, and they couldn’t afford any more.

He had stayed at the desk in the traffic division for over a year, silently slogging through paperwork. Every night, he’d uncap the bottle of Jim Beam and try to tune out Lorraine’s whining and find some peace. Finally, Lorraine told him if he wanted some peace, she’d be happy to give it to him. The next day she was gone.

Days after, when he was looking for his old revolver, he found the folded flag behind some Rolling Stones records. He stood there in his bedroom, holding it in his hands, thinking he needed to find some place of honor for it, somewhere better than in the top of a dusty closet.

He bought a new case for it, a triangular one with polished oak edges that the flag could just sit right in, and he set it on the kitchen counter, next to the ever-present bottle of Jim Beam.

A few weeks later, the flag was still there. The bottle was gone and he had not replaced it.

He practiced at the range for a month, always alone, too embarrassed to let anyone see his fumbling. Finally, he found enough agility in his hand and enough confidence in himself to ask for another shot at requalifying. A week later, he was back behind the wheel of a cruiser.

That’s when he finally understood what Lorraine felt, trapped in a life and feeling second-rate, so invisible that you plan honeymoons you’re never going to take.

A calm female voice came from the radio, calling to him. A.J. keyed his mike and acknowledged her.

“Looks like the detectives are about five minutes out,” she said.

A.J. thanked her and clicked off.

Andy was leaning against the half-wall, staring out at the darkness. A.J. figured he was done throwing up, and was now probably just trying to unscramble things in his head. A wisp of fog curled around Andy’s legs, then disappeared. For a second, everything was clear and silent, as if the darkness was holding its breath.

Andy would be different in the morning, A.J. knew. He wouldn’t know why, because he didn’t understand that this was the kind of moment that you lose a piece of yourself in, a sliver of something taken away by that invisible thing that crawls inside you and leaves just as quickly, without letting you know what it took.

Andy wouldn’t miss it much right away, but over time, one day, if he found himself sleepless and alone, he might wonder where it went and if he could get it back.

Andy gave out a sigh deep enough to raise his shoulders, then he turned and looked toward the cruiser. He was ready now.

A.J. pushed out of the car and started across the bridge. Andy stepped forward under the light. He had some color back, but his forehead was still beaded with sweat or rain. He lowered his eyes, then forced himself to look back up.

“How ya feeling?” A.J. asked.

When Andy found his voice, it was still thick with the scorch of vomit. “Don’t tell the guys I lost my dinner, okay?”

“Not a problem,” A.J. said.

Andy’s eyes drifted reluctantly back to the edge of the railing, then down toward the water, but he didn’t move from his spot. He looked lost as to how he should behave or where he should keep his eyes. A.J. stepped forward and placed a hand on the wet concrete railing. He looked down.

The inky water slithered alongside a bank of thick brush, rounded rocks, and cypress trees. One of the trees had been shattered a lifetime ago by a powerful bolt of lightning. In the dim light, the branches looked burnt.

That’s where she lay. In the arms of the dead tree.

Her name was Tammy.

They had gotten the missing person’s report almost two weeks ago, just another thirteen-year-old girl with a juvenile record, a know-it-all attitude, and a boyfriend who thought it was sexy to cover her neck in hickeys.

A.J. and Andy had been called to take the initial report, and he had let Andy take the lead. They had stood in the dirty, cramped living room, Andy’s pen poised over his notebook. The mother had been unable to remember much about her daughter, except that maybe recently she had dyed her hair red, but she wasn’t sure if it was still red now, or some other color. She didn’t know the last names of any of her daughter’s friends. She wasn’t even sure if her daughter had attended school that day. Sometimes she skipped, the mother said.

Andy had stood there, looking down at an almost blank page in his notebook. Later, on the way to the cruiser, Andy had paused and looked back at the house.

It’s like she was lost long before she was lost, Andy had said.

Then, the mother had come to the porch, calling to them, offering one final recollection.

Hey, officers... she had this pink T-shirt she loved, something with rhinestones on the front that said Too Hot to Handle. She’s probably wearing that.

A.J. turned on his flashlight and shined it down into the black branches. In the thin beam of white light, the pink T-shirt looked more like a rag, the fabric eaten away by eleven days of cold, rushing water. The ribbed collar hung loose around her black, decaying neck.

For a second, he thought he could see the glint of one of the rhinestones, but he knew he must be wrong. The stones would be moldy now, their shine lost in the muddy water, if they were even still there.

The T-shirt was the only piece of clothing on her body.

He looked back at Andy.

Andy had finally come to the edge and was staring down at her, the look on his face a mix of morbid curiosity and horror.

“Not going to get sick on me again, are you?” A.J. asked.

“No, sir,” Andy said, drawing a deep breath. “It’s a little easier the third and fourth time.”

A.J. clicked off the flashlight. “It’s never easier.”

They both turned away from the body and leaned their hips against the railing. In the distance, A.J. could hear a siren, and knew in a few minutes the road would be lit with half a dozen sets of headlights.

“If it doesn’t get easier,” Andy said, “how does anyone do this for twenty-five years?”

“You just find ways,” A.J. said. “And you find things. Like finding this girl. If you hadn’t needed to take a leak, we wouldn’t have found her. But you did need to take a leak and we did find her. And now she can go home. And that’s what you think about.”

“So finding her is a good thing?” Andy asked.

“Yeah.”

“Will we get any recognition for finding her?”

“Nope.”

Andy thought about that for a minute, then took the flashlight from A.J.’s hand. He shined it back down into the tree limbs, holding it on the pink shirt for a long time. From the brush and trees below, the chirr of crickets was starting up and they both stood there for a moment, listening.

“I don’t ever want to forget this moment,” Andy said.

“You won’t.”

Andy set the flashlight down, pointing it so the beam ran along the top of the half-wall. He drew a pocketknife from his pants and flipped it open.

“What are you doing?” A.J. asked.

Andy bent over the railing and started carving in the concrete. A.J. glanced down the road for the cruisers, then back at Andy. Andy’s knife was scraping furiously against the hard surface.

The first headlights were coming down the road when Andy brushed away the gray dust and put his knife in his pocket. Then he walked off to meet the arriving cruiser.

A.J. picked up the flashlight and shined it down on Andy’s scratchings to see what he had written.

A.J. turned to look at Andy as he walked down the bridge toward the flashing blue lights. Despite the mud and rain that spattered his sleeves and trousers, his step was sure and his shoulders were straight.

A.J. watched him for a moment, then looked back to the carving. After a moment, he pulled out his own pocketknife and worked the rusty blade open.

Under Andy’s inscription, he wrote one of his own.