The Dead Man

Chapter Twenty-six

Frank Gentry called, confirming that he'd deleted Anthony Corliss's alert software and installed it on the desktop computer in my office and that no one else was using the software. I caught Simon while he was still at his office, telling him to bring an additional laptop for me.

Lucy left and came back carrying pads of poster-sized Post-its and a fistful of markers in a rainbow of colors. Her cheeks were red from the cold and her eyes were dancing and bright, fueled by our chase of the dead man.

She stripped the living den walls, papering the empty spaces with blank Post-its. I needed to rest so I sat in the recliner watching her work, genuflecting with intermittent spasms.

"I learned under a great homicide detective," Lucy said. "She taught me that the best way to put a case together is to visualize it. Put it on the walls, let the facts paint the picture."

"I do it the same way. Put each case on a separate wall. Start with what we know about each of the victims and how they died. Then we'll fill in what you saw at each of the scenes. We'll also have to keep track of witnesses, evidence, and questions we need answered, plus links between the cases."

She turned toward me, hands on her hips. "Gee, great ideas. I never would have thought of any of that."

We mirrored each other's grins, both glad to be back in the hunt, realizing how much we had missed it.

"Okay, okay. I get it," I said, the words staggering out of my mouth like drunks leaving a bar at closing time. My neck arched and stretched, shoving my head upward and back, raising my chin like the open end of a drawbridge and locking me in the pose until the spasm passed. "I guess this isn't your first time."

"No. But it's my first time in a while, same for you. We need to check each other's work. Shake the rust off."

"Might as well. I'm shaking everything else."

She stood over my chair, looking at me with soft, sad eyes and laughed, giving me a quick hug. "You are something, you know that. Tell you what. I'll write. You edit."

"This isn't the first essay I've ever written, Dad," Wendy said.

She was applying for college. The application included an essay on the highs and lows of her life and what she'd learned from them. She said her lows were the death of her brother and her addiction and her highs were staying straight and sober for over a year and graduating from high school. She wrote that she learned the same thing from the highs and the lows. You can't always choose what happens to you but you can choose how you deal with it.

"Are you sure you want to put yourself on the line like that?" I asked her when she showed me a draft and asked for my comments.

"This is who I am. What else would I write about?"

"Something that doesn't label you as high risk."

She laughed. "Are you serious, Dad? High risk is tattooed all over me. I can't run away from that. Tell you what, I'll write, you edit."

"Works for me," I told Lucy.

She made her way around the room, using different color markers for different topics: black for victims, blue for witnesses, green for evidence, red for the crime scene, though she labeled it THE DEAD MAN in all caps, winking at me over her shoulder as she wrote. Her handwriting was hurried, her shoulder and neck muscles bundled and flexed as she worked.

She didn't look like Wendy. She was taller and her hair was shorter and darker. She was cocky while Wendy was leery. In spite of their differences, I sensed in her the same urgency about life Wendy had shown, as if they knew that they'd closed more doors than they'd opened and that they were running out of doors. There were no words for how much I missed my daughter. There were only memories Lucy was bringing to life, making me realize that this could be the land of second chances for both of us.