“Doesn’t that policy apply to you too?”
“I’m temporary commander of the squad, not one of the regular officers. I’ll have to take my chances.”
He pointed at a young African American male reporter, who said, “Is it true you’re only here because a deputy chief is a friend of yours?”
Stahl said, “I’m here because every cop is a friend of mine. Deputy Chief David Ogden—that’s O-G-D-E-N, age forty-five—is an old friend and also a cop.”
There was laughter from several of the reporters.
Stahl continued. “He remembered I was once the commander of the Bomb Squad. Deputy Chief Ogden asked me to fill in until this special trouble is over and the situation returns to normal trouble.”
An older male reporter said, “That doesn’t really tell us whether your hiring was an instance of cronyism. Aren’t high-ranking jobs in the LAPD subject to strict appointment procedures? Tests, interviews by committees, background investigations?”
Stahl looked at the young man who had asked the first question. “Was that what you were asking about? Cronyism?”
“No,” he said.
“Good. I thought I missed something.” He turned to the second man. “I’ve been given a temporary appointment as a captain so I can accomplish a task. Then I’ll go away. Whatever salary I earn during the period I plan to donate to the fund for the families of the fourteen murdered officers. I assure you I hope I’ll be gone quickly.”
He looked up at the other reporters. “Anybody else?”
A woman stood. “What can you tell us about the perpetrator of these crimes?”
“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing yet. When we catch him, I’m sure you’ll be told. Right now the Bomb Squad’s job is to respond to reports of suspicious devices. Other parts of the department will be doing the investigating.”
“Then tell us about the bomb part,” she said. “Was the incident we just saw the work of the same perpetrator?”
“I can’t answer that,” Stahl said. “Anyone else?”
There were a number of people on their feet with their hands up, but he felt his phone buzz. He looked at the screen and said, “I’m very sorry, but I’ve got to get back to work now. I appreciate your patience.” He stepped away from the microphone. He saw David Ogden step toward it as he walked off through the side door.
As Stahl reached the hallway, he glanced at the text again. It said, “Dodgers 6, Mets 4, FINAL.” He erased it as he headed back toward the Bomb Squad office.
16
When Stahl drove into the underground garage at home, Diane Hines’s car was in his second parking space. He parked beside it, but sat still for a moment. Her car set off a train of thought he had been pushing aside for most of the day. He’d told himself he would think about it later, when he wasn’t handling a crisis. Now he had run out of reasons not to think.
The car meant Diane was in his apartment waiting for him. Coming over four nights ago had been her idea. But tonight she was here because he made sure she would be—or at least made it clear that was what he wanted. He was living with a woman he had met four days ago, and who was fifteen years younger than he was. And he was in a romantic relationship with a woman he was supervising in a public job.
Being with her was against the rules, and he was also reluctantly coming to realize it was unethical. He was endangering her career, or helping her to endanger it, which was the same thing. He’d had many relationships with women, but never one like this.
What was he doing? The first night, he supposed, had been an instinctive attempt by both of them to counteract their near collision with death with a bigger dose of being alive—companionship, liquor, lovemaking. Those were things human beings turned to after a brush with danger, especially if they knew death hadn’t gone away.
But nothing had ended. Neither the danger nor the antidote to danger had changed. They’d become more intense each day. Their camaraderie and their affection had stopped being transient. Worse, they had become necessary.
Today he had watched a video recording of four people under his command behaving bravely under fire. He had been concerned for all of them. But for one he’d felt terrified, wanting to protect her. He cringed each time he saw a bullet pierce the side of the truck she was driving. He wanted to shout at her to get down, to get away.
He tried to put his feelings for Diane in the context of his life. When he was twenty-one he had married a woman he met in the two-year college he attended. Her name was Melanie. They had bonded, partly because they were both poor kids and looked at life the same way. Her father had left when she was five, and his had died in a car crash making pizza deliveries when he was ten.
Dick and Melanie had both grown up avoiding mistakes. Poor kids knew that even small mistakes destroyed people, because they’d seen it happen. Lawyers and doctors and second chances were things rich people had, but help was never on the way for people like the ones they knew.
They’d both needed to work when they were in high school, and in college they had to work more. They were very earnest and focused on forcing the future to be better because the past was unthinkable. They worked for their lives, and for each other.
Now, twenty-three years later, it was not hard to find reasons why the marriage hadn’t succeeded. They had been drawn to each other by a mutual attraction that seemed like fate. She was beautiful and good. He was strong and smart. How could they lose?
They turned themselves into sleep-deprived drudges who barely saw each other between classes and jobs. They’d both been inexperienced and not very adventurous, so sex was tame, quick, and perfunctory, another chore to be performed efficiently and crossed off the list until next time. Increasingly it came at the end of the list, almost the only chore they could put off without having disaster overtake them.
Stahl was the one who cheated. But neither of them was the sort to wait for a second slipup, so when she mentioned divorce he agreed it was fair. Their divorce was quick and cheap.
By the end of the waiting period for the divorce he was prepared to enlist. When the marriage collapsed, he had found himself with little concern for his own welfare. The feeling influenced his choice of Explosive Ordnance Disposal. Now, on the rare occasions when he thought about this decision, he believed he had been discarding the illusion that he could control everything. In working with explosives, if he did badly, he would die. If he did well, he might die anyway. He did well, and as he got more skillful and knew more, he learned to control more and more. Every living EOD man’s failure rate in the field was zero.
Stahl’s life since then had not made it easy to have long relationships with women. He had spent years in war zones, then more years on a ready response EOD team based at Wiesbaden, Germany, that flew to trouble spots when the need arose. Then he spent more years at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida before he went home to California to take a job with the LAPD.
His first night with Diane Hines had been like most of his other first nights with women. They were affairs rather than relationships, ignited by chance and proximity. He and an attractive woman would be thrown together, pursue the attraction, and then weeks or months later, one of them would move on to the next job or the next station or the next city. The problem this time was that because of the bombs every feeling had been magnified and intensified and sped up. Some part of his mind seemed to be on Diane all the time.
Stahl got out of his car, took a step, and put his hand on the hood of Diane’s car as he walked past it toward his apartment. Warm, not hot. She had been in his apartment waiting for a while. He went up the stairs and let himself in.