“Goddamn it. Goddamn it.”
He put his head back on the seat until he could breathe clear again. “I try to listen to music, or shoot hoops in the backyard, but I can’t stop reading about it, or listening to the news. I can’t stop.”
“You were part of it.”
“My parents want me to see somebody. You know, a shrink or something.”
“It’s a good idea. I have to see one. Department rules, and for a reason.”
He opened his eyes again, frowned at her. “You have to talk to a shrink?”
“Already have. I’m cleared—it was a good shoot—for desk duty. And I’m talking to the department shrink. I’ll be back on full active in a while. I don’t mind working through it. I killed somebody.”
She parked, turned off the engine. “I did it to save lives, including my own and my partner’s. But I killed a seventeen-year-old boy. If I could just shrug that off without a single regret, I shouldn’t be a cop.”
She got out of the car, waited for him.
They walked for a while, past a playground, along a promenade, then sat on a bench where gulls swooped and cried, and the bay rolled blue as the sky.
Boats glided on the bay, and Reed heard kids laughing. A woman with a killer body inside spandex shorts and a tank jogged by. A couple who looked a thousand years old to his eyes strolled, holding hands.
“Is it true, what the papers and TV are saying, that he—that Hobart—was the main guy?”
“I’m going to say it’s likely he was the strongest-willed, pushed for the plan. But the three of them? It seems to me they were like pieces of a sick, sad puzzle that fit together, and at the worst time. A few months sooner, a few months later, Paulson probably wouldn’t have fit.”
Reed knew what the papers and TV said about Paulson, what neighbors and teachers said. How shocked they were, how he’d never been violent. Always bright and helpful.
Fucking Boy Scout.
They were putting Angie in the ground now. They’d put a kid on his first summer job in the ground yesterday. How many others?
“I don’t think you can kill like that, just kill people the way they did, if it’s not in you. I mean, maybe—probably—everybody’s capable of killing, but like you did. To save lives, to protect people. In self-defense or like a soldier, that’s different. But what they did, for that something else has to be inside.”
“You’re not wrong. I think with Paulson’s background, his family, they’d have gotten him help. But he linked with the others at a dark time, and those pieces came together.”
He listened to the soft lap of the water, the call of birds, somebody’s radio. Realized the world seemed more real as he sat there, talking to her.
He felt himself slide more inside it as he sat with her.
“What was it like? When you shot him?”
“I’d never fired my weapon off the range before last Friday night. I was scared shitless,” she told him, “but that mostly came before and after. In the moment? I guess it came down to training and instinct. He shot my partner. I could see people, dead and dying. He shot at me, and I just did what I’d trained to do. Take out the threat. Then I had to do what came next. My partner—down, but not seriously injured. There was the kid in the bathroom. The first nine-one-one caller.”
“That’s, ah … Simone Knox.”
“Right. You know her?”
“No, I just … can’t stop reading and watching. I remember her name.”
“She’s in your club. She saved lives. She kept her head, hid, contacted the police. Barry and I—my partner—were right outside in the parking lot.”
“I read that, too. You were right there.”
“It’s playing out that Simone’s call came in about a minute, maybe two, after Hobart pushed in the exit door he’d left unlocked. She lost a friend that night, and another’s still in the hospital, recovering. She’s coping, but it’s rough.”
“You talked to her, too.”
“To her, to her friend Mi, to Brady and his dad.” With a sigh, Essie lifted her face to the sun. “It helps me, and I like to think maybe it helps them.”
“Why’d you become a cop?”
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.” She smiled, then sighed again as she looked out over the water. “I like order. I believe in law, but it’s the combination that works for me. It’s a good fit for me. Rules and procedure, and trying to help people. I never saw myself in a situation like Friday, but now I know I can get through it. I can do the job.”
“How do you get to be a cop?”
She turned her head, gave him a raised eyebrow. “Interested?”
“Maybe. No. Yeah,” he realized. “I am. I never thought much about what I was going to do. Just get a job eventually. I like college. My grades are okay, but I just like being there, so I haven’t been thinking too hard about what happens when I’m out. I told Brady we were waiting for the good guys, because we were. So yeah, I’d like to know how to become a cop.”
By the time she took him to his car, Reed had, for the first time, a life plan. It had forged itself out of death, but it was his life he could see rising from it.
*
Seleena McMullen had ambitions and a smoking habit. Her ambition to rise to fame as an Internet blogger put her outside the church during the funeral. As a reporter for Hot Scoops, with its somewhat questionable reputation, she didn’t get much respect from the print and on-air reporters gathered outside.
It didn’t bother her. One day, she’d be bigger than any of them.
She’d developed both the attitude and the ambition during high school and college. There’d been no question in her mind that she was smarter than any of her peers—so she didn’t have a problem letting them know it.
If that meant she had no real friends, so what? She had clients. She credited Jimmy Rodgers in eighth grade for helping her forge a clear path. By pretending to like her, telling her she was pretty—all so she’d gullibly do his homework while he laughed behind her back—he’d provided her with the impetus to start her own business.
Sure, she’d do homework assignments, for a fee.
By the time she’d graduated high school she’d had a considerable nest egg, and had grown it throughout college.
Fresh out of college, her journalism degree hot in her hand, she’d snagged a job on the Portland Press. It hadn’t lasted long. She had considered her editor and her coworkers idiots, and didn’t trouble with tact.
Still, she’d seen the Internet as the future, and at twenty-four hitched her wagon to Hot Scoops. She worked primarily out of her own apartment, and since she saw her current position as no more than a stepping-stone toward her own site, her own successful blog, she tolerated editorial interference and crap assignments.
Then the DownEast Mall Massacre fell into her lap.
She’d actually walked into the mall, on a quest for new running shoes, seconds before the first shots were fired. She’d seen one of the shooters—identified as Devon Lawrence Paulson—cutting his bloody swath, and had hunkered behind a mall map as she’d pulled out her camera, her recorder.
She had scooped every paper, network, site, and reporter.
As follow-ups she’d dogged victims, family members, hospital staff. She’d bribed an orderly and gained access long enough to get a few pictures of patients, even slipped into one of the rooms after one had been transferred down from ICU.
The recorder in her pocket had caught some of the conversation between Mi-Hi Jung and—bonus—Simone Knox for her to flesh out another story.
By her calculation, she only needed a few more to take that leap off her current stepping-stone. She’d already had offers.
And now her smoking habit tossed another into her lap.
She’d stepped away from the other reporters to have a smoke, moving a half block down to lean on a tree, smoke, and think. She could head to the cemetery when the church portion ended, but how many clicks would yet more pictures of people in black generate?