“What’s the difference?”
Normally he’d find this line of questioning irritating or, at best, pointless. But Captain Lassard never lobbed “So how’re you feeling?” questions for the sake of small talk.
“Dysthymia is much like depression, the same general symptoms present for treatment, but they’re not as severe and they last longer.”
“Depression Lite.”
“Close enough.” Not as severe = the good news. Lasting longer = the catch. A lot of sufferers—himself included—would go years without seeking professional help, because they assumed being low, being sad, was just part of their character, and could not be fixed.
Jason thought the ancient Greeks had it right: The literal translation of dysthymia was “a bad state of mind.”
“I’m on Paroxetine now. Sixteen weeks in.” Citalopram had been a disaster. He didn’t mind the decreased sex drive so much—he wasn’t seeing anyone and the Angela Drake fantasies were exactly that: fantasies. Not being able to get it up or, when he got it up, not being able to finish wasn’t too bad: It wasn’t as though his penis’s dance card was full. Nor was the insomnia the problem; he had always been able to function on four hours a night. But the shakes, the sweats, the having to take a piss every hour, and the explosive diarrhea had been deal breakers. “Copy that, dispatch, I’m en route as soon as I find a public bathroom and destroy their toilet.”
Pass.
But the Paroxetine seemed to be working, and the side effects were nothing he hadn’t dealt with when he wasn’t medicated. The problem with any SSRI* was that it usually took more than a month, sometimes two months, for any change to be noticeable. You could diet down (or up) a couple of sizes before the meds kicked in, that was how long it took. You could get through half of a football season. You could put your house on the market, sell it, find a new home, pack, move. You could walk halfway across the country.*
“So the Paroxetine plus therapy equals life isn’t terrible all the time,” he finished, hoping Marci was going to get to it soon.
“Oh, yeah?” she asked. “You saw a professional?”
“Sure.” You know I did. “Like you did.” Insighter screening was standard for anyone in the academy; all recruits were required to take two sessions, on the second day and at graduation. Depending on your department, you could also be required to see one whenever you were up for a promotion, if you’d had to fire your weapon, and (most puzzling) for off-the-job injuries. “All my past lives had some form of it or another.”
“Didn’t you head up to ICC with what’s-her-face? The head kahuna of Insighters?”
“Leah Nazir.”
“The one who killed her mom?”
“No, she killed the man who killed h—”
But Marci was already shaking her head, annoyed with herself as always when she got a detail wrong. “Right, right, I knew that, it was all over the news . . . I saw her on TV a few times. The Brenner case, and Lane v. Hitler. What was she like?”
“Quiet and pointed. No wasted words.”
“A soul mate!”
Jason smiled and shook his head.
(not in the cards for me . . . or my soul)
Marci continued, “She touch you?”
“Sure. We shook hands.”
“She give you the rundown on your past lives?”
“No, of course not. That’d be like a doctor running into someone with a broken arm, examining them, and setting the bone on the spot.”
“You’re saying a doctor wouldn’t do that?”
“Captain . . .”
“We’re getting off topic,” she said, which Jason knew wasn’t true. Marci didn’t start up random conversations and then let them roam far afield. She had wanted to talk about what was going on inside his head so she could decide on his workload. “We were talking about your next move with the Drake file.”
“Yep. We were. My next move.”
He had no next move. He’d never had a next move. How to explain that it wasn’t so much about clearing Drake as it was about seeing Angela? Marci, a relaxed and tolerant supervisor in nearly all things—including encouraging the use of her first name—would bounce him off the case in half a second if she knew. It’d be re-filed in the tomb that was the CCD and that would be the end of it.
All this to scratch an itch (even without the Angela factor, the Drake file bugged him—there was something right in front of his face and he couldn’t see it) for a woman he barely knew.
“I’ve got some new records to look over,” he heard himself saying. Bad idea. Lying to the police or your boss is always a bad idea. Particularly when they’re one and the same. Bad bad bad. “But if there’s nothing there, I’m at a wall.”
She was nodding. “Yeah. Well. Do the best you can, but you’ve gotta know there’s a limit here.”
He did know. A lot of superiors would have nixed it right out of the gate. Especially when most people thought the killer had been locked away. “I’m thinking we’ll bounce it back to CCD by the end of the week. Sorry, Jase.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’ll tell the family if you want.”
“Not necessary.” Hand over my last chance to talk to Angela unless she kills someone and gets arrested? Nonsense.
“Good talk,” she said, rising from the chair.
No. Not really.
TWENTY
“Hey! You, in the smiley face shirt! Which I hate, by the way.”
Angela looked up from her computer to see Paul hanging in her doorway. Literally hanging; he was clutching the top of the door frame and his feet swung an inch off the carpet. He was shirtless; his right pec tattoo (plain black ink reading TATTOO) was showing. “Do I criticize your casual attire?”
“Frequently.”
“That’s fair.”
Paul’s feet swung and kicked. “I’m getting taller, I know it.”
“You’re twenty-three, little brother. You’re done growing. Vertically, I mean.”
He managed to cling to the door frame, swing, and glare at the same time. “Oh, what, you’re a doctor now?”
“No, I just have a rudimentary understanding of human physiology. Nobody gets a growth spurt for their twenty-fourth birthday. Are those my sweatpants?”
“Well, yeah. Who else’s would they be?”
“Yours! Because you have six pairs.”
“Eight if I count yours.”
“Then don’t count mine! The thing of it is, I wouldn’t even care if you did it because you were a cross-dresser or transgender or experimental or anything like that. But you’re none of those, you only take them to bug me.”
“Guilty.”
“Bugging me makes you happy. Weirdly happy.”
“You should be happy you make me happy. Make me happier and tell me where the tape measure is. I’ve shot up at least a sixteenth of an inch in the last fourteen months. I’ll prove it.”
“I’m not sure you know what ‘shot up’ means.”
“Since I’m the one doing the shooting up, I know all about it.” Pause. “That came out wrong.”
“Paul, you see all the paperwork, right? And the spreadsheets? And my harassed face?”
“Your face always looks like that. Now stop earning money to keep me in sweatpants and measure me, dammit.”
Wily to his ways, she had saved her document the moment he’d bellowed her name from the doorway—average height and build, but Paul had a voice like a bullfrog that swallowed a bullhorn—so she knew she could leap out of her chair without worrying about the half-finished doc. In half a second she was across the room and tickling his belly, forcing him to thrash, laugh, and let go, falling in a heap.
She stood over him in triumph. “Now that makes me happy.”
“Cheat.”
“You’re insufferable.”
“And you’re popular,” he informed her from the floor. He sat up and rubbed the back of his head, to no good effect since his dark brown curls always looked mussed. “The new cop on Dad’s case—Chamberlin?”
She froze in the act of bending over to give him a hand up. “Jason Chambers?”