But she hadn’t.
He’d acted on the signals as he’d read them. When he’d crushed her against him and lifted her off her feet, she hadn’t protested. When he’d lowered her onto the living room sofa and she’d raised her hands toward him, it wasn’t to stave him off, but to fight with him for ownership of his belt buckle to see who could get it undone faster.
But in the glaring spotlight of retrospection, he doubted that she would remember it quite like that. He hadn’t had the crying jag, she had. He wasn’t the one who’d been in desperate need of a comforting hug, she was. If he’d stopped it there, he might have been okay.
But…so much for that.
The best thing he could do now was to stay the hell away from her and leave the unanswered questions about Rodriguez for someone else to answer. He didn’t need to get in any deeper.
Irritably, he wiped away the sweat trickling down his torso, a byproduct of his memories of their tussle on her small sofa. Grumbling, he said, “I’ll call your chief and square it, but even he can see how this creates a conflict of interest for me. If I want my kid, it’s best I sit this one out. You know your way to the door.” He turned to the sink and tossed the dregs of his coffee down the drain.
“So that’s a no?”
“Between you and me, that’s a fuck no.”
“Then how should I rephrase it to Mrs. Barker?”
Crawford came around. “Who?”
“Chet’s widow.” Neal reached into the breast pocket of his sport jacket and took out a letter envelope. “This was hand-delivered to the department this morning by one of her relatives. It’s addressed to you, but sent in care of the chief, who took the liberty of reading it before asking me to pass it along.”
He extended the envelope toward Crawford, who actually recoiled from it. Neal laid the envelope on the dining table. “Basically it says how highly Chet thought of you. He felt you were unfairly criticized over…Well, you know.” Neal’s expression turned sour.
“She goes on and on for several paragraphs, reiterating how highly Chet praised you. Your skills. Courage. Blah, blah. You get the idea. Anyway, she appeals to you to get to the bottom of the courtroom shooting and provide her with an explanation for her husband’s death…which came about here only a few months away from of his retirement.”
Crawford looked down at the pastel blue envelope. His name was written on it in a fine script. He closed his eyes and mumbled a chorus of swear words.
Neal said, “I’ll help myself to coffee while you’re getting dressed.”
Chapter 7
The morgue was in the basement of the county hospital. The medical examiner, Dr. Forest Anderson, was a fifty-something bachelor who loved forensics and French cooking. When he wasn’t busy pursuing one interest, he was elbow deep in the other, which explained why he was almost as wide as he was tall.
In addition to being obese, he had high blood pressure and diabetes, and often joked that his autopsy would be one for the textbooks, and that he regretted he wouldn’t be around to observe it.
As he waddled toward the table on which the cadaver lay covered, he said, “One bullet entered his back, burst through his heart. He never felt it.”
Matt Nugent had been waiting for Neal and Crawford when they arrived. The three of them lined up along one side of the table. The ME moved around to the other, the cadaver’s left, and folded back the sheet as far as the navel.
Over the course of his career, Crawford had seen a lot of bodies, but the dispassion of death never ceased to shock him. It was the ultimate equalizer. Whether one died violently or peacefully in his sleep, death left the remains cold, gray, and eerily motionless.
He took a few seconds to bolster himself, then looked at the dead man’s face.
“This one would also have been fatal,” Dr. Anderson continued. “It went through the neck from the back, severed the spinal column, exited here.” He pointed to the area where the Adam’s apple should have been.
Crawford’s ears had begun to ring. His blood seemed to have come to a boil. He forced himself to breathe evenly through his nose.
“The third shot entered the torso from the back, lower right side, exited through the gut on the left. Until I look inside, I won’t know the damage it did, but I’m guessing it was extensive. Those SWAT guys don’t mess around when it comes to saving a fellow officer.”
Standing beside Crawford, Neal maintained a stoic professionalism. No one acknowledged that Matt Nugent was swallowing noisily.
Anderson said, “Good thing none of them went for a head shot or his face might not be intact.” He looked across at them. “No one’s come forward to ID him?”