Hero cop murders young mother.…
Then there was Gideon Strange, the boy. For whatever reason, Elizabeth bonded to him, too. She’d held him at the funeral as his father wept and was even now involved in the boy’s life on a fundamental level. She cared for him, loved him, even. Beckett never understood the reasons, but knowing the depth of her affection, he wondered how she was holding it together.
“Sir.” It was CJ Simonds, the interruption hesitant.
“Yes, CJ. What is it?”
She pointed, and Beckett looked past the bar to a dark car on the verge and a group of men beside it. “It’s the warden—”
“Yes.” Beckett cut her off. “I see that.” The warden was in a suit, the guards in uniforms sharp enough to cut paper. Beckett pointed at the cruiser. “Watch Liz. Make sure she’s okay.”
“Sir?”
“Just … watch her.”
Beckett crossed the lot, felt heat under his shoes and a fist of emotion in his chest. He’d known the warden for a long time, but the relationship was complicated. He stopped by the car and felt the warden’s stare.
“Detective.” The warden was sweating in the heat, his smile overly bright.
Beckett ignored the guards and spoke quietly. “What the hell are you doing here?”
*
The police cruiser was in the shade at the back of the lot. Elizabeth kept her chin down and her eyes sideways as she cleared the hood and circled to the rear door. She saw the top of Adrian’s head first; and he was looking down, so deathly still she had the wild thought he was actually dead, that he’d drifted off, alone in the back of the car. Then he showed a scarred face, and eyes that were utterly unchanged. For that second the entire world shrank to a black hole that stripped away all the years of her adulthood. She saw how he’d saved her life and never known it, his gentle manner as he’d stopped on a chill day to ask if she was all right. In that second Elizabeth was seventeen again, alone at the edge of a two-hundred-foot drop, a child looking for the courage to take one more step.
Are you okay, miss?
His shoulders were square, the badge on his belt bright gold. She hadn’t heard him, hadn’t seen him.
I just … She wore tall shoes that laced above her ankles, a secondhand dress that flapped against her skin. Her gaze settled on the thirty acres of black water that filled the quarry below. I was just counting.
It was a stupid thing to say, but he didn’t act as if it were. Counting what?
The seconds it would take to fall, she thought, but said nothing.
Are you sure you’re okay?
She stared at the badge on his belt and couldn’t look away. His fingers, beside it, were still.
Are your parents here?
Down the trail, she lied.
What’s your name?
She offered it in a broken voice, and he studied the trailhead at the edge of the woods. It was late and cold and almost dark. The water beneath them looked as hard as metal.
Parents tend to worry about children up here, especially with dark coming on.
His gesture took in the mountaintop, the quarry below. She looked at the sucking blackness of all that water, then at the strip of stone at her feet. His face, when she finally looked at it, was beautiful.
You’re sure they’re waiting?
Yes, sir.
Off you go, then.
He smiled a final time, and she left on legs that were cold and weak and shaking. He didn’t follow, but was watching when she glanced back, his eyes lost in the fading light. She waited until trees surrounded her, then ran as she’d never run before. She ran until her body burned and her breath was gone, then she curled up in dry leaves and wondered if God had sent the policeman to pull her back from the thing she’d meant to do. Her father would say yes, that God is in all things; but God could no longer be trusted, not God or her father or boys who said, Trust me. That’s what she thought as she lay in the leaves, shaking: that the world was bad, but maybe not all of it. That maybe she’d try to live another day. That maybe she could.
Elizabeth didn’t believe in God anymore, but looking at Adrian through patrol-car glass, she thought that fate might be real. She’d almost died the day they first met, and here he was again. She wasn’t suicidal, but still …
“Hello, Adrian.”
“Liz.”
The door pressed against her hip, but she had no memory of opening it. The world seemed to be his voice, his eyes, the unexpected thumping in her chest. The scars on his face were pale and thin, a half diamond on one cheek and a six-inch line that ran top to bottom beside his left eye. Even with Beckett’s warning, the starkness of the scars surprised her, as did the thinness that made the bones of his face sharper than she remembered. He was older and hard, with an animal stillness that disconcerted her. She’d expected something else, furtiveness maybe, or shame.