“Which you understand has been illegal since Darrow vs. Henry VIII?” he persisted for the record. “Back in 1964?”
“Yes. It’s why I had to take care of it myself.” The suspect crossed her arms over her chest and gave him a smile almost as cheery as her boots. “There’s not a jury in the world who’ll judge me for it.”
“By definition, every jury judges the defendant, even if the outcome of that judgment is positive.”
She waved away his summary of the American legal system. “They’ll get it.”
“I have to say, you certainly have a positive attitude.”
“Oh, yes.” She uncrossed her arms and leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table. “I’m generally a positive person. Things will work out and if they don’t, don’t give up! You can fix it, you just can’t be afraid of doing the work.”
If she doesn’t go to prison, this woman has a real shot at being a Hollywood spin doctor.
“You are by far the most cheerful person I have ever arrested.”
The woman who had cut off her brother’s head and tried to drive a chair leg (which she’d whittled to a point over the last three months) through his heart beamed. “Thank you!”
“Time to get photographed and fingerprinted,” he said kindly, and she jumped to her feet, clearly ready for the next phase of her adventure.
“That’s okay, why else d’you think I got highlights?”
“Why else, indeed?” he replied, and escorted her out.
NINETEEN
He was midway through his paperwork (should I put in the thing about her highlights?)
when he saw Lassard making her way to his desk. Depending on what was in the folder in her hand, this could be terrific or terrible.
Captain Marci Lassard greeted him with, “Nice catch.”
“No.” This wasn’t false modesty, or even actual modesty. He hadn’t done any detecting, simply responded to a call and arrested the bad guy. That was fine. Most police work was strictly custodial. That was fine, too.
“But you could have shot yourself in the foot, Jason.”
“Marci—”
“It worked out for you, it usually does, but it’s not your job to repeatedly remind people arrested for homicide that ‘no, really, you can still have a lawyer, are you sure you don’t want a lawyer?’ When they turn you down—and thank God she did—you focus on your job: taking statements, building a case for the DA.”
“She was pitiful.”
“Irrelevant.”
“Wonderful attitude, though.”
“I’ll agree it’s nice when they don’t try to kill us, or worse, spit on us . . .” Marci Lassard, like most cops, had in her younger days been cried on, puked on, bled on, spit on, and shit on. Most of it barely made her blink, but she loathed saliva. She was a heavy hand-sanitizer user long before most people even knew there was such a thing. “But that’s still no reason to sabotage your own investigation. I don’t want to have this chat with you again, Jase.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Hilarious.” She slapped the folder on top of his copy of Dancing Cats and Neglected Murderess. Jason could actually feel himself getting pale. Not this. Not this again. No. “See this?”
Nooooo! “Oh, God.”
“That’s right.”
“Not the chart again, Marci.”
“Take a look.”
“I am begging, do you hear me? Begging you. Look at my face, observe the stress.”
“I thought you looked a little constipated.”
“Listen to my voice, my pleading and pathetic voice,” he whined. “Put the chart away. I see that thing in my dreams. I will obey you in all things. I will clean the lunchroom fridge every day for a month.”
Too late. She slapped the Chicago Police Department—Organizational Overview Chart* in front of him. Her finger jabbed at a box about midway down. “I’m here. And I want to be . . .” The finger, having jabbed, moved on. “. . . up here.” Superintendent of Police. “By way of here.” Chief, Bureau of Detectives. “You want me to be somewhere down here.” Records Inquiry Section.
“I promise I don’t.” He didn’t. His predecessor did, which is why Kline was his predecessor and not a partner.
“I can’t move from here . . .” Point. “To here.” Poke. “Without the detectives under me making lots of arrests and closing lots of cases. Encouraging someone to call a lawyer when they’ve waived their rights is not helpful to either of our careers. And, sorry to sound heartless, neither are closed cold cases.”
Thought so. “Has my productivity suffered since I took over the Drake case?”
The captain plunked down in the chair beside his desk. “You know it hasn’t.” She brushed her short, reddish-brown bangs back from her face. The fluorescent light bounced off her wedding ring; she and her husband were the rare “met in high school and still in love twenty years later” couple. Other than Mr. Lassard’s belief that police work was exactly like what he saw on TV, and his insistence on using phrases like “we threw a real 415e last weekend!” around his wife’s colleagues, Lassard was a good enough guy.
Certainly his wife adored him; she’d asked him to change his name to hers and he had, without hesitation. All her life, she knew she’d be a cop, just like Commandant Lassard from the Police Academy movies. “It was a calling, and not just because I was Charles Rowan* in a previous life!” she’d tell rookies, eyes shining with a near-fanatical light. “There I was, watching the movie and my name was exactly the same as the guy in the movie. The boss with all the goldfish! The Lassard name up on the big screen! It was fate! The only reason we even watched Police Academy: Mission to Moscow was because Blockbuster was out of Pulp Fiction!” (Woe to the rookie who asked, “What’s Blockbuster?”) “This really isn’t about your productivity,” his captain continued. “It’s about you not burning out.”
“Really? I thought it was about the chart.”
“Everything leads back to the chart,” she said solemnly, then grinned. “But enough on that for now—”
He nodded. “I’ve been punished enough.”
“Hilarious. So you and the family went to visit Dennis Drake yesterday.”
“Yes.”
“He didn’t give you shit.”
“Not even the smallest trace of shit.”
“So your next step . . . ?” Marci’s delicately arched eyebrows were more for form’s sake; she’d worked homicide longer than he had. She knew perfectly well what the next steps were. And weren’t.
“The next steps. Right.” Ah. Well. The Drake file’s Closed status was problematic. The CC Division had their own budget, equipment, and staff, and as a detective with another bureau, he wasn’t entitled to any of it. His captain, who wanted her detectives happily challenged because such people brought results, had given him some room to run. But nothing had changed in the month he’d had the file; the missing witnesses were still missing, Dennis Drake was as recalcitrant yesterday as he’d been ten years ago, Kline was still gone (“You grinning shiteaters can go fuck yourselves sideways.”) and thrilled to be gone, and Leah Nazir hadn’t been able to come up with a magic fix. He wasn’t surprised by any of it; he’d expected all of it.
“You’re my steadiest, least excitable guy,” his captain was saying. “Not just in my division; you’ve got some of the lowest affection of anyone I’ve met who isn’t a sociopath.”
“Thanks.” That was the appropriate response, right? Even if it wasn’t necessarily a compliment?
“You’re also methodical and you don’t rattle. But that doesn’t mean you’re invulnerable. It doesn’t mean you can’t burn out, or snap.”
“Because it’s always the quiet ones?”
“Because I’ve seen you almost every day for years and I’ve never even heard you raise your voice.”
Yep. Sounded right. Sounded like the feedback he’d been receiving since he was nine. He’d been tested for the spectrum, and had no idea if the negative results were a relief to his parents or bad news.
“What I’m saying is, there’s laid-back, and there’s comatose.” Long, delicate pause. “Are the meds for your depression working out?”
There it is.
“Dysthymia.”