All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 99

99

“Norma thought it was a phase when you turned down an Ivy League

college,” Nix said.

“You did, too,” Saint said.

“Year on the desk before you could even start training. Not that you listened.”

“Still made me your partner,” Saint said.

He frowned. “Partner? You’re a rookie under my watch, don’t even have a badge yet. I promised your grandmother I’d look out for you.”

Her first day she’d begun looking into the life of Marty Tooms. And she did not stop until the following winter, when on a frosted afternoon as they watched Reagan sworn in and the hostage crisis in Iran come to close, Patch took the Fairlane across the state to chase a lead so tepid he did not even give details, only asked her to check in on his mother, who remained in that pregnant pause while the world spun around her.

Saint knocked on the door and stood awhile then tapped on the glass but could see no one inside.

Maybe it was instinct that led her down the side of the house and into the yard. She walked up onto the rear deck and peered through the French doors and saw Ivy Macauley sprawled out on the kitchen floor.

Ivy was pronounced dead at the scene.

Patch took the news evenly.

He did not cry at the funeral. She had died so long before.

The next day he left the town of Monta Clare behind him.

“You ever wonder how Tooms and Eli Aaron came to work together on this?” Saint said. “I’ve tracked as far back as I can. Tooms lived his whole

life in Monta Clare. Med school at the U of M. Maybe they met there, but I didn’t get the vibe that Aaron was educated.”

Nix stared at his hands, at the lines of his life.

She fished the ice from her soda with her fork then remembered where she was and set it down. “I guess bad people have a way of finding each other. A death sentence without a body though.”

“We all get death in the end,” he said.

“And what of Grace?”

“You’ve read the case file. The report from that shrink. You tell me what you think.” Nix signaled the waitress who topped off his coffee and added a smile.

Saint fussed with the saltshaker. “As his friend or as a cop?”

Nix watched her, like she needed to ask.

She took a breath. “He conjured her from that dark place in his mind that told him he was a thirteen-year-old kid trapped in the room with a monster who did God knows what to him. He wouldn’t take the evaluation.

Not fully.”

“You know that yet you missed your own prom to chase down a local doctor. You gave up your place, a place you earned, at one of the finest colleges in the whole damn country. And you tell me you’re not doing it to

find this girl?”

She watched a couple at the counter.

Nix said, “You heard the interview tapes. You’ve listened to them a thousand times.”

Saint thought of them, of the recordings made with the state cops, with Nix himself, with the psychologist. Their aim had been to build a picture, to recover clear memories that might lead them to the girl. She did not tell Nix she had made copies, that Patch’s words sent her into a fractious sleep every

single night.

“Details,” Nix said.

“He gave a lot of detail because each conversation was still fresh in his mind. And when new memories come to him, he calls my house, fills up my answering machine. I keep the tapes. I keep everything.”

“But the details change. One time she’s got a drawl, the next she’s all Bronx. He thinks she’s a Texan blonde, sometimes a West Virginia red.

She’s older. Sometimes his age. She’s tough—”

“She’s always tough. That never changes.”

“She’s tough because he thinks he wasn’t. Dissociative identity disorder.

It’s when—”

“So he’s the girl now?”

A family pulled into the lot. The woman carried a baby, and Saint watched them all the way in. “That level of trauma. Doesn’t mean he made it up.”

“Let’s say he didn’t. Tell me what we have to go on. So many cases, so many people doing bad things. They outnumber us a million to one. And that’s assuming we’re all good. Giving a man a badge and gun doesn’t mean you’ve given him the moral code to use either correctly. Masks, Saint. A suit and tie. A lab coat and scrubs. They’re just dressing.”

“So we’re all flawed,” she said, as he pulled off a ten and left a decent tip.

“Some of us assign greater merit to those flaws. If we’re ten percent bad does that make us good?”

Out in the sun she placed a hand on the hood of the cruiser. “It depends on how bad that ten percent is?”

“Heat of the moment, I shoot a man dead over a gambling debt. Am I worse than the man who lays into his wife each week? The law says I am.”

“The law is bullshit.”

He laughed. “Now you’re starting to sound like a cop.”

Beside the diner were a couple of stores shuttered, and on white-washed glass she saw a poster long since faded.

MISSING GIRL.

“Move forward, Saint. It’s not our place to deal with what’s left.”

“What if she’s out there?”

A breeze towed clouds till shade covered them.

“If she is, she’s dead,” he said.

“You don’t know that.”

“But I know the kid wouldn’t believe it anyhow,” Nix said.

“It’s noble.”

“It is. Noble acts…they don’t always end anyplace good. But wherever that kid is, I hope to God he’s not getting himself into more trouble.”

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