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.”

“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.