2nd Chance - James Patterson [86]
They nodded blankly.
“There was none on Coombs. Not a mark.”
Jacobi shot a glance at Cappy, then back at me. “What’re you trying to say? That Coombs isn’t our man? That we tied him in to each of the murders, found those clippings in his room, that he tried to pop you not once but twice. But that it wasn’t him?”
My mind wasn’t working clearly. The events of the day, the medication. It was chickenshit compared to everything that pointed clearly at him. “I guess what I mean is, you ever know Claire Washburn to be wrong?”
“No.” Jacobi shook his head. “But I don’t know you to be wrong too often, either. Jeez, I can’t believe I said that.”
They told me to get a good night’s sleep.
“My gut feeling,” Jacobi said, turning back on his way out the door, “is that when the medication wears off and you have a chance to look at everything in the light of day, you’ll see you made a pretty good bust.”
I smiled at them. “We all did.”
That night I couldn’t sleep. I lay on my back, my side throbbing, but I was also feeling the blurry warmth of a couple of Percocets. I looked around the dark room, strange, unnatural, and the truth sank in about how lucky I was to be alive.
Jacobi was right; it was a good bust. Coombs was a murderer. All the facts played out. He had been trying to kill me at the end.
I shut my eyes and tried to drift off, but the tiniest voice tolled in my head. One voice, sneaking through all that was certain, all that seemed plausible.
I tried to force myself to sleep, but the voice got louder.
How could he have missed?
Chapter 104
I WAS RELEASED the following morning.
Jill came and got me, pulling her BMW up to the curb outside San Francisco General as they wheeled me out in a chair. The press was there. I waved to all my new pals, but I refused to talk to them. The next stop was home, a hug for Martha, a shower, a change of clothes.
By the time I walked into room 350 at the Hall with a slightly stiff gait Monday morning, it was as if it were business as usual: The entire detail gave me a round of applause.
“Game ball belongs to you, Lieutenant,” Jacobi said, handing me the brush.
“C’mon”—I waved them off—“let’s wait for the inquiry.”
“The inquiry? What’s that gonna prove?” he said. “Do the honors.”
“L.T.,” said Cappy, his eyes clear and proud, “we’ve been saving it. For you.”
“Do it, L.T.”
Maybe for the first time since Mercer promoted me, I felt like the head of Homicide, and that all the doubts of worth and rank I’d carried with me my whole career were markers on an old journey, miles behind.
I went over to the board where our active cases were listed and I brushed Tasha Catchings’s name off the board. Art Davidson’s, too.
I felt filled with a quiet but exultant joy. I felt relief and satisfaction.
You can’t bring the dead back. You can’t even make sense of why things happen. All you can do is the best you can to let the living believe their souls are at peace.
The detectives circled around me and watched.
I wiped Earl Mercer’s name off the slate.
Chapter 105
I FIELDED PHONE CALLS for the next couple of hours. But mostly I just sat at my desk, giving some thought to my deposition. There was an inquiry pending on the Coombs shooting, standard practice whenever a police officer fired a gun.
The whole incident was still a blur to me. The doctors had told me it might be like that for a while. A kind of repressed shock.
I had a flash of that out-of-date uniform, and Coombs’s eyes burning into me. His arm extended, the orange spurt of his gun. I was sure that someone had shouted my name, probably Cappy or Jacobi, then someone else said, “Gun…”
And my own Glock, flopping up in slow motion, knowing I was a beat too late, seeing the spurt of his gun. Then the gunfire—from all directions, pop, pop, pop, pop, pop… Finally, I put it out of my mind and went back to work.
About an hour later, I was leafing through the file on one of our new outstanding cases when Claire appeared at my door.