“He’s down?”
“Sir, it’s—”
“Is he down?”
She’d only flipped Chandler into diagnostic mode four times before, twice in their first months working together, then twice more for his annual checkup. Chandler was minimally aware and Jen felt him—foggy, dreamlike, but present—but his memory, speech, and communication functions were disabled.
“Yes, sir.”
“Why did you want to see me?” Brooks asked. “If this is about the lawsuit, I’m not interested in talking about it.”
“I have a report to show you.”
“Relevant to that meeting?”
“Yes, sir. I interviewed Enrique Estevan. He’s the father of the man who died last week. He said his son got hold of a counterfeit version of the treatment. He thinks that’s what caused him to die that way.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not exactly a scientist.”
“I asked what you thought, not what you know.”
“Maybe it’s the same as what Olive Ortega thought Child’s Play was getting her. And it’s the same as that guy—”
“For the last time, he’s Teko Teko Mea.”
“It’s the same as what he said. That maybe Eden’s the street name for the treatment.”
“Didn’t you have a responsibility to report this at the meeting?”
“Yes, sir. I suspect I did.”
“Then …?”
“I don’t know, sir.” There was something Gray Suit had said that had troubled her. A shiver of déjà vu. What did he say? Her mind stumbled onto Brooks’s text to her, and this pushed away the thought of Gray Suit. She said, “Why did you tell me to keep my mouth shut?”
“What do you mean?”
“When he said he’d heard the rumor about Eden only yesterday, you messaged me to shut up. I told you a week ago, sir. You said you would tell him.”
“Detective Lu, questioning your superior officer isn’t in the cards. Particularly someone in your present position.”
“Sir, I—”
“Here’s what you will do. Keep looking into all this with the others. But if you find out anything that doesn’t make sense, something that doesn’t seem right, you come straight to me.”
“Like what?”
He seemed to give this some thought, then shook his head. “You’ll know if you see it. And come straight to me if you get a solid lead about who’s distributing it. You do not write a report. You do not tell anyone over the phone. You do not tell your fellow officers. You come straight to me. Understand?”
This all seemed rather strange, but his reluctance for her to follow up the leads around Eden had seemed strange from the start. Still, she had always trusted him, and anyway, it was an order.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“And when you do, you leave your phone behind, you walk into my office, you point to my ceiling, and we come up here.”
“Isn’t that a bit dramatic, sir?”
“No shit. But that’s what you’re going to do.”
It had only been three weeks since her last visit, but Jen was back in the bosom of the retirement and nursing home. The frothy administrator seemed to be having a new problem with her mother but was too embarrassed to say what it was on the telephone.
A note taped to the administrator’s door said, Back in 5!!! followed by six hearts. Jen plunked herself down on the single chair in the waiting area.
A man supported by a walker painted fire-engine red pushed himself in.
He said hello to Jen and read the note. “Ms. Sunshine’s out, is she?”
“Seems to be.”
He kept standing.
“Would you like my chair?” Jen asked.
“No, that’s fine. You’re young.”
It didn’t quite make sense, but he said it with such certainty that somehow it did.
He waved at the building around them. “Are you thinking of taking very early retirement?”
“Might be a good idea, the way things are going at work. But I suspect I wouldn’t move in here right away.”
“You a cop, by any chance?” he said.
“The only people who spot that right away are cops and criminals. You a retired criminal? By any chance?”
He thought this was funny. “No, but it would have paid better. I wrote for the Post. Investigation. Politics.”
He asked what district she was with. And then, when she said she was with the Elder Abuse Unit, he said, “I’m not a huge fan of exit. But that seems to put me in a minority these days.”
She didn’t want to talk about this. “Were you writing back during the DC18 stuff?” she asked.
He smiled. “Stuff? Did you know that the Russian Revolution back in 1917 was fueled by troops refusing to fire on demonstrators? That was one of the issues for the Eighteen.”
“The Russian Revolution?”
“I’m being serious and you should too. No offense, but those were some brave women and men. Not only the eighteen who became the figureheads, but dozens of others whose names we’ll never know.” He then softened. “No, what I meant is that one of the big issues was how police responded to protest and demonstrations.”
“Our job is to maintain law and order.”
The man groaned.
“What’s the matter with that?”
“In one sense, nothing at all. We need laws, we need order. But what if some laws work against the common person?”
“You’re making a speech.”
“Okay, here’s an example. Climate change is killing us, right?”
“Obviously.”
“Did you know that for years, oil and gas companies made sure laws were passed that effectively stifled protest about climate change and protecting the environment? And if a protest took place, you guys ended up doing the dirty work for them.”
“That’s not what we do.”
The man smiled tolerantly. “Of course it’s what police sometimes do. Ever bust a Shadow for vagrancy?”
The very mention of Shadows made her shudder. “I thought we were talking about climate change.”
“Well, how many of those people were left homeless by the Great Storms? How many of them used to live in Miami before it was wiped off the face of the earth? Ever think of that? And, anyway, forget about climate change. Do those people have an alternative? There isn’t enough work anymore, and we don’t look after our poorer folks. We punish them.”
She’d heard this sort of thing before. In fact, far too often at Zach’s. He and his parents swore they weren’t attacking her personally, but she sure felt they were.
Then he laughed. “Sorry, I don’t get much chance any more to climb onto my soap box.”
“As a friend of mine likes saying, ‘What the hell.’”
“What I really wanted to do was congratulate you guys. That’s what the DC18 were about. Not only against the racism built into the laws and police practices, and racist cops in your ranks. It had a much broader agenda. Your fellow officers did really well. I was proud of the DC Police and still am, at least for some of the changes you made. We sure haven’t seen that as much in New York or Chicago.”
At that moment, Ms. Sunshine appeared and welcomed Jen inside.
The administrator patted her helmet of hair. She forced such a big smile that Jen worried her makeup would crack. Then her smile faded. Red shone though the makeup. “My, this is difficult to discuss.”
“Ma’am,” Jen said, “I discuss some pretty difficult things every day at work, so you don’t have to worry.”
The administrator tittered. “I guess you must, but …”
It took some coaxing, but finally the administrator said, “It seems that—mind you, I’m not making any accusations—but there have been reports that your mother, well, she’s—well, they say, flirting awfully aggressively.”
Jen laughed. “You must be confusing my mother with someone else.”
The administrator consulted a note on her desk as if making certain. “No, it seems it is her.”
“Is that a problem?”
“Well, she keeps telling men that she wants to, well, f-f- … she wants to have sexual relations with them.”
Jen didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. She did neither, discussed the situation briefly, thanked the administrator and, as she left the office, mumbled over and over again, “Two months. Just two more months.”
The man was still in the waiting area, leaning on his red walker. He handed Jen a scrap of paper. “If you’re interested, here’s a link to the series I wrote about the trial.”
She stuffed the paper in her pocket, intending to throw it away when she got outside.
Instead it ended up on top of Zach’s dresser after she emptied her pockets that evening.
Raffi and Leah were making raspberry jam. Each year, they made a large batch of one or two types of jam or jelly—raspberry, strawberry, peach, apricot, pear, apple, or grape—as they came into season, and that batch would last about three years.
No one said the obvious: they were now cooking for posterity.
Raffi said, “Raspberry jam is the queen of jams.”
Leah said, “Apricot.”
Jen said, “Any of your jams.”
Then she felt embarrassed because she thought of the shelves of jam in the basement storage space that would last Zach and her until long after Raffi and Leah were gone.
Leah said, “Zach told us about your new interest.”
“My what?”
“Gabriel Cohen’s work.”
She scrunched up her face in a look of incomprehension.
“But you were reading about the DC18, weren’t you?”
Just then, Zach came into the kitchen. “That’s not what I said. I said you left a piece of paper on my dresser with a URL and his name.”
“Oh, that!” Jen said. “He’s some old guy at the retirement home. Says he was a journalist.”
Leah said, “That’s kind of like saying, ‘Albert Einstein says he was a scientist.’”
Raffi said, “He was a local hero, at least in our circles. Won two Pulitzers.”
“He figured out I was a cop and wanted me to read what he wrote back then,” Jen said. “That’s all.”
“It’s been several years,” Leah said, “but I’m guessing he’s still worth reading, especially for a woman in the police force. Dear,” she said turning to Raffi, “I think that’s at a full boil.”
The next minutes were the ones needing maximum concentration. Raffi stirred the boiling jam so it didn’t burn, and when he turned off the stove, he skimmed off white foam. Jen pulled trays of sterilized jars from the oven. Leah ladled jam into the jars. Zach pulled lids out of the boiling water and plopped them on top. Jen screwed the tops down.
They cleaned splattered jam from the counter, the stove, and the floor.
Leah counted. “Fourteen jars! Fantastic.”
At one jar of raspberry jam every four months, they’d finish the last of them about three years after Raffi and Leah were dead.