May 3
Overland Park Regional Medical Center
Overland Park, Kansas
1:18 P.M. CDT / 2:18 P.M. EDT
“… thought I’d come by to see you,” Brian Fisker was saying, seated awkwardly in the room’s solitary chair. “To thank you too, for what you did.”
Piper Cameron had twisted her head slightly, a major victory of sorts; the electric-like tingle in her arms remained unchanged, but so too did their mobility. In that, they matched the utility of her unresponsive legs.
Still, despite the sort-of head turn, to actually look at her visitor required Piper to pivot her eyes to their extreme limit, so that her nose blurred into the overall picture of the Overland Park detective.
Plaid shirt, short sleeves, she noted. Not tucked into those Levis either. So the guy is doing this little drop-in on his own time, off duty. A little charitable visit to the sick and injured, and I suppose I ought to try to be grateful. Hell, I suppose I ought to try to be polite…
“You the guy heading up the investigation?” she asked, politely enough.
“It went federal,” Fisker said. “Guess I’m just the ‘local’ contact for the FBI boys now.”
“Sorry to hear that. Always a pain in the ass, huh?”
“You know about the Feebs?”
“Worked with them, couple of times, back when I was military police. Over in the Sandbox, later at Fort Bragg.”
“MP, were you? What’d you do there?”
“Wore an armband, harassed troopers, the usual. Guess that was why I was so qualified for a career in mall security, right?”
Fisker shifted in his chair, and the silence grew uncomfortable.
Piper relented. “Last couple of years with Uncle Sam, I worked investigations.”
“Then you know.”
“Yeah. You get knee-deep in the casework, then the Feds swoop in and snatch it away. Makes you feel like a particularly useless type of asshole.”
“Amen to that. It kind of leaves you hanging. Loose strings you’ll never tie up.”
“You have any still dangling, Detective?”
“Call me Brian,” Fisker said. “A couple, I guess. You know how it goes, Ms. Cameron.”
“Piper. Any of them unusually galling, Brian?”
“There’s this girl I interviewed. Friend of the Campbell kid, the guy—”
Fisker’s mouth snapped shut.
“Yeah, I know who he is. Was. What’s the unresolved issue with the girl?”
“I guess I just feel bad for her. She’s one of those kids you’d maybe term a loser, a loner, if only because that’s how she thinks of herself. I don’t know; I mean, I did the interview. I guess she told us everything we needed to…”
Piper snorted.
“Brian, I was a girl. Before I shaped up and joined the National Guard, I was probably that girl, you know? And one thing I can promise you, girls like us never tell ‘everything.’ That’s a fact.”
It may have been meant as a sardonic wisecrack; it may even have been a nascent attempt at humor which surprised Piper herself.
Divorced three years, unaccustomed to any evidence of feminine humor for a year or so prior to that, Fisker took the comment seriously.
“You think?” Fisker asked, his tone mildly doubtful but indisputably serious.
“Trust me on that,” Piper Cameron answered, now undeniably serious herself.
And for reasons Brian Fisker could not explain, definitely not even to himself—he did.