FOR A WHILE he half hoped that he’d cross paths with her at the Palace of Justice, and kept her engagement ring in his pocket just in case, but it didn’t happen. Occasionally he’d see Lennox there, drinking by himself, and Finn would imagine walking over and giving Lennox the ring, or striking up a casual conversation in which he would cleverly get the detective to tell him Riley’s last name.
Instead he’d just finish his beer, slip out, unnoticed, and go home alone.
A month passed. His heart ached and he felt pretty stupid about it. A one-night stand. Nobody falls in love in one night, with a person whose name they may or may not know. In the age of Tinder and appointment sex, Finn was no saint or celibate; arguably, he was kind of a dick, as a few of the women he’d briefly dated weren’t shy to point out. Bighearted, they’d admit, considerate, engaging—but unable to commit, a guy who’d bolt like a springbok at the first signs of attachment. He was a realist, he kept insisting, mostly to himself; a reasonable man resigned to the practicability that romance, like typewriters and vinyl records, was a quaint relic of a social contract breached way before his time.
Maybe Riley was, indeed, a hooker, plying his fantasy the way she might wear Catholic schoolgirl plaids—although Joaquin had tried to disabuse Finn of the idea, assuring him that working girls didn’t last long giving free samples. Not that Joaquin would know.
One night, drunk on flavored vodka that Arden had left behind after another thorny Chanel-enhanced, braless-crop-top-but-patently-unsuccessful attempt to seduce him, Finn printed all the pictures he’d taken of Riley while in his loft under the spell of that one argent waxing crescent moon, gorgeous grainy low-res abstracts, her eyes looking right into his lens, fearless, nothing coy or callow in them.
If he’d misread her, his camera had missed it, too, and that, in Finn’s experience, had never happened.
He felt muddled. He felt defeated.
He put away in a flat portfolio drawer all the photographs he’d taken of her, and convinced himself he was letting go.
—
ANOTHER MONTH BLURRED past.
A homeless man was killed in a hit-and-run.
The Sons of Samoa and the Rollin 80 Crips had a dustup in a Del Taco drive-thru that put half a dozen spectators in the hospital and took Finn three hours to document because his fancy new Nikon had a software glitch that kept fucking up the exposure.
On a hotline tip, Vice raided another San Pedro gentlemen’s club suspected of human traffic in Asian female illegals, but the place was deserted when the cops arrived, a triggered sprinkler system flooding away any hopes of clues, and the department was refusing to reimburse Finn for the false alarm.
Early on a hazy, leaden-sky Tuesday morning, Finn watched Gunnery Sergeant Willa Ko, haggard in her orange prison jumpsuit, get escorted up the steps of Long Beach Superior Court through a disappointing scatter of local media and rubberneckers in what could be described only as prosecutorial grandstanding, because Finn knew she could easily have been brought in through a back door.
Outside a smaller courtroom, as one more tardy news crew hustled past, Finn met with a painfully young deputy district attorney, stress acne and a fine silk suit, who shuffled a lap-load of case folders, finally finding and spilling a packet of crime scene photographs from Sunken City into Finn’s hands. “Any officer-involved shooting, we’re mostly just covering our butts here, in case the two dead perps have family that decides to sue. Claim wrongful death or something. You know. It’s unlikely. But.”
“The cop survived?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t in the papers.”
“Undercover op. Still active.”
Finn watched the news crew, down the hallway, clearly freelancers, try to talk their way past the bailiff into Willa Ko’s preliminary hearing, then sorted quickly through his photos from the ruins of Sunken City. When he came upon the picture of the shivering survivor in the blanket, he remembered. “Wasn’t there an eyewitness?”
“She’s been kinda difficult to get ahold of, went to ground, probably scared shitless,” the prosecutor said. “We don’t really need her. It would have been nice. But.” He shrugged. “Witnesses can be unreliable. Her recollection was squishy.”
Finn had stopped listening. Something in the photographs didn’t track—confounded him. He kept going back and forth among a few of them, shaking his head.
“I’m assuming you’ve done a coroner’s inquiry before,” the DDA was saying, droll. “It’s incredibly technical, I ask you if these are the photos you took, you say, ‘Yes they are,’ and we’re done.”
He expected Finn to laugh.
Finn said, “They’re not.”
“Oh, and”—the young prosecutor was already standing up, shaking out the perfect pleat in his suit pants—“we’re still protecting the identity of the undercover officer, so”—he stopped, only then registering what Finn had said—“What?”
“These aren’t what I shot,” Finn said.
The DDA sat down. “What?”
Finn’s relationship to his forensic photographs was primal: He shot them, he forgot them, but whenever he reviewed them again he remembered exactly the moment the shutter fell, like a neuron firing, more precise than a mere memory recalled because the hard evidence was in front of him, unmitigated by the fog of time and subconscious revision. Finn held up the pictures at odds for him, mystified. “These aren’t my photos.” He elaborated, unhelpfully. “Not all of them, anyway.”
Abject panic from the DDA, “Whoawhoawhoa, what are you fucking saying?” Finn looked up at him; the prosecutor was about to hyperventilate.
“Flat exposure, the flash glare here—and here—the framing, the focus, the contrast . . . it’s all shit”—Finn shuffled the stack—“I took these . . . but not these. See? Can you see the difference in the exposure? The resolution? This one. This one, this one . . .” He sorted, agitated, through pictures that were not his: of where the wounded cop had almost bled out, the pockmarked concrete where bullets had missed, the pools of blood, the traces of paramedic triage. All wrong now.
The qualitative differences were way too subtle for the deputy. Biting sarcasm: “Sure, Finn. Must be a bitch to get the light good at a crime scene.”
Finn bit back, “I’m telling you, they aren’t mine.”
“Man, just—”
“—No. Somebody messed with them.” And then he saw one obvious, glaring difference, remembering, “There was a bracelet—no, a watch. A fancy one. Right here. I anchored my shot on it. Dutch angle, so these shadows would clear. Now it’s gone. Everything else . . . It’s like somebody squared the framing and Photoshopped it out. Or . . .” Finn couldn’t wrap his mind around it.
“Or what?” The prosecutor was blushed furious and quiet.
Finn knew exactly what the man was thinking: In seven minutes he was due in the courtroom, but now first he’d have to call and tell his boss the crime photos were tainted, that the forensic photographer couldn’t testify to what was always a routine chain-of-custody protocol, and the implication of doctoring of evidence in police custody promised a potential nuclear prosecutorial meltdown that might compromise cases and convictions going back years.
“But the watermark is from your camera. Unique to your camera.”
“Which was stolen.”
The DDA closed his eyes. “When?”
“Three weeks ago. Same night I took these, in fact.”
“FUCK.” The young prosecutor’s voice ricocheted around the emptying hallway. A passing clerk glared at him. Finn mumbled an apology while the DDA collected his files and got up.
“Get out of here.”
Finn said, “I can attest to all the others.”
“Get the fuck out of my sight. I can’t put you on the stand.”
—
“YOU’RE SAYING IT’S SOMEBODY on the inside?” Joaquin asked, low, later, over beers at the Palace. “A bad cop. Or cops?”
“Or somebody in the crime lab.” Finn was irritated that Joaquin was automatically excluding his turf.
“Yeah, yeah. Or a bad-seed teenager with too much time on his hands and, like, one of those Chinese tattoos that looks like a scribble but means Prosperity.” Sarcasm.
“Teenagers.” Finn wasn’t amused. “Who broke into my car, and took my camera for the security code to sanctify the doctored photos?”
“Dude.” Joaquin rubbed his temples. “Nobody in the lab’s got the balls to do a thing like this, crims are cowards.”
Finn swirled his beer in his glass pensively. “Okay, so, by process of elimination: cop.”
“Or cops.” Joaquin wouldn’t be pinned down. “But before you go running off to Internal Affairs and make a nuisance of yourself, let me play devil’s advocate on that. Why would a cop—or anybody, for that matter—want to doctor photographs of a closed case where the shooters are dead?”
“Who’s to say Internal Affairs isn’t in on it?” Finn said.
Joaquin rolled his eyes. “Promise me, promise me, you’re not going to ask around about this.”
“I wouldn’t know who to ask,” Finn lied.
—
HE SPENT MORE than an hour in the main lobby of Long Beach General, wading through the traffic jam of inpatient confusion gathered at reception, and then approached the beleaguered desk staffer, flashing his police crime scene credentials just long enough to convince her he had some kind of official standing, and combined it with a kind look that said, “Let me just get out of your hair, your job is hard enough,” and was given the floor and room number of the wounded officer in question, scrawled out for him on a Post-it.
Elevator doors whispered open and Finn disembarked with a troupe of med students doing rounds under the watchful eye of a balding resident. He let the interns surge ahead of him and, consulting the Post-it, headed left down the long glass-sided corridor toward the rehab wing. San Pedro Harbor was crowded with container ships and, looming above them, the distant loading cranes hunched empty like gallows.
In the rehab wing hallway, a maze of ready gurneys, wheelchairs, and equipment disgorged from the warren of rooms, a sturdy nurse whisked out of a supply pantry and nearly mowed Finn down.
He flashed his lanyard ID again and asked his question and, already moving away, the nurse gestured and said, “Room 419, on the right. I think she’s got family with her.”
She? Four-eleven. Four-thirteen. Finn heard an argument that got louder, the door to 419 banged open and a ropey old geezer in grimy cargo shorts and a CalArts wifebeater charged out, red-faced, smelling of liquor, steel, and fire.
“Get the fuck out of my way!”
Finn sidestepped and watched the man go. Finn thought he knew him from somewhere; he couldn’t recall how or why. There was the sound of movement in the room, creak of bedsprings and metal, a weird half shuffle and grunting that drew Finn tentatively to the open door to peer inside, where a sallow, stringy young woman in Police Academy sweats had balanced precariously on the edge of the hospital bed, and was holding herself up by an overhead bar. Finn felt his stomach flip. It was the woman who called herself Riley. The one-night stand who had hijacked his heart.
She was struggling to move from the bed to a waiting wheelchair.
Her legs were dead.
Finn blinked: Riley, Finn’s Riley, who had rocked his whole world, was the cop who got shot up on the broken concrete of Sunken City.
Her hands gripped the bar and let her slender arms take her weight as she tried to find some improbable law of physics that would launch her toward her chair. Her sweatshirt rode up, revealing jagged purplish scars from bullets that had sawed through her spine. She lost balance, the transfer board clattered to the tile floor, the wheelchair pivoted, her legs dropped, useless, and she was left dangling, helpless, holding herself up stubbornly with her arms.
“DAMMIT!”
Her eyes found him as he began to cross from where he had been riveted in the doorway, breath held—crossed quickly and caught her in his arms and for a moment it seemed she might melt into him like in a love story. “Relax. I’ve got you.”
But no.
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING? Stop—no—NO—” Her body jerked free of him. One hand twisted off the bar, and she swung it back tactically and clobbered Finn across the face with her elbow. He staggered, dazed, but managed to keep his arms around her, until, twisting together, her other hand lost grip of the transfer bar and Finn hinged her deadweight over one hip and dropped her into the wheelchair before he sank hard onto the floor, holding both sides of his throbbing face with his hands.
“Ow.”
“WHO the fuck DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” she barked.
“I was just trying to help.”
“I DIDN’T ASK FOR ANY HELP!”
Finn brought his hands away, so she could see the hash she’d made of him: eyes red, already bruising, nose swelling, a thread of blood. They stared at each other and he waited for a recognition to dawn. “I’m sorry.” She took a deep breath and calmed, visibly chagrined. “I just, I don’t need, want—require—any help . . . thank you, anyway.” She looked up at the bar swaying above her head, out of reach; irritated, then disconsolate. “I’m not supposed to have help. I’ve got to learn how to do this. By myself.” She looked at him again, eyes narrowing. “Did I break your nose?” She found a tissue on the side table and offered it.
Finn stared back, still waiting for it, for the recognition, growing puzzled, wondering, hoping that maybe with all that had happened . . . with all she had been through . . . she blanked on . . . or she didn’t quite . . .
“Do I know you?”