“IT’S A MATTER OF ROTATION and transfer of weight. Like a golf swing, or so they tell me—which I was never much good at.” Riley lined herself up next to the bed again, transfer board in place; she was intending to reverse the trip, go from chair to bed, and Finn watched, arms folded, giving her space.
After denying she knew him, she had studied him as blankly as she had the first time, in the Palace of Justice, after Lennox, when Finn had approached out of nowhere, some random guy, a nobody in a cop bar, intent on rescuing her from a tyranny of tears.
Do I know you? She might as well have hit him again.
Out in the corridor, an orderly’s shoes squeaked past on waxed tile and quickly faded. Does she? A television jabbered in another room, indistinct. And Finn wondered, in dismay: Does she really not remember . . . or does she not want to remember?
“No,” he had answered her finally. We’ve never met. He had indulged the conceit, bought his ticket, took the ride. Introduced himself, pretended they were strangers, and explained to her why he’d come.
Now Riley gripped the side rail on the chair, and her arms tensed. “Here goes nothing.”
She lifted herself on her hands, like a pommel-horse gymnast—deceptively strong, triceps like ropes—but every movement that followed was ungainly, her butt dragged, her legs wouldn’t cooperate, and as she swung out and pivoted to the bed her thighs got hung up, her core tilted out of center; she lurched, made a desperate stab at the overhead bar and once again was left hanging.
Finn hadn’t even begun to move again, reflexively to help, when, “NO! You stay where you are.”
So he let her struggle, stubborn, helpless, flopping like a gaffed fish. And eventually, through sheer force of will, she got herself onto the mattress, and, with gravity’s help, arched back into the pillows, one crooked leg still bent dangling off the bed, but the bulk of her secure from sliding off. After a moment’s rest, there came a muffled “Shit.”
Riley levered up on an elbow, yanked on the flailed leg until it came up onto the bed, and then arranged herself into the slant of pillows, exhausted. For a moment her guard was down, her vulnerability laid bare. There were tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t crying. “This is my new normal,” she said softly, and seemed to measure Finn, trying to remember.
“Finn.”
“Right. Finn. So listen, here’s the deal: I’m not interested in your doctored photos from when I got shot, I’m not interested in who doctored them, if they did, and I’m not interested in what all that could mean. I’m sorry. You came all the way over here for nothing.”
She really was a Riley, surname McCluggage, a detective recently passed and promoted to the Vice Squad where she was working on “a human-trafficking thing,” she said, when the shooting occurred. He’d told her about the aborted testimony, the angry deputy DA, the photographs that weren’t his, tainted evidence, the very real possibility of an in-house police or City Hall conspiracy to . . . well, what, exactly? she had pointed out. “The wristwatch I remember seeing—” he began, but she cut him short:
“I don’t wear a watch, bracelets, jewelry, and never on the job, and I don’t remember anything like that at the scene before or during all hell breaking loose, no.” About this she was lying, Finn was sure of it; for an undercover cop, she was a lousy liar, which made them, in some strange sense, a matched pair. Was she lying about not remembering him?
“You don’t care that there might be a dirty cop, that he might have—”
“—No.” Again Riley cut him off. “And if you keep going down this road, you will lose your job, they will make your life hell—not just the police, but the DA, the whole fucking civic machine—because a rumor of even one doctored photograph will, in the hearts and minds of convicted felons and their representatives and the appeals courts, start to call into question every case we’ve tried over the past I don’t even want to think about how many years. See what I’m saying?”
He went quiet. He could still feel her, in his hands, from when he caught her as she almost dropped from the transfer bar. She’d lost weight, but seemed stronger. The ripple of her ribs, the heat of her hips. Her breath on his neck. He couldn’t think.
Riley waited for him, patient, eyes emptied out, but probing. “What are you thinking about?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying. It’s my new superpower: I can see through the phony platitudes people toss at me, like how brave I am, all the while thinking, ‘She’s fucked.’” Riley angled her head, then, as if it was Finn’s prompt to recant.
He sighed, frustrated, derailed. “No. That wasn’t on my mind.”
“Oh.” If Riley was pretending not to remember him, she was doing a flawless job of selling it. Finn couldn’t find anything more to say, so he just stared blankly back at her until she asked, softly, “Then why do you look at me like that?”
He couldn’t tell her. He was afraid of the answer. Self-conscious, Finn broke. “I’m sorry about what’s happened to you.” Pushed off from the wall and murmured, “And sorry to have taken up your time.”
Riley’s voice stopped him at the door: “Finn.” He turned. She said, “Who else takes photos for the crime lab?”
“There’s a short list, I could—”
“The soldier who shot her husband—Willa Ko? You wouldn’t happen to know who worked that one?”
Finn played along and said that he had done it.
“Those pictures I am interested in,” she said.
“Okay.” He frowned, remembering her wandering among them in his studio. And there was another awkward pause while Finn tried to understand what she was asking. “Can’t you just get them from the—”
“—From the DA? They’d never share them with me, it’s a homicide, I’m Vice. Or was.” This sounded brittle, but she pushed hair out of her eyes, a gesture he remembered so clearly, and then she corrected herself, “Although I guess ‘medical leave’ is the official verdict. Subject to departmental review.”
“I don’t have those files anymore,” Finn told her, a half-lie that she would see through, if she remembered. “I turn in the memory card from my camera. Crime lab has them.” For a moment he considered offering to ask Joaquin, but if she remembered their night, she would know he had outtakes in his studio, where she’d seen them clipped to the drying lines.
He waited.
Finally, she nodded slightly. “It’s just kind of touchy because I’ve already gone on the record saying I don’t think she killed him.”
“Wait. What?” Finn didn’t want to leave. “Why not?”
But they were interrupted by the overwhelming promise of carnations and, a moment later, Detective Terry Lennox breezed in, treble bouquet of wilting mix-and-match gift-shop flowers in one hand and an old soft leather briefcase swinging at the end of the other. “How’re we doing today, Riley Mac?”
“We’re still crippled.” A hug, a kiss. Like siblings, Finn thought. “But we enjoy flowers.” The detective cut his eyes toward Finn, but ignored him for the time being.
“That’s Finn Miller,” Riley said.
Obligated now, Lennox glanced again and frowned and Finn elaborated, “I work with the crime lab.”
“I thought you looked familiar.”
“Forensic photography.”
“Sure. I’ve seen you. What’s going on with your face?”
“Uh. Allergies.” Lennox was a good enough detective to be troubled by Finn’s presence in Riley’s room, out of nowhere, and Finn saw and sought to defuse it. “I just came by”—he dug in his pocket—“to return this”—the engagement ring.
He held it up, but Riley gave no indication she wanted to take it from him, so Finn placed it on the bedside table next to her cell phone. She didn’t look at it, she just watched him, as if wary. She knows, he thought. She knows.
“About a month back,” Finn explained to Lennox, breezy, making it up as he went along, “outside the Palace of Justice, I saw it drop on the sidewalk when she was getting into an Uber. I asked around, but nobody could tell me who she was.” This last part he said to Riley, searching her face for the tell.
She didn’t give him anything.
“Riles was working undercover,” Lennox said. “Transferred in from L.A.”
“Hunh, okay. Anyway. I kept at it and”—he shrugged at Lennox, like how random was this?—“finally somebody at the station sent me over here.”
Lennox seemed assuaged, but still annoyed Finn hadn’t taken care of his business and left long ago. “Well done. Thanks.”
“Pleasure.” Finn grinned at Lennox, then faced Riley, who remained unmoved, unchanged, unreadable. Finn’s heart sank. Without his camera, without his cloak of invisibility, he was exposed. “So I’m gonna”—he gestured at nothing and walked to the door. “Good luck with that new normal.”
Riley said, “Yeah.”
Finn cleared the doorway, but did not continue down the corridor. Instead, he lingered to eavesdrop on the brittle argument that he correctly guessed might follow his leaving.
“How do you lose the ring and not tell me?” Lennox said.
“How did you not even notice I wasn’t wearing it?” A chilly silence and a change of subject: “Did you ask him?”
“What?”
“Did you talk to the captain, Terry?”
“I did, yes.”
Finn drifted to the other side of the corridor, tucking himself in the open doorway of an unoccupied room, where he could look across and see Lennox open the leather satchel and remove some documents.
“What did he say when you told him I know she didn’t do it?” Riley asked him.
Lennox shuffled the papers, a stall, evasive. “He’s put you in for a commendation. OIS Committee has cleared you in the use of deadly force. City Council voted to cover everything union medical won’t. It’s all good, Riles.” But there was something else, and he couched it all casual: “They just need you to sign a few waivers and releases concerning the assignment of fault.”
Lennox swung the rolling bedside tray over and in front of her, trying to queue up the sheaf of disclaimers. He had a pen ready, but she must have refused him.
“Fault?”
“Culpability. From your end.”
“What are you talking about?” Lennox balked, but Riley decoded it. “They want me to agree not to sue them?”
“That’s the gist of it.”
She faltered. “Why would I sue them?”
“It’s just, you know . . . they need to cover their asses. Standard operating procedure. Bureaucratic bullshit.”
She repeated her question. “Why would I sue them, Terry?”
Lennox opened his hands emptily. He had to have known there would be pushback.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“City attorney wanted to come himself,” Lennox said, lowering his voice, speaking so quietly Finn could barely make him out. “I thought it might be easier hearing it from me. Look, I know what you’re going to say and—”
“No.”
“Riley.”
“I can’t do that. I won’t. It’s insulting.”
“Riles—”
She cut him off. “And what about Willa Ko? Did you or did you not communicate to the captain that I know for a fact she didn’t kill her husband?” The ensuing silence stretched as Lennox seemed to be debating what to say next. “And did you ask him to put me back on the case?”
Lennox slipped his hands in his pockets and jingled some keys and leaned again the edge of a chair back and sighed. “You know for a fact.”
“Yes.”
“No, baby. It’s a feeling you have, and all the evidence says you’re wrong.”
“What about the casings?”
“What about them?”
“Did you even check?” Finn felt sure he hadn’t.
“We don’t need them. We don’t need ballistics—”
“You don’t have fucking ballistics, from what I remember.” She didn’t let him respond. “Her dad shot Charlie Ko, Terry. She’s taking the fall for her father. Willa had given her gun to her dad.”
“According to Charlie.”
“Yes. Her husband, my informant.”
“Who is dead. Making it kinda hard to go to him for corroboration.”
“My word’s not good enough for you?”
“Don’t twist this.”
“What does Mallory say?”
“She’s kinda gone off the grid. But we’re still—”
“You guys just don’t know where to look. She’s probably scared shitless. Put me back on the case. I’ll find her, I’ll find a second source, I can prove that—”
“The case is closed. We got our guy. Or girl, as it were.”
“Why the fuck won’t you listen to me?”
“Shhh, baby girl, c’mon, focus on getting yourself better.”
“I’m not your baby. I’m not your girl. I’m a full-fucking-grown woman, I killed two knuckleheads who tried to kill me, I’ve got a shattered spine to show for it—don’t act like you’re gonna be my big macho manly protector, because you are way too fucking late.”
“This is crazy” was all Finn heard Lennox say.
“No, what’s crazy is you’re going to convict the WRONG PERSON.” She threw the waivers. They separated, fluttered around Lennox like giant snowflakes, and settled to the floor. “And I’m not signing those. It’s insulting. I’m a cop, Terry. I knew the risks going in. Why would I sue the city and jeopardize my whole career?”
Lennox hadn’t moved from the foot of the bed, he took a deep breath and put his hand on her leg, her lower body all Finn could see of her from where he watched; the gesture was meant to be intimate, Lennox probably forgetting, Finn thought, that Riley couldn’t feel it anymore. “You don’t have a career, baby,” he said softly. “You gotta come to terms with that’s not gonna happen.”
“And why is that?”
“Cops need legs,” he said.
Finn’s heart broke for her.
Riley must’ve just stared at Lennox, devastated, and even from the hallway Finn could imagine the expression, he’d seen it once before: She was not going to cry. He saw her hand reach and fumble for the control in the blankets, heard the lowering of her hospital bed, and the curling of her upper body fetal, turned toward the wall. “I’m tired.”
Her legs Finn could see: twined, loose, like lifeless tendrils.
For a long time there was just the dull churning hum of the rehab ward: machines, footsteps, soft discourse of nurses at their station, the murmur of muted televisions.
Lennox looked like he didn’t know what to do. Riley didn’t move. Finn watched until Lennox started to pick up the scattered legal documents, hard on his haunches, head down. Finn found he no longer cared how this might end, and he quietly walked away.