Cate and the detective are the only people in a large room crammed with rolling chairs and beat-up desks, one of which is buried beneath the ruins of an office Christmas party—a desiccated Yule log cake; a crumbling tower of unspooling lunch-meat wraps; a large, clear plastic bowl nearly drained of punch. This room is an opposite of the office in CSI: Miami; the only colors are bad ones—tan and wheat and beige and off-white and gray, and a dirty pale yellow. An atmosphere of failure in keeping up with the bad behavior of humans. The detective sees her looking at the cake.
“Yeah, happy holidays, right? The truth is there’s always a surge in bag-snatching, small-time burglaries, muggings just before Christmas. People want to get presents even though they can’t afford them. I think they also resent the gap between themselves and people who can afford gifts and turkeys and trees to decorate. They start thinking about evening up that score.” He shifts around in the chair and groans a little through clamped jaws. “Crappy back,” he says. Three red-light buttons on his desk phone are blinking; every once in a while, he looks at these, but doesn’t press anything, or pick up the receiver. It occurs to Cate that landlines are no longer conveyances of important information.
“I’m not sure I can be of much help. A lot of what happened is kind of static in my head.”
“So when you go through something like this, your mind can wall off the mess for a while. I mean, you did a lot of damage in that kitchen, considering that the fire extinguisher was your only weapon. You hit them hard and fast. Were you in the military at some point?” He nods toward her partial hand. Cate sees that the cop is imagining her to be a very different person. The kind of person for whom danger and violence are routine.
“No. Childhood accident.” She rubs the two knobs of bone where fingers used to be. Even her memory of them as full fingers is lost by now. “Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever been in any sort of violent situation before, unless you count a table saw.
“Is he dead?” she asks. The last she saw of him, he was being wheeled out of Neale’s kitchen on a gurney, little oxygen pods stuck up his nostrils. “Did I kill him?”
“The gentleman is down for the count. They’ve got him on a ventilator, but when they pull the plug, they don’t expect him to go far on his own steam. We’re still trying to figure out who he is. Guy carried zero ID. Maybe living off the grid. We’ll find him, though. He probably lives near your friend. With break-ins, the perps often live nearby. It’s just a casual, walk-by bit of business. They saw the door ajar as a pleasant opportunity. They surprised her. They went in to take some stuff and then decided to mess with her.”
“When he dies, will I be charged with murder?” As though they’re talking about an episode of a crime show.
“Oh no, lady. You’re the hero in this, not the bad guy.” He shifts in his chair again. He could really benefit from a little yoga. Then she tries to picture him in yoga class.
He pulls her out of her mental drift. “You sprayed the woman with the fire extinguisher. Can you see that? Maybe you’re starting to remember, even a little would be a big help. Could you help me build a rough picture of her?”
Cate shakes her head. “I’m not sure I even registered what she looked like. It all happened so fast.” She is so tired. She doesn’t want to select noses and lips to make a composite. She wants to disconnect from both of them, the huge guy and the crazy lady. The detective isn’t interested in Cate’s reluctance; he turns his monitor to the side so they can both look at the same time, and clicks the mouse to call up a selection of face shapes. Cate watches as the photos flip onto, then off the screen.
“No.”
“No.”
Shakes her head to indicate no.
“No.”
Then, “Do you have a category for really crazy-looking? That was her look, like someone escaping from the asylum.”
“See. Even that’s helpful.” And then he switches back to eyes. “Any of these look familiar?”
“Maybe smaller.”
“Was she white or black or Hispanic?”
“White. But dark.”
“What color was her hair?”
“I’m not sure. Brown? Maybe black. Dirty. Everything about her was dirty. Kind of caked in.”
“Short or long hair?”
Cate shakes her head. “She had a hat or a cap on.”
After reshuffling the component images a few times, what they wind up with prompts the detective to ask, “Was she Hawaiian?”
“I think maybe we’ve reached the limits of this technology.”