PHELPS LED her to a cruiser where she took up position leaning against the grill. He pushed a cup of coffee into her hand and she stared at it for a moment as she tried to figure out what had happened. The initial fear and disbelief were replaced by an eerie sense of calm that she knew was a form of shock that would eventually come out in one big scream.
She had her back to the news cameras parked at the end of the block. She heard Phelps go back to the line, talk to the cops on the scene. He dipped his head into the ambulance. There was a commotion at the edge of her vision.
Phelps headed back and stood in front of her, shielding her from the cameras. “Okay. Look at me. I am going to tell you something and you have to act like I haven’t said anything because it will be all over the news and you don’t want this guy knowing any more about your personal life.” He stepped in. “Okay?”
She was back in the present, back to the hot hood of the car and the too-warm coffee in her hand, and the sun already cooking the city. “What?”
He squared his shoulders. “Daniel’s fine. He’s the one who found her.”
She stood up, searched over his shoulder. “Where?”
Phelps reached out, steadied her with a hand on each shoulder. “We walk over nice and slow. What would that film asshole you love so much say?”
“Bitch, be cool.”
“Yeah, well, some people got no class.”
“Where is he?” A tinge of hysteria had crept into her voice and she took a breath, willing the panic inside her to shrink.
“He’s in the ambulance. He’s fine but he’s in shock.”
She headed around Phelps, toward the ambulance. She was aware that the cameras were there but she was back in cop mode now. Long stride, hand on sidearm, her eyes hidden by her aviators.
Daniel was sitting on the edge of a stretcher, his head in his hands—just a skinny guy with long hair and too many holes in his jeans for a forty-five-year-old. There were bloody patches on his chest where he had wiped his hands. His camera bag sat on the floor beside him, the strap smeared with blood.
Until that second she forgot that he had gone out last night. Iggy, wasn’t it?
Hemingway snapped her fingers at the tech and when his boots hit the street she climbed in and pulled the door closed behind her. She crouched in front of him, and the grip of her pistol clinked on the frame of the stretcher behind her.
Daniel looked up at her. He didn’t smile, nod or acknowledge that he had even seen her. But he began talking, very matter-of-fact, a little too fast. “I was a few seconds late getting to her. Fifteen. Maybe twenty. I stopped at the diner to get a coffee. Came down the street. Passed some schoolkids. Guy walking his dog. When I got there she was still bleeding. Blood pissing out all over the place.” Their eyes connected and they knew one another again. “I’m so fucking sorry, Allie. I tried, I really did.”
The tears filled her eyes. She took a breath, pushed them back. Then unfolded from her crouch and sat down beside him. She put her arm around his shoulder. All she could think was had he been there, she might have lost him, too.
“I called nine-one-one. I wanted to call you but I couldn’t remember your number. I tried to find it in my contacts but my hands were shaking so hard I dropped my fucking phone. And all of a sudden the police were here. And now you’re here and I don’t know what I saw but I want to unsee it.”
“Daniel, it’ll be fine. It’s the adrenaline in your system. You’re in shock. We’ll get you some shots; B12 will help. You’ll start shaking in a few minutes.”
“In a few minutes?” He held up his hand—it was vibrating as if it were plugged into a hummingbird’s central nervous system.
“You’re going to be okay.”
“Okay? Your sister is out there spilled all over our doorway—oh, sorry, your doorway—and you tell me it’s going to be okay? No, Alexandra, it’s not going to be okay. This is so fucking far from okay that it’s in another language. Your sister is dead. I should have been here. You should have been here. How can we keep doing this? We never see each other. We never . . . Ah, fuck it.” And he stopped, stiffened and slid into himself.
Phelps opened the door, stuck his head inside. “The medical examiner’s people just showed up. And your sister has to leave.” He jerked his head in the general direction of the cameras. “The less we give those assholes, the better.”
Hemingway stood up, putting her hand on Daniel’s shoulder. She gave it a squeeze. “Tell them what you saw, then we’ll get you into a shower and bed.”
Daniel waved her away. “Leave me alone.”
She stopped to say something and then realized that she had nothing to offer. “I’ll be outside if you need me.”
But Daniel’s head was back in his hands.
Hemingway and Phelps took up perch on the front bumper of the ambulance as the people who tended to these things came and went. They recorded, filmed, measured, black-lighted, dusted, collected, catalogued, and conversed.
It was slow in coming, but when it hit her it didn’t feel all that different than the time she had been shot. There was that same weird burning in her chest, as if the machinery had stopped working, but none of the noise.
She had to call her folks. To tell them what had happened to their daughter. And for the second time in their lives, they would have to bury a child.
Hemingway pulled out her phone and stared at it for a while, trying to figure out how to handle this. It came alive in her hands, lit up with her parents’ number in East Hampton; the summer cocktail circuit must have started.
She stared at it for one ring.
Two.
Then three.
Phelps pointed at her phone. “It’s sooner or later, kiddo.”
She accepted the call, took a deep breath, and pressed it to her ear. “Hemingway here.” It was a lousy save, one that would only buy her a few seconds.
“Allie! We saw the news and we were so worried. Mom said it was some kind of mistake but I wasn’t so sure. You know how I get. It’s—”
Her father was yammering on, something that went against his Anglican poise. “Dad?”
“—a father thing. If you ever have children, then you’ll know what I’m talk—”
“Dad?” A little louder.
And he stopped. “What?”
“Dad, it’s Amy.” She felt her voice waver just a little, but to a parent’s ears it was enough.
There was a long pause. “Is she all right?”
“I’m sorry.” And with that she held the phone out to Phelps.
They sometimes did this for one another, took up the slack. When Ernie, Phelps’s brother, had lapsed into a coma after a fall, she had been the one to deliver the decision to not continue with mechanical assistance; Jon just couldn’t say the words. At the time she hadn’t understood what it meant to him. She did now. Some things have to be said to—and for—the people you love when they can’t express themselves.
As he took the phone from her hands, her chest tightened. She leaned over and took a deep breath, grateful for the big sunglasses.