NINETEEN

“What happened?” I asked.

Nasty looked up at me and narrowed her eyes. I sensed she was judging my curiosity. I regretted having played into her dueling mean girls trap earlier. That wasn’t who I was. I stared back at her, hoping any residual hostility inbred in our relationship wasn’t written on my face.

She stood up straight and spoke. “Last year, I pulled over a drunk driver. It was a routine bust after a traffic violation. Officer Clark was my partner at the time, but he had a cold, so I played lead and handled everything.”

“If it was routine, what was the problem?”

“There shouldn’t have been a problem. But I saw a gun jutting out from under the passenger seat of the driver’s car. That changed everything.”

“I thought in Texas everybody had a gun.”

“Concealed carry laws. If he has a weapon in the car with him, it has to remain out of view. When he stopped, it slid forward. I couldn’t ignore it. The driver failed my breathalyzer test. Not by much, but enough. He claimed somebody must have hidden it in his car, but I didn’t believe him.”

“Did you think it was his?”

“I think someone gave it to him and he was trying to protect that person.”

“Why would someone give him a gun?”

“I don’t know. But the law says giving a gun to an intoxicated person is a Misdemeanor. He wouldn’t say someone gave it to him, but he said it wasn’t his. I couldn’t look the other way.”

“What happened?”

“I took possession of the gun, and we brought the guy in. He went into lock-up while I tagged the evidence and Clark filled out the paperwork.”

“Sounds pretty cut and dried.”

She raised her eyebrow. “Nothing around here is cut and dried. We don’t even take a case to court unless we can guarantee the district attorney that he’ll win. There’s too much money at stake otherwise. People get mad if they pay their taxes and bad guys end up back out on the street. Once we’re sure we have a case and it goes to trial, it damn well better go our way.”

“But he failed the breathalyzer test. You had the evidence. You said it was routine.”

“I thought it was. The problem came when the lab pulled fingerprints off the gun and ran them through Live Scan, and the hit that came back wasn’t him. It was a local lawyer who had no criminal record.”

“What did he say when you brought him in? Did he give you any leads?”

“We never had a chance to ask him any questions. Clark and I went to his office to talk to him, see what we could find out. What we found was him dead in his office.”

“Somebody killed him?”

“No, he killed himself.” Nasty looked away. “Until that point, I thought maybe I was trying to turn it into more than it was. All I wanted was to talk to him to put my mind at ease. But without his story, the DA had to let my guy go. We had nothing to hold him except a DUI, and it was his first offense.” She shook her head back and forth like it still didn’t sit well with her. “I wanted to keep investigating. There had to be something there, some secret that needed to be uncovered. How else did the lawyer know we’d be coming to question him? What was he trying to hide? But the family put pressure on us to drop it. Said our actions drove their dad to suicide.”

“Do you believe your actions drove him to suicide?”

“There was a note,” she said. “Short and sweet: ‘I didn’t mean to do it.’”

“Captain Washington had you drop the case, and you quit the force.”

“He did what he had to do. So did I.”

I hadn’t realized how long we’d been sitting alone in the lobby of the precinct. Garcia and Tex returned together. Tex’s expression was suspicious. He looked back and forth between Nasty and me as if checking for bloodshed. I rolled my eyes at him.

“Captain Allen,” I said. “It’s late, I’m tired, and I smell. Today has been more excitement than I like. Would it be possible for the department to arrange transportation back to my house?”

“I’ll take you,” Nasty said. She stood up and pulled a set of keys out of her very tight jeans like a magician might make a bunch of flowers appear from inside the sleeve of his jacket. I looked away from her to Tex. I couldn’t read his face. “Oh, come on, Madison. If we haven’t tried to kill each other yet, we’re probably safe for the ride home.”

I looked back at Tex and shrugged slightly. I couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d told me, about how her own actions, that seemed so by the book, had led to someone killing himself. In my own experience an action like that spoke to demons that lay under the surface of an outwardly stable person. But she was right. Any questions that remained would go unanswered.

I wrapped Rocky’s leash around my wrist and followed Nasty out of the police station to her shiny silver Saab. She aimed her remote at the doors and climbed in. I dropped into the passenger seat, buckled the seatbelt, and cradled Rocky on my lap.

“Turn right,” I said.

“I know where you live.”

I honestly wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

We drove along in silence. She continued down Gaston Avenue and pulled her Saab up alongside the curb across the street from my old apartment building.

“I don’t live here anymore,” I said. I was delighted by the surprise I saw on Nasty’s face. “Too many bad memories. No point living in the past.”

She ignored my comment. “So where to? Hudson’s house?”

“Thelma Johnson’s house.”

“Who?”

“Just drive toward Whole Foods and veer left. It’s on Monticello.”

She knew the area well enough to get to my street without any more directions. Once she turned, I told her to go a few blocks farther until she arrived at my address. She put the car into park.

I’d wanted to get out of the car the minute I’d first gotten into it, but I could tell Nasty had something else on her mind. Whatever weird bonding sessions we’d endured over the past few years held me in place more firmly than my seatbelt.

“Do you ever think about him?” I asked softly.

“All the time.” She stared out the window as if lost in a memory. “I wish I could talk to him. Ask him why. That’s all I want to know.”

“You still can.”

She looked at me. “You think I’m talking about Tex, don’t you? Tex and I are ancient history. I’m talking about the guy who shot himself.”

“You can’t hold yourself responsible for what he did.”

“If I could believe, and I mean really believe, that he committed suicide, then maybe I could let it go.”

“He must have been hiding something. That’s what you have to ask yourself: what was his secret?”

“That’s what keeps me up at night.” She bent down and pulled her wallet out of her handbag. She unzipped it and pulled out a small piece of coral paper. When she unfolded the paper, I saw a flat metal pin in the shape of a cross. The prayer of the guardian angel was printed on the coral paper next to where the pin had been affixed. Another smaller white piece of paper fell out and landed on her lap.

“I’ve carried two things with me since that day. This prayer and a copy of his note.”

She handed me both. I wasn’t surprised by the verse on the coral paper or the idea that a small talisman could offer her protection. Cops were like everybody else, and a belief in a higher power might have helped her do her job.

I unfolded the white piece of paper and felt my blood run cold. The suicide note was exactly as she’d told me. “I didn’t mean to do it” was written in the center of the page. What other people took as a confession or an apology, I took completely differently, not because of the handwriting or the sentiment or the lack of punctuation.

But because the note was written on letterhead stationery from the legal offices of Stanley & Abbott.