Gasping, Kate lurched upright in her bed tearing frenziedly at her T-shirt. She instantly collapsed back onto her pillow, felled by lightning strikes of pain in her head.
“Oh Christ Jesus,” she muttered.
She realized the T-shirt was drenched in sweat, not blood. And that last night’s bottle of scotch had given her a head full of excruciating pain without the usual tradeoff of rendering her sufficiently comatose to prevent dreams. The worst dream yet, her house awash in blood with more pouring from the ceiling, this time with Cameron’s body at her feet, spilling its own crimson into the warm coppery-smelling blood that rose over her feet toward her ankles…
In infinitesimal increments she turned her pain-strobed head to see the clock: 6:15. She lay perfectly still again, waiting for the agony to subside enough to allow her to grope in her side table drawer for the bottle of Excedrin. She dry-swallowed four tablets, wincing at the ashy astringency filling a mouth that already seemed stuffed with cotton. Again she lay quietly, waiting for the pills to hit her bloodstream.
Why had she dreamed? Had her newly prescribed medication somehow interfered with the effectiveness of the scotch? Highly unlikely. Not this fast. What on earth would she do if her companion Cutty Sark, so dependable, so faithful over the years, was beginning to fail her…
It was after seven a.m. when she was able to sit up and strip off her damp T-shirt. She picked up her cell phone and selected a number.
To her surprise—and utter dismay—the phone was physically, not electronically picked up. She did not want to talk beyond leaving a message. Her caller ID was blocked to anyone she called, and her finger hovered over the disconnect key.
“Hello? Is anyone on the line?” asked Calla Dearborn.
“Kate Delafield.” A throaty semblance of her voice had somehow managed to emerge from her dry mouth and throat. “It’s too early for you not to have your answering machine on.”
“You’re right. I need to be more thoughtful about this working from out of my new home office. What’s happening?”
“I was calling to make an appointment,” she responded more normally, her vocal chords having finally unpacked themselves.
“Okay, we’ll do that.” Dearborn repeated, “What’s happening?”
“Another dream. Worst yet. Maggie’s better but I don’t believe that’s good news. I’m taking the antidepressant and wondering if it’s making things worse.”
“It’s had no time to have any effect,” Dearborn said in confirmation of Kate’s assumption. “Can you come over today?”
“Not till next week. I have to—”
“You’re calling me at seven o’clock in the morning, Kate. What I’m hearing tells me it should be today.”
“I have to be in the high desert today. I have a friend in bad trouble.”
“You’re in bad trouble.” Dearborn’s voice had picked up more than a degree of vehemence. “This once, think about putting care of yourself ahead of what you think are higher priorities.”
“This one’s higher than a high priority. Someone’s life is at stake.”
“Aimee’s?”
“No.” She would not elaborate.
After more moments of silence Dearborn asked, “When do you leave?”
Kate said honestly, “I’m having a very rough morning. As soon as I can pull myself together.”
“I know I won’t convince you right now that it’s not wholly up to you to save anyone’s life but your own. So how about we compromise? How about you spend some of that pull-yourself-together time here? Will half an hour make that much of a difference? I’m right on your way to the freeway.”
Kate looked at the crumpled, still-damp T-shirt on the floor. “I’ll need coffee.”
“I’ll have it. Strong and lots of it.”
* * *
Just after eight o’clock, Kate pulled up in front of Calla Dearborn’s house. She had showered and felt better for it, her head pain had subsided, but she still felt internally shaky and nauseous as she took the pathway around to the cottage/office. The door was open, the aroma of coffee permeating the yard and a gloomy fog-shrouded morning serenaded nonetheless by a chittering symphony of birds.
Dearborn was at the sideboard pouring coffee into oversize mugs. “I heard you on the pathway,” she said, handing one of the mugs to Kate and going to her armchair. “You’ll find it really strong even for a cop. I’m not a morning person either,” she said, her dimple emerging with her smile. “Help yourself to all the coffee you want.”
Want? Need was more like it. The visage in Kate’s bathroom mirror had looked ashen and ill. But Dearborn’s gaze showed no judgment; her face was serene. “Thank you,” Kate said, and sat down and welcomed a burning swallow of bracing brew from her mug. It wasn’t like Cutty Sark coursing down her throat, but at this moment it felt like a close second.
“How are you doing, dealing with Maggie?”
“Just dealing.” She gulped more coffee. “Well, not exactly. I’ve compounded my troubles. I’m visiting a wonderful old woman at the hospice and of course she’s dying too.”
“I’m sure she’s grateful for the visits.”
“She is. I think we both are—but I like her and don’t want her to die, either.”
Dearborn picked up her pen and pad from the side table and made a note as she asked, “How is Maggie dealing with herself?”
Kate was struck by the question. “She seemed better last night, and the last couple of visits she’s stopped asking me to help kill her.”
“Has she indeed. What do you make of that?”
“Well, I’m glad of it, I guess.” Kate warmed her hands around the coffee mug. “I suppose it’s resignation. She finally believes I can’t do it. Or accepts she’s close enough to death that it doesn’t matter.”
Dearborn didn’t react beyond a brief but thoughtful silence. Then she said, “Tell me about your dreams, Kate. The one this morning and the other ones. Everything you can remember.”
As Kate haltingly described the nightmare sequences in her blood-drenched dreams, her heart began to pound, her skin crawled, she found herself having to take deep, sometimes gasping breaths. Dearborn made very few notes, just listened. And her acute attention, her sympathetic murmurs and occasional wincing, her quietly voiced questions, drew Kate’s trust and elicited more and more background details in the dreams, details of milieu, of smells and textures. She gradually calmed, and was feeling better for talking about the gruesome images and dragging them into the light of this misty morning, feeling better for the coffee. Drinking her second mug Kate thought to look at her watch; she was surprised to see that twenty-five minutes had flown by.
Seeing Kate’s glance at the time, Dearborn told her, “I do respect that you feel you have to leave. You do that when you think you must, Kate.”
Dearborn took another drink of her own coffee and said in commiseration, “Those dreams are so horrific. You describe them so well it would be hard—for me at least—to imagine anybody spending sleep time in a worse reality. In the time you’re willing to give me right now, would you tell me what you make of them?”
Kate managed a bleak smile. “Isn’t that what you’re here for?”
Dearborn’s smile in return was warm. “Detective Delafield most definitely doesn’t get to deflect this particular question. Can you be specific in terms of what you feel while you’re having these dreams?”
“I feel frozen,” Kate answered immediately. She held up a hand to forestall any response from Dearborn while she sat back to think. She continued tentatively, “I don’t feel fear exactly, because I want to do something, I need to act. So it’s more like frozen horror because there’s nothing I can do to stop anything. I feel…futile. Inundated with feeling…helpless…” She foundered, not sure how to go on from there.
Dearborn was making notes. She nodded. “That’s very descriptive, actually. What do you think these repetitive messages from the subconscious signify about your life?”
Kate said slowly, “I’m no longer a cop and the dreams only started when I was no longer a cop. So are they about Maggie? What she’s dredged up with her dying? Maybe about my parents, Anne, everybody I’ve lost…” Or might lose. She had not and could not mention Cameron.
“Are you telling me you feel the death and dying in your dreams refer only to personal loss?”
“‘Only’?” Kate echoed with a shake of her head.
“Bad choice of words. I meant that several of those dreams have you in a squad car. And you were a homicide detective. Very unlike the work most other people do.”
“Yes.” Hadn’t she been reminded enough of that through the years. People she met reacting as if her profession placed her in the ranks of the utterly strange and exotic, their interest in the gory details of her investigations often bordering on the prurient. “The job,” she said.
“‘The job,’” Dearborn repeated in clear disdain for the term. “You were on the front lines of law enforcement in the second largest city with the smallest number of police per capita in the country. Would a soldier in Iraq call what he does ‘the job’?”
Kate shrugged. “We all of us call it that. I grant you, Iraq’s an apt comparison. We’re the thin blue line and all LAPD designations of rank are military—befitting a city where that thin blue line barely holds.”
“‘The job,’” Dearborn again repeated and shook her head. “So sadly consistent with my experience with the lot of you, that macho minimization of risk all of you adopt about putting your lives on the line.”
“It’s what it takes, Calla,” Kate stated. “We’re comrades who buck each other up because we’re the ones who walk into the situations everyone else runs from.” But she had been thinking, turning over in her mind Walcott’s comment about her daily life as a homicide cop. “The dreams…maybe they actually have to do with the job.”
“What are you thinking, Kate?”
“I lost my parents, Anne, comrades I had in Vietnam, and now it’s my closest friend—”
“Heavy losses,” Dearborn interjected.
“But all the death I saw over all my time on the job…” She faltered.
“Tell me more.”
“The accumulated weight of it all over the years…”
Crossing her arms, Dearborn said firmly, quietly, “Your job may not have everything to do with the dreams but from what I know now I believe it has to be the major component. You saw so much death, so much loss—”
“It was the loss, Calla. More than the murders. The victims, they’re dead and gone, their bodies tell us what people are capable of doing to each other. But the people around the people who are murdered—that’s what’s so hard. You have no idea,” Kate said, expelling the words. “Really no idea. Murdering someone is so much more than murder. It’s a devastating assault on the survivors too. Death by heart attack or cancer or even an auto accident, families and friends get to bury that person and assimilate the loss as best they can and get on with their lives. A murder, it goes on and on, years, forever. Survivors relive and relive all those images all through the investigation and afterward, whether we catch someone or we don’t.”
Dearborn was nodding. “And so do the investigating detectives,” she pointed out, intensity in her gaze.
“Yes,” Kate conceded, thinking not so much of herself but Joe Cameron and his Tamara Carter case. “Very much including us.” She again glanced at her watch.
“Kate, as the detective you are, I want you to deduce something. Why, after all that time on the job, after all you saw over all those many years, why only now has it been translated into these dreams? How would a detective look at this?”
Kate said immediately, “The first thing a detective would look at is what’s changed.”
“And?”
“The job’s gone.”
“So how is the loss of the job connected, Kate? What’s different there?”
Kate was silent for some time before she said slowly, “I don’t have new cases crowding out the old ones.”
Dearborn’s eyes held such a glow that Kate felt as if she’d correctly answered a key question on a vital test.
“Kate, tell me this. On the first day when you were called to a new homicide, what did you do with yourself when you came home that very first night?”
“Ordinarily I wouldn’t come home that night. The first twenty-four hours of a homicide, you run collecting facts. Run like hell with what you’ve got.”
“Okay. When you did finally get to come home, what did you do with those images imprinted in your brain?”
“Drowned them,” Kate said immediately. “If I didn’t have to get up and go again on the case in just a couple of hours, I usually told myself I needed sleep and I had some really stiff drinks. The worst ones, I had to. There was the stabbing death of a gay man,” she said, suddenly immersed in memory, “so gory and hate-filled I was just numb from it and that night I made love to Aimee just to make myself feel alive.” She realized what she’d just blurted out and added in embarrassment, “You asked.”
“I did. You can tell me anything in here. I’m glad to have so honest an answer.” Dearborn spread both hands on her lap. “Have I understood what you’re telling me? To make it possible to fully function on your job you opened a cupboard in yourself and put your cases in there. You came home and drowned the worst impressions the day they happened. You took one case after another and stuffed them in that cupboard, the next case pushing the last case further back in the cupboard. Is that what you’re telling me, Kate?”
Dearborn fell silent. And let the silence grow as Kate absorbed what she knew was truth.
“Until…until I didn’t have any more cases to stuff in. My career ended. And the dreams started to leak out of my full-up cupboard.”
Dearborn did not respond for a time, simply looking at Kate as if she wanted that thought to marinate. She finally said, “All your cases were pushed not only out of your sight but out of the sight of all the people you love—”
“God damn it!” Kate flared, jerking forward in her chair. “So I never told anyone. So I didn’t talk about what I did, what I saw. How I felt. Aimee said I should. Maggie said I should. You said I should. I tried and one look at Aimee’s face, Maggie’s face, and I couldn’t.”
“Of course we would react, Kate—”
“You civilians, you don’t have a goddamn clue,” Kate barked. “You don’t know what you’re asking when you want to know what I do.”
“But isn’t that up to us decide? After all, we already have some reference points, we have books, films that convey—”
“Convey?” Kate flicked the word away with a contemptuous wave. “No matter how convincing the acting is, it’s acting. However real the blood looks, it’s fake.” She said heatedly, “People don’t know how it is to see someone’s eyes when they hear the person they love most in the world is dead. And worse, murdered. To see a real body bled out, a real black bullet hole through somebody’s eye, some woman’s breasts hacked away…” She choked to a halt.
Calla Dearborn did not speak, only shook her head. Finally she said, “Yes, I truly hear you. I truly see why you believe that. But isn’t it true that this belief means you placed taking care of the people you love ahead of taking care of yourself?”
“And you’re telling me that’s a bad thing?”
“I’m not putting a value judgment on it, Kate. You made a choice. You paid and are paying a terrible price for everything about yourself that you chose to submerge. That’s not what I’m telling you, that’s what your dreams are telling you.”
Dearborn picked up her coffee mug and sipped from it, her dark eyes contemplating Kate over its rim.
“I hate fucking therapy,” Kate muttered, sloshing coffee around in her mug. “All questions and no fucking answers except my own.”
Dearborn looked at her with the faintest of smiles.
Kate drank more coffee. “Doctor Sherman said I had stress and anxiety but didn’t give me a diagnosis.”
Dearborn said quietly, “Doctor Sherman’s confirmed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I hope you won’t be offended when I tell you you’re textbook. You were a front line soldier, Kate, in Vietnam and now here. Soldiers put their bodies through extreme stress and danger to serve their country, suffer horrendous physical and mental trauma and in return we give them lousy pay and mostly untreated PTSD. We gave you better pay and a pension to go with your PTSD. Which in your case we can and will treat.”
“How?”
“We go back and do a rerun.”
“Are you saying…”
“I help you unpack the cupboard. We take your cases out and look at them again. And this time you and I talk about them. In detail.”
Kate mumbled, “My therapist will need a therapist.”
Dearborn chuckled. “It may surprise you to know I have one. And a consultation group. I do take care of myself, Kate.”
“It will take forever,” Kate grumbled.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Unlike everybody else in my life.
“Kate, what I’d like you to do as soon as you can is to take a case and write out all you can about it. Bring it in and we’ll talk about it.”
“Calla, I have a larger problem that revisiting my cases won’t help. It’s what the hell I do with the rest of my life.”
“I know that, Kate. We’ll get into that another time. I have some thoughts.” Her dimple showed as she said, “Some people might even call them answers.”
“Like what?”
“Not now. Another time. You have enough to think about. You look to be up for your drive to the desert now. Be on your way, Kate, go save that life you need to save. I’ll see you next week.”