65

The phone woke me out of a sound sleep early Saturday morning. Too early. I checked the caller ID—LA—and rolled over to go back to sleep. Next he sent a text message saying we needed to talk and followed this with another phone call. He left a voice mail, but I was too tired to check it and before long had dozed back to sleep, the medication doing its job.

But LA knew how to be persistent. The next time I woke up, it was because Justice was barking like mad at somebody knocking on the front door. I decided to ignore this too, but whoever it was couldn’t take a hint. I squinted at the clock. It registered 7:05. I tried to shake off the effects of the medication, and it finally dawned on me that nobody would come to the house this early unless it was an emergency.

I looked at my bed hair in the mirror and matted it down a little before I padded to the front door. I squinted at the sunlight and saw LA standing there, hands in his pockets, patiently waiting. I opened the door, and Justice jumped on LA, licking as usual. I tried to think of something clever to say, but my mind wasn’t really functioning yet.

“Can I come in?” he asked. “We’ve got to talk.”

I could tell by the grave look on his face that something was desperately wrong. Perhaps Caleb Tate had gone public with the information about my father and Judge Snowden. Maybe the press was getting ready to do an exposé about something someone had dug up on Masterson. It was still hard for me to concentrate and formulate my thoughts, like my mind was wading through a swamp.

“Sure. I’ll make some coffee.”

LA came in and sat down at my kitchen table. He absentmindedly rubbed Justice’s head while I got the coffeemaker started.

“Remember the kid who pleaded guilty on Monday?” LA asked. He wasn’t going to wait for the coffee. He just needed to unburden himself.

“Yeah. But I don’t remember his name.”

“Latrell Hampton,” LA said.

I was standing next to the coffeemaker with my arms crossed. This whole conversation wasn’t making sense. “Okay,” I said.

“We put him in solitary,” LA said, his face ashen. “We did everything we could to protect him. We knew the gangs would try to take him out.”

As I waited for the coffee to brew, the cobwebs started clearing. Something had happened to Hampton.

“That was my case. I put 24-7 surveillance on both his mother and his former girlfriend for two days. But resources are scarce, so we reduced it to drive-bys. Late last night, they attacked his girlfriend and her three-year-old son. Slit the girlfriend’s throat. Stabbed her thirty-two times. Killed the kid, too. Stabbed him multiple times.”

The thought of it made me sick. And I knew the newspapers would be all over this. The cops would get crucified.

“I spent the night over there working the crime scene. Jamie, we just didn’t have enough officers available to stand watch at that house and at his mom’s house 24-7. And now . . .” His voice trailed off.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’ve worked a lot of crime scenes,” LA continued, looking at me with those sad, steel-blue eyes, “but I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much blood.”

The coffee finished brewing, and I poured our cups. I sat at the opposite end of the kitchen table from LA and spent thirty minutes trying to tell him it wasn’t his fault.

He asked if he could hang out at the house for a while, and I went upstairs to take a shower and change clothes. When I came back down, he was sleeping on the couch.

We spent the day together and avoided talking about Latrell Hampton except for a few phone calls LA had to field about the investigation. We went out to dinner that night at a local Macaroni Grill. It was the first time I had felt like a human being in a week.

When he dropped me off at the house, I stayed in his car and talked for another thirty minutes. Just before I got out, he steered the conversation back around to the case that brought him there in the first place.

“We both know who’s behind this, Jamie. You can’t let him off the hook on that murder case. Until we take him out, we’ll never break the back of this conspiracy.”

“It’s out of my control,” I said. “Masterson made the call.”

LA turned in his seat and looked at me. “You know what I love about you? You have no idea how popular you are. If you threatened to quit over this, there’s no way Masterson would let you.”

“You don’t know Masterson.”

“I know he’s a politician. And I know the surest way to lose votes right now is to tell the public that he forced Jamie Brock to nol-pros the Tate case and she quit. Think about how that would play out.”

LA had a point, but I knew it wasn’t that easy. “If we go to trial, all this stuff about my dad comes out. Tate will annihilate Rivera on cross, and the press will crucify Masterson and me. It’s too late now.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” LA said, his voice animated. “First, I don’t think you had any obligation to divulge that information to Mace James. Nobody can prove anything except that your father did well in front of Judge Snowden. And even if you did have a duty to divulge it—you told Masterson, and he told the AG. What more could you do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It sounds logical sitting here tonight, but Caleb Tate would play it—”

“Jamie,” he interrupted, “they made the little boy watch while they slashed his mother’s throat. The CSI guys could tell because of the blood-spatter evidence. What kind of animals do that? What kind of warped man incites them?”

It seemed to me that LA was piling assumption on top of assumption. But I shared his burning desire to take down Caleb Tate. Maybe I was doomed to live life as a fighter, my self-image defined by my enemies more than by the people I loved.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“That’s all I can ask.” And then, as if to seal the deal, LA reached over and gently placed his hand behind my head. He leaned in and gave me a kiss, and I didn’t fight him. It had been a long day, and my emotions were raw, but this felt right.

We pulled back and lingered there for a moment, a few inches apart.

“I need to get going,” I said.

I got out of the car because I didn’t trust myself to stay there. I closed the car door but leaned back down. He rolled down the passenger window. “Thanks for the kiss,” I said.

“There’s more where that came from.”

I smiled. Probably for the first time in more than a week. “I never doubted that,” I said.