Page 16 of Trust my Heart

I was scared, and the worst part was how familiar the fear was. I had sat across a desk from paper about me before, paper that was wrong, in rooms where saying it was wrong only made everything worse. The last time, it had cost me almost everything I had, and it had started exactly this small.

Luke looked up when I sat down.

“What did Murphy want.”

“Paperwork.”

It was even true. Luke set his pen down anyway.

“What kind of paperwork?”

I let my eyes go past him, one slow lap of the floor, and come back. Chen two desks over, on the phone. A uniform at the printer, close enough to hear anything worth hearing. Half the day shift moving through the aisles with coffee. Luke followed the lap all the way around, and his jaw set, not at me.

“Tonight, then,” he said, and picked the pen back up. He’d wait, because I’d asked him to, and he wouldn’t wait past dinner.

I gave the copying up as lost and typed the Kellner file number into the records system instead.

The property log entry sat there the way it had sat in Murphy’s folder. Wrong tag number, my name in the operator column, dated on a Tuesday I had no memory of at all. I opened the entry history. I opened the version list. I opened the amendments tab, which was empty. If the system had lost a correction of mine, it had kept no record of ever holding one, and if I had typed the number wrong myself, the file showed exactly that and nothing else. There was nothing in it to argue with. There was a number, and my name.

Winchester, then, because Winchester I remembered. I opened the canvass and read all sixty lines, fifty-eight of them in my own words, and the two blanks where the kid at forty-one and the empty house at forty-five should have been. I could have recited what the missing lines said. I checked the file’s history, top to bottom. Then I did the whole thing over, both files, slower. The second pass gave me nothing either. No half-saved draft. No older version with two more lines in it. No mark anywhere that the file had ever said anything different from what it said now. I remembered it one way. The record showed it the other, and the record had the time stamp.

I couldn’t have said how long I sat there running it. Long enough that the sound of the floor changed without my noticing. When I looked up from the screen, the bullpen was close to empty, the briefing room door shut down the hall with most of the shift behind it. Luke’s chair was pushed in and his coat was gone off the back of it. Court, or the briefing; either way I’d missed him leaving, missed him standing up ten feet away from me, and that alone should have told me what kind of state I was in.

“Reports.”

I hadn’t heard anyone come up. Wright stood at the corner of my desk, jacket over one arm, all the time in the world, reading my screen without hurrying about it. The canvass was still open on it, fifty-eight lines and two blanks. I reached over and closed the window. Not fast. It didn’t matter. He’d had all the time he needed, and he’d taken it.

“They bury us in them,” he said, warm, comfortable, one cop to another. “Ninety percent of this job is typing, and the typing is out to get us. And that records program.” He shook his head at it. “You fix a thing, it unfixes itself by morning. I’ve said so upstairs for years. Nobody should be surprised when something turns up wrong in a file. It’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more.”

I hadn’t mentioned the flags. Not to him, not to anyone on the floor. And there he stood, sympathizing with my morning before I’d said one word about my morning, handing me the same comfort Murphy had handed me behind a closed door, almost in the same order. Reviews went through supervisors. There were half a dozen honest ways for all of it to reach him. I sat there and counted them while he smiled at me, and the counting didn’t help.

“Something on your mind, Sergeant?”

“Nothing at all. Commiserating.” The smile widened a notch, friendly as ever. “Mistakes happen, Detective, that’s all a flag ever means. Careful people, sloppy people, it doesn’t choose. Even the ones nobody would believe it of.” He glanced toward the briefing-room door, then back to me, and something in the look had changed by the time it landed. “Especially those, around here. Few months back in the building and the whole floor’s made up its mind about you. Reinstated. Cleared. The inspector’s good books. The golden boy of the division.” The words stayed light. The voice underneath them had stopped being light somewhere in the middle. “A man like that can’t put a foot wrong, can he? And if a foot goes wrong anyway, there’ll always be somebody standing by to explain how it couldn’t have been him.”

I didn’t answer. I watched his eyes instead, because he was smiling and his eyes weren’t. They stayed on me, flat and patient. And all at once there was dread low in my stomach, put there by nothing but a look.

“Anyway.” He straightened, bright again, every trace of the other voice gone. “Don’t let the paperwork win, Detective. And don’t work through lunch. Nobody thanks you for it.” He strolled off toward the stairs, unhurried, saying something pleasant to the cleaner in the corridor on his way, and the bullpen was empty again, and I was sitting at my desk with my heart going like I’d taken those stairs at a run.

That’s when a hand came down on my shoulder.

I came half out of the chair and swore, loud, one short word that bounced off the empty desks.

“Easy,” Luke said.

He was standing behind me with his coat over one arm, frowning. He looked at my screen, then back at me.

“What are you reading over there? A report or a horror story?”

“Don’t come up behind a man like that!”

“I walked the whole way across the floor.” He said it slow, watching me. “You were somewhere else.” A beat. “You all right?”

The question was a real one, and I could hear the second question waiting behind it.

So I shook it off the best I could, and stood.

“I’m fine. I’m starving, that’s all, I worked out an appetite. Come on, that diner on Parliament. I need a burger and fries, something greasy and fast, and I need you to order the same so I can steal your fries.”