Page 21 of Trust my Heart

“I review what the queue gives me, Detective. Every supervisor in this building does.” A pause, exactly long enough. “I’m sorry. I mean that.”

“All right,” Chen said, to the room, already moving. “Floor’s got work.” She said it to everyone and aimed it at me.

The floor got busy again, and everyone kept watching. Murphy’s door was open when it started. When I looked again it was closed, and I hadn’t heard it close.

Luke never moved. He stood at his desk with a file in one hand and nothing on his face at all. I’d seen that face before, in interview rooms, on the other side of the glass, and it had never once been aimed anywhere I was standing.

We worked the rest of the afternoon ten feet apart, and nothing crossed the gap, not a word, not a look. Once, a court package came through needing both our signatures, and he brought it over, set it on my desk, said “Second tab,” and was gone before the pen was in my hand. That was the whole conversation. A constable came up with a question for him, looked at the space between our desks, and went away without asking. The question came by email instead. Around us, the whole floor stayed very busy not watching, and the ordinary sounds kept on, phones and printers and rain on the high windows, as if nothing had happened.

At end of shift Luke stood, took his jacket, and left without me. In all the time since the program had chained us together, through everything, that had never happened once. The floor saw that too.

I gave it twenty minutes, then took the back stairs down to the parking level, because the front doors meant crossing the floor again, and I had nothing left for that.

The parking level was concrete and half the lights, pool cars in their row, the ramp up to the street at the far end. I was ten steps in when Wright came down the ramp on foot, coat over his arm, and saw me, and stopped.

The warmth, the openness, the worry, all of it went out of his face between one step and the next, and what was left looked at me with nothing in it at all. When he spoke, the voice had gone down a register, flat and unhurried, and I understood that I was hearing him for the first time.

“You’ve been reading your own file, Detective.” He came closer, no rush. “Whose mistakes do you think they are?”

I didn’t say anything. He wasn’t asking.

“Here’s where things are,” he said, “since you paid for the answer.” He set his coat over a pool car’s mirror, smoothed it once. “Luke got more interesting than he expected while I was gone. That’s worth something. I intend to ride it. So is he, when I get to it. And when something better opens up, they can both go back where I found them.” He said it with no weight at all, a man reading a duty roster.

I didn’t move. Part of that was training: give him nothing, hold the face, let him do all the talking. The rest was simpler. There was nowhere to put what I was hearing, so I stood there and took it.

Somewhere over our heads the building went on. A pipe ticked. My own pulse was very loud and very slow.

“So,” he said. “Take it upstairs. Tell Murphy a sergeant confessed the whole thing in an empty garage with no witnesses. Better, go home and tell Luke, tonight, while he’s that angry with you. Use the voice from this afternoon.” He lifted the coat off the mirror and put it on, unhurried, squared the collar. “You see the problem?”

A door banged in the stairwell above us and feet came down, some constable with a banker’s box, and the warmth was back in Wright’s face, instantly.

“Get home safe, Detective,” he said, at normal volume, and walked to his car, and on the way he said something to the constable with the box that made the man laugh.

I stood there in the cold with all of it. Every word of it was true, and none of it was worth anything past the bottom of that ramp. He hadn’t threatened me, hadn’t sworn me to anything, hadn’t needed to. The floor upstairs had done it for him this afternoon, with my help.

The apartment was lit when I got home. Luke was at the counter, still in his work clothes, two plates made and neither one touched, and he didn’t get up.

“Two days ago, you told me you were chasing paper on an old case.”

“Luke…”

“I’m not done.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never raised his voice. “At the diner you told me it was the machine. You sat there and watched me be relieved, and you paid the bill and walked me home. And this afternoon Adam stood in the middle of our division and told everyone we work with you’ve been investigating him.”

He hadn’t gotten a single thing wrong, and I had nothing to answer with.

“I was going to tell you.”

“When?”

“That night. Then the next night. I didn’t know how to broach the subject.”

“And what else?” He said it evenly, and that was worse than if he had yelled. “That’s my real question now. Until two days ago I’d have sworn you didn’t lie to me. Now I get to go back through the whole month and wonder. The flags. The nights you went quiet. Every time you looked at your phone and put it face down. What else have you decided I don’t get to know? About work. About him.”

There was a true answer to that. It was worse than anything he was imagining. I didn’t give it.

“That long a pause is giving you away,” he said. “I told you everything,” he said. “On that couch. Every ugly thing I had, some of it things I’d never said out loud to another living person. Because we said nothing sits between us that hasn’t been said. I heard you agree to that.” He looked at me for the first time since I’d come in. “And then you lied to me and went asking around about my past behind my back.”

“The person I went to see was his partner, Luke. Four years, same as you. She told me she read everything he touched before it went out, because it wasn’t safe not to. And that the one time she stopped covering for him, her own files started coming back wrong. Missing pieces. Flags she couldn’t explain either…”