Chapter 61 Acquaintances
A FEW DAYS AGO•••
The police station at two in the morning had a particular kind of stillness to it.
It wasn’t comfortable. It had the kind of air that came at the end of a long day when things had been resolved and people could finally breathe. It was the kind of stillness that existed around unfinished business, around open case files and cold coffee with the hum of fluorescent lights that nobody had bothered to switch off because the people still inside the building weren't ready to go home yet. Or in Police Officer Ryan’s case, weren't willing to.
It was the older policeman who had questioned Grace at the hospital earlier. He sat in the chair in front of the monitor with his arms folded across his chest and his jaw set so tight it ached, and he stared at the half-rendered composite on the screen like it owed him something, like if he looked at it hard enough and long enough, it would give him back what he'd lost in that hospital.
It wouldn't. He knew that, but he wasn't ready to move, so he kept sitting there.
An imaging specialist across the desk, a soft-spoken older man who had been doing this job for longer than Ryan had been alive, moved the cursor carefully across the screen, making another adjustment to the jawline. The room smelled like old paper and the dregs of a coffee pot that had been sitting on the warmer since six that evening, and somewhere down the hall a phone rang twice and then stopped.
Ryan didn't blink.
It hadn’t been more than a few hours since Daniel Marsh had died during the shootout in the hospital, they all thought it was a simple shoulder wound but apparently, that wasn’t the case. He was a lost cause before the attempt to even save him.
Ever since, Ryan hadn’t heard any witty remarks from the new young partner that was assigned to him, he had always thought it was unnecessary yapping from the young boy but now, there was awful silence from someone who'd been talking to you a minute ago and wasn't anymore.
Daniel had been a good kid, he was tough and was one who never wanted to back down from any challenge.
Ryan had always liked that about him.
‘You'll grow to like me,’ he'd said. ‘I’ve got that influence. We'd make a good team.’
He'd said those things with complete conviction, and Ryan had indeed grown to like the young man, even laughing at some of his witty comments, and now he was gone. And Ryan was sitting in a police station at two in the morning because he had seen the face of the person who did it, and he was not going home until that face was on record.
"The cheekbones," Ryan said quietly. "They were sharper than that. More defined."
The specialist adjusted without a word. He'd stopped making small talk around midnight, which Ryan appreciated. He didn't want small talk, he just wanted the face and fast.
The composite shifted on the screen, subtle changes accumulating the way they had been all evening, and Ryan leaned forward slightly, studying it. The memory of the person was clear in his mind, sharp in some places and smeared in others, like a photograph that had been handled too many times.
He remembered the face. He would always remember the face.
He was going to find that face and whoever it belonged to was going to spend the rest of their life behind bars if Ryan had to personally drag them there.
The door to the imaging room opened and another policeman leaned in, his jacket already on, his keys in his hand. He was a few years older than Ryan, heavyset and patient in the way that long careers in law enforcement either built in you or destroyed, and he looked at Ryan now with an expression that sat somewhere between respect and genuine concern.
"Hey," he said, keeping his voice low and even. "It's past midnight. You've been here since six this morning. Why don't you head home, get some sleep, and we can pick this back up first thing tomorrow? We can save the progress, so we don't lose anything."
Ryan didn't turn around. "I'm fine."
"I didn't ask if you were fine. I said go home."
"And I said I'm fine, Detective." His voice came out flat, not aggressive, just immovable. "I'm not leaving until this is done. You don't have to stay."
The policeman was quiet for a moment and Ryan could feel him considering whether to push it, he was weighing his authority against the particular grief of a young officer who'd lost someone, and apparently deciding it wasn't a fight worth having tonight.
"Alright," the policeman said finally then turned to the specialist. “You good?"
"I'm good," he said without looking up from the screen.
"Call me if you need anything." The door closed again, and the room went back to its hum and its quiet.
Ryan unclenched his jaw and rolled his neck once, feeling the vertebrae pop. Then he leaned back toward the screen.
They worked through the rest of the night like that. Sometime before the sun rose, Ryan finally rose to go home, knowing his boss might take him off the case if they walked in to find him still seated.
“Thank you.” He greeted the specialist with a shake and pushed through the door. He then walked down the corridor of the quiet station, past the empty desks, the sleeping computers, and the board on the wall that he couldn't quite look at directly because Daniel's name was written on it in relation to an open investigation, and seeing it still didn't feel real. He pushed out through the front doors into the night air, which hit him cold and immediate and almost helped.
He sat in his car for a moment without starting it.
Ryan started the car.
He didn't drive home directly. He told himself he was just taking the long way, getting air, letting the drive decompress him the way drives sometimes did when sleep felt far off and the inside of his own head was too loud to sit with. But he knew, if he was honest with himself, where he was going. He'd known since he got into the car.
He drove into a nice neighborhood, the houses here spoke richly of their owners' pockets. He pulled up in front of a house. The lights in the front room were still on, which didn't surprise him, he doubted anyone in this house was sleeping much either. He sat outside for a moment, his hands resting on the wheel, preparing himself for the particular weight of walking back into this particular grief from the outside when it wasn't his own to carry.
Then he got out of the car and knocked.
The woman who opened the door was in her forties, her dark hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and she had the face of someone who had spent the last four days crying in careful, controlled increments so as not to fall apart in front of the people who needed her. She was Daniel's mother. She had fed Ryan dinner at this table whenever Daniel insisted he came over.
He didn’t even understand why the boy chose to be a detective when he could have everything handed down to him.
‘But that’s no fun now, is it?’ Daniel had said it to him once while grinning, when the other officers mentioned it.
The woman looked at him and said nothing for a moment. Then she stepped back and let him in.
"Come in, Ryan. Have you eaten?"
"I'm okay, Mrs. Marsh. I just wanted to stop by, I won't stay long."
She nodded, guiding him gently through the small entryway toward the living room where a lamp was on and the television was running at low volume, the house smelled like the candles he’d noticed that she always burned in the evenings. She paused at the bottom of the stairs and called up.
"Molly, love. Ryan's here."
A beat of silence from upstairs. Then the sound of quiet footsteps.
Molly Marsh came down the stairs slowly. She was almost eighteen, five years younger than her brother, with the same lovely green eyes Daniel and their mom had. She also has the same way of holding her mouth when she was trying not to show too much. Though she wasn't hiding much tonight.
Her eyes were swollen in the way eyes got after days of crying rather than hours, the kind of puffy, exhausted grief that didn't go away between sessions because there weren't really sessions, it was just continuous, with brief pauses to sleep if they could, and eat and breathe before it came back.
She stopped on the bottom step and looked at Ryan.
He looked back at her and felt the guilt move through him like it was something physical.
Molly stepped forward. Her voice, when it came, was quiet and cracked at the edges.
"Promise me," she said. Her eyes didn't waver from his. "Promise me you'll find who did this." She pulled in a breath that shook slightly on the way in. "Avenge my big brother. Please."
Ryan looked at her, standing in her family's living room at almost five in the morning with her eyes red and her whole face asking him for the only thing he actually had to give, and he felt something settle in his chest. Not peace. Nothing like peace. More like the specific kind of resolve that comes when you've already decided something and someone has just reminded you why.
"I promise," he said quietly.