Good Morning, Killer

a spine board. Claps on the back, handshakes, long-lost pals. Now the wind was wrapping around my legs, and I could look forward to clammy panty hose the rest of the day.

Finally, he jogged over, brushing off his hands.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you. Hi, doll,” giving me a smooch. “See that lifeguard? The tall, skinny guy? That’s Hank Harris!” he said wonderingly.

“You know him?”

“I know his dad!” Andrew shook his head. “When you turn fifty, things get weird. That kid’s supposed to be eight years old, playing Little League!”

“You’re not fifty.”

I never knew anyone to add to his age, but Andrew was several years ahead of himself in an apprehension he had about “getting old,” which was ridiculous. He was adorable. Not perfect-looking (nose like a stumpy old carrot, not the tightest chin), but a rough-hewn charisma you would definitely pick out at a bar — dark wavy hair cut short and greenish eyes that could bully or tease; a face that could be a mask of detachment, then open up like a kid who just hit a home run. I believe this was the reason — an extraordinary ease with his own emotions — that Andrew was often picked by the department for public relations gigs. He was a seasoned street detective who apparently was not afraid to show what he felt. Therefore he would not likely be afraid of the deeply awful things that had happened to you. When Andrew gave workshops on bank security the female tellers would write down their phone numbers on deposit slips. He would call them back, was my understanding.

That’s how we met. Working the same bank robbery, dubbed “Mission Impossible” because the bandit came in through the roof. We don’t always catch the bad guys, but we’re great with the nicknames.

Andrew took the umbrella. I put my arm around his waist even though his jacket was cold and slick. We were walking as fast as possible, an inelegant pair, since I am five four and he was six one, outweighing me by a hundred pounds. He was built like a football player and cared about it. He owned a bench and read weight-lifting magazines.

“So what happened?” I asked of the bike wreck.

“I don’t know why assholes go out in this weather.”

“Because they’re—”

“—The sand is all soggy, look at this, like riding in peanut butter.”

The wind picked up. We ran for it.

“Come into my office.” Unlocking his car. “Normally we don’t let Feds in here. But I have something special for you.”

“I have to go.”

“So do I.”

But we paused, very close, under the umbrella.

“I’m crazy about you, you know that,” he said.

“Yeah, well, you drive me crazy. Is that the same thing?”

The rain drummed on our makeshift roof. In the frank light our faces were eager, ruddy, his high round cheeks shining like a choirboy’s. In those days it lifted me to be with him. It just lifted me, like a kite off the ground that wants to return to the same spot in the sky.

His eyes half closed and I rose up and he leaned down to kiss me and we did and the umbrella tipped and rain went down our necks.

“Fuck this shit,” he said, fumbling for his keys.

“I have to get out of here. You know about the kidnapping?”

“Let me see. Do I work robbery/homicide, or is it Hal’s Auto Body?”

I laughed. “Sometimes a toss-up, huh?”

“I’ve been at the house since four this morning!”

“You have?”

“First it was a critical missing, then they got the call around three.”

“How are the parents?”

He shrugged. “Distraught. The girl never came home from school. They contacted her friends. Nothing.”

“‘Not like their daughter not to let them know where she was,’” I guessed.

“Not like their daughter,” he agreed.

Our few words implied a complicated professional speculation about who these people were and how the girl had disappeared.

“So what were you doing there?”

“I caught the case.”

“It’s your case? It’s my case, too!”

He snorted indulgently as he often did when I would say things that showed I was missing the precision of what was happening.

“What the hell did you think that page was all about?”

“There were … other possibilities.”

He tried to get past a smile. Code 3-ER-AB. A supply closet in a certain hospital emergency room. Code 3-RVM-AB. The Ranch View Motel.

“I was giving you a heads-up, in case it worked out.”

“I guess it did.”

But I wasn’t so sure.

“Get in the car, I’ve got more.”

“Is this a good idea?”

Teasing. “To get in the car, or to work together?”

Right then I didn’t like it.

“Andrew, how are we going to do this?”

“What do you mean, how?” He was hurt. “I thought it would be good for you at the Bureau. I thought you would get a kick out of it.”

“I did. I do. It’s very cool.”

I smiled and touched his hand, pushed up his sleeve to look at his watch. A kidnapping is a federal crime. The FBI has jurisdiction over the local police. He had to know I would be his boss.

“We better get over there.”

I had become aware of sirens. They might have called an ambulance for the fellow with the bike. Or maybe it was another wreck. Suddenly the light was hurting my eyes, hard off the ocean, steely blue. It was going to be one of those sickening days when the sun comes out after all.

Two

Juliana Meyer-Murphy was in ninth grade. She came from a stable home in which the parents had been married seventeen years, neither previously divorced. There was a younger sister. The house was a two-story Spanish with cast-iron balconies and fat curves and bits of colored tile set at odd places in the stucco. There were fan palms and potted flowers and even a fountain, as if the owners were Hollywood aristocracy instead of manufacturers in the garment business. The front door was painted purple.

The tech vans pulled up to the residence at the same time Andrew and I arrived in our separate cars. A blue sky was shining through a maw in the clouds while fine spray sifted across the rooftops like million-dollar rainbow dust. I grew up in this neighborhood, but these new mini mansions could have eaten our little cottage for breakfast. Like the Meyer-Murphys’, they each had at least one sport utility vehicle in the driveway and a sign for an alarm system on the lawn. A private security patrol car sat side by side in the middle of the street with a unit from the