“Nice job, man.”
“You need anything, Harry?”
“Some shitstorm, huh, Harry?”
He murmured “thanks” or “yes” or “no” or just shook his head. He wasn’t ready for conversation with any of them, and he certainly wasn’t ready to be a hero.
A crowd had gathered outside, pressing eagerly against police barriers, gawking through both broken and unbroken windows. He tried to ignore them because too many of them seemed to resemble the perp, their eyes shining with a fever glaze and their pleasant everyday faces unable to conceal strange hungers.
Connie came through the swinging door from the kitchen, righted an overturned chair, and sat at the table with him. She held a small notebook from which she read. “His name was James Ordegard. Thirty-one. Unmarried. Lived in Laguna. Engineer. No police record. Not even a traffic citation.”
“What’s his connection with this place? Ex-wife, girlfriend work here?”
“No. So far we can’t find a connection. Nobody who works here remembers ever seeing him before.”
“Carrying a suicide note?”
“Nope. Looks like random violence.”
“They talk to anyone where he works?”
She nodded. “They’re stunned. He was a good worker, happy—”
“The usual model citizen.”
“That’s what they say.”
The photographer took a few more shots of the nearest corpse — a woman in her thirties. The strobe flashes were jarringly bright, and Harry realized that the day beyond the windows had grown overcast since he and Connie had come in for lunch.
“He have friends, family?” Harry asked.
“We have names, but we haven’t talked to them yet. Neighbors either.” She closed the notebook. “How you doin‘?”
“I’ve been better.”
“How’s your gut?”
“Not bad, almost normal. It’ll be a lot worse tomorrow. Where the hell did he get the grenades?”
She shrugged. “We’ll find out.”
The third grenade, dropped through the attic trapdoor into the room below, had caught a Laguna Beach officer by surprise. He was now in Hoag Hospital, desperately clinging to life.
“Grenades.” Harry was still disbelieving. “You ever hear anything like it?”
He was immediately sorry he had asked the question. He knew it would get her started on her favorite subject — the pre-millennium cotillion, the continuing crisis of these new Dark Ages.
Connie frowned and said, “Ever hear anything like it? Not like, maybe, but just as bad, worse, lots worse. Last year in Nashville, a woman killed her handicapped boyfriend by setting his wheelchair on fire.”
Harry sighed.
She said, “Eight teenagers in Boston raped and killed a woman. You know what their excuse was? They were bored. Bored. The city was at fault, you see, for doing so little to provide kids with free leisure activities.”
He glanced at the people crowding the crime-scene barriers beyond the front windows — then quickly averted his eyes.
He said, “Why do you collect these nuggets?”
“Look, Harry, it’s the Age of Chaos. Get with the times.”
“Maybe I’d rather be an old fogey.”
“To be a good cop in the nineties, you’ve gotta be
He just stared at her, which was easy enough, much easier than considering what she had said, because it scared him to think she might be right. He couldn’t consider it. Wouldn’t. Not right now, anyway. And the sight of her lovely face was a welcome distraction.
Although she did not measure up to the current American standard of ultimate gorgeousness set by beer- commercial bimbos on television, and though she did not possess the sweaty exotic allure of the female rock stars with mutant cleavage and eight pounds of stage makeup who unaccountably aroused a whole generation of young males, Connie Gulliver was attractive. At least Harry thought so. Not that he had any romantic interest in her. He did not. But he was a man, she was a woman, and they worked closely together, so it was natural for him to notice that her dark-brown-almost-black hair was beautifully thick with a silken luster though she cropped it short and combed it with her fingers. Her eyes were an odd shade of blue, violet when light struck them at a certain angle, and might have been irresistibly enticing if they had not been the watchful, suspicious eyes of a cop.
She was thirty-three, four years younger than Harry. In rare moments when she let her guard down, she looked twenty-five.
Most of the time, however, the dark wisdom acquired from police work made her seem older than she was.
“What’re you staring at?” she asked.
“Just wondering if you’re really as hard inside as you pretend to be.”
“You ought to know by now.”
“That’s just it — I ought to.”
“Don’t get Freudian on me, Harry.”
“I won’t.” He took a sip of water.
“One thing I like about you is, you don’t try to psychoanalyze everyone. All that stuff’s a load of crap.”
“I agree.”
He wasn’t surprised to find they shared an attitude. In spite of their many differences, they were enough alike to work well as partners. But because Connie avoided self-revelation, Harry had no idea whether they had arrived at their similar attitudes for similar— or totally opposed — reasons.
Sometimes it seemed important to understand why she held certain convictions. At other times Harry was equally sure that encouraging intimacy would lead to a messier relationship. He hated messiness. Often it was wise to avoid familiarity in a professional association, keep a comfortable distance, a buffer zone — especially when you were both carrying firearms.
In the distance, thunder rolled.
A cool draft slipped across the jagged edges of the big broken window and all the way to the back of the restaurant. Discarded paper napkins fluttered on the floor.
The prospect of rain pleased Harry. The world needed to be cleansed, freshened.
Connie said, “You going to check in for a mind massage?”
Following a shooting, they were encouraged to take a few sessions of counseling.
“No,” Harry said. “I’m fine.”
“Why don’t you knock off, go home?”
“Can’t leave you with everything.”
“I can handle it here.”
“What about all the paperwork?”
“I can do that, too.”
“Yeah, but your reports are always full of typos.”
She shook her head. “Your clock’s wound too tight, Harry.”
“It’s all computers, but you don’t even bother to run the spell-check program.”
“I just had grenades thrown at me. Fuck spell-check.”
He nodded and got up from the table. “I’ll go back to the office and start writing up the report.”
Accompanied by another long, low rumble of thunder, a couple of morgue attendants in white jackets approached the dead woman. Under the supervision of an assistant coroner, they prepared to remove the victim from the scene.
Connie handed her notebook to Harry. For his report, he would need some of the facts she had
