'Did you have any idea?' I asked quietly. 'Did either of you?'
'Of course not,' she said sadly. 'No one knew.'
More silence and then she made her last plea.
'Think about it, John. It's better to heal in private.'
'Like with Sarah?'
'What do you mean?'
'You never talked about it… you never talked to me.'
'I can't talk about that now.'
'You never can. It's only been twenty years.'
'Don't be sarcastic about something like that.'
'I'm sorry. Look, I'm not trying to be like this.'
'Just think about what I asked you.'
'I will,' I said. 'I'll let you know.'
She hung up as angry with me as I was with her. It bothered me that she didn't want me to write about Sean. It was almost as if she was still protecting and favoring him. He was gone. I was still here.
I straightened up in my seat so I could look over the sound partitions of the pod my desk was in. I could see the newsroom was filling up now. Glenn was out of his office and at the city desk talking with the morning editor about the coverage plan for the abortion-doctor shooting. I slumped back down in my chair so they wouldn't see me and get the idea of assigning me to rewrite. I was always dodging rewrite. They'd send out a bunch of reporters to a crime scene or disaster and these people would call their info back to me. I then had to write up the story on deadline and decide which names went on the byline. It was the newspaper business at its most fast and furious, but I was burned out by it. I just wanted to write my stories about murder and be left alone.
I almost took the printout up to the cafeteria so I'd be out of sight but decided to take my chances. I went back to reading. The most impressive piece had run in the New York Times five months earlier. No surprise there. The Times was the Holy Grail of journalism. The best. I started reading the piece and then decided to put it down and save it for last. After I had scanned and read through the rest of the material, I went up for another cup of coffee, then started to reread the Times article, taking my time with it.
The news peg was the seemingly unrelated suicides of three of New York 's finest within a six-week period. The victims didn't know each other but all succumbed to the police blues, as it was called in the article. Two with their guns at home; one hanged himself in a heroin shooting gallery while six stoned hypes watched in dazed horror. The article reported at length on the ongoing police suicide study being conducted jointly by the FBI's Behavioral Science Services in Quantico, Virginia, and the Law Enforcement Foundation. The article quoted the foundation's director, Nathan Ford, and I wrote the name down in my notebook before going on. Ford said the project had studied every reported police suicide in the last five years looking for similarities in causes. He said the bottom line was that it was impossible to determine who might be susceptible to the police blues. But once diagnosed, it could be properly treated if a suffering officer sought help. Ford said the goal of the project was to build a database that could be translated into a protocol that would help police managers spot officers with the police blues before it was too late.
The Times article included a sidebar story about a year-old Chicago case where the officer had come forward but still was not saved. As I read, my stomach tightened. The article said Chicago police detective John Brooks had begun therapy sessions with a psychiatrist after a particular homicide case he was assigned to began bothering him. The case was the kidnapping and murder of a twelve-year-old boy named Bobby Smathers. The boy was missing for two days before his remains were found in a snowbank near the Lincoln Park Zoo. He had been strangled. Eight of his fingers were missing.
An autopsy determined that the fingers had been severed before his death. That, and not being able to identify and catch the killer, apparently was too much for Brooks to take.
Mr. Brooks, a highly regarded investigator, took the death of the precocious, brown-eyed boy unusually hard.
After supervisors and colleagues became aware that it was affecting his work, he took a four-week leave and began intensive therapy sessions with Dr. Ronald Cantor, whom he was referred to by a Chicago Police Department psychologist.
At the start of these sessions, according to Dr. Cantor, Brooks openly spoke of his suicidal feelings and said he was haunted by dreams of the young boy screaming in agony.
After twenty therapy sessions over a four-week period, Dr. Cantor approved of the detective's return to his assignment in the homicide unit. Mr. Brooks by all accounts functioned properly and continued to handle and solve several new homicide cases. He told friends that his nightmares were gone. Known as 'Jumpin' John' because of his frenetic, go get'em attitude, Mr. Brooks even continued his ultimately unsuccessful pursuit of the killer of Bobby Smathers.
But sometime during the cold Chicago winter something apparently changed. On March 13-which would have been the thirteenth birthday celebrated by the Smathers boy. Mr. Brooks sat in his favorite chair in the den where he liked to write poems as a distraction from his job as a homicide detective. He'd taken at least two tablets of Percocet he had left over from treatment of a back injury the year before. He wrote a single line in his poetry notebook. Then he put the barrel of his.38 Special into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was found by his wife when she came home from work.
The death of Mr. Brooks left family and friends bereaved and full of questions. What could they have done? What were the signs they had missed? Cantor shook his head wistfully when asked during an interview if there were answers for these troubling questions.
'The mind is a funny, unpredictable and sometimes terrible thing,' the soft-spoken psychologist said in his office. 'I thought that John had come very far with me. But, obviously, we did not come far enough.' Mr. Brooks and whatever it was that haunted him remain an enigma. Even his last message is a puzzle. The line he wrote on the pad offered little in the way of insight into what caused him to turn his gun on himself.
'Through the pale door,' were his last written words. The line was not original. Mr. Brooks borrowed it from Edgar Allan Poe. In his poem 'The Haunted Palace,' which originally appeared in one of Poe's best-known stories, 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' Poe wrote:
While like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh-but smile no more.
The meaning of those words to Mr. Brooks is unclear but they certainly carry the melancholy incumbent in his final act.
Meantime, the murder of Bobby Smathers remains an open case. In the homicide unit where Mr. Brooks worked and his colleagues still pursue the case, the detectives now say they are seeking justice for two victims.
'Far as I'm concerned, this is a double murder,' said Lawrence Washington, a detective who grew up with Brooks and was partnered with him in the homicide unit. 'Whoever did the boy also did Jumpin' John. You can't convince me any different.'
I straightened up and glanced around the newsroom. No one was looking at me. I looked back down at the printout and read the end of the story again. I was stunned, almost to the same degree as the night Wexler and St. Louis had come for me. I could hear my heart beating, my guts being taken in a cold and crushing grip. I couldn't read anything else but the name of the story. Usher. I had read it in high school and again in college. I knew the story. And I knew the character of the title. Roderick Usher. I opened my notebook and looked at the few notes I had jotted down after leaving Wexler the day before. The name was there. Sean had written it in the chronological record. It was his last entry.
RUSHER
After dialing the editorial library I asked for Laurie Prine.
'Laurie, it's-'
'Jack. Yes, I know.'
'Look, I need an emergency search. I mean, I think it's a search. I'm not sure how to get-'
'What is it, Jack?'
'Edgar Allan Poe. Do we have anything on him?'
'Sure. I'm sure we have lots of biographical abstracts. I could-'
'I mean do we have any of his short stories or works? I'm looking for 'The Fall of the House of Usher.' And
