It's that soft laugh I always loved, a cool breeze of kindness and clarity.
'Maybe it's me now,' I murmur.
I'm trying to sound defiant, but the quivering chin and sweaty palms make it hard to pull off.
I can feel him smile, gentle and smug and not really there. Damn it.
'Yeah, yeah, yeah . . .' I mutter to the ghost as I reach out and turn the knob.
I push him away in my mind, and I open the door.
5
I STARE INSIDE for a moment without entering. My terror is pure and clean and nausea-producing. It occurs to me that this is the core of what I hate the most about my life since the 'big bad' happened. The constant uncertainty. One of the qualities I always liked about myself was my decisiveness. It was always simple--decide and do. Now it's:
God, I am afraid. All the time. I wake up afraid, I walk around afraid, I go to sleep afraid. I am a victim. I hate it, I cannot escape it, and I miss the effortless certainty of invulnerability that used to be me. I also know, however much I heal, that that certainty will never return. Never.
'Get a grip, Barrett,' I say.
This is the other thing I do now: I wander, without ever going anywhere.
'So change it,' I murmur to myself.
Oh yeah--and I talk out loud all the time.
'You one cwazy wabbit, Barrett,' I whisper.
One deep breath and I move through the door.
It's not a big office. Just the four of us, desks and computer stations, a small acting conference room, phones. Corkboards covered with photos of death. It looks no different now than when I was here six months ago. But the way I feel, I might as well be walking on the moon. Then I see them. Callie and Alan, backs to me, talking to each other as they point at one of the corkboards. James is there, focused with his usual cold intensity on a file that lays open on the desk in front of him. It's Alan who turns and sees me first. He sees me, and his eyes open wide, his mouth drops, and I am bracing myself for a look of revulsion. He laughs out loud.
'Smoky!'
It is a voice filled with joy, and in that moment, I am saved.
6
DAMN, HONEY-LOVE, you won't have to dress up for Halloween anymore.' This is Callie. What she says is shocking, crass, and unfeeling. It fills me with an easy joy. If she'd done anything else, I probably would have burst into tears.
Callie is a tall, skinny, leggy redhead. She looks like a supermodel. She's one of those beautiful people; staring at her too long is like looking into the sun. She's in her late thirties, has a master's in forensics with a minor in criminology, is brilliant, and lacks any social veneer at all. Most people find her intimidating. Many decide, on first blush, that she's uncaring, maybe even cruel. This couldn't be further from the truth. She is loyal to an extreme, and her integrity and character couldn't be tortured out of her. She is blunt, forever truthful, brutal in her observations, and refuses to play games, political, PR, or otherwise. She would also put herself in front of a bullet for anyone she calls a friend.
One of Callie's most admirable features is the one that's easiest to miss--her simplicity. The face she shows to the world is the only one she has. She doesn't believe in self-importance and has no patience with those who do. This is probably the crux of what confuses those who judge her harshly: If you can't take her poking fun at you, she's not going to lose any sleep over your discomfort. Lighten up or get left behind, because--as she likes to say--'If you can't laugh at yourself, you're of no use to me.'
It was Callie who found me in the aftermath of Joseph Sands. I was naked and bleeding, screaming and covered with vomit. She was dressed to kill, as always, but she didn't hesitate to gather me in her arms and hold me while she waited for the ambulance. One of the last things I remember before I passed out was the sight of her beautiful tailored suit, ruined by my blood and tears.
'Callie . . .'
This reproval comes from Alan, quiet, serious, to the point. Alan's way. Alan is a huge, scary-looking African-American. He's not just big, he is gargantuan. He is a mountain with legs. His scowl has caused more than one suspect in an interrogation room to wet himself. The irony, of course, is that Alan is one of the kindest, gentlest people I have ever known. He has a tremendous patience I have always admired and aspire to, and he brings this to our cases. He never tires of going through the evidence, of examining the smallest thing. Nothing bores him when he is tracking a killer. And his eye for detail has broken more than one case. Alan is the oldest of us, in his mid- forties, and he brought ten years of experience as a Los Angeles homicide detective with him when he joined the FBI.
A new voice. 'What are you doing here?' If displeasure was a musical instrument, this would be a symphony.
It's said without preamble or apology; blunt, like Callie, but without her humor. This comes from James. We call him Damien behind his back, after the character in
James is also brilliant. That off-the-charts, white-hot nova kind of brilliant. He graduated from high school at fifteen, got perfect scores on the SATs, and was wooed by every college worth a damn in the nation. He picked the one with the best criminology curriculum and proceeded to burn his way through to a PhD in four years. Then he joined the FBI, which had been his goal all along.
When he was twelve, James lost his older sister to a serial killer with a thing for blowtorches and screaming young women. He decided he was going to work in this office the day they buried her. James is a closed and faceless book. He seems to live for just one thing--what we do. He never jokes, never smiles, never does anything unnecessary to the job at hand. He doesn't share his private life or anything else that would give a clue to his passions, likes, dislikes, or tastes. I don't know what kind of music he enjoys, what movies he prefers to watch, or even if he does.
It would be too simple and neat to think of him as just efficient and logic-driven. No, there is a hostility to James that comes out in sharp bursts. His disapproval can be acrid, and his thoughtlessness is legendary. I can't say that he takes joy in the discomfort of others; I would say instead that he just doesn't care about it one way or the other. I think James is forever angry at a world where individuals like the one who killed his sister can exist. Even so, I long ago stopped forgiving him for himself. He's too much of an ass.
But he is brilliant, a brilliance forever blinding those around him, like a permanent camera flash. And he shares an ability with me that ties us together, a gift that creates an umbilicus between us, that gives me an evil twin. He can get inside the mind of a killer. He can slide into the nooks and dark places, consider the shadows, understand the evil. I can do it too. It's not uncommon for us to end up working together on certain parts of a case, in a very intimate sense. During those times, we get along like oil and ball bearings, smooth, flowing, unstoppable. All the rest of the time, being around him is about as pleasant as someone sanding me like a two-by-four.
'Nice to see you too,' I reply.
'Hey, asshole,' Alan purrs, a low chord of menace. James folds his hands in front of him and gives Alan a cold, direct look. It's a trait James has that I have to admire: Even though he's only five foot seven and maybe 130 pounds soaking wet, he's almost impossible to intimidate. Nothing seems to scare him. 'It was just a question,' he replies.
'Well, how about you drink a nice big cup of shut the fuck up?'
