'So you're not even getting paid for your breakdown,' Dupree says. 'Nice.'
She laughs in spite of herself. 'Look, this guy did something, Alan. I can feel it.'
He is a believer in intuition too, and for the first time, he seems to consider her seriously. Or maybe he's just being nice. 'You check girlfriends? Wife?'
'Ex-wife,' she says.
'She alive?'
'Oh yeah. In fact, when I saw her, she was full of spunk.'
'Who's with the lunatic now?'
'Nobody.'
'You left him down there?'
'I can't charge him with anything. But he isn't going anywhere. I took his shoes and his belt.'
Dupree looks confused. 'He a suicide?'
'Probably not. I just knew he wouldn't go anywhere without his shoes.'
For the first time Dupree smiles, and gets that look of pride, the one that used to sustain her. 'Look, just send the guy home, Caroline. Before it gets any weirder. Tell Spivey to pick him up Monday and they can start over.'
'Okay,' she says, to placate him, to drop the subject. 'You're right.'
He takes a drink of his coffee. 'You knew I was going to say that. You brought me down here to ask me something you already knew the answer to?'
'No.' The breath catches in her throat.
Dupree just watches her.
'Look,' Caroline says. 'How many confessions have you heard? A thousand? We arrest a guy inside a house and he confesses to breaking in. Or he confesses that he killed the girl whose blood he happens to be wearing. We can see that. We call it a confession when some asshole describes for us the world we can see with our own fuckin' eyes.
'But this guy today… I mean, did it ever occur to you that there is another kind of confession, maybe a more important kind?
'What I'm trying to say is-' She's frustrated by her inability to communicate to him. 'Maybe there's a whole other world, Alan. And maybe it's made up of all the intentions and the things we
And finally she looks up at him and she can see that he wants to know, but he can't possibly. How can he when she doesn't even know.
'God, you need to get some sleep,' he says quietly.
'Maybe there aren't names for the crimes we commit.'
'What the hell does that mean, Caroline?'
'I… I don't know.' She closes her eyes and thinks about Clark Mason and the way he uses that word 'confession,' the purity and freedom of it, the way he seemed to just cut loose, to talk – or to write, actually. 'I wanted you and Debbie to split up,' she blurts. 'I never told you that. I never acted on it. But it's what I wanted.'
'Oh, come on, Caroline,' Dupree says. 'That had nothing to do with it. You can't take responsibility for what happens to other people.'
'Did you think when you left Debbie that we would get together?'
His answer catches in his throat. 'That wasn't why-'
'Did you think we would get together?'
He looks down at his coffee.
'Then don't tell me it didn't have anything to do with it.' She feels herself getting wound up. 'Up here, in the world, we collect fingerprints and we make eye contact and we measure blood spatters and interview people who lie to us and we pretend like we don't want each other and that what we're doing has meaning. But what the fuck are we doing? You're with your wife. I'm alone. The dead stay dead. We bag 'em and take 'em away and clean up their blood and so what? We save some girl's life, and we're so busy patting ourselves on the back, we don't even notice that she's been dying since she was twelve. We just move the shit around up here, Alan. We don't change anything. We don't save anyone.'
'Who told you we're supposed to save people?'
'Then what?' She cranes her neck.
'We make sure the other guys don't get away with it.'
Caroline wants to sleep or to cry, she can't tell which. She looks past Dupree, out the front window of the coffee shop.
'You're tired, Caroline. That's all. You're a little burned out, and you're letting some nutcase get inside your head.'
She's ignoring him now, staring out the window and across the street.
'You need to send this guy home. You need to get some sleep. You need-'
Caroline stands and begins walking slowly across the coffee shop.
'Where are you going?' Dupree asks.
She walks to the window and looks out. Across the street, behind the row of parked cars, she can see Pete Decker, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. He is yanking on something – the hair of the young girl who answered the door to Pete's apartment. Pete is dragging her by the hair across the sidewalk, toward the door of the apartment building. Two of the boys who were up in Pete's apartment earlier stand patiently on the sidewalk holding big stereo speakers and watching Pete pull the girl.
Caroline walks out the coffee shop door and begins to cross the street.
The girl says nothing as Pete drags her by the hair. Her face has the placid surface of the recently and frequently stoned. In fact, she doesn't resist at all until they reach the doorway, at which point she spreads her arms and calmly gets hold of the door frame. For a moment, Pete can't get her inside. He flicks at her face with the back of his hand and the girl crumples, and Pete gathers himself to finish dragging her inside when he looks up and sees Caroline striding across the street.
'Oh, hey,' he says, and lets go of the girl. She slumps in the doorway.
Caroline reaches the curb without slowing. Pete steps out of the doorway and begins to sprint down the sidewalk, but she has the angle. She gets her arms around his waist and is dragged a few steps as Pete tries to run. He smells like cat piss and onions. He twists and punches at her the way he punched the girl; Caroline feels a weak blow glance off her head, and she slides off his waist and down his legs. He tries to run again, but she's got his ankles and Pete Decker crashes down on the sidewalk. He scurries a few feet with her holding his ankles before she can pull herself up and jump onto his back and crawl up, driving the ball of her kneecap between his shoulder blades. The air goes out of him, but he keeps trying to crawl forward. She grabs the scruff of his hair and pushes his face into the sidewalk. Pete continues to struggle, flailing with his arms and legs. Caroline wonders what the hell is taking Dupree so long.
And it's not until she gets one of his wrists and cranks it, and Pete finally gives up and slumps down on the sidewalk, that she looks up and sees Dupree standing there like a civilian, like a fucking tourist next to the gawkers and the kids with the stolen stereo. They're all staring down at Pete Decker, whose face is jammed into the sidewalk and whose nose and lips are bleeding. And they all have the same look on their faces.
'Jesus, Caroline,' Dupree says. 'You need to get some sleep.'
5
The cold returns at night in Spokane, on just about every night in the winter, even nights like this, when the sun has lied about early spring. At dusk the air loosens, the pooled snow begins to freeze, and the grass shines like it's been sheeted with glass.
