At this Somers shakes her head.
“You need me to do your dirty work. You’re using me.”
“Come on, Clare.”
“Really?” Clare says. “Am I wrong?”
“Come on,” Somers says again. “All investigation is dirty work. All of it. I’m not using you. I need your skills. I hired you because you’re good at this work and I wanted you to see that. Like you say, my hands are tied as a cop. I have a long list of rules and procedures I’m bound to follow. I walk a thin line that you don’t need to walk. Yes, I need you. You could argue that I’m using your skills to my advantage. But I found room in my tiny little cop budget and a workaround with my superiors so I could pay you. I gave you a shot at your own case. Have you ever considered that I might be doing you a favor?”
“A favor that suits you.”
“Ha!” Somers laughs before her expression snaps back to focus. “I’m not going to apologize to you. You say you’ve always been a pawn. Let me ask you something, Clare. Do you have free will? Does your brain function on its own?”
Clare crosses her arms, silent.
“Well. You know what? I’m a black woman and I’ve been a cop for fifteen years. You have no idea the shit I’ve dealt with in my life. The crap people throw my way. Half my colleagues can’t make small talk with me without regularly jamming their foot in their mouth. I won’t bore you with the stories, because there are thousands of them and there’s just no way you’d understand. You couldn’t. Just like I can’t understand what it’s like for you to have endured the kind of marriage you had, to have lost your mother so young, to have dealt with addiction like you have, and losing a baby? That’s a form of grief that could do anyone in. It could. But I’m going to tell you what I tell my kids every day: don’t exhaust yourself focusing on the various ways other people have failed you. Shit will come at you that you can’t control, and no one else is going to change their ways on your behalf. And if you operate that way? Looking to others? You might end up blind to the people who actually care about you. So scrub out anyone who causes you harm and move forward. But telling yourself that things are the way they are because you’ve been a pawn? Fine. Fate has not been good to you. But that way of thinking isn’t getting you anywhere. You need to jump off the hamster wheel, Clare. You’ve got to take control.”
Clare blinks fast and looks up. Her cheeks feel flushed. She cannot make eye contact, but when Somers reaches to squeeze her hand, Clare does not withdraw. She releases a sharp laugh to mask the tears.
“Okay?” Somers says.
“Okay.”
“We ready to regroup?”
“Yes.” Clare rubs her eyes and gestures to the building. “What are we doing here? Seeing the coroner?”
“Jack Westman’s autopsy was never publicly released. You remember when Douglas Bentley mentioned that? Well, he was right. That’s pretty standard when no one is charged. I could request access from the police file, but that can take a while. And I have this feeling that your friend Germain might not be terribly amenable to sharing it. So I figure we’ll go right to the source.”
“And the coroner will just give it to you?” Clare asks.
“I have some tricks to make sure he does,” Somers says.
Again they sit in silence. Clare cannot give in to how tired she feels. Part of the exhaustion comes from trying to keep everything straight, to keep track of what she’s told Somers and what she hasn’t. Perhaps, Clare thinks, full disclosure is just easier. She takes hold of Somers’s arm.
“I need to tell you two things before we go inside,” she says.
“Uh-oh.”
“I called my friend Grace this morning. My friend from home. I grew up with her. She and my ex, Jason, kind of became friends after I left. Long story short, he convinced her that I was bad news.” Clare coughs. “That I was just some junkie who ran off on all my family and friends because I couldn’t hack my life. Anyway. I called her after I left the hotel this morning. And she told me that a woman came to her door a while ago, asking about me. So I had this gut feeling, like this terrible gut feeling, and I emailed Grace a picture of Zoe Westman. It was her. Apparently, Zoe Westman showed up at her house asking about me.”
Somers presses her fingers to her temples with a groan.
“This is not computing,” she says. “I don’t get it. How is that possible? She must be wrong.”
“She’s not wrong,” Clare says. “She wouldn’t make that mistake.”
“Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable. You know that. They can see things that aren’t really there.”
“Not this time,” Clare says.
“What in the bloody hell, then?” Somers says. “So Zoe Westman is alive and she’s searching for you? I do not get it.”
“There’s nothing else you know that you haven’t told me?” Clare asks. “About Jason? About Malcolm? Because like I said, this is all connected. It is. It must be. And I feel like I’m in the middle of it.”
“I don’t know anything I haven’t already told you,” Somers says. “Like I said, I’ve got my best people on it. And now I’m confused as hell. What’s the second thing you need to tell me? Do I even want to know?”
“I saw Malcolm Hayes this morning,” Clare says. “He’s here.”
“Jesus Christ. Are you kidding me?”
“We’ve
