“But that’s terrible! It’s immoral!”
“Well, it’s a legit investigative technique. Or at least, it can be. I’m just letting you know it can be misused, and also, once rumors get going, they take on a life of their own. It don’t mean the police actually have anything. It don’t mean your boy’s really in danger.”
The streetlight at the corner let me see her well enough to know I’d lost her there. Her expression closed off like I was moving back into the “stranger” category.
“My son is in danger,” she said. “You know who we are. We’re the kind who get the consequences. He ain’t no worse than those summer kids who smash mailboxes and smoke weed on the docks, but then those boys all go off to college and nobody ever holds them to account. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to be for Noah too, before the accident. You know, just floating through life whichever way he wanted, and nobody stopping him, nobody blaming him for anything that went wrong. But it was never going to be that way for Jackson.”
She opened the door and got out before I could think of anything to say. I called out, “Evening,” and watched to make sure she got in safely, but she didn’t say another word.
She was right. If Jackson had gone through what Noah had—if he’d been arrested for stealing prescription drugs, if he’d been in an accident that nearly killed him and would’ve left him disabled if not for all that rehab and PT—well, he wouldn’t have gotten a second chance. He might’ve done time for the pills, instead of getting off with a stint in juvenile rehab. And he would’ve been left disabled, because there was no way Mazie could pay for all the care it took to bring a boy in that condition almost all the way back.
I’d given Noah that second chance. It had cost almost everything I had, but wasn’t that what money was for?
Surely Jackson deserved the same.
6
Wednesday, June 19, Evening
I left Mazie’s and drove back up the causeway, but I didn’t go straight home. I hated to leave Noah waiting, but half the time he wasn’t there anyway. And, I told myself, at least now I wasn’t ignoring him to focus on my work. I was trying to help his friend.
If Detective Blount was still on duty—it was only a little bit past six—I might be able to find out some things from him. And if he wasn’t, I could find out when his next shift was. He’d been pretty rude in the crowd the other day, but then he never had any social graces to begin with. I pulled into a spot outside the police station.
As I went up the steps, the door at the top opened and Terri Washington came out. We’d been friends in high school, two outcast nerds who shared an interest in the law, but I’d only seen her maybe twice since returning to Basking Rock.
“My goodness, Terri,” I said. “For half a second I thought Oprah Winfrey was coming down these steps. I was about to look for a TV camera.” She really did look like Oprah, and she’d loved the comparison back in high school.
“Uh-huh,” she said, with a glint of humor. “Wish I had her money instead of her looks. How you been?”
We stopped to chat, her standing two steps above me on account of how petite she was. I asked, “What you doing at the cop shop? You back on the force?”
With a look that clearly said I had lost my mind, she asked, “You suffer some kind of brain injury, Leland? You here to report some mugger hit you upside the head? I quit about thirty seconds after my pension vested. It’d take an act of God to bring me back.”
A breeze came up as we chatted. Evening was one of the few pleasant times to be outdoors in the summer. Terri told me she was working as a private investigator while studying part-time for a degree in social work. “People are always underestimating me,” she said. “When you’re a cop that’s a bad thing, but as a PI, it’s good. I don’t get noticed. And even if I do, people still do any damn fool thing in front of me.”
“What, do they just think you don’t carry no consequences?”
“That’s exactly it. Like, what harm could I do?”
“Well, you could put ’em on your TV show, make ’em have some kind of embarrassing heart-to-heart with Dr. Phil.”
She laughed.
“That why you’re here?” I asked. “Some PI thing?”
“Uh-uh.” She explained that she volunteered for Jumpstart, a local halfway house for women in recovery. I felt a pang of guilt. What if I’d done more to push Elise into something like that?
“You okay?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. It’s just, you know, it’s a sad thing.”
“Addiction? Yeah. Especially when they relapse. We had two of those in the past week, and one of them got picked up. I was just in there talking to her. Going to need a public defender.”
“I know some good ones up in Charleston County,” I said. “They might have some intel on whoever you get down here.”
“Well, thank you.” She looked at her watch. “I should let you go take care of whatever you’re here for.”
“Yeah, hoping to talk with Detective Blount.”
In her eyes I saw her put two and two together. She said, “The Warton thing?” When I nodded, she said, “He was already gone when I got here.”
Without moving her head one iota, her eyes flicked around like she was checking that the coast was clear. Then she looked at me quite pointedly and said, in a tone much more casual than the look in her eyes, “I do have time for a quick drink. Unless you want to keep standing here on these steps?”
I
