Page 17 of Trust my Heart

He looked at me a second longer. If he had more to say, he kept it for later.

“You’re buying,” he said, and put his coat on.

I grabbed my jacket and got us moving toward the doors before he could ask me anything else.

Chapter 6: How Did It Start with You

Ryan

The coffee had gone cold before first light, and I drank it anyway, because it was something to do with my hands.

The division across the street was nobody’s idea of 51. New brick, a wall of glass, bike racks, the edge of a green roof if you caught the right angle. The lobby lights came on warm while the sky was still gray. If a man left 51 for this, nobody in his life would have called it a step down.

I’d parked where a car could sit for an hour without becoming anybody’s business, and I’d been there long enough to watch the building come awake. Cleaners out first. Night shift trickling through the back lot in ones and twos, heads down against the drizzle.

Luke thought I was chasing papers on an old case of mine. That was what I said at the door this morning, jacket already on, and he’d nodded, and that had been the whole of it. It had come out smooth and easy, and I’d thought about that most of the drive over. The lying was getting easier. That was its own kind of bad news.

The night before, at the diner, I’d done the thing I’d promised. Most of it. I told Luke about the flags, and Murphy being decent about them, and the records system that eats entries, and the IT check that was going to settle the whole question. All of it true. He’d relaxed by the second refill. His shoulders came down. At the end he said, “So it’s the damn machine,” and sounded finished with it. I said it looked that way. What he didn’t get was Wright standing over my desk in an empty bullpen, telling me nothing at all in a voice I still couldn’t repeat to a single living person. So, I’d kept it, and smiled, and picked up the check.

Finding this place had cost one phone call. Everybody at 51 knew where Wright had gone when he left the first time; it wasn’t a secret. The name of the detective who’d ridden with him out here took a records clerk who owed me from my 52 days. Now the favor was spent, and I was parked outside a strange division waiting for a woman I’d never met. I hadn’t said the plan out loud to anyone.

My phone buzzed on the seat. Luke. New dryer’s inaugurated. Almeida held a small ceremony.

I typed back: Tell him I’m proud of them both.

He sent a thumbs up. I put the phone face down on the seat and sat there feeling bad about a text about a dryer.

Day shift came in over twenty minutes, in small bunches through the back lot, everybody the same height under an umbrella. I had a six-year-old service photo and a description from the clerk, and from across the street every second person matched both. That plan died quietly. I did the thing I’d wanted to avoid, and went in the front door like a person.

The lobby smelled like new carpet, which no part of 51 had smelled like since two decades ago I guessed. One wall was framed community awards and a shelf of plaques, with the overhead lights aimed at them. The visitor book wanted name, badge, division, and reason for visit. I gave it the first three honestly and wrote follow-up, general for the fourth, and signing it I thought: there it is. Paper. Every version of this morning left a record somewhere, and I was the one holding the pen.

“Detective Brar,” I said. “Is she in yet?”

The desk sergeant was young for the desk and friendly, like the building. He checked something, barely looking at my badge. “Just. You’re out of 51.” He sounded pleased about it. “Long way from home. She expecting you?”

“No.”

“Back lot. Gray truck. She takes her ten minutes out there before shift. Parade, rain or shine.”

The gray truck had its tailgate down despite the drizzle. The woman sitting on it was in her fifties and built small and square, with an unlit cigarette between two fingers. She watched me cross the whole lot without once looking like she was watching.

“Detective Brar. Ryan Carlson, out of 51.” I held the badge up where she could read it. “I’d like ten minutes if you have time.”

“Ten minutes for what.”

“Adam Wright.”

Her face closed, polite about it. She looked at me for a long moment, top to bottom, the way we were all trained to look and most of us forgot to. I couldn’t tell what she found. Something in it must have been familiar, because she put the cigarette back in the pack, flipped the tailgate up, and said, “Not here. Walk with me to the end of the lot. Anybody asks, you came about a prisoner transfer.”

We walked. The end of the lot had a fence, a dumpster, and a view of the ramp to the parking level. Nobody within fifty feet.

“How is he?” she said. “Settling in all right over there.”

“Everyone likes him.”

“They would.” She said it with no heat at all. “Ask anybody inside that building this morning, they’ll tell you Adam Wright was the best thing that ever happened to this unit. You could run a poll. He’d win it today, and he’s been gone since the spring.”

“And if I ask you?”