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“You look like you just saw a ghost,” she says. “Or made one.”
Sometimes I forget Tessie is a detective in her own right. She may not do much in the way of fieldwork, but she has interrogated more people than I can count. Thousands, probably. She knows what guilt looks like.
“Do you really want me to tell you?”
She sits down and pulls open her snack drawer. This is a drawer I am supposed to pretend does not exist. It is her private stash. She feels the same way about this drawer as I do about my apartment. She grabs the most chocolatey of bars and hands it to me. “Eat this,” she says. “Before you pass the fuck out.”
I thought my hands were shaking from all of the murder. Maybe I’m not so much racked by guilt as suffering from low blood sugar. I take a bite and immediately feel nauseous.
“I’m good,” I say, wrapping the wrapper carefully over the end, hiding the nub of my nibble.
“You are absolutely not good,” she says. “You’re pale, sweaty, and you can’t eat. Either you’re coming down with one hell of a flu, or you did something you wish you hadn’t.”
“I had to do it. I wish it hadn’t been so gross.”
Tessie doesn’t react. She’s using her interrogation skills on me. I could say anything now and she wouldn’t show any sign of horror or similar emotion. She’s just going to listen and build the case against me, let me hang myself with my own rope.
“You know you’re not in trouble, right?” she says. “I mean, he wasn’t a person. There are no laws against killing an animal, which for all intents and purposes, that’s what he was.”
“Was he?”
“I mean, lawyers will argue it back and forth, but he wasn’t a person.”
He was a person to Justice, though. He was a brother. He was someone Justice was trying to protect. It’s not human law I am worried about. It’s natural law. Specifically, Order and Justice.
“I’m taking you to my place tonight,” she says. “I don’t like the way you look, and I don’t think hanging out at the station is going to be any good for you, either.”
“Okay.”
Usually I’d argue, but I don’t feel like arguing right now. I feel like being somewhere I don’t have to be myself, because what myself did today has probably shattered anything that might ever have happened between Justice and me. I have betrayed Justice. I can pretend I didn’t, but I did.
“Let’s go.”
* * *
I’m at Tessie’s apartment. She also has a small place, but hers is more traditionally appointed. It has a functioning kitchen, for starters. She’s making something in it while I stare at my phone. I’m not looking at anything in particular. I’m just looking in general.
“He’s going to hate me.”
“Who?” She frowns. “Chief’s going to love you. He might not ever really know why, but he will be glad a murderer is off the street.”
“Justice.”
“Oh. The moth. Yeah. He might not be a fan. I think you should lay low for a while. Take some leave. You’re not okay, Sally.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“See. That’s how bad you are. I just called you Sally and you didn’t even freak out on me.”
Huh. Guess I didn’t.
8
I’m in a state of something like shock for about a week before I start to feel myself again, before the oddness and the guilt begin to be absorbed by everyday life. Obviously, the murders stop. There aren’t too many questions asked. The proximity of the death of Officer Peterson to the end of the serial killer’s reign of terror is not thought to be of any significance.
Officially, the murders remain open cases. Unofficially, everybody knows that one of us took matters into their own hands and nobody is going to say a fucking thing about it. The Chief gives me a nod and a smile on my way into work most days now, which is about as explicit a sign as possible that he knows.
After seven days of something like mourning, but more like freaking out, I decide it’s time to get back to normal. I can’t stay at Tessie’s forever. I have to reclaim my life.
