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“Really?” she murmured.
I considered that it might be best to let her fall asleep as I worked on her foot.
Unfortunately, she was hooked. “You used past tense. When did he die?”
“He’s still alive,” I said, “but he’s dead to me.”
“You’ve never said anything about your family. How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
“None.”
“Only child,” she said. “And I’m accumulating siblings daily. And if Cleve really is my father, Molly is my cousin again, not my sister. Lavender was my sister. Navy was my brother. And they’re both dead. Wait’ll Skye gets a load of this. Although, technically, if Pete OneTree is her father, we’re not related by blood.” She sighed and pulled her foot out of my grasp. “Tell me about your father. Your family can’t be as fucked up as mine is. Was.”
I picked up her other foot and started in on the arch. “He was a cop. A detective. NYPD.”
“So it runs in the blood. Retired now?”
“He’s in prison.”
Liz sat up, jerking her foot off my lap. “What?”
I held up my hand, cream on the fingers. Liz shook her head. “Your father.”
I got a towel and cleaned my hands. I came back, but sat in the chair near the bed, because this wasn’t something I could talk about lying down or, honestly, close to Liz because it made me feel dirty.
She was sitting, a pillow in her lap, her arms crossed on it. Waiting.
I’d never told this story, so I didn’t know where to begin. I harkened back to my Ranger days when we’d give a Sitrep (situation report) after doing a reconnaissance mission. Short and to the point. “My father got his gold shield fast. Was a star in the department. Made lieutenant and then captain of detectives. He retired as a deputy inspector, which is pretty damn good for a guy who didn’t graduate high school but eventually got his GED.”
I paused, but Liz didn’t ask a question, for which I was grateful.
“He had a reputation for breaking hard cases no one else could. For nailing the bad guys. When I joined the force that’s all I would hear about from the older guys. How great my father had been. How hard it was going to be to live up to his reputation. The weird thing was, I had no desire to do that. I just wanted to do my job.”
“Over a year ago,” I continued, “a reporter for the New York Times was digging into an old rape case where new DNA evidence revealed that the man who’d been imprisoned twenty-five years ago for it was innocent. He was released and got a bunch of money from the city. But this reporter wasn’t satisfied. He wanted to know why the wrong man was convicted. Turns out, the lead detective on that case had been my father.”
I’d been staring off into space. I turned and looked at Liz. She was focused on me. Waiting. No indication of any judging.
I was already as exhausted as Liz had been when she collapsed on the bed. “Long story, short version. My father had repressed the testimony of a witness who was the man’s alibi. Without that, the suspect was basically railroaded into a false confession and sent away. Once that became public, defense attorneys began tearing through all my father’s old cases. They found at least a dozen with similar suppressed evidence. Whether it was witnesses or stuff from the crime scene. A couple of those convicted had died in prison. Eight were exonerated. And then, of course, there are the cases that were closed that shouldn’t have been, with the perp still out there, most likely committing other crimes because an innocent man had taken the rap. It was bad every way you approached it.”
I fell silent. Saying it out loud was worse than just thinking about it.
“And now he’s in jail?” Liz said.
I nodded. “Prison.”
“Is that why you left New York City?”
“A bit part. Everything changed from ‘you can’t live up to your father’ to ‘are you as corrupt as him?’”
“Assholes,” Liz said. “But selfishly, thank God for it.”
“What?”
Liz leaned forward. “Not about your father. What he did was terrible. He betrayed you and his badge. But he was punished, he isn’t ever going to railroad the innocent again, and most of all, you’re here in Burney. With me.” She tilted her head, thinking. “You know, this explains Jim Pitts.”
“What?”
“You looked at Jim Pitts and saw another young man tarred because his father had been crooked. That’s why you wanted to give him a break so badly. It just turned out that he was as bent as his father.”
