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She grunted and chewed bread. “Honestly?”
“Please.” He was dying to know.
“Because you’re a cop.”
That stung. “So, what. Rocco is ATF. You let him help out at your school.”
Munching on shrimp, she shook her head. “Not the same thing.”
“Both law enforcement.”
She shrugged. “Still different.”
“What have you got against cops?”
She clearly had some grudge. A big one, too, if she had declined his offer to work for free based solely on that.
“I see right through this little plan of yours,” she said.
“What plan is that?”
“Serving sumptuous seafood to get me talking.”
She was right, but he wasn’t letting on easily. “How so?”
“There’s a surprising intimacy to it. The informality that comes when you eat with your hands.”
It was hard to be aloof with someone while sucking tasty bits of crab from your fingers. That was the reason he’d chosen the meal instead of steaks.
Brian gave a knowing smile. “Guilty as charged.” She was changing the subject. Trying to lead him down a different path. “Spill it.” He kept his features soft, his tone inquisitive not defensive. “Why do you hate cops?”
“If I open that can of worms, things will get heavy, fast, and not in the way that you want.”
She had no idea what he wanted. If she did, it would probably scare her off.
“I want to know you,” he said. “Want you to know me.” All true. “This is an important subject, considering I’m the thing you hate.”
“All right. Remember you asked for this.” Dropping crab legs into her bowl, she looked up at him. “My dad was a cop. He used to beat my mother. She never dared call 911 because he told her that he would make her disappear if she ever did. But the neighbors called the police a couple of times. When they showed up, they would take my dad outside, talk to him on the front lawn. Neighbors watched from their yards or from their windows. Then they’d let him go. They claimed it was because my mom wouldn’t make a statement or press charges. Bottom line, calling them was pointless. I learned the hard way that blue wall of silence is real.”
The same thing that had supposedly happened with Haley. At least according to Charlie.
But in this day and age, once a victim or someone else called the police to report domestic violence, the matter was usually out of the victim’s hands. If a law enforcement officer believed a crime was committed, they were obligated to arrest the alleged offender, regardless of whether the victim wanted to press charges.
Who was to say how strictly that had been enforced when Charlie was a kid?
Today, with the legislation that had been passed to protect victims of domestic violence, the law was upheld.
Of course, he wasn’t so naive as to think that there weren’t any cases that slipped through the cracks.
This was a small town. Seth did have a lot of friends on the force. Some who might have been inclined to look the other way. Not that Brian ever would have.
“I remember, vividly, the last time my father beat her. It was summertime. I was seven. There was a heat wave. A scorcher of a day. The cicadas were so loud, it was kind of frightening. Meat loaf for dinner set him off. Because he’d wanted fried chicken. He beat her so badly, I thought he might kill her. So, I called the cops. When they came, I finally mustered the courage to speak up. Even though my father looked at me like he wanted to strangle me, hollered at me to shut up. I kept talking, told them everything that happened. The two officers had an argument outside. One finally came back. Arrested my father. Five hours later. Five,” she said, holding up her hand, “he stormed back into the house. My father snatched me out of bed by my hair. Grabbed his gun. Dragged me to their bedroom. Mom begged him not to hurt me. He looked at me with these glassy eyes, had the strangest expression. Told me that this was my fault. Then he shot my mother. Next himself. And left me alive.”
To live with the memory of that horror. Surely with survivor’s guilt as well. Losing both her parents in such an awful, ugly way, to be traumatized at such a young age. What a terrible thing.
“I’m so sorry you had to go through that,” he said.
“That’s the summer I went to live with my aunt and uncle, Rocco’s parents.”
