Sympathy between humans (6 page)

 

 

After giving my statement, I ran into Marlinchen, who hugged me like a long-lost sister in the hallway. Campion was there as well, having heard the news on WCCO. Later that evening, one of the fire department officials let me ride with him out to the Hennessy property. There I found my car covered in soot, but otherwise driveable. I hosed it down as an interim measure, and drove it directly to a car wash.

 

 

It was only as I was falling asleep that night that I realized I’d forgotten to bring Cicero the money I owed him.

 

 

The
next day, around noon, I drove to the towers. On the 26th floor, I stepped out of the elevator and into a scene I’d been a part of too often.

 

 

Soleil was standing in the hall, leaning against the wall, her face a mask of grief. She was crying openly outside Cicero’s apartment. Nearby, at the door to Cicero’s apartment, a young uniformed officer was standing guard, trying to look impervious to the shock and dismay around him. From inside the apartment, a radio crackled. And I felt a fine tremor begin in my legs. The last time I’d felt that sensation was in the county morgue, where I’d gone to view a body a forensic assistant told me might be my husband.

 

 

I wished I didn’t know the things I knew, wished that like a civilian I could kid myself that a scene like this could signal a burglary or a simple assault. But it didn’t. It didn’t mean anything less than a homicide. I could have turned around and walked away, gone someplace private to internalize it. But I didn’t.

 

 

No one questioned my presence there. The neighbors knew me as Cicero’s girlfriend; and the cops on the scene knew me as a Sheriff’s detective. The uniformed officer outside the open door had me sign in on the scene log, and then I went inside.

 

 

It seemed wrong for there to be so much activity in Cicero’s apartment, which I’d associated with ambient light, quiet, order, and Cicero’s form, low to the ground but kinetic in its stillness. Now, every light in the place blazed, and able-bodied people moved around, looking out of proportion to the surroundings, their movements too quick, seeming random.

 

 

The apartment had been torn up. The chest holding Cicero’s medical instruments and supplies had been overturned, and notes from the filing cabinet were strewn on the floor. The wheelchair lay tipped forward in the middle of the living room. Nearby were some streaks and droplets of dried blood on the short, hard carpeting, as if someone had shaken a paintbrush.

 

 

The first of the technicians, a man named Malik, was starting a sketch that would eventually capture the layout of the apartment, as well as the position of every relevant object and bloodstain. The other tech, a full-bodied, red-haired woman I hadn’t met, was making notes. The detective was standing off to the side. It was Hadley.

 

 

He’d been my last boyfriend, pre-Shiloh. He’d worked closely with Shiloh, when they’d been on the interagency Narcotics task force, and I’d once raided a meth lab near Anoka with both of them. A black man, Hadley wasn’t particularly tall, but he had quick reflexes that I remembered from games of one-on-one. His hair was shorter now than in his undercover-Narcotics days; it was a look more suitable to his new role as a Homicide detective.

 

 

His dark eyes took me in, and he lifted his chin in acknowledgment. He could do no more while talking on his cell phone.

 

 

“When the techs are through . . . Yeah, I don’t know,â€

 

 

The girl who opened the door
at Ghislaine’s apartment looked like her country cousin: a little shorter, a little heavier, with hair that was as white as corn silk, and small, apprehensive blue eyes. She was braless under a V-necked white T-shirt, her pale legs in cutoffs, barefoot. Behind her issued the mindless noise of a television talk show.

 

 

“I’m here to see Ghislaine,â€

 

 

When you’re sleeping well,
the trapdoor at the bottom of your mind opens and you have deep, strange dreams: psychodramas full of symbolic imagery that you rarely remember on waking, and when you do, you tell a friend,
Last night I had the weirdest dream.
It’s when you’re restless and not sleeping well that you dream close to the surface of your mind, more like thinking in your sleep than dreaming.

 

 

In other words, the details of the dream that follows were just speculation, nothing more.

 

 

I was back in the courtroom. Hugh Hennessy was on trial, but this time I wasn’t the prosecutor. I was just observing, or that’s what I thought, until Kilander laid his hand on my shoulder.

 

 

Hugh can’t speak for himself,
he said.
Any judge would throw this case out so hard it’d bounce.

 

 

You said that already.

 

 

But they’ve found someone to speak for him,
Kilander said.
They want you to do it.

 

 

I said,
I can’t do that.

 

 

Don’t keep the judge waiting,
Kilander said.

 

 

Empathetic thinking is an important skill for a detective. No matter how much you might dislike a suspect, it’s useful to adopt his viewpoint, understand his motives. I kept this in mind as I settled myself behind the stand.

 

 

Whenever you’re ready,
the judge said.

 

 

I leaned forward and spoke for Hugh.
I know how bad it looks,
I said.

 

 

A little louder, Ms. Pribek,
the judge said.

 

 

I know how bad it looks,
I repeated.
But normally my desk was locked. And normally the kids didn’t even go in there; I didn’t keep anything in my study to attract them, no toys or candy. I kept the pistols there because there was no furniture in our bedroom that locked. My desk did. The guns would be just down the hall if I needed them. I kept the pistols loaded because the lake area wasn’t as built up back then as it is now. It was pretty isolated, and I wanted to protect Lis and the kids from break-ins. I don’t know why I forgot to lock the desk that one time. I just did.

 

 

How could it happen that the one time I forgot, Aidan went in there and found the gun? And he didn’t just shoot into the air, or his foot, but his chest. His chest!

 

 

I wasn’t afraid to call the paramedics and have the shooting on record; that’s not why I drove Aidan to the hospital myself. I know that’s what it looked like, but it’s not. I was afraid to wait for the ambulance. I grabbed him in my arms and ran for the garage. If there had been any speed traps on the road, the police would have had to chase me all the way to the hospital, because I wouldn’t have stopped. I wanted so badly to save him. But no one chased me, no cops saw me. I got all the way to the hospital, and still no one seemed to notice my arrival. And then I looked back at Aidan, and he wasn’t breathing. He was blue. And I knew he was gone.

 

 

I sat there in the car and cried, and still no one came over. When I was done crying, I thought about bringing the ER staff over to the car, getting them to take Aidan’s body, but then I didn’t want them to take him away from me and put him in the morgue. So I started the car up again and just drove home. I don’t know what I was thinking. I guess I wasn’t thinking at all.

 

 

When I got home, Lis was sleeping with Marli in the bed, and I didn’t wake them. When the sun came up, the morning was so beautiful, and I decided to bury Aidan under the magnolia tree. Lots of old American families have gravesites on their property. It’s a tradition. So I buried Aidan under the tree, and I said a prayer.

 

 

Marli woke up and I told her Mother was sick, and Aidan had gone away for a while. She said, “He’s coming back, isn’t he?â€
The first headlines
about Hugh Hennessy were restrained and respectful:
NOTED WRITER PERISHES IN HOUSE FIRE
. The media was respectful in their coverage of the funeral, where in the front row of the cathedral, Hugh’s four children all wept, their arms around each other, even Colm unashamed of his tears.

 

 

But after the burial, questions began to swirl, about why Hugh’s stroke wasn’t reported, about the identity of the young man who’d died earlier the same day and who’d been identified as Aidan Hennessy on his death certificate. Reporters began to probe, and in time the whole story came out. The media was banned from the Hennessy property on the day that Hennepin County technicians dug under the magnolia tree, but reporters congregated at the end of the long peninsula driveway, and their lenses captured the images as the techs brought up the bones of a very small child with ten fingers and a shattered sternum.

 

 

The Hennessy children refused all comment, with Campion acting as a family spokesman, however terse. I called Marlinchen several times in those stressful first weeks. She assured me everything was under control, and I believed her, mostly because although she sounded sober and occasionally tired, her voice lacked that sharp, tense note that I remembered from the worst of times. The continued presence of J. D. Campion might have something to do with that, I thought. He apparently had no plans to leave the Cities, and I was glad. He wasn’t the guardian that Family Services would have chosen for the Hennessys, but he was perhaps uniquely suited to this brainy, idiosyncratic little family.

 

 

In August, my work took me to the University of Minnesota campus to conduct a short interview. It was a hot day, humid but not unpleasant, and considering that it was only summer session, there were quite a few young people out on the great quadrangle overlooked by Northrop Auditorium. I was crossing along a path ground down in the grass when a male voice called after me. “Detective Pribek!â€
J
ODI
C
OMPTON
lives in California. She is the author of the acclaimed novel
The 37th Hour,
which also features Detective Sarah Pribek, and which is available in paperback from Dell.