The Angel of Knowlton Park (50 page)

Authors: Kate Flora

The only sound in the corridor was the shuffling of his feet. It carried him back to a shabby rooming house and one of his rare visits to his father. He'd knocked on the door. Heard shuffling steps and the door had opened to an older, ravaged version of his own face, the reek of booze, the charming Irish joviality. A ratty bathrobe and mottled feet in ragged slippers, a swollen purple hand reaching out to pull him in. His father had been the age then that he was now. Looked decades older. The sound of slippered feet ever after that made him cringe.

He heard footsteps behind him. A soft voice called, "Detective?" He turned to find Charlene Farrell standing there. "I heard about what happened tonight."

"I don't want to talk about it," he said.

"I wasn't going to ask you to." She looked young and tired, and something, maybe weariness, had taken the brittle edge off. "I knew you'd come back to check on the victims." He started walking. "Look. Detective. I'm not here to bother you. Honestly. I just wanted to apologize."

"For what?"

"Misjudging you?"

He turned on her suddenly. "I thought that was your job."

"Excuse me?"

"It's what you do. What your paper loves to do. Ignore the thousands of good things police officers do every day. The lives we lead. The risks we face. Only waiting for a mistake, or something you can call a mistake, to rub our faces in it. What about you? About what you do? About that picture? You're young, at the beginning your career, and you've already done something more unthinkable than anything I've done in thirty years. And there's no one out there to call you on that."

"My editor approved that picture."

"As if two wrongs make a right," he said. "Now, if you'll excuse me—"

"Dammit," she said. "I'm trying to apologize and you won't give me a chance."

"Write me a letter," he said. "Write my boss a letter."

"I don't want to write
to
you," she said. "I want to write
about
you. The people you've helped. The difference you've made. Like today. Tonight. Captain Cote tries to shut you out of the investigation. Without you, your insight, experience, persistence, who knows what might have happened."

"Who have you been talking to?"

She smiled. "I have my sources."

Then surely they'd also told her about his reputation with the press. "Please don't write it, Ms. Farrell. It can only make things worse. For me. For a lot of other good people." She started to speak. He held up his hand. "One other thing. It's never just one of us. It's a team thing. I didn't catch a killer and I didn't save those kids. The Portland Police did."

"You really believe that?" she said.

He walked away from her then. Walked until he came to Neddy Mallett's room. The boy looked so small and so sick. Smaller because of the enormous stuffed moose that lay beside him.

Chris was sitting in a chair beside the bed, reading. She set down the book, came over, and put her arms around him. "Hi, honey," she said. "How was your day?"

"I wouldn't want a rerun. How about you?"

"If this is going to be a long-term relationship, I may have to take up knitting. I need something mindless to do when my head is all full of worry about you." She pulled his face down to hers and kissed him.

Burgess had never had sex in a hospital room but he was willing to consider it. "Why would you worry about me? I was with Stan and Terry. They look after me."

"The Three Stooges," she said.

"You have no idea," he said.

"Yeah. Maybe you can help me with that." She tightened her grasp. "It is over?"

"Except the paper work. You wanna go away somewhere this weekend?"

"Like where?"

"I know where there's a nice cottage on a lake. We could borrow a canoe."

"It sounds heavenly," she said. "But I'll believe it when I see."

"You check on Nina?"

"An hour ago. They're going to keep her down for a while."

"Was she..." He was supposed to be able to deal with ugliness. Couldn't bring himself to ask.

But she knew. "No, Joe. Neither of them were. None of them. You guys got there in time."

"The Three Stooges."

"Oh. All right. I know you're not Stooges. I just wish..."

"I know you do. You always will. But consider this. If you were Iris Martin, or Nina Mallett..." He touched the wild red curls. "Or Ned... who would you rather have on your side, The Three Stooges or Paul Cote?"

She stepped up beside him, pressing her hip into his. "Oh, Joe," her voice dropped into that lower register. He reached down and took her hand. "That's not fair."

"And life is?"

Reluctantly, he stepped away. "I'm going to look in on Nina."

"You coming back?"

"To you? Always."

"Idiot."

"Only an idiot would come back to you?" She picked up the moose and threw it at him. "Portland officer assaulted by moose," he said. "Yes. I'll be back."

He sat in the chair beside Nina Mallett's bed, holding her limp hand in his. He uncurled the fingers with their chipped pink polish, one of them bandaged where she'd cut herself, and heard her voice, back there in that horrific room. "It's all my fault. It's always my fault. I'm bad. I'm bad. I'm bad."

It was a terrible time to be a child. He and Terry and Stan, and even the righteous Vince Melia, were such imperfect guardians of the small souls entrusted to their care. Even sworn to serve and protect, they could only do it one incident, or one bad guy, or one street corner at a time.

Just for tonight, he ought to have been able to enjoy some satisfaction that things had come to a good end. He'd done his job. Timmy Watts's killer had been identified. Matt McBride's killer had been caught. Regina McBride, monster and maker of monsters, was behind bars. So were the vicious predators Osborne and Taylor. And the three children were alive. The runaway train of predation and abuse had been stopped. Now it was time to tend to the injured. Sooner or later they would wake up and begin to feel their pain. He had little confidence that someone would be there to help them deal with it.

He knew Melia had stopped at church on his way home. For Vince, the certainty of the Baltimore catechism was still there. It was wired in Burgess, too. There was a deep place where the certainty and the possibility of redemption dwelled and could be comforting. But there was a parallel place that was dark with doubt and cynicism, a pool that got stirred up when children and other innocents were the victims.

Police officers don't cry. They're supposed to be the ones who are there when ordinary citizens need comfort and security. Sitting in the dimly lit room, listening to the quiet rhythm of Nina Mallett's breathing, Burgess became, for a private moment, an ordinary citizen. Then he wiped his eyes and heaved himself back up out of the chair. It had been a long day, a long week, a long year, a long life. And tomorrow he would get up and do it again.

The End