Chapter Eight #2
She shook her head. “The police said they came from behind us. I never saw a thing.” Glancing up at Sam, she said, “Will you find them? Will you make them pay for taking my sweet husband from me?”
“I’ll do everything I can. I promise you. Is there someone we could call to be with you? A friend or your family or anyone?”
“No. My family and Sri’s are in India. The only close friend either of us has here is each other. That was all we needed.”
Sam couldn’t imagine being so alone in the world. “Surely the people you were with last night would come if you asked them to.”
“I don’t know them well enough to ask for that.”
“If you write down the name and phone number of a friend, I’d be happy to make the call for you.”
Rayna thought about that for a minute, and then reached for the pad. “Sri made me memorize the phone number of his lab partner in case I couldn’t get in touch with him. He got so absorbed in his work that sometimes I had to call her to reach him.” She wrote down the woman’s name and number.
Sam handed the notebook to Freddie, who left the room to make the call, and then she gave her card to Rayna. “I have to ask… You say your family is in India, but you speak with a British accent.”
“Sri and I were educated in the United Kingdom. That’s where we met. Our families sacrificed a lot to give us the best of everything, and we were looking forward to doing the same for them after we finished school. Now…” She sighed deeply. “I don’t know what I’ll do.”
“If you think of anything that might be helpful to the investigation, please call me anytime. And if I can do anything at all for you, feel free to call.”
“You’re very kind. Thank you.”
“I’m sorry this happened to you and your husband in our city.”
“So am I. We loved it here. We were happy.”
Sam wanted to tell her it was going to be okay, that she would survive this, but how could she be sure of either of those things? “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you. Everyone has been so kind.”
“I’ll leave you to get some rest.” Sam stepped out of the room and encountered Keeney, noting his eager expression and handsome young face. The job hadn’t broken him yet, but it would. It always did.
“Are you all right, Lieutenant?”
“Yeah. Tough one.”
“I don’t know how you guys in Homicide can handle what you see every day. I wouldn’t be able to do it.”
“You’d be surprised what you can do when you have to.”
“I guess.” He shrugged. “I give you credit, and I admire how good you are at it.”
“Thank you.” Drained after her conversation with Rayna, Sam leaned against the wall and put her head back, taking a minute to regroup.
In the distance, she heard whispering at the nurse’s station, probably directed at her.
A lot of whispering had been directed her way in recent weeks, and she ignored it the way she always did.
“I don’t know how you can deal with that either,” Keeney said in a low tone intended only for her.
“I deal with it by ignoring it.” She thought about how she wished she could pop into a cubicle while she was here and ask for a pregnancy test. Hell, she could stop by their doctor friend Harry’s office and ask him to do it for her.
But doing either of those things would require her to share her suspicions with someone, and it had been hard enough to bring Shelby in on it.
She probably ought to tell Nick, but the thought of disappointing him—again—had her deciding to wait until she knew for sure. Harry could put her out of her misery, but they had a case to work and no time to waste with a shooter on the loose and a city on edge.
They had to operate under the assumption that the shooter wasn’t finished with them yet, so there was no time to tend to her personal business. Not today anyway.
Freddie rejoined her a few minutes later. “The lab partner is on her way. She was glad we called. She said she’s been frantic wondering where Rayna was and if she was all right.”
“I’m oddly relieved to know that someone cares about her.”
“Me, too. Where to from here?”
“I want to talk to Danita Jackson again.”
“Let’s go.”
To Keeney she said, “Let us know if anything changes here or when they release her.”
“Will do, LT. Hope you catch the bastards fast.”
“Me, too.”
They left the hospital and headed for the Jackson home, located a few blocks from where Jamal had been shot.
On the way, Sam said, “Stahl is offering to take an Alford plea.”
“That’s a bunch of crap,” Freddie said bluntly. “Crap” counted as a swear word to him. “What’re you going to do?”
“They told me to take twenty-four hours, talk it over with Nick and my dad, but I want to hear him say he did it.”
“Can’t say I blame you after what he put you through.”
“A trial would be ugly—for me, Nick, the department.”
“Who cares? You’re the one who was in that room with Stahl, and you’re the only one who matters when it comes to making this kind of decision.”
His fierce support made her smile. “Thanks.”
“Whatever you decide, we’ll have your back.”
“That means a lot.”
Danita’s two-story townhouse had pots of flowers on the porch and other blooms lining the sidewalk. “You can tell a lot about people by how they take care of their homes,” Sam said to Freddie as they approached the gate to the white picket fence that surrounded the small front yard.
“True.”
“Danita, she takes care of her place. She puts in the time to make it pretty and welcoming. If she takes that kind of time with her home, imagine the effort she’s put into her children.”
“I don’t think I’m going to have kids.”
Sam stopped short and spun around to face him. “What? Since when are you not having kids?”
“For a while now, . Elin and I have talked about it. She mostly agrees with me.”
“About what?”
“That we don’t want to bring kids into this crazy world. What happened to Jamal… If that ever happened to a kid of mine…” He shook his head. “All my life I’ve heard it said that God doesn’t give you more than you can handle. That would be way more than I could handle. It would ruin me.”
This was not the time or the place—in front of a grieving family’s home—to have this conversation, but they were having it anyway.
“You’re letting the job color your thinking.
To us, this shit happens far too often, and it does happen too often.
Way too often. But we see the worst of it.
We don’t see the millions of other people who go through their lives without ever having something like what happened to Jamal happen to them.
Millions, Freddie. The odds of your child being randomly gunned down on a street are astronomical.
He’s more likely to win the lottery than be killed the way Jamal was. ”
“It’s not just Jamal. It’s so much more than that.”
“Believe it or not, I get it. I do. I worried incessantly about Scotty and something happening to him before he had Secret Service protection. I still worry about it, even with the army that surrounds him. I think about all the things that could happen, but you know what?”
Freddie tilted his head. “What?”
“The pure, sweet joy he brings to our lives is so much greater than the sum of our fears. He’s the best thing to ever happen to either of us, and I wouldn’t trade the love I feel for him for all the peace of mind in the world.
I would hate for you to miss out on the unbelievable experience of being a parent because you’re afraid of what might happen.
But even more than that, I’d hate for you to let fear run your life.
You’d miss out on one of life’s greatest joys, Freddie.
Don’t deny yourself that because of the awful shit we see on this job. Please don’t.”
He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “You make good points, as always.”
“Normally I’d have something to say to that, such as, of course I do, but this is too important for jokes. Promise me you won’t rule it out entirely before you’re even married.”
“I promise I’ll talk to Elin some more about what you said.”
“Fair enough.” Sam glanced at the white house with the black shutters. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Hey, Sam?”
She turned to face him again. “Yeah?”
“Thanks. For what you said and everything. I know it’s a tough topic for you.”
“It was tougher before I had Scotty,” she said, again trying to forget about the possibility she might be pregnant. “He’s made a lot of things that were wrong right again.”
“He’s a great kid.”
“Yes, he is, and you’d have great kids, too. You’d be a wonderful father.”
“You think so?”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Yes, Freddie, I think so and so does everyone else who knows you. My dad told me once that the worst thing I could do is bring the job home with me. Don’t do that. You’ll always regret it if you make decisions for your own life based on the shit we see out here.”
“Point taken.” He flipped the latch on the gate and gestured for her to go first.