Chapter 17
Mark Coleman died on the way to the hospital.
Nothing could alter the truth of that.
And not a thing could change the fact that I still felt nothing but hate for him, even after learning that Railes’s shot was fatal.
The drizzle had stopped, but the dark sky remained swollen with murky clouds.
The chill ran to my marrow. I shivered as Ewing interviewed me.
Ewing’s questions were preliminary. With a fatal police shooting, an investigator from an independent agency would be assigned.
But Ewing was getting a lay of the land.
With one of his cops opting for lethal force, he had every right.
I felt the pressure in my chest. It squeezed my ribs, made my breath go shallow. The same kind I felt after Mom died. When Sophie OD’d. When Jess told me about the rape.
“Cold?” Ewing said.
We stood outside the house where Mark Coleman had gone down.
I shook my head.
“We can go inside,” he offered.
“No, I’m fine.”
I didn’t want to step past the yellow police tape to return to that crummy, sad living room. Dead leaves and pine needles papier-machéd the lawn. There was something about the way they smeared together that made me nauseated.
“We can also go back to the station, but I’d prefer to talk to you while things are fresh in your mind.
” He was trying for nice and accommodating, but disdain filled his eyes, underlying the big question.
Would I be a team player this time? Was there still hope for me, or would I let everyone on the squad down again so soon after reporting Hartley for sexual harassment?
The wonder radiated off him like heat from a furnace.
The moment seemed to balance on the top of a point, tilting this way and that.
One way meant I could snatch the glorious opportunity to send all the ugly male bro-cop bullshit down the fucking drain.
The other meant I could give in to my searing rage at Coleman by minimizing what Railes had done.
And I could stay the course, become detective as I had been planning.
“Fine,” I said. I loathed the idea that I might give him precisely what he needed, more emboldened cop culture, more certainty that no one would crack their protective shell.
But I’d already backed up Railes in front of Leon.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t change my mind, though.
And so I started from the beginning, from the moment I climbed out of my car and walked up on the porch. What I heard. What I saw. What I said. What I did.
And Ewing asked me again for details on the knife.
“You mean, did I see the knife?” I said.
“Did you see him holding it?”
I looked down at my hands for an answer. All I saw was Coleman mauling Jess. It overpowered everything. I tried to slow-blink it away, but it wasn’t working, just like it hadn’t earlier when I was listening to Leon. The roaring still filled my ears.
“I was watching Leon,” I lied. “He was yelling. He had my attention because Railes pointed his gun at Leon first. Of course I’m not sure what Railes saw.”
“Okay. Did you see the victim holding the knife after he went down?”
“I only saw the knife on the floor. Maybe he dropped it as he fell.”
“I need you to think clearly about this one, Mitchell.”
“It’s clear.”
“Leon Spencer claims Coleman never had the knife, that Railes made that up.”
I shrugged for Ewing’s sake. My mind was already made up. “I couldn’t verify that for you.”
My chest spooled tighter. No, I’d never be the same after this. I couldn’t tell you for sure why I lied, but it wasn’t only Billy Railes’s voice whispering in my ear before help arrived: You better be a team player this time, Mitchell. Last chance.
“Is this story going to hold up when the independent investigator arrives to review Billy Railes’s use of lethal force?” Ewing eyed me as if he thought his stiff glare might either get me to crack or keep me in line for good. Make me a team player from this point on.
“Why wouldn’t it?”
“Because they aren’t going to ask it once. They’ll ask it a thousand times and you can’t give them one little opening.”
“There’s not much to keep straight,” I said. “I saw what I saw.”
It’s not that I wanted to protect Railes. I didn’t. I couldn’t stand the guy. I couldn’t stand the whole culture that produced guys like Railes. Tolerated and encouraged them, too.
But I’ll admit it.
As much as I wanted to protect myself, I still wanted to get back at a dead Coleman, too.
True, I didn’t want any more backlash from cops. In a weird way, I thought providing cover for Railes might earn me a ticket to the inside club, not that it was a ticket I wanted. But avoiding more backlash was only part of the story.
My reasons for backing up Railes were all too personal and something I needed to keep to myself. They were all tangled up into something ugly and raw rearing up inside me, snatching away my ability to do the right thing.
As I said, hate is like fear. You can’t control it when it takes you.
It can overshadow everything. In that moment, I felt Coleman got what he deserved, no matter how he got it, and nobody else should pay for it and nothing more should be made of it, even if it was at the hands of mind-numbingly stupid Billy Railes.
I knew I was as wrong as the clouds were bloated and dark above me.
Leon was a wreck by the time he was situated in the Sane Suite in town.
A nurse had him in a room where I watched through one-way glass and listened over an intercom.
They wanted him to talk about the rape, but he wouldn’t.
He was in shock, still working his key chain with intensity.
I felt as low as the underside of a stray tick in a dark forest, waiting for a wandering deer.
Leon’s word against mine. All I had to do was “remember” things differently when the investigator arrived in the morning.
Wallace called me, but I couldn’t stomach talking to him.
I texted him and told him I was held up.
I focused on Leon, watching them take him through it all again, coaxing him to discuss the rape after he’d given his statements about the shooting.
When he got to the part where Coleman pulled him back from the door, I thought again of Sophie.
How she told me that when Josh, her rapist, was kissing her, it felt good at first.
He got a hand under her shirt and she thought that was all right, too. She was okay with things progressing—until he pulled her in way too tightly.
He gripped her arms to the point that they hurt. When she tried to squirm away, he only jerked her in tighter. Josh wasn’t going to ask because he didn’t want to get a no.
Out in the dark under those great ponderosas, hours after we ran into the woods, she whispered to me that she began to block things out.
That she’d flashed to a boa constrictor, clamping around its prey, and that clicked to an old urban legend that had stuck in her mind, about a girl who loved her pet snake and would let it sleep in her bed.
She whispered the tale to me, that the girl fed the boa a rat once a day, but suddenly it quit eating.
It wouldn’t eat for weeks, so she took it to a reptile shop and spoke to a specialist, who told her to not let the snake out of the cage until it began eating regularly again and to not let it sleep with her ever again.
When the girl asked why, he said, “Because it’s stopped eating to make room to digest you. ”
Sophie told that story to me that night while she was racked with fear, her breath hot against my cheek, the hiss of her voice against my ear making it itch.
Myth or not, the story had come to her as Josh’s slobber trickled down the side of her chin.
She had felt her spine grind against the small rocks under her sleeping bag.
I asked her if she told him to stop. She wasn’t sure, but she recalled telling him that the other tents were nearby and that this wasn’t a good idea, that one of the guys who was down at the lake might walk back up or even I might come out from the tent at any moment.
But Sophie had said she told Josh to back off. But he didn’t. He kept pulling and pressing. And she had wanted it all to cease, but she couldn’t fight back because she froze up.
Just as Jess had done a decade later.
Making it difficult to prosecute.
Making it possible for two rapists to strike again and again.
And now Leon—struck by the same monster who hurt my sister. But unlike in so many cases where the rapist goes free because it’s often too difficult to prove when there are no witnesses, Mark Coleman would not strike again.
“Do you have any bruises or cuts?” the nurse asked Leon.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t care anymore.”
My phone rang. Wallace again, likely wondering where I was and if I was coming over. I glanced at Leon and the nurse, the pit in my stomach growing larger, my rage at Coleman still ratcheting up even though I knew he was gone forever.
As upset as I was with Railes for pulling his weapon and lying, and even as the heavy cloak of guilt for not contradicting Railes’s story began to descend upon me for eternity, I was glad Coleman was gone.
“I’m tied up,” I told Wallace. “I can’t make it tonight.”
I walked out of the hospital into the cold, soggy night. Sweat trickled down my back. Drizzling rain fell on my head. My hands were wet and slick.
I kept picturing their pained and confused faces.
Leon.
And Sophie.
I pictured Coleman’s body crashing to the floor.
The knife skidding . . .
It all stopped me short. Jesus, what had I done?
I had covered for Railes. How could I have done that? How could I have thrown all my morals out the window for a piece-of-shit cop?
The answer was obvious.
I was no better than Billy Stinking Railes.
And if I thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.
Three days later, Leon hanged himself.
In a way, Mark Coleman’s murder took another life, too, when I locked arms and stories with Billy Railes.
When I told Jess, the day after the shooting, I only covered the bare bones: that there’d been a domestic dispute, that an officer shot Coleman because he was resisting orders, that he was aggressive and wouldn’t comply.
I didn’t mention Leon. “But now, at least, Coleman’s gone, Jess. He’s gone,” I had said.
I saw it in her face then. Not relief. Not even surprise. Confusion. And something else—a deep disappointment. Even sadness. A slumping of her entire body, like a punctured balloon. She whispered, “Now I’ll never be able to talk to him.”
“But what on earth were you going to say?” I asked. “There’s no talking to men like him.”
But it fell on deaf ears. She had gone somewhere else in her mind at that moment, like she was listening and trying to make out some strange sound off in the distance.
Two long and painful weeks later, I quit.
Railes and I were both already on a decompression leave for being involved in a shooting and taking the required two weeks off.
But I knew then I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t tuck that shame away.
Jess seemed worse by the day, and she wasn’t even aware of what had really happened, of how I had backed Railes.
The scale of it practically knocked me off my feet, made me dizzy.
Pains shot through my chest every time I thought of it.
At times, I thought I was having a heart attack, but I knew it was anxiety.
And ultimately, I knew there was no way to weave that ugly, frayed strand back into the fabric of who I thought I was, into what I thought I was trying to accomplish by becoming a cop.