weeks,” he was saying. “I get my ass chewed for carrying your comp time and sick days over from the year before…at this rate, you’ll be able to retire at forty.”
“No one asked you to carry my comp days over.”
“That’s not the point.” He took a breath and covered his mouth, looking to come from a different direction. “It’s my responsibility to watch out for anything that might have an effect on the way my detectives do their jobs.”
Caroline just stared at him.
“If you were getting divorced, I would be concerned. I might suggest you talk to a counselor. If you had been involved in a shooting, if you had some personal crisis…” He gestured with an open hand, as if he’d made his case already.
Caroline started at the words “personal crisis.” She thought about her mother. “But those things aren’t happening to me,” she said quietly, not exactly convincingly.
“No,” he said. “No. But we both know what happens if you don’t deal with the stress of this job. It can’t be easy being the only woman in SIU. And I understand your mother is ill. I just thought it might help to have someone to confide in.”
Caroline stood and paced away from her desk. “So is this an order? Do I need my guild rep in here?”
“No.” He stood and took a step back, smaller than he’d been. “No, there’s no need for that.” He smiled. “I’m not the enemy, Caroline.”
He backed out of her cubicle and retreated to his office. Caroline ran her eyes along the metal-lined cubicles of the SIU office. Thankfully, there were no other detectives in the room. At least he had the sense to wait until the room was empty. She shook as she packed her briefcase, then started for the door.
Outside, she stood in front of the cop shop for a few minutes, breathing the cool April air and watching the light traffic in front of the courthouse. A patrolman bringing in a drunk driver gave her a little wave and she nodded back. She watched the patrol car pull into the cul-de-sac in front of the jail and then she walked to her own car and climbed in, but didn’t start it right away.
She didn’t want to go home yet, to sit there all by herself waiting for Joel to get off work, wondering which granola-fed college students were throwing themselves at him tonight. She didn’t want to go to the bar where he worked either; he would think something was wrong.
And maybe something was wrong. Caroline thought about what Sergeant Lane had said. The kid in the river was horrible, the stuff of nightmares. There was a time, when she first started on the force, when Caroline would’ve needed a couple of days off to sort through what had happened. Like the shooting.
After the shooting, she’d cried on Dupree’s shoulder like a scared kid—and even that wasn’t enough. She took a week off and probably could’ve used two. She’d had trouble sleeping and had a case of the shakes that came and went for months, as if the reverberations from her nine-millimeter had followed her home. The next two months were consumed by shooting reviews, and in every question Caroline heard the accusation that a male officer wouldn’t have needed “deadly force” to subdue a drunk man. She had to answer questions about whether she was the victim of abuse herself (she wasn’t), or had witnessed abuse as a child (she hadn’t). The man had been arrested twice before for beating his wife and had a couple of other minor felony charges on his record. That night he’d come home drunk, found that dinner had been put away, and had gone after his wife with a dull bread knife. Caroline was the first officeron the scene and found the man standing over his wife, beating and stabbing her on the kitchen floor. She yelled at the man through the back door and he turned on her, screaming and moving toward her. Twice she told him to stop, but he stalked out the door, Caroline backing down the steps, into the yard. Finally he lunged at her, and she fired
Laura Cooper, Christopher Cooper