asking me.”
“I asked him if he knew your roommate, and he said that he really could not recall her. He said it twice. Then he had to go and we hung up. And we thought nothing more of it, because it was nothing, until yesterday when Detective O’Malley came in to the office, and brought it to my attention, this small contradiction.”
Nothing moved on Lily, except her head, which slowly and desperately turned to look at Spencer, her eyes pleading with him to help her, to explain, to make it clear and all right. “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” said Lily in a shaken voice.
“Miss Quinn.” That was Spencer. He finally spoke. His voice was like he did not know her. He came around the table and stood at its edge. “In light of what you’ve told me, it seems peculiar that your brother would say he didn’t recall your roommate when you and she helped him with his reelection. Either he doesn’t recall her, or she helped him with his campaign, not both. Both cannot be true. Either you are not telling us the truth—Amy did not help with his campaign. Or he is not telling us the truth, and indeed he does recall her.”
“Please,” whispered Lily. “I don’t know what you’re saying.” Her palms down on the table, Lily leaned forward, hyperventilation attacking her lungs. “Detective,” she said, trying to breathe slower, to keep her voice calm. She failed. “I’m sorry, I really don’t know what you’re implying … I don’t know what you’re asking me.”
“Could it be true, Miss Quinn,” said Harkman, “that Andrew Quinn does not recall Amy?”
“I guess so, it can be true, yes,” Lily said with breathless panic, placing her hand over her chest to still her heart. It was Impossible! Perhaps an interrogation room was not the place for such exclamations of the soul. Her voice lost its fight and got progressively weaker. She was whispering now. “It can be true.” She was nearly inaudible.
And then the three of them were silent. Spencer watched her, Harkman watched her, and Lily stared at the table. Her whole body felt to be suddenly emptied and re-filled with nerve endings, all shooting electrical anguish into her skin.
“Miss Quinn …”
“Please.” She jumped up. “If we’re done, I have to go. I do, I can’t sit here another minute.” Lily groaned in the middle of room Interrogation #1 and ran out. Spencer followed her. He stopped her on the street outside the precinct.
“Lily,” he said, slightly panting. “Are you running away from me?”
“Yes,” she blurted. “No.” She tried to push past him but he stood firm in front of her. “Just let me through. We’re done, aren’t we? Let me through.”
Spencer took her by her arms to stop her from moving. She was shaking.
“Please,” she said. “Leave me alone.”
“Lily,” he said gently. He was still holding her arms, he almost brought her to him in an embrace; she was too stirred up to know what it was. “I’m sorry. I am. We’re just trying to find Amy.”
“Oh, giving out traffic tickets on the LIE gives you experience in missing persons, does it?” Lily exclaimed, trying to wrest from him. Her knees were buckling from sadness. “No,” she said, furiously shaking her head. “No!” Even more adamantly. “Whatever it is you’re thinking, there’s a simple explanation.”
“I’m not thinking anything.” He let go of her, and she stood still, but leaned against the dirty wall of the building. “You’re the one doing all the thinking. Because you’re the only one who knows whether his statement is true.” Spencer looked at the pavement. “And from your reaction, it seems to me that you know it can’t be.”
Turning her head to look inside a window pane, the glass reflecting off her own filmed over glass eyes, Lily put her hands over her face, struggling to keep the tears back.
When Spencer got back to his desk, he sat down heavily, looked around the office, and thought it was time to go—perhaps permanently. Harkman sitting across from him was by contrast jubilant. “Finally! A break in the immovable case. A lead.”
“Yeah, a lead.” After a few minutes Spencer said, “I think Sanchez and Smith can handle it from here.” He turned to Harkman on the swivel chair. “I’m going to give this to them. I can’t do it, Chris. I have to get off this case.”
“Which case? The McFadden case?”
Spencer nodded.
“What the hell are you talking about? We finally made some headway. A U.S. Congressman!”
Blood ties. Brother and sisters. How Spencer craved a drink. “I know. That’s just the thing. I can’t do it.”
“O’Malley, what’s gotten into you?”
Spencer thought back to the white, wet buildings of Hanover, New Hampshire, to Dartmouth College, to the black shutters on his soul; thought back to Greenwich, Connecticut and the tangled web he had once weaved investigating another missing girl and the duplicity and manipulation of the ones closest to her. Their squalid story swallowed him. He couldn’t go back to that place twice. It took him years as a traffic cop on the Long Island Expressway before he could face being a proper investigator again. There were some things in life for which once was enough. There weren’t many of them. Many of life’s offerings were renewable pleasures, like sex, or renewable miseries, like alcohol. But this drowning in shallow waters was not something he wanted to relive even while saturated in Scotch.
“O’Malley, you’re overwhelmed. Give your smaller cases to me. Concentrate on this one.”
“I’m not overwhelmed. Stop psychoanalyzing me. This is precisely the one case I don’t want. I’ll keep the smaller ones. I got plenty else I need to be doing, and you, too. Sanchez and Smith are more than capable of taking over for us.”
“I don’t want them to take over for us! This is a big case. A Congressman, O’Malley! There might be another promotion here for me and for you, too. I’ve got a family to think of. I’ve had three heart operations. What the fuck is the matter with you?”
“Chris, I’m sorry. I just don’t want to do it. What can I tell you?”
“But you’re the one who came to me with this!” Harkman exclaimed. “You’re the one who remembered reading what Andrew Quinn had said. I mean, what the hell? Why are you doing this?”
Spencer wasn’t about to explain anything to Harkman. “You can’t change my mind. I don’t want to get mired in this. There’s too much baggage here for me. I’m putting Sanchez and Smith on it.”
“No, you’re not, O’Malley.”
Spencer’s clouded gaze cleared slightly.
Harkman stood and came over to Spencer’s desk, leaning over him. Spencer moved away, and it must have seemed like wariness, thought it was nothing but distaste. “You selfish bastard,” Harkman said. “You think you’re the only one who knows things. But I know things, O’Malley, I know things about you, the kind that Internal Affairs would be very interested in hearing. I’ve been very good to you, but don’t fuck with me on this one, because I need this case. As always, you’re only thinking of yourself.”
Spencer
