Should he tell her again that he was no longer looking at Kira? He thought not. He sipped the lemonade to open his throat.
His ability to refrain from and resist corruption through several terms defined him. It was not only a matter of pride, but a matter of identity. So ingrained in him that to contemplate otherwise made him feel physically sick. He searched for a way to do this without doing it. To remain true to himself but to limit collateral damage. To protect and serve, he thought.
“The idea behind what I do,” he found himself saying in a whisper of a voice, “is to serve the public, to do so equally, uniformly, to treat people fairly and equally, the idea being that you make society safer. I accept that that’s a naïve attitude, but there you have it. Safe to live and work and to limit or eliminate fear. As much as it’s a cliché, fear is in fact the real enemy. Fear limits us all. The fear of illness is often much greater than the illness itself. The fear of crime is the same way. So I’m supposed to keep the crime down and to bring in those who commit crimes when they happen, and those two things are supposed to work in concert.”
“I realize how hard this must be. I’m so sorry, Walt.”
He drew in another lungful of air like it was his last. Exhaled. “Harder on you, I know. I can bend the laws, Fiona. I can’t break them.”
“Understood. And I don’t want you to have to do either.”
“It’s supposed to rain tonight,” he said.
“Walt . . .”
“Bear with me,” he pleaded. “A lightning strike can set an area on fire. Spark a little wildfire that burns an acre or two before help arrives. You’re pretty high here on this knoll. And you’re what, about a mile from the East Fork station house? They’d probably respond in under ten minutes. Five minutes, more like. Five minutes from the time of the call.”
“Walt?”
“The thing about a small fire like that . . . you’d have to have the right winds so it didn’t hit any buildings. Not much wind tonight, not at the moment, which is good. The thing about blood evidence in the wild? It stays there for a long, long time. It’s recoverable weeks, months, sometimes years later. Rain doesn’t do much to it. Snow. Ice. But wildfire . . . fire’s the one thing that destroys it.”
An owl screeched from deep in the woods. Bea lifted her head but thought better of it. He heard Fiona swallow and noted her lemonade was still in the drink holder.
“I see,” she said.
“It’s a two-edged sword,” he cautioned. “When a fire’s called in, of course they respond, but we do, too. We’re on the property. We have access at that point.”
“I can’t possibly do something like that.”
“Who said anything about you doing anything?” he said, as if it were the farthest thing from his mind. “It would be entirely improper for me to suggest such a thing. I was simply talking about lightning strikes in general. If a fire started out here, obviously you’d call it in. And they’d be up here quickly.” He dragged himself up out of the chair. Bea jumped to her feet.
Fiona remained seated. “I worked so hard to put all this behind me.” She spoke straight ahead as if the forest were listening.
“When the evidence firms up—and it will—we’re going to act on it. It’s what we do.”
“The thing is,” she said. “A guy like him. He ruins things forever. They talk about second chances, but there are none. People warned me, but I didn’t want to believe it.”
“Even after a fire, you put a little water on it and a forest grows back again. Sometimes prettier than it was. I imagine the same is true for flower beds.”
“Were you listening to me?” she asked caustically.
“What’s important here is whether or not you’re listening to me,” he said.
“Is that right?”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“What you’re asking—it’s impossible.”
“I’m not asking anything,” he said. “I thought I made that clear.”
“Telling me, asking me, whatever.”
“Shit happens,” he said.
“Do not go there. Do not even think that. That’s not you. You do something like that and it’ll be there between us forever. It won’t bind us. Don’t fool yourself. It’ll be there between us, something you’ll regret, something you’ll always hold against me. Promise me you won’t do this.”