known he had a sense of humor.
Danny glared at him but said nothing.
Maggie treated Danny with respect, as if his doing his job was no more than what she had expected. She summarized the examiner’s findings in a clear voice, perfect in her recall. As she began explaining the nature of the symmetrical knife cuts, Danny could no longer pretend he did not recognize the pattern. He flushed and I could feel his heart palpitating as if it were my own. His hands began to tremble so violently the medical examiner noticed.
“You okay?” he asked with concern.
“Alissa Hayes,” Danny whispered.
“Who?” Maggie asked, her gaze so intense it broke through Danny’s confusion.
“Alissa Hayes,” he said. “About four years ago, maybe less. Fahey and I caught the case.”
“What about the Alissa Hayes case?” Maggie asked slowly.
“She had these same marks. The parallel cuts that look like gills.”
“Are we talking about a closed case?” Maggie said. “As in the ones I was going through earlier when you stopped me?”
Danny was sweating so profusely I almost felt sorry for him. “It was closed,” he mumbled. “We got a guy for it.”
“Someone is serving time for it?” Maggie asked. I could feel her indignation rising. “Someone got convicted?” She looked straight into Danny’s eyes. “Was it a clean conviction?”
That was her way of asking Danny if he had tampered with the evidence.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Maggie glanced at the medical examiner, but he just shrugged. “Before my time,” he explained.
“Let’s take a look at the file,” Maggie suggested. “This could be a copycat.”
“Maybe so,” Danny said, turning away from the body. “Maybe so.”
We all knew it wasn’t true. Danny had what was left of his conscience to tell him that he’d been sloppy, that one of his mistakes had come back to him.
Me? I had Alissa Hayes herself to tell me the exact same thing.
Chapter 11
It took Maggie less than fifteen minutes to find what she needed to know from the file on Alissa Hayes: it had been a bad arrest. Not corrupt, no evidence was planted—that I knew of—but sloppy and rushed, which may have been worse from her standpoint. She was angry at first, and then curious, and then angry again, her eyes narrowing at each step in the tainted trail that took an innocent man from freedom to imprisonment.
Danny did not wait around for her judgment. He disappeared in search of a bar that would help him forget what was likely to come: headlines, at least locally, and maybe even nationally, all about an innocent man being sent to jail while a murderer roamed free, followed by dissections of the case and where we had gone wrong. Soon after, my photo would be dredged up and my shooting death rehashed yet again. Cop shot dead while his partner stood by, killing the assailant only after it was too late. It would all be replayed endlessly in the press and on television, and soon a defense attorney somewhere would demand to go through our other solved cases, searching for even more mistakes. I’m sure there were plenty to find. And though no one would say it aloud, every person we had ever worked with would share a single thought: our failure to find the right killer had led to another young girl’s death, and who knew how many other undiscovered kills? The blood of Vicky Meeks was on our hands. Danny would become the Lady Macbeth of our world, wandering through the final stages of his career, unable to wash away the stain.
Yet I thought of it all with complete detachment. What did it matter now? My wife would not be surprised to learn I’d been sloppy. And if she decided to comment, there was nothing, however disparaging to my memory, that she did not have a right to say. I had failed her as miserably as I had failed Alissa Hayes and Vicky Meeks. If it gave her comfort to defend me, so be it. If she needed to condemn me—then so be it, too.
Judgment belonged to the living. All that mattered to me was making it right. All that mattered was that I stay with Maggie and help her find the real killer. Maggie, my angel. My terrible, beautiful, avenging angel. My Maggie.
She could have gone a lot of places once she finished reading the file. She could have headed upstairs to see our commander, even the chief of police. She could have stopped by to see the district