I felt the cold steel forcing my hand down to waist level before ratcheting tight, one wrist to the other. The cop with the shotgun didn’t do anything until I was pulled down to my knees and then she spoke. “The gun, Officer. The one on the table, bag it. You should have done that right away.”
The younger one had a whine in his voice as he answered and it grated on my nerves. “What about chain of evidence?”
The shotgun was now pointed at the floor and the cop’s finger was finally outside the trigger guard. Now I could focus past it to read “Ramirez” on the name tag.
“Chain of evidence don’t mean shit if the lady with the baby shoots us dead. We protect ourselves first.”
She gave me a sweet half-smile at odds with disinterested cop eyes.
“Sorry, sir. We have to do things in a certain way. I am quite sure you have done nothing wrong.”
Fred had finally stopped crying and I turned my head to see Claire standing about four feet away and staring at Ramirez as she asked, “What is your name?”
The cop smiled and showed beautiful teeth. They looked capped and were even, with a smudge of lipstick on one incisor. “Elena Ramirez, ma’am. That is a beautiful boy you have there.”
Claire didn’t say a word; she just stared with narrowed eyes and I recognized her rage, but then she smiled and chucked Fred under the chin. When he laughed, I relaxed a bit and allowed a smile as Ramirez glanced down at me with a slightly confused look and then back at Claire.
“Yes. His name is Fredrick.”
The cop shifted her grip on the shotgun and I knew what she was seeing. Here she was, talking politely with a man who had just killed three people and a naked woman who looked absolutely relaxed despite having three stiffs in the same room. She was probably wondering if she had missed something because all the little cop alarms were going off in her head. She stepped back and looked me over again, and I knew she was trying to place my face. Early thirties, slightly over six feet tall, with very pale skin and lots of old scars on his arms and hands. Pale gray or blue eyes and blond hair cut short. Normal enough, except I looked comfortable despite the handcuffs and the corpses and the cops. Cops know that only psychopaths, soldiers, and cops can kill and be comfortable with it, and she was probably trying to put me in the right category.
Others had tried, so I grinned at her, “Lots of luck.”
I said it out loud and Ramirez glanced at Claire and looked even more confused. My wife was mad, which made sense, but not scared, which didn’t. So Claire ended up filed away in the cop memory too, five foot nine, about a hundred and forty pounds, well built, sun-browned all over except for a narrow strip around belly and crotch. She was crowned with thick, unkempt, reddish-brown hair worn long, and had dark brown eyes. I wondered if the cop would recognize the untannable stretch marks brought on by pregnancy.
The other cop was back on the walkie-talkie, deciphering the Babel of static and code with ease and answering too low for me to hear.
Ramirez said, “Perhaps, ma’am, you might get dressed. I think you might distract the paramedics when they arrive. You are also certainly confusing Officer Halley.”
Claire allowed herself to be escorted upstairs and started a conversation about babies, while I waited in the doorway with a really dumb cop behind me with a pistol and a walkie-talkie. My hands weren’t used to being handcuffed anymore and they ached with tension and muscle memory until I consciously relaxed. I could see out the open door past the front yard to the tree-lined street and, although it was early spring and cold, neighbors were starting to cluster in small groups on the sidewalk. The police car still had its flashers on and the harsh light threw the whole block into sharp relief.
In time Claire and Ramirez came back down with Fred but she wasn’t allowed to talk to me, and soon after that, an ambulance showed with a half-dozen cop cars and a small panel truck. The first non-uniformed cop into the house was a big man with washed-out blue eyes in a cheap, gray, three-piece suit, carrying an unlit, expensive cigar. In the house I could hear Ramirez talking and then