I realized that the other one, Ray St. Louis, had said something to me.
He turned around in his seat to look back at me. He was much larger than Wexler. Even in the dim light of the car I could make out the rough texture of his pockmarked face. I didn’t know him but I’d heard him referred to by other cops and I knew they called him Big Dog. I had thought that he and Wexler made the perfect Mutt and Jeff team when I first saw them waiting for me in the lobby at the Rocky. It was like they had stepped out of a late-night movie. Long, dark overcoats, hats. The whole scene should have been in black and white.
“You hear me, Jack. We’ll break it to her. That’s our job, but we’d just like you to be there to sort of help us out, maybe stay with her if it gets rough. You know, if she needs to be with somebody. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Good, Jack.”
We were going to Sean’s house. Not the apartment he split with four other cops in Denver so in accordance with city regs he was a Denver resident. His house in Boulder where his wife, Riley, would answer our knock. I knew nobody was going to be breaking anything to her. She’d know what the news was the moment she opened the door and saw the three of us standing there without Sean. Any cop’s wife would know. They spend their lives dreading and preparing for that day. Every time there’s a knock on the door they expect it to be death’s messengers standing there when they open it. This time it would be.
“You know, she’s going to know,” I told them.
“Probably,” Wexler said. “They always do.”
I realized they were counting on Riley knowing the score as soon as she opened the door. It would make their job easier.
I dropped my chin to my chest and brought my fingers up beneath my glasses to pinch the bridge of my nose. I realized I had become a character in one of my own stories—exhibiting the details of grief and loss I worked so hard to get so I could make a thirty-inch newspaper story seem meaningful. Now I was one of the details in this story.
A sense of shame descended on me as I thought of all the calls I had made to a widow or parent of a dead child. Or brother of a suicide. Yes, I had even made those. I don’t think there was any kind of death that I hadn’t written about, that hadn’t brought me around as the intruder into somebody’s pain.
How do you feel? Trusty words for a reporter. Always the first question. If not so direct, then carefully camouflaged in words meant to impart sympathy and understanding—feelings I didn’t actually have. I carried a reminder of this callousness. A thin white scar running along my left cheek just above the line of my beard. It was from the diamond engagement ring of a woman whose fiancé had been killed in an avalanche near Breckenridge. I asked her the old standby and she responded with a backhand across my face. At the time I was new to the job and thought I had been wronged. Now I wear the scar like a badge.
“You better pull over,” I said. “I’m going to be sick.”
Wexler jerked the car into the freeway’s breakdown lane. We skidded a little on the black ice but then he got control. Before the car had completely stopped I tried desperately to open the door but the handle wouldn’t work. It was a detective car, I realized, and the passengers who most often rode in the back were suspects and prisoners. The back doors had security locks controlled from the front.
“The door,” I managed to strangle out.
The car finally jerked to a stop as Wexler disengaged the security lock. I opened the door, leaned out and vomited into the dirty slush. Three great heaves from the gut. For a half a minute I didn’t move, waiting for more, but that was it. I was empty. I thought about the backseat of the car. For prisoners and suspects. And I guessed that I was both now. Suspect as a brother. A prisoner of my own pride. The sentence, of course, would now be life.
Those thoughts quickly slipped away with the relief the physical exorcism brought. I gingerly stepped out of the car and walked to the edge of the asphalt where the light from the passing cars reflected in moving rainbows on the petroleum-exhaust glaze on the February snow. It looked as if we had stopped alongside a grazing meadow but I didn’t know where. I hadn’t been paying attention to how far along to Boulder we were. I took off my gloves and glasses and put them in the pockets of my coat. Then I reached down and dug beneath the spoiled surface to where the snow was white and pure. I took up two handfuls of the cold, clean powder and pressed it to my face, rubbing my skin until it stung.
“You okay?” St. Louis asked.
He had come up behind me with his stupid question. It was up there with How do you feel? I ignored it.
“Let’s go,” I said.
We got back in and Wexler wordlessly pulled the car back onto the freeway. I saw a sign for the Broomfield exit and knew we were about halfway there. Growing up in Boulder, I had made the thirty-mile run between there and Denver a thousand times but the stretch seemed like alien territory to me now.
For the first time I thought of my parents and how they would deal with this. Stoicly, I decided. They handled everything that way. They never discussed it. They moved on. They’d done it with Sarah. Now they’d do it with Sean.
“Why’d he do it?” I asked after a few minutes.
Wexler and St. Louis said nothing.
“I’m his brother. We’re twins, for Christ’s sake.”
“You’re also a reporter,” St. Louis said. “We picked you up because we want Riley to be with family if she needs it. You’re the only—”
“My brother fucking killed himself!”
I said it too loud. It had a quality of hysteria to it that I knew never worked with cops. You start yelling and they have a way of shutting down, going cold. I continued in a subdued voice.
“I think I am entitled to know what happened and why. I’m not writing a fucking story. Jesus, you guys are…”
I shook my head and didn’t finish. If I tried I thought I would lose it again. I gazed out the window and could see the lights of Boulder coming up. So many more than when I was a kid.
“We don’t know why,” Wexler finally said after a half minute. “Okay? All I can say is that it happens. Sometimes cops get tired of all the shit that comes down the pipe. Mac might’ve gotten tired, that’s all. Who knows? But they’re working on it. And when they know, I’ll know. And I’ll tell you. That’s a promise.”
“Who’s working on it?”
“The park service turned it over to our department. SIU is handling it.”
“What do you mean Special Investigations? They don’t handle cop suicides.”
“Normally, they don’t. We do. CAPs. But this time it’s just that they’re not going to let us investigate our own. Conflict of interest, you know.”
CAPs, I thought. Crimes Against Persons. Homicide, assault, rape, suicide. I wondered who would be listed in the reports as the person against whom this crime had been committed. Riley? Me? My parents? My brother?
“It was because of Theresa Lofton, wasn’t it?” I asked, though it wasn’t really a question. I didn’t feel I needed their confirmation or denial. I was just saying out loud what I believed to be the obvious.
“We don’t know, Jack,” St. Louis said. “Let’s leave it at that for now.”