He was right. It never had.
“Then what? You just want to keep this little horror story for yourself? That it?”
“Yeah, something like that. You could say that.”
In the car with Wexler and St. Louis I sat with my arms crossed. It was comforting. Almost as if I were holding myself together. The more I thought about my brother the more the whole thing made no sense to me. I knew the Lofton case had weighed on him but not to the point that he’d want to take his own life. Not Sean.
“Did he use his gun?”
Wexler looked at me in the mirror. Studied me, I thought. I wondered if he knew what had come between my brother and me.
“Yes.”
It hit me then. I just didn’t see it. All the times that we’d had together coming to that. I didn’t care about the Lofton case. What they were saying couldn’t be.
“Not Sean.”
St. Louis turned around to look at me.
“What’s that?”
“He wouldn’t have done it, that’s all.”
“Look, Jack, he—”
“He didn’t get tired of the shit coming down the pipe. He loved it. You ask Riley. You ask anybody on the—Wex, you knew him the best and you know it’s bullshit. He loved the hunt. That’s what he called it. He wouldn’t have traded it for anything. He probably could have been the assistant fucking chief by now but he didn’t want it. He wanted to work homicides. He stayed in CAPs.”
Wexler didn’t reply. We were in Boulder now, on Baseline heading toward Cascade. I was falling through the silence of the car. The impact of what they were telling me Sean had done was settling on me and leaving me as cold and dirty as the snow back on the side of the freeway.
“What about a note or something?” I said. “What—”
“There was a note. We think it was a note.”
I noticed St. Louis glance over at Wexler and give him a look that said, you’re saying too much.
“What? What did it say?”
There was a long silence, then Wexler ignored St. Louis.
“Out of space,” he said. “Out of time.”
“ ‘Out of space. Out of time.’ Just like that?”
“Just like that. That’s all it said.”
The smile on Riley’s face lasted maybe three seconds. Then it was instantly replaced by a look of horror out of that painting by Munch. The brain is an amazing computer. Three seconds to look at three faces at your door and to know your husband isn’t coming home. IBM could never match that. Her mouth formed into a horrible black hole from which an unintelligible sound came, then the inevitable useless word: “No!”
“Riley,” Wexler tried. “Let’s sit down a minute.”
“No, oh God, no!”
“Riley…”
She retreated from the door, moving like a cornered animal, first darting one way and then the opposite, as if maybe she thought she could change things if she could elude us. She went around the corner into the living room. When we followed we found her collapsed on the middle of the couch in an almost catatonic state, not too dissimilar from my own. The tears were just starting to come to her eyes. Wexler sat next to her on the couch. Big Dog and I stood by, silent as cowards.
“Is he dead?” she asked, knowing the answer but realizing she had to get it over with.
Wexler nodded.
“How?”
Wexler looked down and hesitated a moment. He looked over at me and then back at Riley.
“He did it himself, Riley. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t believe it, just as I hadn’t. But Wexler had a way of telling the story and after a while she stopped protesting. That was when she looked at me for the first time, tears rolling. Her face had an imploring look, as if she were asking me if we were sharing the same nightmare and couldn’t I do something about it. Couldn’t I wake her up? Couldn’t I tell these two characters from a black and white how wrong they were? I went to the couch, sat next to her and hugged her. That’s what I was there for. I’d seen this scene often enough to know what I was supposed to do.
“I’ll stay,” I whispered. “As long as you like.”
She didn’t answer. She turned from my arms to Wexler.
“Where did it happen?”
“Estes Park. By the lake.”
“No, he wouldn’t go—what was he doing up there?”
“He got a call. Somebody said they might have some information about one of his cases. He was going up to meet them for coffee at the Stanley. Then after he… he drove out to the lake. We don’t know why he went there. He was found in his car by a ranger who heard the shot.”
“What case?” I asked.
“Look, Jack, I don’t want to get into—”
“What case?” I yelled, this time not caring about the inflection of my voice. “It was Lofton, wasn’t it?”
Wexler gave one short nod and St. Louis walked away shaking his head.
“Who was he meeting?”
“That’s it, Jack. We’re not going to get into that with you.”
“I’m his brother. This is his wife.”
“It’s all under investigation but if you’re looking for doubts, there aren’t any. We were up there. He killed himself. He used his own gun, he left a note and we got GSR on his hands. I wish he didn’t do it. But he did.”
2
In the winter in Colorado the earth comes out in frozen chunks when they dig through the frost line with the backhoe to open up a grave. My brother was buried in Green Mountain Memorial Park in Boulder, a spot not more than a mile from the house where we grew up. As kids we were driven by the cemetery on our way to summer camp hikes in Chautauqua Park. I don’t think we ever once looked at the stones as we passed and thought of the confines of the cemetery as our own final destination, but now that was what it was to be for Sean.
Green Mountain stood over the cemetery like a huge altar, making the small gathering at his grave seem even smaller. Riley, of course, was there, along with her parents and mine, Wexler and St. Louis, a couple dozen or so other cops, a few high school friends that neither Sean nor I nor Riley had stayed in touch with and me. It wasn’t the official police burial, with all the fanfare and colors. That ritual was reserved for those who fell in the line of duty. Though it could be argued that it was still a line-of-duty death, it wasn’t considered one by the department. So Sean didn’t get the Show and most of the Denver police force stayed away. Suicide is believed to be contagious by many in the thin blue line.
I was one of the pallbearers. I took the front along with my father. Two cops I didn’t know before that day, but who were on Sean’s CAPs team, took the middle, and Wexler and St. Louis were on the back. St. Louis was too tall and Wexler too short. Mutt and Jeff. It gave the coffin an uneven cant at the back as we carried it. I think it must have looked odd. My mind wandered as we struggled with the weight and I thought of Sean’s body pitching around inside it.
I didn’t say much to my parents that day, though I rode with them in the limousine with Riley and her parents. We had not talked of anything meaningful in many years and even Sean’s death could not penetrate the barrier. After my sister’s death twenty years before, something in them changed toward me. It seemed that I, as the survivor of the accident, was suspect for having done just that. Survived. I am also sure that since that time I have continued to disappoint them in the choices I have made. I think of these as small disappointments accruing over time like interest in a bank account until it was enough for them to comfortably retire on. We are strangers. I see them only on the required holidays. And so there was nothing that I could say to them that would matter and there was nothing they could say to me. Aside from the occasional hurt-animal sound of Riley crying, the inside of the limo was as quiet as the inside of Sean’s casket.