Los Angeles, four days later…
Angela Dodson kept her eyes on the ground as she crossed through the main room of the physical therapy center at Our Lady of Mercy Memorial Hospital, only looking up to give her fellow law enforcement officials a quiet "good morning" as she passed.
"Detective." None of them would meet her eyes. All the more reason to keep her gaze on her shoes.
"No…no…" she whispered to herself. If she said it enough times, maybe it would become not-true. Maybe God would take pity on her and undo what had been done.
Jose Weiss, her partner, the closest thing she had to a friend these days or so it seemed, tried to step in front of her, tried to block her view. His arm was in a sling today, the white strap holding it across his chest looking tacky against his plaid blazer. A bullet had passed through the meaty part of his upper arm last night during the shoot-out. His gun hadn't even been drawn, but she'd already pulled hers and shot one of the thugs who had ambushed them in the alley they'd run down in pursuit of a kid who'd tried to knock over a convenience store. She'd taken down the one who shot Weiss too, but it was the first of her bullets that'd proven lethal. A night of turning the scenario over and over in her head, and Angie still couldn't figure out how she'd known the men were there, in the alley. She and Weiss hadn't even been on the clock—just stopped off at the corner store to get some coffee before heading into work.
Most cops went twenty years without pulling their piece. Not her. She was always in the wrong place at the wrong time. She always knew where they were.
Weiss should've been at home, resting. His brown skin had a grayish tinge to it, and she knew he'd skipped a dose of painkiller so he could be lucid enough to drive. So he could be here for her. Her only friend.
"You don't need to see this, okay?" he said, trying to herd her back the way she'd come.
Angela's eyes were focused beyond him as she shouldered past. "No…" she repeated again.
She heard him ask for everyone to clear the room as she walked forward. Weiss sounded so far away, like he was murmuring at the far end of a tunnel. It was hard to hear him over the pounding of her own pulse in her ears.
They kept the PT room so cold, and yet her palms were sweating. She wiped them on her trousers as she knelt down beside the body that lay on the gleaming tile beside the shallow, cross-shaped hydrotherapy pool. Her eyes looked out across the pale blue water and then up to the skylights, the one directly over the water smashed in, only a few shards of glass clinging to the frame.
Angela pulled back the sheet and looked down into her own face.
Not her own face, though it might as well have been given how much it looked like her. Not her. Isabel. Her twin sister; her other half. The light to her dark; the insane to her sanity.
Isabel was dead.
It felt like she should be hurting more, right now. Her sister was dead, but there was nothing but a big gaping hole inside of Angie. Gently, she picked a sliver of glass from her sister's forehead. "Isabel…she fell from the roof…"
"She jumped," Weiss corrected softly. She'd almost forgotten he was in the room with them, her and Isabel.
"No," she said firmly as her fingers moved, seeking all the little pieces of glass that had imbedded themselves in Isabel's face. This wasn't right; this wasn't procedure. It was her job as a detective to preserve the integrity of the crime scene, but she couldn't stop herself. The fact that she had been the last one called—after everything was photographed and bagged and now all that was left was to take her sister down to the morgue—was cold comfort.
Weiss stayed away, by the door. Smart man—she couldn't have born being touched right then. "I know it's hard to accept. She was sick…"
Anger flared up inside Angela, momentarily filling the hole. Her only friend. Didn't he know her—know her family—well enough by now to understand just how crazy he sounded? "Isabel wouldn't kill herself," she said as she lowered the white plastic sheet back over her twin's head.
"Angie…"
"She wouldn't kill herself."
"Detective…"
"Period."
"Detective…"
"Period!" It was so much easier to be angry at Jose than at Isabel. She couldn't be angry at Isabel. Not now.
"Angie," Weiss said, one more time, "There were security cameras."
And she felt a tear run down her nose.