"I wish to god I knew," Regan said flatly, and McCoy stared at her.
You've seen the video, she'd said to him. Now you know exactly as much as I do.
"You can't remember," McCoy said aloud as the realization came to him. "Then there could be a dozen explanations! Maybe your hand spasmed. Maybe, given what sort of shape you were in, you honestly thought he was armed. Maybe —"
"Maybe I decided to kill the man who'd killed my husband and my friends and who'd killed me." Regan looked away, at the kitchen window that showed nothing but the dark outside. "I don't know what I was thinking right at that second but I know what I was thinking as I crossed that room. I was thinking about Gran-Da, I could hear his voice. Give up and you're gone. I stayed on my feet because he was telling me give up and you're gone." She paused. "And if a man draws down on you, you put him in the ground."
McCoy shook his head. "You don't know that. You can't know for certain —"
Regan closed her eyes. "Ed," she said quietly. "You watched the DVD?"
"I did," he said. "Doesn't show nothing about what was in your head, though, counselor. Your boss is right about that."
She opened her eyes and when she spoke, her voice had the calm, clear precision McCoy was used to hearing from her in the courtroom. "Detective, when N.Y.P.D officers are instructed in firearms handling and marksmanship, where are they trained to aim, when holding a suspect at gunpoint?"
Green shook his head, but he answered, "At the torso."
"And on the CCTV footage you've seen this evening, did you observe where Officer Elish Reagan was aiming her weapon as she approached Mr Tourmetti?"
"The angle of the camera —"
Regan cut him off. "Answer the question, Detective."
Green paused, and shook his head again. "At Mr Tourmetti's chest. Center mass."
"Then can you explain, Detective, how it is that Officer Reagan came to shoot Mr Tourmetti in the head?"
"Maybe the fact that she'd just been shot four times foxed her aim," Briscoe said. He took the frying pan from the heat, held a plate over it and turned it over. When he removed the pan, a pile of crisp, golden potato slices oozing cheese sat on the plate. He put it on the counter between Regan and McCoy. "Why don't you stop trying to talk yourself into taking the blame, and find some cutlery?"
Regan dug out forks from a drawer and distributed them. "Lennie …"
"Sit," Briscoe said, pointing at her stool. "Eat. You haven't got the sense to come in out of the rain at the moment, literally, as you've demonstrated. I watched that tape too, and I saw a cop in a hell of a tough situation who let off a round for reasons none of us will ever know." He forked up a mouthful of food and blew on it. "You know, when I was maybe three weeks into my gold shield, I caught a case where one cop killed another cop. First guy was narcotics, undercover, and he got blow. Ended up in a run-and-gun with three guys all out to end him. He hears a noise behind him, spins around and fires. Double-taps the twenty-two year-old patrol officer coming to his assistance."
"I remember that," McCoy said. He tried the potatoes, and found them surprisingly good. "No charges, in the end. Lennie, this is pretty impressive."
"I got it from Julia Childs," Briscoe said, and shrugged when all three of them stared at him. "Sort of. Her recipe starts with 'always plant your potatoes in March'. I tend to begin at 'do you have cheese in the fridge'. And yeah, no charges, but the guy left the force after that. He'd done some stuff wrong — not identifying his target, for one thing."
"It's always on your mind," Green said. "Whether you come up on an officer-needs, or you're calling in a 10-13 yourself, you always have to wonder if you're going to startle someone in a lethal manner." He shrugged a little, spearing a potato slice. "Or get startled."
"You know it," Regan said.
Briscoe shrugged as well. "You don't want it to happen, you train so it doesn't happen, but still, sometimes someone lets off a round on instinct. And Regan, honey, you know, if one of those cops you talked about being on the other floors of the building, if one of them had come into the room and you'd shot at them? Maybe even hit them? Nobody, not even you, would call it anything but a god-awful tragic mistake in a god-awful situation."
Regan put her fork down. "Except that's not what happened, Lennie. Is it?"
"Here's what's going to happen," McCoy said. "You're going to go in to Major Case, and you're going to tell Ron what happened, without any of the speculation." Ron Carver had a reputation for being by-the-book. McCoy suspected years working with Detective Goren might've loosened some of the pages in that book from their binding, but he had no desire to find out by testing the matter when Regan's reputation would be at stake. And he only worked with Regan for a few weeks. Less. He won't know, as I know, that whatever she thinks, whatever she says, she is not capable of of this. "And tomorrow, when Neil Gorton asks you, you're going to do exactly the same." He paused as a thought came to him. "Was there a Board of Inquiry over the shooting?"
"About three," Regan said.
"And did you know Durham dropped a gun when you testified?"
Regan shook her head. "I didn't testify. I was still in hospital with tubes down my throat. When I woke up, I was a hero. The inquiry was done. I didn't know Marco dropped a gun for me, not until he told me later. I don't —" She stopped, biting her lip, and then scratched her right cheekbone with her left forefinger. "I don't know if I would have done the same for him, and that's the truth. He was a better partner to me than I think I could have been for him. He was a better partner than me, all round."
"He's not being a very good partner to you now," Briscoe observed, and Green muttered something that sounded like you got that right.
"He's telling the truth." Regan shrugged. "I guess he feels he has to get it off his chest."
"He was lying then, or maybe he's lying now," Green said. "You think of that?"
Regan frowned. "Why would he —"
"That's what I'll put the judge," McCoy said, then corrected himself. "What Ron will put to the judge. You didn't lie to that inquiry in Seattle. You weren't even there. But he did. Either he lied under oath then, or he's lying now, weighed against the testimony of a witness who hadn't committed perjury."
Regan slammed her hand down on the counter. "He covered for his partner! Jesus, Jack! That's what you do, you have your partner's back!"
"Would you?" McCoy asked Briscoe, and then turned to Green. "Or you, Ed?"
"I'm not going to say I wouldn't try to see my partner's point of view, counselor," Green said, and shrugged. "But if I found any cop full of holes and a dead shooter, I wouldn't think I needed to lie. Story tells itself."
"There's a lot of difference between looking at things a certain way, on the one hand, and dropping a gun by the hand of some poor dead shmuck and taking the cell-phone out of it, on the other," Briscoe said. "If Ed shot somebody and there wasn't a gun, I'd know that I needed to look harder to find it." He shrugged. "And you know that, Jack. You were there for the ride when Van Buren shot that kid. If I'd been going to plant a gun, that would've been the time to do it."
"So you're both better cops than I was," Regan said. "If Marco lied, he lied to protect me. If he covered for a murderer? Jack, I'm the murderer."
McCoy shook his head. "I don't believe it."
"I do."
"You told me that a partner believes in you when you can't believe in yourself, didn't you?"
"Yeah." Her eyes filled with tears. "And that's the thing, Jack. My partner saw it. Marco threw down that gun and he told me to get myself off the force because he could see it in me. Which means it was there."
"What about what I see in you?" McCoy demanded.
Regan shook her head. "You're a lawyer, Jack, not —"
"I might not be a police officer," McCoy said tartly, "but I've looked enough killers in the eye to know what I'm seeing when I see it. Do you have a problem with the death penalty?"
"What has that got to do —"
"Answer the question!" McCoy demanded. "Do you have a problem with the death penalty?"
"No, I don't! Some people forfeit the right to life, and a sentence set out by law, carried out after a fair trial —"
"But you had a problem with what happened to Phillip Watts."
"That might have been justice, but it wasn't law, and I don't see—"
"I didn't consider it an optimal outcome," McCoy said. "But he made his bed and he got to lie in it. But you, Regan, you had trouble with it, even though you knew what he did to Mary Firienze. Because — how did you put it? You took an oath to forge justice out of the operation of the law. I cannot believe you are capable of … of an extra-judicial execution. I don't care what your great-grandfather said, and when and where you remembered it. We don't always learn the lessons those terrible old men who shape our lives try to teach. Thank god."
"That's a nice idea," Regan said. "But I'm on tape doing just that."
McCoy shook his head. "There's another explanation," he said firmly. "There has to be another explanation."
Regan sighed, and ran her fingers through her hair, still damp from the rain. "You can't possibly know that."
"I can," McCoy said. "I know it the way that way Lennie would know that if Ed said he fired at an armed suspect, then there had to be a gun somewhere. Because I know you." He paused. "It's why you left Seattle, isn't it? This. Not because you got hurt."
"I was going to go back," Regan said. "The doctors — they said with luck, with hard work, I might never be what I was but I could probably get to where I could pass a physical. I was going to have the surgery on my arm, do the rehab — get back on the street. I went full-time at law school to fill the days while I waited. Then I saw that video. I saw myself shoot an unarmed man in the head, and don't tell me it was a hand spasm. You're not a cop, so you didn't see it, but Ed did. I was holding that gun center mass all the way across that room, just like I was supposed to, and when I got up to Tourmetti I lowered it. I lowered my gun and then I lifted it up and shot him. That's what's on the tape, Jack, and even you can't lawyer it away."
"You tell the judge tomorrow the exact truth." McCoy leaned forward, emphasizing each point with a stab on his forefinger. "You had four bullet holes in you, you were bleeding just about to death, you have no recollection of firing. The gun went off. No one can say why. You might have meant to fire a warning shot, it might have been an accident!"
Regan shook her head. "You're starting to sound more like Danielle Melnick than Jack McCoy. And you know it doesn't matter, too. In a criminal trial, with me as the defendant?" She shrugged. "Sure. E.E.D. Accident. Justifiable homicide. But tomorrow? Judge Steinman is going to watch that footage and see me executing an unarmed man, she's going to listen to a Seattle Detective and my partner tell her I'm a wrong cop, and she's going to discount everything I say."
"It might not get that far," McCoy said. "After you ran out on us, Steinman ordered that Rivera be given the option of new counsel. By the time we get into the courtroom, Carver could have a confession in his pocket."
"Then why are we even talking about it?" Regan countered. "Why are you guys here, searching my room?"
"Because you're a witness, and if you do need to take the stand —" McCoy's phone buzzed again and he glanced at the screen. Chen. "I have to take this," he said.
"Yeah," Regan said. "Saved by the bell."
