All That It Seems
Setting: "Shrink Wrap"
And, suddenly, it's after six.
I lean back from my report on Julia Wagner, shift some hair out of my face. Everyone without a life is still here— Doakes, Batista (that shit about his wife still surprises me...), LaGuerta, Soderquist. Everyone else has started trickling out, including Masuka, and I don't even want to know where that bald little dweeb is planning to spend his Friday night. Dexter left twenty minutes ago, characteristically sharing nothing about his weekend plans.
As for me, I can't help but feel a little disappointed that Rudy couldn't come over tonight, and maybe that's why I'm not in any hurry to leave. The second night in a row I've gotta go home to a cold bed, and even if it's lame to admit it, I can already feel his absence.
Though I've been flashing on this morning more times than I'd care to admit today. By the time he finally got all that crap off my legs I felt like I was going to explode from want, but fuck it was worth the wait...
Exhaling, I glance back down at my desk. I can think about that later.
Vanessa Gayle's case was closed officially today. Her body was cremated yesterday. Suicide's a shitty end result, but after talking with Meridian I can't say I'm surprised, and, at the least, she's another name off our board. I've only been here a couple months and already I feel like we're hearing about our stats at least three times a day before lunch.
At least we're moving toward closure on another case, my case— Julia Wagner. She's sitting in holding right now. Doakes is hoping that a night of stewing without her daughter will break her, and at this point I couldn't feel an ounce of sympathy for her. It turns out she did have an SUV, or her father did anyway, before he died. The title was transferred to his wife, Julia's mother, who's currently living in a home up in Vero Beach. I guess the bitch never thought we'd search that far north, or maybe it just didn't occur to her that we could have the vehicle towed to Miami, but the forensic work up on the car this morning pretty much sealed her fate. Under the black light, the thing lit up like a motel bed sheet.
I just don't understand why she did it, why of all the ways to kill her husband she'd do it with a car, why she'd kill him at all with their new daughter and their nice home in the Gables. Their life clearly was not all what it seemed from the pictures in Kent's wallet and on the living room walls.
I glance right, at Batista. God knows he kept it together for months without a precinct full of detectives figuring it out.
Still, Julia's keeping her mouth closed, even as the evidence keeps piling up. If she's smart she'll plead out, maybe'll live to see her daughter graduate from college, but so far she's been opting for silence. Maybe she shut down, is having trouble living with what she's done. Crime of passion, sure, I could almost understand something snapping in the heat of the moment, making a decision to save yourself or someone else, just reacting like an animal; but Julia got that car all the way down to Miami, stalked her husband, ran him down, called his cell phone barely a few hours after his death, brought the murder weapon back to her mother's parking space the next day. That's a special kind of psychosis, or a special kind of rage.
I just want to know why she did it.
An impulse seizes me, and I push out of my chair, walk over to Doakes. He's typing something up on his computer, fingers stabbing the keys like each one's done something to personally offend him. Everything about him is intense, but I can't help but appreciate that we seem to share a similar drive, and that he really doesn't seem to give a fuck about how I talk to him. It's a relief that I don't feel like I have to watch myself around him.
"I want to try talking to Julia Wagner again," I say before he can ask what I want.
He looks up at me. "No plans with your new boyfriend?" he rumbles.
"I think I can get her to talk to me," I say, ignoring that.
He studies me without a trace of confidence. "Do you?"
And despite myself, I falter slightly. "Honestly, I don't know," I revise, "but what's the harm in trying?"
He shrugs. "Knock yourself out, Morgan."
I almost want to say 'Really?' but catch myself, instead just mutter a "Great" before turning away. I hear him go back to his typing as I stop by my desk to grab everything we've got on the case, and then I head to the elevator, hit the button.
Holding is on ground level, behind a barred barrier. Other than to escort Pascal up and down the station, I haven't been down here since I left Vice, though even then I wasn't here much. Didn't exactly get to do a ton of perp walks in the barbie suit. There's nothing particularly interesting about it, just a couple rooms filled with a lot of cells, but it's a little weird to be down here now that I'm with Homicide. Makes me think of my years on patrol. Drunks and crazies and DUIs. People pissing on restaurant windows at 4 in the afternoon. Sometimes I couldn't help projecting myself into the future, and now here I am. In that future. Plain clothes and everything.
More or less.
The doors open and I step inside.
I wonder what Julia is thinking about as she stews in her little cell, on that thin as fuck mattress. Even if she never loved her husband, even if she hated him, she shared a bed with him, a child, a life. They were married for almost eight years. How could she have decided to do what she did? Was that violence always there, simmering just below the surface? Did Kent ever suspect what was really there under that Southern, family-values exterior? Or did he die thinking that she loved him?
I exit the elevator, walk to holding, and smile politely at Miller, the uniform currently guarding the door.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey," I reply.
For half a minute we exchange small talk, and then he opens the door.
As I walk in I notice that Julia Wagner's one of only a couple chicks in here, and she's the only one awake. She's stretched out on her shitty cot, staring up at nothing, and I see her look over at me for a second as I walk over to her cell.
"Mrs. Wagner," I open, not really sure what my plan is now that I'm standing here.
"What time is it?" she asks the ceiling.
I glance at my watch. "Six thirty."
"AM?"
My eyebrows drop a little. "PM."
She kind of grunts something that might be an 'Alright,' keeps staring upward.
Is this regret... or boredom? She has to know that we have her, and she's lying there like it's just a bed at a crappy motel. Her stoicism pisses me off. Everything about her in general just sort of pisses me off right now.
"You mind if I ask you something?" I ask.
She says nothing, taps her fingers on her chest.
I shift a little closer to her cage. "We have enough to bury you," I say. "Doesn't really matter how much of your dead husband's insurance money you spend on a lawyer, either way you're gonna end up rotting in prison by Sunday."
She doesn't even look at me, sighs as if I'm annoying her.
"You'll be lucky if you ever get to know your daughter as she grows up," I continue. "Your sister's going to have to be the one who's there for her, through all those fucking..." I grope, "little moments in her life, and that's assuming she even agrees to take her on at all. She could grow up in the foster system, never having a mother, or a father. And you took that from her."
She stiffens, shifts slightly to look in my direction. "Emily will be fine," she says, more to herself than to me. "She has plenty of family."
"Will she be?" I take another step, look down at her through the bars. "You think, what, Kent's parents would take her if your sister didn't? What kind of life would she have with them if they did, if every time they saw her they just saw the bitch who murdered their only son?"
She sets her jaw.
"Emily's gonna grow up without a mother or a father. Do you think she'll even remember you? What do you think people will tell her when she asks where her parents are, what happened to them?" I think vaguely of some those conversations with Dad about Dexter. "Will they tell her you both died in some kind of accident to save her from the truth?"
She rolls over and finally looks at me, her face all hard lines. "Leave me alone," she hisses.
I glare at her and open my folder, pull out a glossy, full-color photo of the crime scene, which I slap against the bars. She immediately looks away, as if it burned her. "You did this to the man you married, shared a fucking life and a daughter with. This is what you did to your family." I pause, stare at her angrily. "You can't even fucking look at it, can you? At what you did to him?"
Silence. No tears, no denial, no admission, no nothing. Does she really feel nothing, or is she just numb to it all?
"Tell me why," I say.
She just sits there, elbows on her knees, staring off into space.
I want to unlock the door and strangle her. "What made you do this?"
Nothing.
I wrap my fingers around one of the bars. "Do you even fucking know?"
She glances over at me, her eyes skirting the picture. "I'm done talking."
"I'm not," I say, accidentally clanging the metal with my boot as I shift. "What the hell did he do to you?"
She rolls onto her back again, curls her fingers on her stomach.
For a long time I just stand here, rage turning the temperature in the room way way up. I just want an answer, some little nugget of sense to the bloody mess her husband left all over that sidewalk.
But Julia Wagner gives me nothing, just closes her eyes.
Slamming my molars together so hard it hurts, I shove the picture back into the folder, then turn and walk out. Rage pounds in my ears as I leave holding, passing Miller without a word, and suddenly I find myself in the parking lot. It's only as I stop in my usual spot that I remember that I don't have my purse or any cigarettes.
Fuck.
Or even my keys to leave.
Fuck.
Exhaling, I lean against the wall, stare at the line of patrol units without really seeing them, craving a cigarette. Going in there accomplished nothing. Even if I was the one outside the cage, she's the one with all the power. Doakes would never have lost his temper like that, and Dad wouldn't have either. For as much as he was always gone, always searching for some space from the station and from life, I've heard enough stories about Dad to know that he would never lose his cool in the box.
I can feel the weight of his disappointment all over me. Dad's ghost haunts this whole damn building.
I wish, suddenly and intensely, that I didn't have to be alone tonight. I wish, maybe unfairly, that Rudy had canceled whatever he's doing tonight for us. I'd be worried that I fucked everything up the other night when I started crying like a pathetic dipshit if it wasn't for this morning, but there's still that part of me that worries that even despite what he said about not going anywhere, I'm still gonna end up waking up one day to find that he's lost interest in me.
But he looked so serious this morning... Could I trust him to stay?
I don't know.
All I do know is that I want a fucking cigarette.
I push off the wall, head back into the station. I don't want to face Doakes. I just want to grab a smoke and go home, put the day to rest. Tomorrow we interrogate Julia Wagner again, and maybe my partner will be able to break her.
Whatever. For right now it's done, and I'm going home.
