Danny had his secrets, his secret places and names. Danny Taylor hadn't always been Danny Taylor. Vivian knew that, the rest of the team, he suspected, knew it as well, but they hadn't asked.
So here he was, in a bar with Samantha, watching her nurse her third glass of scotch, and waiting for her to ask because she'd been wanting to, he knew she had. She had that look in her eye people got when they were waiting for a great revelation.
Knowing this, he saved her the trouble.
"My real name was Garcia, Daniel Garcia. My dad grew up in Spanish Harlem, my mom in the Bronx. They met, they -- whatever, fell in love, and here I am."
Samantha watched him for a minute, took another sip of scotch.
"You're sitting here sober and you've got the bitterness of a drunk, Danny."
He laughed, rubbed at his face, and felt grateful for the generally subdued atmosphere at this time of night.
"You've got a thing about drinking, Danny..."
There it was, the one. The one question he'd been waiting years for, wondering if it would ever come. He'd known it would someday, known it so instinctively, in fact, that he had an entire speech planned out for it. For some reason, the words fell away just now.
"Yeah...yeah, I do, I just, uh, guess I always -- guess I never wanted to get near it because of my father."
"Drinker?"
He nodded, rubbing his left hand over his knuckles.
"Mine too, pal. A drink, " she said, "to our ace fathers and their addiction."
She turned the glass around in her hands, watched the liquid dance against the sides and wait for it to tell her stories, to tell her what about it made their fathers drink it so much they couldn't see straight day after day. She waited for it to tell her why it had to exist and destroy families and make people hate themselves for this poison they needed.
The answers, apparently, didn't come.
"Kind of an ironic toast, don't you think, Dan?"
She hadn't drank in a while, he could tell. A few shots, and she was already buzzed. Of course, the last time she did drink was about two years ago and he'd been with her then too. She drank over Annie Miller, and over Jack, and sometimes, she didn't remember the things she told Danny about Jack. About how much she loved him.
Maybe she didn't even know how much she loved him, it was pushed so far back. One day, he wanted to tell her, one day, he wanted to ask Jack why he had done this to her -- made her love him and push her away.
"Sam. My father was drinking the night of the accident."
"Oh, shit, Danny. That just, that just sucks. God."
She pushed the glass away, suddenly reviled by it and its toxicity, ran her hands through her hair so fiercely he thought she'd pull a few pieces clear out of the scalp.
"My brother drank...pretty heavily when he came back from Vietnam. I think he hoped if he drank enough, the images might go away."
"Did they?"
"Shit, do they ever? You drink, they go away for a little while. You stop, they come back."
He nodded, took a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the table, and popped them individually into his mouth.
"You know what I think, Sam? I think the world just sucks sometimes."
"I'll agree with that."
She contemplated her drink again.
"You think I shouldn't drink, Danny? Because of what I come from?"
"No."
"But what if --"
"You're not an alcoholic, Samantha, believe me. Not even close, " he spoke gently, dropping the peanuts back into the bowl and leaning forward.
"But sometimes, Danny, sometimes, " she said in a whisper, "I want the images to go away."
"We all do."
She nodded, her eyes darting down to the crumbs on the floor.
"Sometimes I think it's in my blood."
"What?"
"This pain, " she said, laying her hand on her chest.
The pain, he thought, was the pain he saw her wear on her face everyday like a benchmark to everything she'd been and done. A testament to her past and present and even future. The pain was the one that felt Jack and what he'd done, the one that felt every single case they'd lost and every single emotion of the ones they'd left behind.
He knew this pain. They all did. And Jack -- he felt the pain of Samantha. He didn't have to say one single word, but Danny would always know where his heart would lay forever. Even if he himself didn't.
"Sam, " Danny whispered back, putting a gentle hand on her arm, "I think we got screwed when we were kids, you know? But we're better than that now, look at us."
"Yeah, " she said.
"Yeah, " she said again, pulling her arm out from under Danny's grip and putting it on top of his now.
The creak of hinges as the door opened behind them caught their attention and they both smiled at who it was. Matt, with his partner, spotted Samantha and Danny, waved, and joined them at the booth, Matt sitting next to Sam and Alexis taking a seat by Danny.
"What brings you here?" Samantha asked casually. Her brother caught the look in her eye though, knew she was wondering why he'd be in a bar, wondering if the temptation was starting to eat at him.
He shrugged though, scooped up a few peanuts.
"We like the atmosphere. And -- it looks like we might have a serial killer on our hands."
Danny and Samantha turned to each other, both eyes darting up.
Alexis leaned forward, hands clasped around each other.
"That case you guys just had -- Sandy Granson? She was the third victim. Matches each of the two previous victims in appearance. Death is always by gunshot, she was tortured for at least a few hours just like the second victim. And --"
She stopped for a moment, gathering herself.
"Sandy Granson had a 'U' carved in her chest."
Samantha moved her eyes in confusion, questioning what the significance of that was. Matt turned to her, answering her question before she asked.
"First vic had a 'Y', second vic had an 'O'. Now we've got a 'U' and three dead girls. No fingerprints yet, he didn't sexually assault any of them. He's good. Real good."
"Too good?" Samantha asked, leaning forward on her elbows, wavering slightly from her buzz.
"We'll see."
*
Tuesday, December 14
She struck most people as the type of woman who kept a daily organizer, who wore conservative sweaters with her head to the ground in high school; the type of woman who had a 'What Would Jesus Do?' bracelet or bumper sticker attached to her car; who never left a dirty dish on the counter before bed, never let her husband leave for work before ironing his suit, his tie, even his socks.
Stephanie Meslin was the type of woman who kept her life in order, kept her house completely organized, and always had a smile in excess supply for family, friends, and total strangers. So it never occurred to people why anyone would want to hurt this woman who only invited the warmest of human emotions just by being, simply, Stephanie.
Sometimes, the smallest incongruencies tilted the entire axis of our lives. Stephanie Meslin wouldn't know until much later, perhaps too much later, that if she'd waited to have that bowl of cereal until tomorrow so her husband could get a fresh gallon of milk on his way home from work, she wouldn't have endured what she had. If she had waited, waited just one day, she could've seen the movie they'd been planning for all week; she could've taken that trip to Lake Tahoe in the spring; she could've felt his fingers on her skin once more.
If only...if only she'd waited.
Sometimes, it was the smallest of things that changed our lives.
The smallest of details that could kill us.
*
"Can you just be honest with me, please? If she's dead, I'm going to find out soon. I'd rather -- I'd rather know now so I can...so I can stop waiting for her to come home, " Patrick Meslin spoke, rhythmically clenching and unclenching his hands.
"Mr. Meslin --" Samantha began.
"Please, " he pleaded, tears pricking at the corners of his eyes.
Truth was, Stephanie had been gone for 36 hours and, according to Matt, matched the previous victim's descriptions. It could be coincidence. It really could be, she kept telling herself. But with each passing hour, the doubt started taking over her certainty.
Her cell phone rang and she apologetically glanced to Mr. Meslin, stood and moved to a quiet corner, spoke quietly into the mouthpiece.
"Spade. Oh, God. Yeah. All right, Viv. Thanks."
She closed the phone slowly, watched the earpiece fold into the mouthpiece and pondered how quickly that conversation had just ended a life. She had never been the one to deliver this kind of news before, had never felt this tremor in her legs. How could you look in someone's eyes, watch the change from an impassioned kind of hope -- a hope shrouded in skepticism, but one that lay on the foundations of believing everything might be okay -- to one of emptiness, the look of everything being utterly lost that had once been all there was.
With one life, so went another.
"Mr. Meslin..."
He got this funny, painful, awkwardly twisted smile. It fluctuated up and down for a few seconds, trying to decide whether to show her he was grateful for what they had tried to do or merely say, To hell with it, I'm done with this world.
He settled for walking away and falling against the doorway to his kitchen, not trusting himself to take another step. That's where she left him a few minutes later and that's where he would remain for the rest of his life.
In that same spot.
Pained from his loss, unable to move, unable to even comprehend moving. Unable to understood why he should move anymore.
That's where Patrick Meslin's life ended; ten blocks away from the grocery store his wife had been going to; six blocks away from her disfigured body lying in an alley off 86th. Six blocks from home and each would never leave the last place they had lived.
*
It seemed odd to put such opposites together in a phrase by saying saints and sinners. He heard it a lot, in songs and movies, heard of the saints and the sinners and the people who talked about them like they knew what they were saying.
Saints were Saints for a reason, for their good works, their faith; and yet, it seemed, they scarcely were remembered by name, rather, by title. They were simply known as Saints and their each individual offerings fell all together in that generalization. The sinners, he mused, were more widely known and often called by name in daily life.
We remembered the Saints, but we knew the sinners by name.
So he started thinking about this as he found himself in St. Germaine's again. Started trying to remember the Saints he'd learned about and their feast days and the prayers he could say to make these sins go away.
There was St. Matthew who wrote the first gospel; the Patron Saint of bankers.
St. Thomas Aquinas; Patron Saint of students and universities.
St. Monica; Patron Saint of wives and abuse victims.
St. Christopher...he'd always liked St. Christopher, liked the legend behind him. The story of a young man crossing a river, stopped by a little boy asking to be carried across. When St. Christopher picked him up, there was an unbelievable weight atop him. The legend went that the boy was Christ carrying the weight of the world. So St. Christopher was the Patron Saint of travelers.
He liked it, liked him, liked the legend, and he didn't know why. Maybe because he could feel that weight sometimes, sometimes almost everyday, and maybe if he prayed enough, St. Christopher would carry him too.
He knew his sinners too, knew his own heart to be amongst that crowd.
Sinners, sinners...
Jack.
Jack Malone.
And here he was, a sinner, just a faceless sinner with a name people knew because he was just that; a sinner amongst Saints. Here he was in this church, praying to God and all the Saints that would listen to make sense of what he'd created for himself here.