A/N: All previous disclaimers apply.
Mac Taylor had always prided himself on his objectivity, his ability to separate instinct and desire from hard truth. It was an ability that, like it or not, he had inherited from his late father, a Chicago real estate magnate who had plucked the seeds of his fortune from the fruitful loins of his father and multiplied it tenfold by virtue of his savvy and his ruthlessness in business dealings. By the time he had come along in the winter of 1960, his father had established himself astride the Chicago construction world, and on the rare occasion he chose to lift the black veil of forgetfulness from his childhood, he saw himself on the floor of his father's office, hiding Sgt. Rock in the thick forest of the green carpet and listening to his father reshape the city skyline on clouds of cigar smoke.
Most of what he remembered of his father came from those final two, tortured years, when the mellow sweetness of his beloved cigars had soured to the rotten, black masses that had consumed his lungs with tarry, patient fingers and reduced him to a wracked wraith in a starched winding sheet, but his mother and family photo albums had supplied the rest. In addition to his father's pragmatism, he had inherited his eyes and the nasal Midwestern speech pattern. His father had been a meticulous man, impeccably groomed even on lazy Sundays, nary a hair out of place. In pictures, he was lean and erect, and the hand that rested on his childhood shoulder carried short, neat nails that would have met and exceeded military expectations.
According to his mother, he had drunk precisely one glass of port every night, and never more. Business luncheons were a daily occurrence, and three times a week, he and his developer cronies hit the greens for a round of golf. Saturdays were reserved for horseback riding, and until the age of sixteen, Mac had accompanied him and learned the value of horseflesh at the expense of his own. Until the roar of crumbling masonry had overtaken it in 1983 and again in 2001 and 2006, he had awakened in the night to the sharp snap of riding crop on leather spats, and if he looked closely enough while he was putting on his socks in the morning, he could see faint lines in the flesh of his ankles where a lesson had been reinforced on a strip of rawhide.
His father had been a disciplinarian from the first and had made no secret of the lofty ambitions he nurtured for his only son. While his mother had twitted and cooed over his first, wobbling steps, his father had dismissed them as no more momentous than the act of breathing. After all, any son of his was expected to walk, and so of course he had. He would not spoil his boy with praise he had never earned. Each milestone was greeted with the same stony apathy, and by the time he was in kindergarten, Mac had stopped trying to make his father smile, had understood it as an exercise in futility.
He had been another project for his father, another monument to be erected in his honor. He had been sent to exclusive private schools where manners were taught alongside calculus and biology. Long after he had forgotten the specifics of Paul Revere's dramatic gallop through Boston, he still knew how to wear a cravat and which fork to use at dinner. Tweed-wearing schoolmasters who had worn pretension like aftershave had done their best to reshape him in accordance with his father's wishes. The course of his life had been predestinate from the moment his father had laid claim to paternity, or so he had thought, and it had come as quite the surprise when Mac had discovered his free will and erased the blueprint his father had drawn for him.
Your father saw it as an act of treason when you refused to toe the line he had drawn in his fine, distinctive hand. To his mind, free will was a legacy to be inherited at the reading of the will. Until then, it was your duty as the sole Taylor heir to do as you were told. He had invested his seed and his money in you, and it was the least you could do to repay him with absolute obedience. And was it really so much to ask? All he required was that you surrender your dreams in favor of the prefabricated ones that he had made for you. Go to Harvard Business School and become a financial magnate. Arrange deals that would bring reflected glory to his name and land the family in the society pages. There was no room for science or inquiry when there were millions to be made. Dreams were for the stupid and the poor, not for those who controlled the strings of the world. Not for the Taylors, who had been a distinguished family since the Industrial Revolution.
You were supposed to be a chip off the old block. And carve one off for yourself, of course. That was the price of independence in high society: an heir. A son bought freedom from the crushing stranglehold of impossible expectation. Sons were safeguards; if the unthinkable happened and a son turned out to be a disappointment, hopes could always be pinned on the next generation. The day your voice began to change, you father assumed that you would one day be a father in your own right. It was another requirement to be met, just like the straight As and the perfect application of tack to a thoroughbred.
As you grew older, you watched your male cousins chafe and wither under the strain of generational obligation. Exuberant boys transformed into harried, humorless men, white-faced and balding at thirty. Most drank too much and talked too loudly and hid their frustrations behind cosmetic smiles and thousand-dollar suits. They were hurried into careers for which they had no great affinity and marriages whose successes were measured by the bottom lines on bank statements. Children were conceived and borne into the world before there was sufficient love to sustain them, and the whole ugly cycle was repeated in a living example of DNA replication.
Not that the women in the family drew better lots. Those granted entre by blood were cosseted and treated like princesses of delicate china, but their pampered status was fleeting and easily upended by the arrival of the male heir. They were afterthoughts, and little thought was given to their future beyond a good liberal arts education and the social graces to attract a good match from an acceptable social milieu. As long as they were pretty and fertile, they served their purpose.
Those who were grafted onto the family tree by marriage were sadder still, set pieces hollowed on the inside. They had plastic faces and saltwater breasts, Barbie dolls in a Versace wardrobe. They were too thin inside their cinched and taped gowns, and sometimes when you danced with them at social functions, you detected the faintest whiff of vomit and bourbon on their breaths, the unmistakable smell of youth ripening to middle age. They dieted and facelifted until they were skin stretched taut over brittle bones, and all the sacrifices rarely mattered because the husbands they were struggling to keep were having dalliances and siring bastards with younger women. Most abandoned the Cinderella dream soon enough, learned to turn their heads, and waited for freedom and recompense to come on the closing of a coffin lid.
You hated that life, hated watching dreams die under the under the crushing heels of fathers who, deprived of their own hopes, could not bear to see happiness in the faces of their sons. You despised attending the funerals of those who could not abide the pressure and had relieved it with a bullet to the temple or through the roof of the mouth. You hated the cloying press of tuxedoes and three-piece suits. You were tired of watching beautiful young girls turn into glassy-eyed socialites who limped through life on the crutches of Valium and Dilaudid.
You were seventeen when you told him that there had been a change of plan. You had not enlisted in the military, not yet, but you wanted to be anywhere else, away from the silent, tasteless dinners and the riding lessons and the endless discussion of college and life after the lambskin. You were filled with the bravado of the young, and you told yourself that no matter how he reacted, you were going to stand your ground.
You told him that day because he was in a good mood. He came home smelling of sweet Havanas and another fortune made. He was jaunty and whistling when he went into the living room to kiss your mother, and you followed him into his study with your heart in a mouth dry as the desert sand you would taste so often four years later. He was pouring himself a glass of port when you slipped into the room, but he must have heard your footfalls on the carpet because he greeted you with a hearty, Hello, Mac. It was so fond that you thought you stood a chance, that for one magical night, even one magical hour, he would listen to you.
Dad, can I talk to you? I think I've finally decided what I want to do after graduation.
He turned, clearly pleased. Have you? Excellent. I was beginning to wonder. He gestured to the sofa opposite the fireplace and sipped port from the tumbler in his hand. Sit. Tell me all about it.
You sat, lips and teeth heavy as lead. The part of you that loved your father with the blind, unquestioning devotion of a child hesitated, but you knew that if you put off this discussion any longer, it would never happen. You would always find a reason to wait another day and then another, and by the time you thought to speak, there would be no words and you would be ten years chained to an oak desk in Sears Tower. You swallowed your cowardice like a small, hot marble that lodged in your sternum, gripped your knees to hide your trembling hands, and waited for your moment of truth.
Your father plopped onto the sofa with a contented groan, took a long sip of port, and plucked at the pleat of his tailored pants.
Long day? you ventured, stalling for time to rally your courage.
Your father chuckled, weary and phlegmatic. Show me one that isn't. I spent half the goddamned morning in a three-martini lunch with Bill Waterman on the Rheingold deal, and the rest of the day fielding phone calls from soused, high lawyers. Still, I think they're going to accept my latest proposal, thank God.
That's good.
That's very good. Now, we were talking about what you'd decided. Where will you be attending college? University of Chicago? Fordham? Harvard? Colombia? He leaned forward, and the tumbler dangled loosely from his fingers.
The marble in your chest swelled, a malignant tumor out of control, and for a minute, your tongue twitched impotently in your mouth. You forced yourself to think of your older cousin, Marshall, who drove his car into Lake Michigan and drowned in its frozen waters at twenty-two. I'm not going to any of them, Dad. I want to join the military.
The smile hung on your father's face as the seconds ticked inexorably past, suspended there in defiance of the oppressive gravity that suddenly blanketed the room. When your pronouncement finally sank in, his face didn't fall. It closed, and the happy, hopeful light in his eyes guttered and died. I should've know you'd disappoint me, his expression said, and he brought the tumbler of port to his lips and drained it with a single toss of his head.
The military, he repeated contemptuously. What in God's name for? This is your future we're talking about, Mac, not some game you play with your little friends.
But it's not a game, Dad, you insisted valiantly. It's a chance to do something on my own, to prove myself. Besides, with the G.I. Bill, I can get money for college after my enlistment's up.
Your father laughed. Is that what this is about? Money? Relieved. Here was a problem he could handle. Mac, money is no object. You can choose any school you want, and the money will be there.
No, Dad, it's not just about money, you snapped, exasperated. You hated him when he was like this, so smug, so sure that he could make problems disappear with the opening of a wallet or the flourishing of a checkbook. I just want to do something for me, figure out what I want for a change, who I am.
Who you are? Don't be ridiculous. You're a Taylor-
I'm sick of being a Taylor, you screamed. I want to be me, Mac Taylor. I would rather be him, whoever he is, than spend the rest of my life riding on your coattails. You stopped, astounded into silence by your own audacity, and a gleeful voice at the base of your brain whispered that you sounded like a whiny pussy who still had not grown any hair on his nutsack.
Your father rose from the sofa and went to pour himself another glass of port from the decanter on the wet bar. He poured it, downed half of it at a gulp, and replenished the glass. The liquid was a deep, rich red, and though you did not think of it at the time, later you would wonder if it was not a portent of things to come, of the course your life your life would take once you turned your back on your father's house that summer. But at the time, you only wondered how much of the booze he would drink before the night was out.
He took a steadying, dainty sip and studied you over the rim of his tumbler. When he spoke, his voice was calm, musing, the same tone he used with oily-handed attorneys and city commissioners who were trying to fuck him over. So your grand plan to find yourself is to join the Army?
Yes.
I've got news for you. The Army isn't some cartoon. It's a meat grinder. It'll chew you up and spit you out, and if you come out the other side, you'll think and act just like all the other jarheads on the assembly line. Is that what you want? To be spoonfed your personality and get your opinions from some survivalist handbook?
Not much different from living under your roof, you thought mutinously, but you were smart enough to keep your mouth shut on that particular sentiment.
He took a contemplative swallow. No, Mac, he said. You won't be joining the Army. He drained his third tumblerful and turned his back, and you knew what that meant. There was be no more discussion, and you were dismissed. His decision was final.
Except it wasn't that night. You stared at his back as he stood with his palms pressed to the wet bar, and you came to a sudden, inescapable truth. You were drowning in his shadow just as surely as your cousin, Marshall, had drowned in the frozen waters of Lake Michigan, and if you did not escape now, you never would. You would join Marshall in the family mausoleum, another casualty of the family name.
You set your shoulders. With all due respect, I am.
His shoulders tensed in turn. I thought I'd made myself clear.
You did. Now I'm making myself clear.
I'm not going to let you throw your life away just because you want to play at rebellion. You'll go to college, you'll get a good job, and ten years from now, you'll thank me.
I've already enlisted, you blurted. A lie, but he had no way of knowing that, and anyway, you were desperate to win just one fight with your father.
He slammed his palm on the wet bar with enough force to make the empty tumbler rattle and shed its condensation like bloody tears. Then I'll have the agreement voided.
No, you won't. I've made up my mind, and I'm going, you shouted. It was impossibly loud, the roar of a young lion, but you could not help but notice it lacked the full-throated timbre of your father. No longer a boy, but not yet a man.
His shoulders slumped, but when he turned around, he was smiling, and his eyes were glassy and bright with too much booze. You really want to go this way, Mac? he asked, and flashed you a predatory smile.
A fulcrum shifted inside your stomach, oily and heavy, and you understood that whatever passed between you now was for good and all. Once done, it could not be undone. You licked dry lips. Yes, sir.
He closed the distance between you in deliberate, wobbling strides until you were within kissing range, and for one mad instant, you were sure that was exactly what he was going to do. So close, you smelled the pickled sweetness of the port mingled with cigar smoke on his breath.
Then you're on your own, he said. It was a whisper. No favors, no help, and not one dime from me. Is that understood? I might not be able to talk you out of this fool's errand, but I'll be damned if I'll help you die. Not one dime.
Yes, sir. The words were a rattle inside your mouth, giddy with adrenaline and the stupefying realization that you were free.
He backed away. Go on. He jerked his head in the direction of the closed study door. Go live out your Sgt. Rock fantasies. Don't come crying to me when you come home with your leg blown off.
You left quickly on shaking legs, certain that he would call you back and tell you that he had changed his mind, but the only sound you heard before the heavy, wooden door slammed on your departing back was the slosh and gurgle of your father pouring himself another drink.
The gibe on Sgt. Rock hurt because the best memories of your father came from those hours spent playing soldier underneath his desk. The next day, you went to lend truth to the lie you had told your father and enlisted, and Sgt. Rock was in your coat pocket, your small, plastic point man. You still have that Sgt. Rock action figure buried in a box in the back of your closet. His face was mostly gone the last time you looked in on him, a fatal war wound that should have earned him an honorable discharge from the flimsy, cardboard box, but you can't bring yourself to part with him, and so he stands sentry over Claire's beach ball.
It was a tense three months in your father's house before you left for boot camp. He did not shout or raise his hand, and there was no dramatic declaration that you were no son of his, but it was plain that the landscape between you had changed irrevocably. You left for basic training in Fort Bennig a week after graduation, and the city boy who had grown up with the gritty taste of asphalt on his mouth and tongue suddenly found them full of thick, sweet Georgia clay. The military slapped any illusions you might have had that you were ready for the world right out of your head, but you never regretted your decision because it gave you the one thing you had always craved: a sense of belonging, a feeling that you were where you were meant to be and doing what you were meant to do.
Your father was wrong about one thing, though. You did get money from his coffers. Your mother sent it once a month in the care packages she prepared. It was never much; the largest sum you remember was one hundred dollars, but you suspect it was all she dared slip from the joint account she shared with your father. Your stubborn streak balked at accepting the money, saw it as a concession of weakness, but every time you started to tear the check to pieces, you thought of your mother surreptitiously slipping it into the parcel with a kiss and the fervent wish that it would bring a scrap of happiness to her boy so far from home. You never tore them up, but you never cashed them, either. You just stashed them in the bottom of your footlocker, and when you came home from your last tour of duty in 1985, you found them underneath your socks, lined on the bottom like perfect little soldiers. You burned them in the trash barrel outside your apartment, and they smelled like burning leaves.
You have often wondered about your mother and how she ended up with your grimly practical father. Happenstance, you suppose, or perhaps she was temporarily blinded by the gruff charm he exuded when it suited him. The same thing happened with you and Claire, God rest her soul, and in both cases, you think it would have been better if they had run. Your mother was the idealist to your father's pragmatist, a free spirit you could easily have seen wallowing with the Mud People at Woodstock if she had not been bound to you by apron strings. Your mother's eternal optimism was all that made life in your father's house bearable near the end.
There's always another day after this one, she would say, and that unruffled serenity helped her weather your father's fits of brooding melancholy and distemper.
But she was wrong about that. One day, there would be no next for your father. You found that out courtesy of a phone call from your mother one night in 1990. The shadow of the end had been caught on an X-ray, and your father's days were now a finite set. You hadn't set foot in your father's house since 1977, but she asked you to come, and so you went, shoes polished and pants smartly creased.
Your father would not die for another seven months, but you could smell death on your mother's skin when she opened the door. Gone was the smiling flower-child who would gladly have danced with the Mud People and worn garlands in her hair. She was old and used up and shrunken in the looming presence of death. Her hair was thin and so was her smile, and when she led you into your father's study, her feet made no sound as they moved over the green carpet of Sgt. Rock's jungle. She was a ghost.
Your father, on the other hand, had inherited your mother's optimism. He swore that the best oncologists in Chicago were wrong, that he had more time. The chemotherapy and radiation treatments would make more time, wring it from his diseased, cigar-blackened lungs with poisonous, searing fingers. He would buy time with his checkbook and his willpower. Just like every other inconvenience in his life, money would make his problem disappear.
It didn't work; the only thing that got smaller was the family fortune, fed to the ravening tumors, which gorged and grew fat. The progression was relentless, chronicled with scrupulous indifference by the unblinking eye of the X-ray machine. The shadow on the films deepened and expanded, and once, you thought, ridiculously but not without merit, that it resembled the Blob. After one visit to the oncologist's, the idea became so entrenched in your mind that all you could hear was the incongruously jaunty theme song that accompanied the opening credits. Then all you could do was sit behind the wheel of your mother's Mercedes and giggle at the absurdity, knuckles white and bloodless against the black leather of the steering wheel.
Your mother, of course, did not giggle, touched by the grief you would come to know so well ten years later, when your Claire left you a ray of California sunshine and returned a few hours in a drizzling mist of scattered ash. Looking back, you cannot imagine what your mother must have thought, watching you howl with laughter in the driver's seat while she faced the prospect of life without the man she had called her other half for thirty-seven years. It must have seemed monstrous, and maybe it was, but it was the only action you could take. Not even the Marines had taught you how to cure cancer.
The tumor was spotted in August. By October, it had consumed one lung and was devouring the other, and the pressure was suffocating him. He asked you to kill him the week before Halloween. He had been relegated to the guest bedroom on the second floor by then, and even with the oxygen to assist his breathing, his moving days were done. He was propped in the bed and surrounded by machines and the nostrums of the dying. The oxygen hissed into his lungs through a nasal canula, and the stilted silence was punctuated by the measured click-drip of the morphine drip.
You sat at his bedside, and the room stank of piss and stale shit that your mother and the hospice workers could not clean fast enough. He was wasted, and whenever he exhaled, it sounded like bubbling tar and smelled of blood and old smoke and rotten phlegm.
Mac, he said, and it was phlegmatic and hot. He coughed, and blood flew from his lips like high-velocity blood spatter.
You reached for a tissue from the box on the nightstand and wiped his lips. Beneath the blood, they were blue, and it was several long, impotent moments of dabbing before you realized why the color would not come off. You hurriedly crumpled the tissue in your fist and stuffed it into your pocket, and after that terrible conversation was over and you were in your own apartment, you found it there. You pulled it out and held it in your palm, and the only thought of which you were capable as you gazed at the smear of blood and your father's decaying lungs was, The mark of sin. You flushed it down the toilet, pulled a half-empty bottle of Smirnoff from the cupboard and drank until the angular, fastidious contours of your apartment blurred around the edges.
But before the stiff hands of the clock marched to that appointed hour, you sat your vigil and wiped the evidence of dying from cracked, papery lips.
Save your strength, Dad, you urged him, and sat back in your chair.
A glottal, sputtering caw that sent up more blood and stippled the linens. A laugh. For when? It seems that if I've got any talking left to do, it's best to do it now. There's nothing I want to tell the undertaker except to kiss my ass.
You could not argue with the sentiment, and it was a shade of the father you had once known. You looked at your feet and said nothing, filled with a regret you could not explain.
I know we haven't always seen eye to eye, Mac, he went on. But I need you to do me a favor. He licked his lips and wheezed.
What is it, Dad?
The doctors say there's no getting better from this. It's too strong and too far gone. They've promised to make me comfortable, but the damn drugs aren't working. Haven't for weeks. I've asked them to up the dosage, but they won't because they're afraid, I'll overdose and die. He laughed again, a gargling chuckle, and blood welled between his teeth. Can you imagine? I'm dying, and they're afraid I might die. Quacks, all of them, he said contemptuously.
I don't-
They said they were bound by the Hippocratic Oath to first do no harm, but they're just afraid to do what's right. But you won't be. That Marine training of yours ought to have done that much at least. You know about duty.
I still don't know-
He heaved himself onto one spindly elbow, an effort that wrenched a groan of agony from his wattled throat. The fuck you don't, Mac, he rasped.
His hand shot from beneath the bedsheet and clamped around your forearm with astonishing speed and strength. The flesh of his palm was so thin that you felt the sickly heat of the blood in his veins. It was clammy, feverish, and alien against your skin, and you wanted to recoil. His eyes blazed with manic intensity.
You don't have to do it yourself if you don't have the stomach for it. Just pour the dope into my damn tea, and I'll drink it when the hospice worker shows up. He collapsed onto his pillows and gasped, a mortally-wounded horse pawing uselessly at bloody ground.
You knew what he was asking, had known from the moment he opened his mouth, and you also knew that you could not do it. By the time you came home from Beirut, you had been refined and distilled. You knew who you were beneath all the Taylor trappings of a private education and the sharp bite of silver spoons on your tongue. You were devoted to duty and country, and you were a damned fine man, and damned fine men did not kill their fathers, even if they begged for it.
Even if a small, shameful part of them wanted to.
You had done your duty killing in Beirut, and you wanted to do no more. Not when you remembered Stan Whitney holding onto his life with both gut-filled hands. Whitney had been nineteen and had not wanted to die. Life had been wrested from him on foreign sand with no one to be sorry he was dead except you. Now here your father sat, on the other side of fifty and refusing to face the consequences of his thirty-year love affair with Castro's crop. It was not fair, and you would not be party to it.
I'm sorry, but no.
His eyes widened. Dammit, Mac, this is no time for your stiff-necked moralizing. I want to end it on my terms, to die with what dignity I have left. Three months from now, the damn tumors will have invaded my brain, and I'll be so much breathing meat, gibbering in my own shit. I don't want your mother to remember me like that. I don't want to be remembered like that. For God's sake, do what I ask just this once.
I can't. I'm sorry.
You won't, you mean, he grunted, and closed his eyes. Talking had exhausted him.
I'm sorry, you repeated. Such a stupid, useless phrase.
You stayed with him for a few more awkward minutes, and when you rose to leave, he seized your forearm again. It feels good, doesn't it? he gasped, and smiled to reveal blood-stained teeth.
You told yourself those words were the ravings of a man wracked with pain. They were also the last words he ever spoke to you. On subsequent visits, he turned you away, and when you showed up for the deathbed goodbye in late March of 1991, he was too incoherent to recognize anyone. Sometimes, you puzzled over them in your mind when the nights were long and it was better than dreaming of Whitney dying in the sand, but they did not haunt you.
Not until Claire said them in 1998, after a squabble over whether or not to have children. Savage and wounded and full of terrible knowledge. It feels good, doesn't it, Mac? The constant powertrip. Then you did know what your father meant, and you were so stunned by the revelation that you could only sit on the couch in the living room and ponder it between pulls of Beam. Claire apologized the next morning, but the words could not be unsaid, and they have followed you through the years, repeated on the lips of others.
Danny said it after you took him off the promotion grid, and again after you fired Aiden. He is the most volatile of your CSIs, but he's also the most honest, and the accusation, spat like hobnails at your feet, was hard and stinging as a slap. Stella has said it, too, upon occasion, though not as sharply. And Flack says it still in the way he dismisses your friendly overtures in the hallways of the lab.
You have tried to deny it, but with so many chorusing the same refrain, you have begun to wonder if it is not an unwelcome truth. You can admit now that you fled Chicago after your father was in the ground and you had been officially disinherited by the proviso of his will. There was nothing left for you there, and you wanted to pretend that none of the years spent in his house had happened.
But you could not shake them. You realize now that everything you have done since has been influenced by his shadow. You left Chicago because of it, you became a cop and refused to become a father because of it. You hurt Claire because of it, and oh, isn't that a hot prong of restless conscience? Sometimes, you think she died because of it. If you had not been so set against fatherhood, so terrified that you were Taylor to the core beneath your Marine façade, maybe she would have been at home with Billy or Johnny, and not in the Towers, crunching numbers for a company soon to be vaporized by burning jet fuel.
With all the tragedies left you by your father's legacy, he left you a single gift. You learned objectivity at his knees while you guided Sgt. Rock through the jungles of Underdesk. You learned how to separate wish and whimsy from analytical fact. While your mother could look at a tenement or vacant lot and see a park or a set of boutiques, your father could see the same and a hundred details besides. He could see the termites and the wood rot that would render a property untenable or the ideal locations and prevailing currents of a city that would mark the X of a trendy nightclub or eatery. He could bring himself to raze a quaint, turn-of-the-century brownstone for the sake of his bottom line. That clinical detachment served him well, and it allowed you to kill fellow human beings over imaginary lines drawn in shifting sand. If you want to get technical, you owe your father your job.
However, he had come by it, his objectivity was gone, and he could only take solace in the fact that he knew it. All the evidence on his desk that pertained to Lessing's escape said it was unhappy coincidence. The preliminary reports from the institution's doctors indicated that aside from his sudden catatonia, Lessing was healthy, and the tox screens he had ordered independently had shown no unexpected results-just the expected dosages of anti-psychotics and chemical inhibitors. No Hepatitis, meningitis, or other pathogens that would account for the sharp decline in cognitive function.
Neither the crime scene photos nor the prelims from Trace or DNA had hinted at the presence of unwanted personnel. He had sent Hawkes back the following day to photograph Lessing with an ALS camera to check for latent prints or bruising, any evidence of abuse. Nothing. Just the dirt that dusted his skin even after two showers. Aside from its maddening resistance to water, it contained high levels of nitrates and carbon dioxide, both of which were consistent with cemeteries and mass graves. Stella had done a search of cemeteries that morning, and he had been leafing through the results for the past half an hour.
So far, nothing had turned up. No tenants by the name of Lessing had taken their eternal rest in Mount Pleasant, the closest graveyard to where he had been found. It was possible that his wife's kin were buried, and as lab supervisor, he supposed he could ask Danny to run a check, but he would want to know why, and Mac had no answer to that himself. None that wouldn't make him look like a fantastic hypocrite, at least. He could use the Because I said so excuse, but Danny would react to that as well as any child would, and he couldn't stomach two days of petulant sulking with so little to justify it. It was just…
Your gut. Just your gut. That tool of every seasoned investigator, the one you never overtly acknowledge if you can help it. Evidence is better. Evidence is best. Evidence stands up in court. Guts do not fare as well, not even when presented as glossy, 8x10 photos of a homicide detective's lower intestine. Guts get laughed off the bench and get the defendant a lifetime pass to the loony lodge.
Besides, it all comes back to hypocrisy. You can hardly go off half-cocked, chasing leads on roads to nowhere; not after the countless words you have spent extolling the inviolate virtues of concrete evidence. When Danny was fixated on a member of the crew on the Sand Hog case, you told him to follow the evidence, not his gut. So how could you look him in the eye now and tell him that you want him to undertake hours of tedious record-searching on nothing more than a hunch? You have already made that mistake with Flack and Jesse Spencer. You all but ordered Flack to hold off on an arrest just because you did not want the worst to be true. Not only that, but you deliberately let Jesse elude custody because it didn't feel right. Hypocrite, Flack's eyes said. It feels good, doesn't it? The power trip.
So you have nothing to go on, and yet, you cannot let the matter rest. You cannot accept the bland truth that Lessing slipped through an unattended door and wandered to temporary freedom. It is too pat, and so unfair. It exposes the truth behind the pretty lie. Flack and his wife's peace of mind-the entirety of their justice-hinges on the mental acumen and the keyring of a hospital attendant preoccupied with the dim pleasures of ogling the Penthouse centerfold and scratching the crack of their ass.
He had been there on the day Lessing's sentence had been handed down, in the gallery with Flack and his wife. He couldn't forget Rebecca's face when the judge had declared that for his crimes, Lessing would spend his life as a ward of the State of New York. No surprise-the D.A. had warned all the victims' families of this outcome-but fury and empty-eyed despair. From the corner of his eye, he had watched the tears stream down her frozen face as her jaw struggled to contain her impotent rage. Flack's arm had curled protectively around her, and his fingers had brushed gently at her tears.
Nor had he forgotten what she had said later, outside the courthouse in the fall sunshine. It's not fair.
She'd said it as Flack held her on a wooden bench not far from the stone steps, huddled against his body and shuddering with the force of suppressed sobs. Nor had he forgotten Flack in that moment, small and deflated and helpless in the face of reflected grief. It's not fair.
It was simplistic and childish and true, and he could not blame her for it. She wasn't the only one harboring the thought. She had just been the only one blunt enough to say it aloud. It was etched into the faces of the other families and friends of the dead who had no arms to console them. He'd had the same thought himself in the months and years since Claire had been stolen. It wasn't fair. It was hard and ugly, and the punishment seldom fit the crime. It hadn't that day, either, and that was why the D.A. hadn't dared to meet the Flacks' gazes as he scurried from the courtroom.
It's not fair. No, it wasn't, and that was why he was hunched over his desk, poring over the rolls of the necropolis at Mount Pleasant with a magpie's eye, searching for the faintest glimmer of why or how. He was determined to preserve the Flacks' sorry justice for whatever it was worth, and if he found that any of Lessing's wardens had had a hand in his escape, he would go to the D.A with a demand to reconsider the means of his incarceration. He couldn't see him swing, but he could see him properly caged.
He had just pulled the roster of the dead towards himself when Stella strode into his office, folder in hand.
"Hey, Mac," she said. "Got those DNA results from the Tremonti case. Looks like the son is in the clear, but we haven't eliminated the brother yet." She stopped when she realized he wasn't looking at her. "Mac? A little courtesy would be nice."
He blinked and sat back in his chair. "Sorry, Stella. I was just-,"
"Are you still working the Lessing case?" She had caught sight of what he was reading. "I thought you said there was probably nothing to it?"
He scrubbed his face with his hands and sighed. "I did, but-,"
"You want to be sure," she finished for him, and plopped into the chair on the opposite side of his desk.
He nodded. "I owe it to Flack to be sure."
"Have you told him yet?"
"No. Right now, there's nothing to tell."
"I'm not sure you should even if there is," Stella said quietly.
Mac blinked. "What makes you say that?"
She shrugged, a helpless, ineloquent gesture. "I don't know, Mac," she admitted. "He's been through a hell of a lot, and he's not the only one."
He wondered briefly who she meant. Maybe she was talking about herself and her fun-filled evening with Frankie Mala, or Danny, who was learning to live with a brother who was fading into shadow but refused to die. Maybe she was talking about him. He'd nearly been turned to dust right along with Flack, and maybe she suspected that he wasn't sleeping so well, was awakening from dreams of Stan Whitney to find Flack standing at the foot of the bed with his guts in his hands and dripping onto the carpet with a thick, mournful plip-plop. Maybe she meant all of them. Maybe none. He didn't ask.
It's not fair.
"I'll be careful, Stella."
She offered him a tired smile. "I know." She rose with a grimace. She moved more slowly since Frankie had bruised her with his careless, cruel hands, and not for the first time, Mac thought Mala had escaped too lightly in death.
"I'm going to see what I can dig up on Mr. Tremonti's brother."
"Keep me posted."
Another smile, heartbreaking and beautiful for the weariness in it. "You know I will."
When she was gone and the glass door of his office had closed on the heavy clack of her heels, he picked up the roster from Mount Pleasant with the intention of stuffing it into his desk drawer.
And then he froze, mesmerized by the name he had glimpsed through an errant slip of page. He stared at it for a long time, and then, mouth dry and bitter, he picked up the phone.