“I’m condoning murder, Kay. It’s well past bending the rules.” It was breaking the laws of man. But maybe not the laws of Jericho.
“Condoning isn’t the same as committing.” She stopped and gave him a thoughtful look. “Wade. Wade shot Wooderson—to keep you from doing it. To keep you pure.” Another pause, then, “Shit. That’s— It’s like you’re the kid in that Terminator movie, with the high-power robot at your command.”
“Have you ever in your life seen Wade Granger take a ‘command’?”
Another pause. “You didn’t even have to ask him. He just did it. Jesus, Jay, is that honestly what you want to sign up for? A pet psychopath? What if you come home from work one day and bitch about somebody—you going to be okay when that person turns up with a bullet in his brain?”
“Are we talking about Hockley? Because in his case . . .”
But Kayla obviously didn’t want to joke about it. “Take some time off. Get out of town for a few days and, sure, if you can, take Granger with you, see what he’s like in an atmosphere that’s a little less blood-soaked and testosterone-baked. Settle down and think it all through. Then come back and make a decision when you’ve had enough sleep and aren’t still seeing Wooderson’s brains on the driveway.”
“Why are you arguing with me on this? I mean, you honestly think I’m wrong?”
She shook her head impatiently. “I think you’re overly dramatic. I think you’re a pain in the ass. But I think you’re a hell of a lot better than Jackson, so if I can’t be here doing this job, you should be.”
“Kay, they’re not going to— What, you’re worried they’re going to try a recall? No, you’re paranoid. News about your dad isn’t even out yet, not fully. There are some rumors, maybe, but not enough to cause you any trouble.”
She sighed and flopped back in her chair. “Jackson knows. So as soon as he’s ready, as soon as he’s got all his ducks in a row, he’ll leak it, and the shit will fly. And, honestly, Jay, I’d be okay with it. I could accept that maybe I don’t deserve the job, not if I was so totally clueless about corruption going on right under my nose. I could go find another job, but not if it means Jackson taking over. I mean . . . he’d be terrible. The people deserve better than that, don’t they?”
“I have no idea what anyone deserves.” Not the town, not himself, not Wade, not Eli. He could feel the exhaustion creeping up on him. The clarity that had come with deciding to quit the force had buoyed him up, but now that the decision was being dissected, he could feel himself sinking. “I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I don’t want to be a bad cop.”
“And the self-doubt you feel about all that may be part of what makes you a good cop,” Kayla said gently. Then she added, “Or maybe you’re a crooked bastard who’s going to drag the department into even more disrepute. Who the hell knows?”
“Your pep talks are a bit bittersweet, you know that?”
“I’ve never been much for the pep.” She pushed her chair away from the desk and stood up with energy that seemed only a little forced. “Take some time off. Get out of town. Come back refreshed and we’ll see where everything stands. Sound good?”
He didn’t want to agree. Everything would be so much easier if there was just one black-and-white boundary in his life, one bridge he could burn that didn’t get rebuilt with scrap metal and rough, salvaged lumber. But apparently he wasn’t going to get that clarity, not right then.
“Okay,” he said grudgingly. “I’ll take a break and get back to you.”
“Thank you,” she said. And he supposed that was enough.
Jericho should have waited. He was too tired, too strung out, too nerve-jangly and adrenalized to deal with anything complicated. It was absolutely not a great time to talk to Nikki. Still, he’d gone by the house on the way back to his apartment, and she’d been home. So.
“Eli was an asshole.” It seemed meaningless, considering they both knew it perfectly well, but it had occurred to him that he’d never expressed the sentiment to Nikki’s face. So he sat there on her secondhand couch, staring at her scowl, and said, “I have no idea why you married him and it’s none of my business. But I want to say it, right now, for whatever record there is between you and me: Asshole. Abusive, angry son of a bitch.”
She just sat there. Watching and waiting, and for a moment, Jericho felt as if maybehewas the asshole in all this, dragging up the past. But he thought of his reasons for coming over, and drew at least a little strength from them.
“He beat the shit out of me when I was a kid,” he said. Strange how hard it still was to say the words. “Not my mom, usually, but sometimes her too, if he was really on a tear. He—” What? Jericho had never done the therapy thing, but he’d talked to people who had, heard all their jargon, all their pasted-on explanations for something that seemed a hell of a lot simpler on its own. Jericho didn’t want to talk about how Eli hadn’t been given any positive male role models or hadn’t understood appropriate ways to express his frustration. “He was an asshole.”
“But I married him,” Nikki finally said. “I walked into it with my eyes open. I had kids with him.” It sounded like a challenge, but Jericho could hear it differently, if he listened through his younger ears. Sometimes people needed answers to questions they couldn’t ask.
So Jericho responded with, “Wade says Eli had a lot of good qualities. I didn’t see many of them, from my perspective, but Wade’s pretty smart, especially when it comes to understanding people. And he has some nice things to say about Eli.”
“And you have some nice things to say about Wade,” Nikki replied, clearly fighting to get a smirk back on her face.
But Jericho was too tired for that shit. “You married Eli, for whatever reasons. And for another set of reasons, reasons I think I understand better than the first, you killed him.” Inexcusable that it had taken him so long to figure it out. Sexist, probably, assuming that a woman, even a woman like Nikki, couldn’t have committed the crime. But once he’d gotten past whatever the mental barriers had been, it all made sense.
“There must have been a final straw. He’d been beating you for a while, I’m guessing. Maybe it started small and got worse. You’ve got no money, no family to run to, and you hate the cops way too much to trust them to help you. And you’re tough. Proud. It must have been something serious that sent you to the shelter, but the woman there didn’t mention you seeming banged up or needing medical care. So I’m thinking he hit one of the kids.” It felt wrong to make this kind of a speech without giving her a chance to respond, but he needed to get it all out first, let her know his perspective, before she said anything that would set them down a path too narrow to turn around on.
“He pushed you too far, so you pushed him off the cliff. I think you had your damn bike in the back of the truck and rode it home along the trail—that’s why the forensics lab only found one set of tire tracks going out there. Somehow Mike DeMonte knows about it—” That was what he’d meant when he’d told Jericho to look closer to home. Not Wade, but Nikki. “—and that’s not good. He’ll probably tell the feds anything he knows, eventually, in order to get a sweeter deal. And Wade knows.” Which was why he’d told Jericho to let it all go and not keep poking. Because if Jericho could have lived the rest of his life without having this knowledge, everything would have been a hell of a lot easier. “And now I know.”
“You don’t know shit,” she growled. “All you’ve got is guesses and theories.”
“I know,” he said, and he did. He might not have the evidence to prove it, but he knew it all the same. So for the second time in two days, he was faced with an unrepentant killer he couldn’t convict.
But Nikki wasn’t a thrill-killing psychopath. She’d had a reason for doing what she’d done, and there was no reason to believe she’d do it again. There was no one to protect, no future crimes to prevent.
