This logic I can't even follow. Biting down on my response, I turn and walk out. I am still angry with Caleb by the time I reach the police department and find Patrick asleep at his desk.
I slam the door of his office, and he nearly falls out of his chair. Then he winces, holds his hand to his head. "I'm just glad to see that you public servants are really earning all my tax dollars," I say sourly.
"Where's the digital lineup?"
"I'm working on it," Patrick responds.
"Oh, yeah, I can see that you're really exerting yourself."
He stands up and frowns at me. "Who peed in your coffee?"
"I'm sorry. Just some domestic bliss spilling over. No doubt I'll find my manners by the time you find probable cause to lock up Szyszynski."
Patrick looks me right in the eye. "How's Caleb?"
"Fine."
"Doesn't sound like things are fine . . ."
"Patrick. I'm here because I need to know that something's going on. Anything. Please. Show me."
He nods and takes my arm. We move through corridors I have never navigated at the Biddeford Police Department, and finally wind up in a back room not much bigger than a closet. The lights are off, a green screen hums on a computer, and the boy who sits in front of the keyboard has acne and a fistful of Munchos. "Dude," he says to Patrick.
I turn to Patrick, too. "You're kidding."
"Nina, this is Emilio. Emilio helps us with digital imaging. He's a computer whiz."
He leans over Emilio and hits a button on the keyboard. Ten photos appear on the screen, one of them Father Szyszynski's.
I lean forward, look close. There is nothing in the priest's eyes or his easy smile that would make me believe he is capable of such an abomination. Half of the people in the photos are dressed in the vestments of priests; the other half are wearing the standard issue jumpsuit of the local jail. Patrick shrugs. "The only picture I could find of Szyszynski was in his clerical collar. So I have to make the convicts look like priests, too. That way there won't be any cause for question later on, after Nathaniel makes his ID."
He says it like it is going to happen. For that, I adore him. As we watch, Emilio superimposes a collar over a picture of a ham-faced thug. "Got a minute?" Patrick asks me, and when I nod, he leads me out of the little makeshift office, through a side door, and into a courtyard.
There is a picnic table, a basketball hoop, and around this, a high chain link fence. "All right," I say immediately. "What's wrong?"
"Nothing's wrong."
"If nothing was wrong, you would have been able to talk to me in front of your teenage hacker."
Patrick sits down on the bench of the picnic table. "It's about the lineup."
"I knew it."
"Will you just stop?" Patrick waits until I sit down, then looks right into me. Those eyes, they've got a history with mine. They were the first things I saw when I came to, after being hit in the skull with a baseball thrown by Patrick at Little League. They were the fortification I needed at sixteen to ride the chairlift at Sugarloaf, although I am terrified of heights. For almost my whole life, they've told me I'm doing all right, during moments when it was not in my own power to answer. "You need to understand something, Nina," Patrick says. "Even if Nathaniel points right to Szyszynski's picture . . . it's a weak disclosure. Surveying a lineup isn't something a five-year-old can really understand. It could be he picks the only familiar face; it could be he points to anyone, just to get us to leave him alone."
"Don't you think I know that?"
"You understand what it takes to secure a conviction. We can't lead him into making an ID just because you want this case to move faster. All I'm saying is that Nathaniel might be able to talk a week from now.
Maybe even tomorrow. Eventually, he's going to be able to say the name of the perp, and that's going to be a much stronger accusation."
Leaning forward, I bury my hands in my hair. "And then what am I supposed to do? Let him testify?"
"That's the way it works."
"Not when my child's the victim," I snap.
Patrick touches my arm. "Nina, without Nathaniel's testimony against Szyszynski, you have no case."
