“Pallorino, just sits, okay. Just relax.”
Angie closed her eyes and struggled once more to recall the events leading up to her alleged shooting of Spencer Addams. She caught a flash of the bridge. In the mist. The shots. Getting to the other side. Tracking him through mountainous old-growth forest slaked in mist for hours ... Her heart stilled. The little girl—she’d seen the ghost of the girl again.
Ice chilled in her veins.
She’d followed the girl ... then ... just blackness.
Holgersen’s phone rang, and he answered it. Angie looked out of the window as he took his call. Outside, tiny flakes of snow shimmied against gray sky. Unusual winter, she thought.
“Yeah, she’s awake now,” Holgersen was saying. “Yeah, okay.” He handed her his phone.
“Vedder. He wants to talk to you.”
“IIO investigation?”
He nodded.
She reached for his phone and said, “Did he—the MVPD—send you to watch me? To tell them when I’d come around?”
“Fuck no, Pallorino.”
“Don’t lie to me, Holgersen.”
He dragged his long fingers through his dull brown hair. “Okay. So they wanted someone here. They was going to send a uniform, but I came myselves, okay. Just take the damn phone.”
She put it to her ear, shivering a little from cold.
Angie listened to Vedder asking the right questions about how she was feeling, offering the expected platitudes, and then he told her that he would be functioning as the liaison officer between the IIO and the MVPD on her case, and that she’d need to speak to the outside investigators as soon as she was able.
“Understood, sir,” she said coolly. “I’ll be in tomorrow. I’m sure I’ll be fine tomorrow.”
She killed the call and held the phone out to Holgersen.
This was her second serious incident in six months. And she had no recollection of the actual shooting. She was in shit.
“Any one of us woulda done it,” Holgersen said, taking the phone from her. “Shot the crap out of him.”
“Is that what I did?”
He held her eyes.
“Fuck,” she whispered, pushing her tangle of hair back off her brow and looking away.
“At least they’s alive—Maddocks and Ginny.”
“Yeah.” She stared at her reflection in the window. “At least.”
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who are you, for I know you not at all?
CHAPTER 78
THURSDAY, DECEMBER21
Angie sat opposite Vedder at his desk. It was after 7:00 p.m., and she was physically, emotionally, and mentally beat after spending the entireday answering the IIO investigators’ questions about the Spencer Addams shooting and the sequence of events leading up to it ...Why did you defy a direct order from Inspector Frank Fitzsimmons and go after Sergeant Maddocks? What happened on the bridge? How long did you track Addams? What happened when you found the Affected Person? Did you warn him? Did you tell him to drop his weapon? Did you believe he posed a significant threat to your safety? Did you use all other means to effect an arrest? Did he resist? How did he resist? Why did you shoot? What did you do then?
It was not helping her at all that she couldn’t recall the actual shooting.
Neither was it helping to know that Maddocks and Fitz and anyone else involved in the lead-up to her “incident” were being questioned, too, as witnesses. And that a pathologist other than Barb O’Hagan was conducting the autopsy on Spencer Addams.
