Heather(5)

She grabs her bag from the back of her chair and slips out of the front door, but halfway to her car she realizes she left her keys on her desk. When she leaves her office for the second time she sees Latour and Collins outside the holding room when she returns, their backs to her. They are talking in hushed tones, so she stays still for a moment, listens.

“According to Mac, her problems started when she found a body.”

Callie waits a beat. The guys on the squad like to make a lot out of the Pines’s reputation as a mafia dumping ground, all the thugs from the big North Jersey gangs trundling corpses out to the woods, like that episode of the Sopranos. Paulie and Christopher stumbling through the trees.

“Oh shit. What’s the story there?”

“Your girl Jenna? She found a dead baby.”

As if on cue, Jenna starts to sing again. This time, Bruce Springsteen.

Callie waits for another punchline, the guys messing with her. Maybe they know she’s listening. Jenna sings on. Like a freight train running through my head. Oh, oh, oh, I’m on fire.

“You’re serious?” Collins asks.

Latour clears his throat. “She was out delivering papers and there was a newborn. Side of the road.”

The detail makes Callie’s breath catch in her chest. She figured Latour and Collins had their wires crossed, were thinking of some other sorry soul. But Jenna used to tell Callie about her job delivering papers as a teenager, how her fingers were always smeared black with ink. And that it was the best job she ever had, because all she needed to do was to walk and sing, walk and sing, sling a paper here and there. Peaceful.

“What’s the deal? Whose was it?”

“Nobody knows. Just one of those things. Case went cold.”

The back of Callie’s neck gets hot. One of those things?

“How old was she? Jenna?”

“Sixteen, I think. Frank always told us to take it easy on her. Guess Hauser didn’t get the memo.” He lets out a rough little chuckle that makes Callie ball her fists. She leans against the wall, wills her shoulders to relax, but when they do her keys slide out of her pocket, slap against the floor.

Latour and Collins turn toward her. Latour stares at her, insouciant, holding back a smile. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Chief.”

She clears her throat. Draws herself up. “I want all the files we have on this Baby Doe case on my desk by the time I come back in the morning, Latour.”



* * *



Before she leaves she microwaves a cup of water and dumps a packet of Swiss Miss in it, stirring hard to work through the clumps. Latour is nowhere to be found—probably out back, playing some stupid chiming game on his phone while he smokes—so Callie slips into the holding room, delivers the mug.

Jenna wraps her hands around the warm drink. She must have been picking at her cuticles again. Dots of fresh blood on her thumb. Callie stares at her. Why didn’t you ever tell me?

“What?”

“Why were you out there tonight, Mom?” Jenna must have heard the guys talking in the hallway. Must have heard them address Callie once they realized she was there. Knows that Callie knows now.

Jenna looks up at her from underneath that unruly tangle of hair. “I told you. Sometimes you just feel the devil at your back and you’ve gotta run.”

“Right.”

She knows this mood of Jenna’s, the shame sinking in, turning her stony and defiant. But something about the thought of leaving Jenna here, with Latour and Collins, and knowing this awful Baby Doe thing, makes her wish she had something to offer her. A sweater. A solid meal.

Jenna’s feet are still bare on the cold linoleum. Callie undoes the laces on her boots, peels the navy socks from her feet, lays them on the table.

“Come on, I don’t want those,” Jenna says, wrinkling her nose.

“Mom, just take them, would you?”

Jenna just juts her chin, petulant.

Callie stares at the clock behind Jenna’s head, watching the twitchy tick of the second hand. “Look. You’ve had a long day. I’ve had a long day. But maybe once you’re out … once you’re booked and you get through all that, detox again … we can talk? About this thing that happened? The baby?”

“Is that why you’re being nice to me? Because you feel sorry for me, Calliope?”

“No … I … but I think—”

“I know what you think of me. You accused me of hitting Jane. Of letting that girl bleed out in the road. So this dear daughter act? It’s bullshit. All cause you heard some rumors about something that happened thirty years ago?”

“Tell me what happened.”

“I’m not talking about it, Calliope. I made my statement and I’m done doing anything for the cops in this town. It’s the shame of my life that you’ve become one of them.”

In an instant the room feels too small and hot, the ticking of the clock so incredibly loud. Callie worked so hard, so much harder than anyone she knows in the force, to get through high school, taking every shift she could at the pizza place to stay up on rent as her mother lost job after job. She got a full ride to Rutgers, graduated summa cum laude. She’s pursued extra training as often as possible, made herself valuable to her team. She’s done so much to be able to stand on her own two feet and not feel the world spinning beneath her, like it did when she was a kid. She clears her throat. The words emerge like the low growl of a cornered animal.