As the troopers filed out, Saffy turned to the bulletin board. She’d memorized the photographs, but there was something about a crime scene. When she’d been sitting on a case too long, when all her leads had dwindled to nothing, Saffy returned to the physical: Marjorie Lawson, sprawled on her own kitchen floor, blood pooling from the back of her head, seeping across the freshly scrubbed tile. The oven light was on, the room hazy with smoke, cornbread burnt to a blackened log.
“Captain.”
It was Corinne. Her only female investigator, the best of the bunch. Corinne had been Saffy’s first hire as lieutenant, after Moretti decamped back to Atlanta. Corinne had solved dozens of homicide cases under Saffy’s direction, had used her father-in-law’s pull with the superintendent to help with the promotion to captain. Now, she lingered at Saffy’s shoulder, all slouching gait and low, slick ponytail. Corinne was both subtle and savvy, with a dry sense of humor that had pulled Saffy through many long nights.
“We fucked this up,” Saffy said quietly, small in the shadow of the photographs.
“It wasn’t you,” Corinne said.
“You know that doesn’t matter,” Saffy sighed. Corinne did not argue.
The day crept on. Saffy reviewed witness statements with Lewis and Taminsky, shuffled overtime forms, coughed down a frozen burrito as she approved a surveillance van for a narcotics operation. By the time the summer sun set, most of her team had gone home or out to the field, and the station was quiet. Saffy knew she should get some rest before she came back in tomorrow—a Saturday, her one supposed day off—but the air was a suffocating sort of humid and her chest had filled with a familiar longing.
She shouldn’t do this. It was not healthy. It was not particularly sane. But Saffy was alone, blissfully alone, and the night would not judge. It had been months since she’d succumbed to this urge—April last time, a gray evening in the pouring rain.
Saffy pulled the filing cabinet from beneath her desk. The folder was exactly where she’d left it, alongside the other cold cases, closed and forgotten. Saffy told no one. This was her dumbest secret, her sweetest shame.
The girls from 1990 gave her nothing in return. Still, Saffy tucked their file beneath her arm as she trudged out to the stale, empty parking lot. The girls always slipped out in moments like this, when she felt stuck or frustrated, when she had a dead end like the Lawson case. Izzy, Angela, Lila. They would slither from that folder, whispering conspiratorially. They would appear in the back seat of her unmarked Ford Explorer or behind a suspect in the interrogation room, a taunting nudge, a constant reminder. Saffy was captain, yes. But once, she’d been a girl. Every mystery was a story, and sometimes, to see the whole thing, you had to go all the way back to the beginning.
*
Izzy came, that night. A specter in a dream. The girls drove Saffy forward, then pulled her temptingly back—the girls, as they would have been. Izzy, on a porch at sunrise. Late thirties, smudged glasses, her favorite tattered flannel. A cup of coffee on a clean glass table. Her fingers, working at the shell of a hard-boiled egg, chipped nail polish bright against the white. The slimy skin of the egg, revealing itself, vulnerable and helpless, slick as a newborn.
*
When Saffy woke the next morning, she knew what she would do.
A layer of June had settled like a film in the night—dawn was rising, lonely out her bedroom window, and her sweaty sheets smelled sour, in need of a wash. Her phone was already pinging.
Reviewing the Lawson transcripts this morning, Corinne had texted. Anything specific you want me to flag?
Saffy wiped the crust from her eyes, tapped out a quick response.
Go back to the witnesses for the defense, look for any holes. Call LT for help. I’m off today.
By the time the sun had risen, Saffy was in the car, her mind still blurry as the air conditioner blasted, musty and stinking of plastic. She merged onto the highway as she unwrapped a granola bar, raving yellow lines already rippling with heat.
After thirteen years of driving this route, Saffy knew the turns of road by heart. She reached the state line and crossed into Vermont, Lake Champlain growing smaller in her rearview as fields melded into strip malls. As she sped down the empty road, Saffy pulled the carton of cigarettes from her glove box. She had not been a smoker since her teenage years, not normally, not technically. But on these drives, she allowed herself as many cigarettes as she wanted. She was already breaking her own rules. The guilt had arrived, along with the shame, and it seemed pointless to deny herself this tiny satisfaction.