fic: you cannot have an opponent if you keep saying yes. (prime suspect) (3/3)
T W E L V E ;
The week of Christmas, another girl goes missing. She knows she’ll be working through the holiday. She does her shopping during her lunch break two days before Christmas Eve.
The day after Christmas, the girl has been found.
It’s the same story as all the other girls: a strangled body, blonde hair, a black crucifix painted on the wall.
The third day of interviews, the third day of working with the influx of information on the newest victim, she doesn’t even think about it:
She goes home with Reg. They order takeout from some suspect looking Chinese restaurant around the corner and she uses his cinnamon toothpaste to get the taste of garlic chicken out of her mouth. They compare phone records belonging to the assorted victims until one in the morning.
Reg yawns noisily and stretches. When he stands, his knees crack, and Jane snorts; she calls him grandpa as she stands up too, and Reg merely glares at her.
“I’m hitting the hay,” he says, and turns towards the bathroom, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling it off as he goes.
Jane follows him. She leans heavily against the doorjamb as she watches him brush his teeth.
“I was thinking, I might . . . ” she says awkwardly. Reg spits into the sink and turns the faucet on. What she meant to say was that she was thinking of continuing to dig through the records. That she was thinking of hitting the hay, too. That she thinks she’ll go home. That this isn’t a good idea. That what they have found here is a patch of thin ice and she’s not entirely sure how much longer it’s going to hold their weight.
“You were thinking what?” Reg asks. He wipes his mouth on a towel and steps over to her. He switches the bathroom light off and they stand there in shadow. He looms over her in the doorway and Jane looks up at him, equal parts unsure of herself and irritated with him.
He steps around her, their bodies brushing against each other, him clad only in his boxers, her still fully dressed, and he looks over his shoulder.
“Come on then,” he says, as though they are speaking in code.
And as though they are speaking in code, she nods. She shuts off the hall light and she follows him into his bedroom.
“What you think the deal is with the blondes, huh?” she asks as she settles in bed beside him.
“Gentlemen prefer them apparently,” he drawls, and Jane rolls her eyes.
“No, but really. Like, is that a thing? A guy’s got a real preference, only wants to make it with blondes?”
“You tell me, Blondie,” Reg says. He winds a thick strand of her hair around his finger and pulls gently.
“Stop that,” she murmurs, and reaches up and grabs at his wrist. He stops pulling, but he doesn’t let go of her hair.
“Prior to . . . ” he gestures generally, sort of at the bed, and Jane tips her head back, curious as to what he’s going to call this, whatever this is. It turns out nothing, because he trails off, and then pauses. He starts again, “Every woman I was ever attracted to enough to wanna ask out, or, you know, whatever, was a brunette.” His fingers are still dragging through the ends of her hair. “Not that I hopped into bed with you on account of the color of your hair,” he says. She can hear the smirk in his voice, and Jane leans heavily against his shoulder.
“Yeah,” she teases, “and I certainly didn’t hop into bed with you on account of your lack of hair.”
“Ah, a comedian, huh,” he says, and he tugs on her hair harder. Jane rolls with it, her body pressed against his side, her face resting against the center of his chest.
She could ask him why he hopped in bed with her in the first place, but she’s not entirely sure she wants to hear the answer. She’s not entirely sure she knows what her own response would be.
He was there, and she needed him.
There’s that, she thinks, but you don’t say that sort of thing out loud. You don’t say a lot of things out loud. For example, she will not say that they have crossed a line tonight. She came over to his apartment, they ate dinner together while discussing the case, and then she got into bed with him.
She got into bed with him as though they did this every night. As though they were domesticated, as though one needed the other in order to sleep. The thought leaves her unsettled, but she does not move away from him.
Instead, she opens her mouth against his chest and kisses the skin there. His breath hitches, and she can feel it more than she can hear it. He tangles his fingers in her hair, so she kisses him again. She kisses down the length of his chest and dips her hand under the waistband of his boxers.
She sucks him off, swallows down around him, and tries to hold his hips down with the flat of her hand.
He says her name thickly when she first takes him into her mouth. He says her name again, and again after that, his fingers still pulling at her hair.
There is something undeniably satisfying about getting Reg to say her name like that -- to pant it the way he is, the way he mixes her name with the word fuck, like they both mean the same thing. He says it like she’s the one destroying him, and simultaneously, the only one who could save him.
She wonders if she says his name like that. She wonders if he thinks the same thing about her, because she’s seen it, she’s seen the way he looks at her after he makes her come. It’s like he wants to see how much closer to a breaking point he can push her, just how strong the seams that keep her stitched in truly are -- see if this time he can be the one to rip her open, rip into her, and place his name on that wreckage.
She swallows when he comes, she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
He’s on her instantly, kissing her mouth open, pushing her legs open.
She only says his name once.
The feds are brought in after the explosion.
The responding officer to the scene of the next victim -- blonde girl, I’d say 20? 21 years old? there’s a big old cross on the wall though, and -- is killed when a bomb wired to the victim’s stove goes off.
The FBI claims jurisdiction, and Jane and Reg wear matching scowls as they watch Sweeney duke it out with the bureau chief the FBI brought in with them.
The FBI experts flown in from D.C. call this behavior escalation. They say that their killer is escalating. The use the word their, the word escalating.
When Reg asks what that means, what that means for them, he gets several different answers.
It means the killer is losing control. It means he’s asserting control. It has nothing to do with control. It means he is bored. It means he’s getting sloppy. It means he wants them to think he’s getting sloppy. It means he wanted to make a statement.
“It means you don’t have a goddamned clue,” Reg snaps. Beside him, Jane folds her arms over her chest but she doesn’t say anything, not even when the expert (Hutch or Hitch or something like that) looks to her as though to back him up.
She’s with Reg on this one.
“Police work’s always had a good deal of guesswork to it,” he says as they step back out into the cold towards his car. “But these assholes? These guys are a step away from palm readers and fortune tellers.”
Jane nods solemnly in agreement, and then holds a hand flat over her stomach.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” Reg asks as they stop in front of his car.
“Ugh, I ate too many taquitos with Lou.”
“He take you to that Mama Guillermina’s or whatever?”
Jane fixes him with a plaintive glare. “Don’t remind me.”
“You probably got a tapeworm from there, you know,” he says as he swings the driver’s side door open.
Jane groans as she drops into the passenger seat. “I said don’t say anything, Reg.” She’s quiet as she buckles her seatbelt and Reg looks like he’s trying not to laugh at her. “You can’t get tapeworms from eating taquitos anyway. Can you? Can that happen?”
Reg starts the car.
“I don’t know. How many you eat?”
“I don’t know. All of them.”
“All of them? Tell me, Jane, what is the numerical value for ‘all of them,’ I ask you.”
“Like, eight?” she guesses. Reg raises his eyebrows.
“Eight, Jane? Eight? You at war with your digestive tract or something?”
“Not all of us have as bland a palate as the great Regis Duffy. And besides, I was hungry.”
“Hey, I’m not the one with an army of tapeworms setting up camp somewhere down in my stomach lining.”
“Okay, I am hardly a scientist or a doctor or anything worm-related, but I am about 98% sure that is not in fact how tapeworms operate. I have also decided that people do not get tapeworms from eating taquitos. Look at Lou. Strong as an ox. Eats that shit all the time.”
“Lou has a natural immunity. Lou’s Puerto Rican.”
“Well, that’s just not fair.”
“That’s life.”
The funeral for the dead cop is two days later.
She attends with Reg, her in a nice black dress, and Reg in his dress blues. He drives them there, and they ride in silence. The ride back is just as curiously tense, just as devoid of conversation, and when he parks outside her apartment building she doesn’t move.
Reg kills the ignition without a word and they sit there, the sun already setting, and Jane smoothes her hands over her dress. She needs to run up and change. The two of them are returning back to the station after she changes, after she grabs the files she left on the kitchen counter before the funeral.
“Did you know him?” she asks suddenly. Her voice seems too loud for his car. “The officer who was . . . did you know him?
Reg says, “No,” but he says it reluctantly, as though admitting that is a concession he would rather not have to make.
“Me either,” Jane says. Reg doesn’t acknowledge what she’s said, and Jane sits there. She is unsure what is so different about this funeral. The two of them have attended scores of them, funerals for fallen officers they have known well and loved and funerals for relative strangers. The only difference Jane can derive for this one is that this man died because of their case.
“You don’t ever feel the least bit guilty?” he finally says, as though he is thinking along the same line she is. He’s watching the road, the bumper of the car parked in front of them. She thinks what he means is the dead cop. But they’re sitting outside her apartment building. They are outside her apartment building and she knows that Matt is inside. She wants to believe that Reg is referring to the dead cop.
“I don’t know,” she finally sighs.
He turns to look at her, but he doesn’t say anything. He just looks at her. He looks at her, and his eyes are tired, sad and tired.
“I gotta get in and get changed,” she says. And that’s when he moves for her, his hand on her thigh, sliding higher over her stockings. She spreads her legs, but god, they don’t have time for this. He bites at her neck while he rubs her off between her legs, his fingers pushing at her, at the barrier of her stockings, the fabric wet. She should warn him not to leave a mark. She needs to warn him not to leave a mark. But she doesn’t say a thing. She likes his mouth against the column of her throat. She bends her knee, her heel balanced on the edge of the seat, her skirt raised and bunched around her waist. She pushes her hips into his hand, and it’s Reg that groans.
Jane goes up to her apartment with the collar of her jacket raised, covering her neck.
She calls to Matt as she enters the apartment that she’s gotta run -- she just needs to grab a few things.
She changes quickly and surreptitiously in their bedroom. She winds a scarf around her throat to hide the raw reddened marks Reg left there.
She snatches the files off the kitchen counter and leaves with a small wave.
T H I R T E E N ;
Sometimes she thinks about telling Matt.
Whenever she imagines this scenario, it always occurs in the morning, over breakfast. Sometimes she imagines him frying eggs, other times measuring out coffee grounds. Other times still doing nothing at all -- he is just there, waiting, in the kitchen they share, and she must come to him and confess.
In these scenarios, she would walk into the kitchen and she would say, Matt there is something I need to tell you.
She would say, Matt you remember that Reg Duffy?
Yes that Reg Duffy. That terrible Reg Duffy. That Reg Duffy that made me cry so I made you hold me. Him.
I’m fucking that Reg Duffy.
You know what? By the time you’re done I bet you’ll end up thinking I’m your favorite because at least I’m honest. Reg said.
So am I. She said.
Matt gives her an out, just the once. He gives her a chance to come clean.
So am I, she said, but she said it to Duffy. She said it that gray morning, and that was so long ago.
It’s mid-January. She returns to their apartment at nine in the morning on a Saturday.
“Jane,” Matt says. She has been waiting for this.
“We need to talk,” he says.
Jane drops her bag to the ground. She toes off her boots, gray slush spilling from the soles of them onto the hardwood floor, melting quickly.
“Alright,” she says quietly. She crosses her arms over her chest and she says to him: alright.
“I’m just, I’m just gonna come out and ask it. You seeing someone else?”
Jane lets her gaze go flat. Jane has always been good at rationalizing her own behavior when she wants to do it. Always been able to look at the things she does and find a neat spin to it, find a way to say you did this and it was in your control, you did this for reasons better than others would assume.
When she was fifteen years old she started smoking Marlboro Lights. She started smoking Marlboro Lights because her mother had always smoked Marlboro Lights, but she did not smoke them because she wanted to be her mother. She smoked them in ironic imitation, as homage made defiant.
Anything you can do, I can do better.
Mimicry designed to demonstration control.
She smoked them as that final fuck you.
She was sixteen when her father found out she was smoking. To say he found out is deceptive. It implies that Jane attempted to hide the habit, and this is not true. She was bold with her sole minute rebellion. She was sixteen and she was behind the bar, working the bar, and right there, right in front of him, she took a cigarette out of the pack and she lit one up.
Her father said, “Oh, Janey,” and then took a cigarette from his own pocket and joined her.
She told Reg this one night. She told him a variation of this story. This was when she had first started staying over. This was after she would flee minutes after he came, after she came, rearranging herself in his bathroom, using his toothpaste and his mouthwash, before swinging her way out of his apartment, legs still trembling, heart still beating too fast as she covered her mouth with her scarf against the cold, against New York at two in the morning.
His bedroom was dark. His bedroom was empty, his entire apartment empty. That fit him in a way she didn’t like to analyze. That fit him in a way that on anyone else, the fit would have made her sad.
Her mouth had felt rubbery and used as she lay there next to him, and she had turned her head slightly, hair spilling everywhere, to find him still awake on his back.
“I started smoking when I was fifteen,” she said to him, a random non sequitur. They had not been speaking of smoking, of her childhood, of his. They had not been speaking at all.
He had not turned to look at her when he said, “Yeah?” He did not look at her as he let the pause stretch and fill the room, did not look at her when he murmured low, “Real long time to be a smoker.”
She didn’t know why she said it. She didn’t know why she confessed it then, and it has never been something she has sought to rationalize. It was their version of pillow talk: naked truths about themselves. Violent facts, mundane facts, gruesome facts.
Their lesser selves laid bare.
“My dad,” she said, quiet, into the pillow, their bodies were not touching. “My dad,” she said, “he got a scare few months back. Thought it was lung cancer.
“We made a deal,” she said. “He quits, I quit.”
Reg hadn’t said anything. He had not asked that obvious question -- it been hard? That question with the foregone conclusion.
He would do the same with her, tell her things she had no business knowing. Tell her the sort of things no one ever asks you about but that you carry with you all the same.
She thinks it all can be traced back to that hospital upstate when she walked out the door with him.
That hospital, the morning after, this never happened.
He told her he had never killed a man before. There was a confession to those words, a strange gravitas they both attempted to belie with humor, but it was there.
One night he told her that he saw his ex-wife at Grand Central Station.
“What were you doing at Grand Central?” she yawned.
“I like the trains,” he said, irritation bleeding through. She was missing the point, he didn’t say. “Doesn’t matter,” he did say.
“How long you guys married for?” she asked.
He had chuckled. “Too long, she’d say,” he said. “Long enough, I’d say.”
“What happened?” Jane asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t know,” he said. She knew in that moment that he was not evading the question, but rather that he honestly did not know. Things fall apart. Collateral damage. Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.
His hand was curled around the inside of her thigh, solid and warm, and it was the only part of him touching her.
“Why you still wear the ring?” she asked.
“Old habits, I guess.”
She had not liked his answer then, but she had not pressed it. She thinks she understands it now, or she understands it as she sees it.
The ring makes her tolerable to him.
Her meaning Jane. Her meaning anything short of the job, short of his former marriage, anything that could require any semblance of a commitment.
The ring is a safety, a home base, that place that renders her The Other. She can understand it.
As she sees it, she can understand that.
In their shared apartment, Jane keeps her arms crossed over her chest and she looks to Matt.
You know what? By the time you’re done I bet you’ll end up thinking I’m your favorite because at least I’m honest. That’s what Reg said to her.
So am I, she lied.
“No,” she tells Matt.
“There’s no one else,” she says.
F O U R T E E N ;
Reg thinks that he’s found their first break with this case.
Jane thinks he is wrong.
They get into it in Sweeney’s office, their two varying, competing theories -- he thinks it’s the super from one of the girls’ apartment building, Jane thinks he is oversimplifying it.
More importantly, Jane doesn’t think they have probable cause. Sweeney sides with Jane, and Reg blows her off the rest of the day.
The following day, a Saturday, Jane swings by his apartment. She buzzes up, simply says, “It’s me,” and it’s enough -- he opens the door for her.
She has a twenty-year old bottle of scotch she holds up, equal parts triumphant and strangely sheepish, and says, “Peace offering?”
They watch the Knicks game together, drinking that scotch, idly going over the case file -- the true subtext for her stop over; not the veiled apology, not the scotch, not the Knicks.
He goes down on her sometime after the second half, the words, “peace offering,” mumbled hot against her hip once he has her panties peeled down her legs. She makes an amused, appreciative noise in the back of her throat, and he bites the inside of her thigh in response. He makes her come first with solely his mouth and his tongue, and then again on his fingers, again on his cock, making the muscles in her thighs jump and twitch, making her mouth hang open, everything boiled down to how he is fucking her against the arm of the couch.
After he comes, he does not pull away from her. Her arms are still draped around him, and she likes the feel of his heart thudding against her. She likes to feel it slow, likes to feel his body relax, how his breathing returns to normal, the way he sighs like he just lost something inside of her.
Jane butts her head almost affectionately against the cut of his jaw.
“So these girls,” Jane says, her chin still tucked against his shoulder.
He turns to look down at her.
“You thinking about those dead girls while I’m fucking you?” He doesn’t sound angry when he asks it, but rather kind of incredulous.
Jane’s face scrunches up. “No,” she says. “But now I’m kinda feeling guilty for not thinking about them.”
“For not thinking about them while I fucked you.”
“No, for not thinking enough about them in general. For fucking you instead of reviewing those case files.” For fucking you at all, she doesn’t say. “I’m feeling a little guilty about that, is all.
“Don’t turn this into a thing,” she snaps.
You don’t feel the least bit guilty, he had asked her.
She is finally learning how to say yes.
Yes, I feel the least bit guilty.
Yes. About all of that.
F I F T E E N ;
There are things Jane will never know because Reg will never tell her of them.
These things include:
How he thought she was dead in that hospital upstate. How he got the call and he was sure they would be too late, he was sure that a man doesn’t get lucky, not twice, not twice in one night, and he had called her over and over again the entire ride there, and not once did she pick up. He had been sure that she was dead then. He was sure that she was dead, that this Roy finally got what he wanted, what he had hoped his buddy would have achieved back at that motel, and he leapt from the car even before the sheriff got it in park. He leapt from the car, and the first thing they told him was that shots were heard fired down in the South Wing, down in the basement, and he had not even thought about it -- he ran straight there, his shoes squeaking wet against the linoleum;
How if anyone would have told him when he first met Detective Jane Timoney that he would eventually fuck her, that not only would he fuck her once but again and again after that, that he would want her, that he would need her in a near horrifying visceral way, he would have laughed and then spit in their face;
How the night Jane was shot he stayed at the hospital the entire time until she was out of surgery, until she was in the clear. How he threw up during his second hour at the hospital, how his shaking hands only reminded him of her, how long it took to wash her dried blood off of his skin;
How he almost decked some asshole detective from Organized Crime when he overheard him at a bar talking. The clown made some comment about how that’s what you get when you got girls working as dicks, and when Reg approached him, when Reg asked, “You talking about Detective Timoney?” the detective responded, “That the broad’s name?” Lou had to grab Reg by the arm and pull him away, and there are few fights Reg regrets not getting into, but this ranks as one of them;
How much he hated her that first night she stayed over at his apartment. How he was furious with her, furious with himself, furious all the more when she left without a word the following morning;
How rattled that funeral for the dead cop left him. He didn’t know how to explain, didn’t know if he’d ever want to, but he realized what was so strange about the funeral as he drove Jane to her apartment: it was the first police funeral he had attended since Jane had been shot. It had been the first cop he had helped bury since she had been shot. He had been thinking of her, thinking of burying her, so he touched her in his car, wanted to get inside of her, wanted to feel her warm and wanting, wanted to be sure she felt alive;
How long Evrard has known about the two of them -- that evening Evrard took him out for some drinks and kept looking at him like he wanted to say something but didn’t quite know how to broach the subject. Finally Reg had turned to him and said, “Spit it out, Velerio.”
“You’re a good guy, Duff,” he said.
“But?” Reg asked.
“I ain’t said nothing to no one, but,” and at this Evrard downed the remaining beer in his glass. “I know about you and Janey.”
“Me and Jane, huh,” Reg said. He sat there silent for a beat and then turned back to Evrard. “What’s there to know ‘bout me and Jane?”
“You really gonna play it like that?”
“Like what?”
“Dumb.”
Reg had flagged down the bartender and ordered another round for the both of them.
“Man, I’m not stupid,” Evrard said. “I’m not Calderon and I sure ain’t Blando,” he said and then he laughed, like there was a story there he had no interest in sharing let alone knowing. “I’ve seen you guys. The way the two of you . . . are with each other.”
“You’re telling me that you have assumed that I am sleeping with Jane because the way we act ‘round each other, that it?”
“Nah, man, I’m saying that’s part of it.” Evrard paused. “I saw you guys.”
“Saw us where?”
“Where haven’t I seen you two fools. Saw you guys leaving the Christmas party, get in a cab together. Saw you two down at McLane’s. Don’t know how drunk you two idiots were, or if you thought you were in the clear or something, but I saw you two over by the bathrooms.” Reg had averted his gaze. He knew exactly what Evrard was talking about, or at least he thought he did. The memory was hazy, but he remembered the night well enough: the bar, McLane’s, all those shots Blando kept ordering, how Blando and Calderon had cut out early, how drunk he was, how drunk Jane was, how he was feeling reckless and so was she -- how as of late they had seemed to mirror each other with more ease, without intent. He could remember how her hand would brush against his knee at random under the table, how that made him stupid, how he did the same until his hand wasn’t just brushing against her at random, but rather remained there, his hand high on her thigh, his fingers toying with the inner seam of her jeans. He wound up stumbling into her outside the bathrooms, he wound up pushing her against the wall, biting at her jaw while she rubbed at him through his trousers.
He couldn’t look at Evrard. It was too embarrassing, too embarrassing imagining what he and Jane must have looked like, drunk and stupid and all over each other.
“So you know then, huh,” was all Reg said, his eyes glued to the muted sports clip show playing on the mounted television.
“I know.” Evrard was watching the television too. “What I don’t know is what the hell you are thinking, Reg.”
Reg took a long sip of his beer.
“You think thinking’s got something to do with this?” he said, and then he laughed, quiet and mocking;
How his mother knows of Jane, how she came over to his apartment one Sunday morning, disapproving of the apartment, disapproving of his ex-wife, had disapproved of her when she was his actual wife.
“I was talking to Judy in 3A,” she said to him, potatoes frying on the stove, Reg brewing her the decaf coffee she only drinks.
“Yeah, Judy in 3A,” he responded, distracted.
“You know what she say to me? She say to me her husband Roland see you downtown with a real mean looking blonde. What’s that about then? You dating now? She Irish?”
He told her it was nothing. He told her that it was just a fellow detective. That they had been working that case, that real awful case with all those dead girls. He told her about that, yeah, Ma? He told her about that.
He did not use Jane’s name and he did not look at his mother as he spoke to her.
He does not tell Jane anything about this -- about Evrard, about his mother, about how terrible they both are at keeping secrets, and what he will not know is that Jane has kept the same sort of evidence to herself. She does not tell Reg about Dan Costello. She does not mention the Christmas party. She does not tell Reg about Matt. She does not see a point.
He won’t tell her how terrible they both are at keeping secrets, except for from each other.
He won’t tell her that ‘a real mean looking blonde’ is the most apt description he has ever heard for her.
He does not see a point.
S I X T E E N ;
Their case does not improve. Their case is going poorly.
Things fall apart.
Collateral damage.
Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.
“What are we doing?” Reg asks while Jane toys with a ball of rubber bands at his desk. “Just waiting for this guy to get sloppy?”
The answer, she thinks, is yes. There’s a certain degree of ego associated to serial killers. There’s pride there -- pride in the kill and pride in getting away with it.
She shoots a rubber band in Augie’s direction and then shrugs at Reg.
She doesn’t feel like fighting with him, so she shoots a rubber band at Augie, she shrugs at Reg, and then she walks away.
That weekend they fought bitterly.
For the first time he had come up with her to her apartment. Matt was out. Matt was on a skiing trip with his son. He had not even asked Jane if she wanted to join them. She’s never going to call him on that one.
And maybe it was because he was on his turf, Reg mentioned Matt for the first time.
“Where’s Matt the Boyfriend at?” he had asked as he surveyed their kitchen.
She has been able to stomach the guilt on her own. She can stomach whatever it is she feels when she leaves Reg’s apartment and returns to her own, when she returns to Matt. But Matt’s name in Reg’s mouth, Reg in their apartment -- it was too much for her.
“He’s out of town,” she had said, and Reg had nodded.
“So this has taken on every shade of a tawdry affair then, huh? Bring the other man around when the boyfriend’s out of town?”
“Oh god,” she sighed, exasperation coloring her words in almost an amused tone. “You wanna turn it into that? Are you seriously trying to guilt trip me?” He had not responded to her, and that only made her angrier, only seemed to confirm what she had asked. “Jesus Christ. Just go, Reg. Fucking go. Get out of here.” The exasperation to her voice had bled away, or maybe the exasperation stayed. Maybe the exasperation was always there, always present between them, that unannounced third party. But her voice had started to strain under the weight of it as she told him to leave. She started to strain under the weight of it, under the weight of him.
“Leave,” she said, something wild there, something feral.
And he did. He left.
A week later and Jane is begging him to stay.
A week later and another missing girl. A week later and Jane heads down to the bunk to grab a quick nap. She needs some sleep, she’s not getting enough sleep. Jane keeps dreaming of dark parking lots. She keeps dreaming about broken glass sticking in the palms of her hands. She’s dreaming about motel rooms painted in black and the sudden patter of gunfire in the distance.
She needs some sleep. She needs to collect her thoughts.
Reg finds her down there and as sure as he enters the room they start fighting. She wants to drive down to Jersey that evening and reinterview one of the victim’s boyfriends; Reg accuses her of grasping at straws. The two of them don’t even get going, the argument barely begun, before Reg is heading for the door.
“Jesus, Jane, I don’t got the energy for this,” he says and Jane sits up straight.
“Wait,” she hears herself say, and he stills, his hand on the doorknob.
“Stay,” she says. “Just . . . for a minute. We don’t have to, you don’t have to say anything, or, or, listen to me. But. Can you just. Can you. Stay?”
His shoulders slump, but he steps away from the door. He turns to face her, slouches back against the wall next to a shelf full of out-of-date police manuals and safety guides.
“Jane,” he finally says. He says it like a warning.
He warns her, but he stays.
This is how she remembers things. She remembers these things as being entirely on her.
She wants him to leave and he’ll go.
She wants him to stay and he will.
Sometimes he will.
S E V E N T E E N ;
“We’re hanging out on a ledge here aren’t we,” she says. She says it quietly and her voice is swallowed up by the gloom and din of the bar. He hears her though, she knows this, but he does not respond. He looks down at his hands, his wedding band still on his ring finger.
“Pretty soon we’re gonna have to go and figure out if we’re going over, or.” She doesn’t finish.
He doesn’t respond, not in words. He makes a derisive noise in the back of his throat.
“What,” Jane drawls, “the premeditation ruin it for you? You’d rather we just keep crashing into one another whenever the mood persuades?”
“I’d rather we not talk about it, how’s that,” he says thickly, acidly.
Jane takes a pull from her bottle of beer.
“Not yet?” she supplies.
Reg sighs. “Not yet.”
Earlier that day, they bring a man in for questioning. They arrest him, bring him in under police custody.
It is the super from one of the victim’s building, on par with Reg’s initial hunch.
His initial hunch will prove wrong, will prove a misdirection, but for the first time this entire case, they have their closest avenue to a suspect.
They get a guy in custody.
It’s February. It has been over four months since she was shot. She had not realized she had been counting the time, but it hits her that day, it hits her as they question this man, a stranger, unrelated to her shooting, in the interrogation room. It has been over four months.
Jane passed her psych evals with flying colors.
“You seem to be coping well,” were the doc’s exact words.
“You’re healing well,” the doc at the hospital told her.
“You look good,” Reg said.
But Jane can’t stop dreaming about motel rooms painted black.
She can’t stop dreaming of a rope at her neck, black paint on the wall, her blonde hair spread out across the floor.
Jane can’t stop.
(Why can’t I stop . . . Reg asked her).
Jane finally breaks.
She comes so close to freaking out in the interrogation room once they get this guy, once she starts questioning him with Reg, and Reg must notice. Reg interrupts suddenly, and grabs her by the elbow and wheels her out into the hall.
“What the fuck are you doing?” she asks, voice low. “What are you -- ”
He drags her into an empty interrogation room and she’s shaking. Her hands are shaking (me too, he said, it’s the adrenaline).
“You need a minute,” he tells her, his voice laced tight with authority.
“I don’t need,” she starts to say, but the words go soft on her. They break in the middle.
“There’s nothing wrong,” she tries to say, but her bottom lip begins to tremble.
She turns her face away from him. She holds her hand over her face, and the sob that escapes her throat, muffled slightly behind her hand, is still too loud in the empty room. Reg doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even touch her, not at first. He lets her cry alone. He doesn’t ask her what’s wrong or why she’s crying. He doesn’t call her unprofessional and he doesn’t tell her to pull it together. He just stands there, guarding the door, and she doesn’t know if he’s there to keep her from leaving or to keep others from entering.
When her cries start to border on the hysterical, he finally steps towards her. He wraps his arms around her -- remember that Reg Duffy who made me cry so I made you hold me -- and drags his fingers through her hair. He does not tell her that everything is going to be okay. He doesn’t say anything. He is just there, his body firm and unyielding against her own.
Things fall apart, she wanted to say. Collateral damage.
Can’t account for every chip that hits the table.
She needed him, and he was there.
She does not know how to say that out loud.
But then, she does not think she needs to anyway.
She pushes him away and wipes at her face.
“Let’s finish this,” she says to him, her voice even.
Reg nods.
E I G H T E E N ;
There hasn’t been a body in over four weeks.
Their killer has dried up, the trail has gone cold.
Jane’s been working on a murdered Wall Street exec case with Lou. She’s moved on, Reg too. He just closed his own case: a man strolled over to the next-door apartment unit in Little Ukraine and bludgeoned his neighbor to death with a frying pan.
In the interrogation room, he said he just wanted some peace and quiet.
He said Reg had to understand that.
Reg tells her about it that night. She talks him into trying out some trendy Chilean place on the Upper East Side they wind up forsaking in favor of their usual Mom and Pop diner.
The night is soggy and wet, April Fool’s Day that Saturday. She can smell spring on the air, the rain lacking that bite of cold they had endured all winter.
She snags a fry off of Reg’s plate and he shoots her a look.
“So, our Crucifix Killer is just a footnote in history then, huh?”
Reg smiles and finishes his coffee. “Sure the feds got the files stored deep in some backroom. Over on a shelf with the Zodiac files and the Black Dahlia case, who shot JFK.”
“You’re sure about that?” she smirks.
He shrugs. “It’s their case now,” is all he says. She knows he doesn’t mean that though. She had seen his face when the case was handed over to the feds -- the tight line of his mouth, the rigid carriage of his entire body. She had been with him that night when they got plowed at McLane’s with Evrard and Lou and Augie.
“To being let off the hook!” Augie had proclaimed before they downed their first round of shots.
“You heading home?” Reg asks as they leave the diner.
Jane braces her hands on her hips and looks up at him. She squints against the rain and Reg raises the collar of his jacket under his neck.
“Should I?” she asks, almost haughtily.
They stand there staring at each other outside the diner, in the rain. His eyes are narrowed, his mouth twisted in a repressed smirk.
“This the part where you make me say it?”
Jane does not even try to disguise her smile.
“Make you say what?”
He looks at her the same way he looked at her in that hotel room upstate all those months ago. He looks at her the way he looked at her in her father’s kitchen, outside that hotel on 44th Street, at that corner table at McLane's.
He looks at her as though, for him, she is intolerable.
“I want you to come home with me,” he says quietly -- just enough of that disgruntled edge to his words for them, for him, to be tolerable for her.
It makes this -- whatever this is, whatever this huge thing looming between them is -- tolerable.
“Okay then,” she says, just as quietly. She smiles then, all teeth, and he rolls his eyes.
This started outside the city, but they belong to the city. They belong to the city moreso than the city belongs to them.
She will never not want to be a cop, and neither will he.
When she steps out of the bathroom, Reg is already laying in bed, curled on his side, eyes shut, facing her. She moves to pull on her jeans, but she stops. Holds the jeans in her hands, still naked, and watches him. He doesn’t open his eyes to look at her once. She drops the jeans back down to the floor and wordlessly climbs back in bed with him. She presses her back against his chest, curves her own body to fit his, and he exhales loudly behind her. Wraps his arms around her, pulls her that much closer. She closes her eyes.
“Don’t say anything,” she whispers.
What she means is: don’t ruin this.
His right hand brushes against the bare swell of her hip, and it’s only then that she notices it -- his finger is bare. There is no ring.
Don’t say anything, she said.
Don’t ruin this.
She keeps her eyes closed and she lets her body relax against his. Against his hand, the ring finger bare, their lesser selves laid bare.
He presses his palm flat against the twin scars on her abdomen.
He leaves his hand there, as though still covering the wound.
F I N .
P R E V I O U S :
P . 1 | P . 2