The Poet

Warner Books

Chapter One

But my rule didn't protect me. When the two detectives came for meand told me about Sean, a cold numbness quickly enveloped me. It waslike I was on the other side of the aquarium window. I moved as ifunderwater-back and forth, back and forth-and looked out at the restof the world through the glass. From the backseat of their car Icould see my eyes in the rearview mirror, flashing each time wepassed beneath a streetlight. I recognized the thousand-yard stare Ihad seen in the eyes of fresh widows I had interviewed over theyears.

I knew only one of the two detectives. Harold Wexler. I had met hima few months earlier when I stopped into the Pints Of for a drinkwith Sean. They worked CAPs together on the Denver PD. I rememberSean called him Wex. Cops always use nicknames for each other.Wexler's is Wex, Sean's, Mac. It's some kind of tribal bondingthing. Some of the names aren't complimentary but the cops don'tcomplain. I know one down in Colorado Springs named Scoto whom mostother cops call Scroto. Some even go all the way and call himScrotum, but my guess is that you have to be a close friend to getaway with that.

Wexler was built like a small bull, powerful but squat. A voiceslowly cured over the years by cigarette smoke and whiskey. Ahatchet face that always seemed red the times I saw him. I rememberhe drank Jim Beam over ice. I'm always interested in what copsdrink. It tells a lot about them. When they're taking it straightlike that, I always think that maybe they've seen too many thingstoo many times that most people never see even once. Sean wasdrinking Lite beer that night, but he was young. Even though he wasthe supe of the CAPs unit, he was at least ten years younger thanWexler. Maybe in ten years he would have been taking his medicinecold and straight like Wexler. But now I'll never know.

I spent most of the drive out from Denver thinking about that nightat the Pints Of. Not that anything important had happened. It wasjust drinks with my brother at the cop bar. And it was the last goodtime between us, before Theresa Lofton came up. That memory put meback in the aquarium.

But during the moments that reality was able to punch through theglass and into my heart, I was seized by a feeling of failure andgrief. It was the first real tearing of the soul I had experiencedin my thirty-four years. That included the death of my sister. I wastoo young then to properly grieve for Sarah or even to understandthe pain of a life unfulfilled. I grieved now because I had not evenknown Sean was so close to the edge. He was Lite beer while all theother cops I knew were whiskey on the rocks.

Of course, I also recognized how self-pitying this kind of griefwas. The truth was that for a long time we hadn't listened much toeach other. We had taken different paths. And each time Iacknowledged this truth the cycle of my grief would begin again.

* * *

My brother once told me the theory of the limit. He said everyhomicide cop had a limit but the limit was unknown until it wasreached. He was talking about dead bodies. Sean believed that therewere just so many that a cop could look at. It was a differentnumber for every person. Some hit it early. Some put in twenty inhomicide and never got close. But there was a number. And when itcame up, that was it. You transferred to records, you turned in yourbadge, you did something. Because you just couldn't look at anotherone. And if you did, if you exceeded your limit, well, then you werein trouble. You might end up sucking down a bullet. That's what Seansaid.

* * *

I realized that the other one, Ray St. Louis, had said something tome.

He turned around in his seat to look back at me. He was much largerthan Wexler. Even in the dim light of the car I could make out therough texture of his pockmarked face. I didn't know him but I'dheard him referred to by other cops and I knew they called him BigDog. I had thought that he and Wexler made the perfect Mutt and Jeffteam when I first saw them waiting for me in the lobby at the Rocky.It was like they had stepped out of a late-night movie. Long, darkovercoats, hats. The whole scene should have been in black andwhite.

"You hear me, Jack. We'll break it to her. That's our job, but we'djust like you to be there to sort of help us out, maybe stay withher if it gets rough. You know, if she needs to be with somebody.Okay?"

"Okay."

"Good, Jack."

We were going to Sean's house. Not the apartment he split with fourother cops in Denver so in accordance with city regs he was a Denverresident. His house in Boulder where his wife, Riley, would answerour knock. I knew nobody was going to be breaking anything to her.She'd know what the news was the moment she opened the door and sawthe three of us standing there without Sean. Any cop's wife wouldknow. They spend their lives dreading and preparing for that day.Every time there's a knock on the door they expect it to be death'smessengers standing there when they open it. This time it would be.

"You know, she's going to know," I told them.

"Probably," Wexler said. "They always do."

I realized they were counting on Riley knowing the score as soon asshe opened the door. It would make their job easier.

I dropped my chin to my chest and brought my fingers up beneath myglasses to pinch the bridge of my nose. I realized I had become acharacter in one of my own stories-exhibiting the details of griefand loss I worked so hard to get so I could make a thirty-inchnewspaper story seem meaningful. Now I was one of the details inthis story.

A sense of shame descended on me as I thought of all the calls I hadmade to a widow or parent of a dead child. Or brother of a suicide.Yes, I had even made those. I don't think there was any kind ofdeath that I hadn't written about, that hadn't brought me around asthe intruder into somebody's pain.

How do you feel? Trusty words for a reporter. Always the firstquestion. If not so direct, then carefully camouflaged in wordsmeant to impart sympathy and understanding-feelings I didn'tactually have. I carried a reminder of this callousness. A thinwhite scar running along my left cheek just above the line of mybeard. It was from the diamond engagement ring of a woman whosefianc? had been killed in an avalanche near Breckenridge. I askedher the old standby and she responded with a backhand across myface. At the time I was new to the job and thought I had beenwronged. Now I wear the scar like a badge.

"You better pull over," I said. "I'm going to be sick."

Wexler jerked the car into the freeway's breakdown lane. We skiddeda little on the black ice but then he got control. Before the carhad completely stopped I tried desperately to open the door but thehandle wouldn't work. It was a detective car, I realized, and thepassengers who most often rode in the back were suspects andprisoners. The back doors had security locks controlled from thefront.

"The door," I managed to strangle out.

The car finally jerked to a stop as Wexler disengaged the securitylock. I opened the door, leaned out and vomited into the dirtyslush. Three great heaves from the gut. For a half a minute I didn'tmove, waiting for more, but that was it. I was empty. I thoughtabout the backseat of the car. For prisoners and suspects. And Iguessed that I was both now. Suspect as a brother. A prisoner of myown pride. The sentence, of course, would now be life.

Those thoughts quickly slipped away with the relief the physicalexorcism brought. I gingerly stepped out of the car and walked tothe edge of the asphalt where the light from the passing carsreflected in moving rainbows on the petroleum-exhaust glaze on theFebruary snow. It looked as if we had stopped alongside a grazingmeadow but I didn't know where. I hadn't been paying attention tohow far along to Boulder we were. I took off my gloves and glassesand put them in the pockets of my coat. Then I reached down and dugbeneath the spoiled surface to where the snow was white and pure. Itook up two handfuls of the cold, clean powder and pressed it to myface, rubbing my skin until it stung.

"You okay?" St. Louis asked.

He had come up behind me with his stupid question. It was up therewith How do you feel? I ignored it.

"Let's go," I said.

We got back in and Wexler wordlessly pulled the car back onto thefreeway. I saw a sign for the Broomfield exit and knew we were abouthalfway there. Growing up in Boulder, I had made the thirty-mile runbetween there and Denver a thousand times but the stretch seemedlike alien territory to me now.

For the first time I thought of my parents and how they would dealwith this. Stoicly, I decided. They handled everything that way.They never discussed it. They moved on. They'd done it with Sarah.Now they'd do it with Sean.

"Why'd he do it?" I asked after a few minutes.

Wexler and St. Louis said nothing.

"I'm his brother. We're twins, for Christ's sake."

"You're also a reporter," St. Louis said. "We picked you up becausewe want Riley to be with family if she needs it. You're the only-"

"My brother fucking killed himself!"

I said it too loud. It had a quality of hysteria to it that I knewnever worked with cops. You start yelling and they have a way ofshutting down, going cold. I continued in a subdued voice.

"I think I am entitled to know what happened and why. I'm notwriting a fucking story. Jesus, you guys are ..."

I shook my head and didn't finish. If I tried I thought I would loseit again. I gazed out the window and could see the lights of Bouldercoming up. So many more than when I was a kid.

"We don't know why," Wexler finally said after a half minute. "Okay?All I can say is that it happens. Sometimes cops get tired of allthe shit that comes down the pipe. Mac might've gotten tired, that'sall. Who knows? But they're working on it. And when they know, I'llknow. And I'll tell you. That's a promise."

"Who's working on it?"

"The park services turned it over to our department. SIU is handlingit."

"What do you mean Special Investigations? They don't handle copsuicides."

"Normally, they don't. We do. CAPs. But this time it's just thatthey're not going to let us investigate our own. Conflict ofinterest, you know."

CAPs, I thought. Crimes Against Persons. Homicide, assault, rape,suicide. I wondered who would be listed in the reports as the personagainst whom this crime had been committed. Riley? Me? My parents?My brother?

"It was because of Theresa Lofton, wasn't it?" I asked, though itwasn't really a question. I didn't feel I needed their confirmationor denial. I was just saying out loud what I believed to be theobvious.

"We don't know, Jack," St. Louis said. "Let's leave it at that fornow."

* * *

The death of Theresa Lofton was the kind of murder that gave peoplepause. Not just in Denver, but everywhere. It made anybody who heardor read about it stop for at least a moment to consider the violentimages it conjured in the mind, the twist it caused in the gut.

Most homicides are little murders. That's what we call them in thenewspaper business. Their effect on others is limited, their graspon the imagination is short-lived. They get a few paragraphs on theinside pages. Buried in the paper the way the victims are buried inthe ground.

But when an attractive college student is found in two pieces in atheretofore peaceful place like Washington Park, there usually isn'tenough space in the paper for all the inches of copy it willgenerate. Theresa Lofton's was no little murder. It was a magnetthat pulled at reporters from across the country. Theresa Lofton wasthe girl in two pieces. That was the catchy thing about this one.And so they descended on Denver from places like New York andChicago and Los Angeles, television, tabloid and newspaper reportersalike. For a week, they stayed at hotels with good room service,roamed the city and the University of Denver campus, askedmeaningless questions and got meaningless answers. Some staked outthe day care center where Lofton had worked part-time or went up toButte, where she had come from. Wherever they went they learned thesame thing, that Theresa Lofton fit that most exclusive media imageof all, the All-American Girl.

The Theresa Lofton murder was inevitably compared to the BlackDahlia case of fifty years ago in Los Angeles. In that case, a notso All-American Girl was found severed at the midriff in an emptylot. A tabloid television show dubbed Theresa Lofton the WhiteDahlia, playing on the fact that she had been found on asnow-covered field near Denver's Lake Grassmere.

And so the story fed on itself. It burned as hot as a trashcan firefor almost two weeks. But nobody was arrested and there were othercrimes, other fires for the national media to warm itself by.Updates on the Lofton case dropped back into the inside pages of theColorado papers. They became briefs for the digest pages. AndTheresa Lofton finally took her spot among the little murders. Shewas buried.

All the while, the police in general, and my brother in particular,remained virtually mute, refusing even to confirm the detail thatthe victim had been found in two parts. That report had come only byaccident from a photographer at the Rocky named Iggy Gomez. He hadbeen in the park looking for wild art-the feature photos that fillthe pages on a slow news day-when he happened upon the crime sceneahead of any other reporters or photographers. The cops had made thecallouts to the coroner's and crime scene offices by landline sincethey knew the Rocky and the Post monitored their radio frequencies.Gomez took shots of two stretchers being used to remove two bodybags. He called the city desk and said the cops were working atwo-bagger and from the looks of the size of the bags the victimswere probably children.

Later, a cop shop reporter for the Rocky named Van Jackson got asource in the coroner's office to confirm the grim fact that avictim had come into the morgue in two parts. The next morning'sstory in the Rocky served as the siren call to the media across thecountry.

My brother and his CAPs team worked as if they felt no obligation totalk to the public at all. Each day, the Denver Police Departmentmedia office put out a scant few lines in a press release,announcing that the investigation was continuing and that there hadbeen no arrests.

Continues...
Excerpted from The Poetby Michael Connelly Copyright ©1997 by Hieronymous, Inc.. Excerpted by permission.
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