I squeezed his hand. “If you’d rather not …” Fine time to be magnanimous, I thought.
He shook his head. “If you ever want the illusion of safety, put yourself in a banquet room where more than half the people are cops and firefighters. We’re physically fit and highly trained in self-defense. We’re armed and tough. We’re essentially a paramilitary corps. We’re used to being in control. People expect us to be confident, take charge. Nothing can touch us, right?” He sighed. “I think it’s called denial.”
I thought it was the longest speech I’d ever heard from Matt. Eventually he got to the story itself.
“We’re down in the garage, we say good-bye at Kenny’s car, and I split to go to mine. I’m about two cars over when I hear a kid yell, ‘Gimme me your wallet. Hand it over. Gimme your keys.’ I turn and the kid has a gun under Kenny’s chin. I had a split second to decide what to do. I remember thinking, How dumb is this kid? But we’re in civvies, and he couldn’t have known that we were law enforcement and about a hundred cops were twenty feet above him on the ballroom floor.”
“I can’t imagine,” I said, weak from picturing myself in that garage.
“I yell, ‘Police, freeze.’ But even before it’s out I know this kid doesn’t care. He swings his gun around to me, giving Kenny a chance to reach for the kid’s neck, and I hear two shots. One is mine; one is the kid’s. I can’t tell you how long it took me to figure which bullet went where.”
A light knock at the door. Elaine. “Hey, you two. Thanks for making the coffee.” I knew she’d be impatient to get on with the day’s business. A trip to the caterer was on the list, and then our eagerly awaited nitrogen lunch with Phil.
“Give us ten minutes,” I said.
“I’ll warm up the car.”
Matt gave me a questioning look.
“Our little joke, about how that’s not necessary in California, and how that’s why I should never have moved back to Massachusetts.”
Matt kissed my cheek. “I’m glad you don’t mind a little cold weather.”
Elaine’s knock had broken his rhythm, perhaps fortuitously. He’d returned to the present, ready to wrap up the story.
“So, bottom line. I’d shot the kid in the chest. The kid got Kenny through his thigh. The kid died. Kenny had a limp for the rest of his life, until he died a couple of years ago. It didn’t matter that the kid had a record a mile long. He was nineteen years old and I killed him.”
“You had no choice, Matt. And you saved Kenny’s life.”
“You always have a choice. But I know what you mean. For months I had nightmares. One night it would be that the gun failed on me. The next night the gun wouldn’t stop firing.”
I was stunned by the whole story, and by Matt’s revelations—his thoughts and his feelings about the seamy side of his job. I understood why his sharing this with Dana might help her. He hadn’t seen his partner killed, but he’d lived through a traumatic incident and gone forward in his profession.
In the end, I could only be thankful that neither of the bullets got Matt. Not physically, anyway
Waiting for Elaine to fix her face, as she termed it, I sat with my notebook, doodling, my usual process when I was working on a case, real or imagined. I was prepared to give Dr. Philip Chambers a second chance to show himself a worthy fiancé for my friend, with no involvement in the nefarious events of the weekend. Wouldn’t he be thrilled if he knew of my generosity? I mused.
I’d never been so ill equipped for a meeting of this kind—the kind where I’m ostensibly having a friendly visit but in my mind conducting an interrogation. In this case, I’d managed to inflate the facts of Phil’s condescending attitude and what might have been a simple error—duffel bag or briefcase?—into a full-fledged Murder One scenario. The possibility that I was way off base was enormous.
I had no forensics information about the actual crimes—the shootings of Dana and Tanisha’s patient, and then Tanisha. Even with my special brand of cajoling, I hadn’t been able to persuade Matt to present himself to the Berkeley PD and learn the inside scoop. I’d had to rely on the newspapers, which I knew not to trust for full disclosure on an open case.
We did learn that the victim of the first shooting had died at the trauma center. The newspapers said more or less what we knew from Dana, that he was Indian and carried multiple ID cards. Police determined that he was “really” named Lokesh Patel, in this country as a visiting scientist. They didn’t mention the existence of the other IDs. He’d been working on a project with scientists at BUL and local consulting firms. There was no apparent motive for the killing. All the authorities could glean from the records at Golden State Hospital, where he’d driven himself from someplace in Oakland, was that he’d been shot in the chest. The victim had said nothing about where the shooting took place, other than “in the parking lot.”