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Gil Shalos1
Author of 15 Stories |
8.15 am Friday 24th November 2006
He held the door for her and she darted past him, stopping to brush raindrops from her hair and shoulders. “Thanks,” she said.
“Looks like the rain’s set in for the day,” McCoy said.
“That’s appropriate,” Casey said. She didn’t need to elaborate: McCoy knew she was talking about the funeral they would both be attending that afternoon.
“It doesn’t always rain,” McCoy said, thinking back to bright, sunlight graves. “But you’re right – it seems more suitable when it does.” They walked toward the elevator together. “Do you want to get dinner tonight?”
“Like a post-funeral date?” Casey asked, pressing the call button.
“When you put it like that it sounds fairly crass,” McCoy said.
“I know what you meant,” Casey said. She stepped into the elevator and hit the button for her floor, and then hit 10. “I think probably not, Jack.”
“Raincheck?” McCoy suggested.
“No,” Casey said. McCoy raised his eyebrows and she gave a little shrug. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“You didn’t seem to think it was all that bad an idea on Wednesday night,” McCoy said, stung.
“It wasn’t,” Casey said. “But we need to be sensible about this, Jack. Where can this go? An illicit affair, sneaking around, then what? Our jobs are too important to us to put them at risk for a fling.” She paused. “My job is too important to me to put it at risk for a fling.”
“Are you sure it’s a fling?” McCoy asked. The elevator stopped at Casey’s floor. She didn’t move. After a moment the doors closed again and the elevator continued upward.
“It was pretty clear to me that it was a fling on Wednesday night,” Casey said quietly, looking straight ahead.
McCoy had half-expected something along those lines since she’d seen Regan in his arms at the hospital and turned and walked away. Still, he was surprised how angry it made him. “Is that what – I should have sat and watched her have hysterics?” McCoy said.
“Do you really think I’m that much of a bitch?” Casey said.
“Then what – ?” McCoy asked.
“You broke a land speed record getting to the hospital,” Casey said.
“I seem to remember you hightailing it out of my apartment after your own call from Cragen,” McCoy said angrily. “Now you've got hurt feelings because I didn’t what – wait for you to come back?”
“I went to the scene, Jack,” Casey said. “Look – you remember the time that son-of-a-bitch came after me in the office?”
“I’ll never forget,” McCoy said, and meant it.
She shrugged. “ Olivia rode with me to the hospital. She was there when I woke up. And you – ”
“I came to the hospital!” McCoy protested.
“After you went to the scene.”
“But Casey, back then we weren’t – we were colleagues,” McCoy said.
“Exactly, Jack,” Casey said, with the same expression on her face as when she played a trump card in a cross-examination. McCoy shook his head and Casey held up her hand to stop him. “Look, it’s like you said. No-one likes to go home alone after a win. It was what it was. Let’s leave it there.”
“You clearly find me easier to resist than I find you,” McCoy said. He reached out and brushed her fringe away from her eyes. It was a transparent move and the wry smile that quirked Casey’s lips told him she saw it as such - but she turned her head to follow his touch, all the same.
“Nothing about you is easy, Jack McCoy,” Casey said huskily. She closed her eyes for a second, and then looked straight at him with absolutely no artifice. “We both know my judgement gets a little uncertain around you,” she said. “Be a gentleman, Jack. Don't take advantage of that to let me ruin my career.”
McCoy traced the line of her jaw with one finger. “You're a hell of a lawyer, Casey,” he said regretfully, letting his hand fall back to his side.
“Back atcha,” she said.
“Are we going to be okay?” McCoy asked.
Casey grinned at him. “Until the next time you go all cave-man on me and try to take a case away from me because I’m a girl.”
McCoy held up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m totally reformed, sensitive, new age, and all the rest.”
“Good,” Casey said. The elevator doors opened on the 10th floor and McCoy stepped out. “Hey, Jack,” Casey said, and he turned back. “Try to be careful who you win cases with, okay?” She hit the button to close the elevator doors before he could respond.
McCoy turned towards his office, shaking his head a little. Casey was making the sensible argument – but it was still a little bruising to McCoy’s ego to know that Casey’s logic so easily swept aside any attraction she felt to him.
Take it as a mixed blessing. Branch would come down on us like a ton of bricks.
McCoy settled himself at his desk and picked up his phone. “ Colleen, would you send Mr Chen to see me when he gets in?” At her acknowledgement, he hung up and turned to reviewing his notes for witness prep.
It was only a quarter hour later that a knock on his door made him look up. Qiao Chen stood awkwardly in the doorway. “Qiao,” McCoy said. “Close the door. Take a seat.”
Chen did so. McCoy could see the younger man was nervous. “ Mr McCoy,” he said. “I’m glad you called. I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate the opportunity to work with you here in major felonies, how much I’ve learned.”
“Good to know,” McCoy said, recognising the attempt to manipulate him. “Qiao, when you came up here from Rackets I told you it was for what we thought was going to be People v Walters, but turned out to be People v Watts.”
“Yes,” Chen said.
“Both those are closed now,” McCoy said. “One way or another. So it’s time for you to go back to Rackets.”
“But – ” Chen said. “But – was my work not good?”
“Your work was fine,” McCoy said. “You have a future with the DA’s Office, Qiao.”
“In Rackets,” Chen said glumly.
“For now,” McCoy said, and smiled to soften the blow. “You need more court time. I’ll tell your bureau chief to make sure you get it. There will be other openings.”
Chen looked down at his hands. “And Regan Markham?”
“I don’t follow,” McCoy said coolly.
“Are you sending her back down to Fraud?” Chen asked.
“ Ms Markham will be staying on the 10th Floor,” McCoy said.
“I’m ten times the lawyer she is!” Chen burst out. “I made the Dean’s list every semester at Yale. I was first in my year on my bar exam! Everyone knows Markham barely scraped a pass on her second try! Down in Fraud it’s practically a Bureau hobby, trying to find a legal question Regan Markham can answer without a textbook!”
Bureau hobby … Young ADAs were competitive – and arrogant. It was nothing new to know they were turning on the weakest member of the herd. When McCoy had been a young ADA, it had been a myopic overweight lawyer called Carl Bogdanovich who had been the butt of everybody’s jokes. In later years, McCoy was ashamed to remember the cheap points he’d scored at Bogdanovich’s expense.
Regan Markham had been on the receiving end of the same treatment. McCoy was a little surprised how much he resented it.
“You may be ten times the lawyer, Mr Chen,” McCoy said, anger sharpening his voice, “and for all I know you’ll always be ten times the lawyer. But you aren’t one tenth the prosecutor.”
“How can I be a better lawyer and she be the better prosecutor?” Chen demanded.
“The fact that the idea puzzles you proves I’m right,” McCoy said. Chen glared at him, angry and baffled. And young. Very, very young. McCoy forced himself to make allowances. “ Mr Chen. Have you heard the saying that it’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You play to be the best player on your team, Mr Chen,” McCoy said, trying to explain. “That’s an admirable ambition. But Regan Markham plays to win. That’s why she’s on my team.”
“Sure,” Chen said, throwing up his hands and standing. “Whatever you say, Mr McCoy.” As he turned to the door, he muttered under his breath: “Guess the rumours about major felonies are true.”
“What rumours are those, Mr Chen?” McCoy barked. Chen hesitated, then shook his head silently. “That’s what I thought. Better get your things packed, Mr Chen. I think you’ll find it’ll be quite some time before you’re back on this floor.”
It was about a half-an-hour later when Colleen Petraky opened the side door to McCoy’s office, a file box in her arms. “ Mr McCoy, you wanted to know when we got the extra desk out of Ms Markham’s office?”
“Thanks, Colleen,” McCoy said. “How did you go with that list?”
“All here,” she said, holding out the box. “Where do you want me to put it?”
“I’ll take it,” McCoy said.
He carried the box down the hall to Alex Borgia’s old office and set it down. Chen’s calendar, his pot plant, his framed photos were all gone, as was the second desk. McCoy spotted the familiar, battered file box under Regan’s desk and pulled it out, setting it beside the box Colleen had given him.
An hour or so later McCoy was on his way to the conference room for a deposition. The elevator doors opened and he glanced towards them to see a familiar but unexpected face.
“Regan!” he said, stopping dead.
“Morning, Jack,” she said. The left side of her face was almost back to normal but her right eye was still swollen and blackened and the grazing and bruising had ripened. The ragged cut of her hair was even more obvious than it had been in the hospital and it stood out around her head in a dirty blonde halo. The welts the ropes had left on her neck and wrists had scabbed over, dark against her skin.
Theatrically, McCoy consulted his watch. “What kind of time do you call this?”
Regan flushed, stammered: “I was giving my witness statement down at One PP for the inquiry into the shooting, I – ”
“Regan, I’m joking,” McCoy said. “I didn’t even expect you in today.” He took her by the shoulders and studied her face. “Are you sure you’re up to it?”
She turned her head, hiding the worst of her injuries. “I think so.”
“Yeah?” McCoy said sceptically, putting his fingers under her chin and turning her face back towards him.
“Yeah.” She endured his scrutiny but wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“Because you’re looking pretty interesting.” McCoy let her go.
Regan snorted. “Yeah, well, I made a six year old scream for his Mommy on the subway this morning, so no matter what else happens, the day hasn’t been a total bust.”
“How’d you go at One Police Plaza?” McCoy asked and then saw a paralegal down the hall trying to catch his eye. “Dammit, I have to go – listen, tell me later, okay?”
“Okay,” Regan said. McCoy squeezed her shoulder and, reluctantly, went.
Well, that wasn’t too bad.
When McCoy had appeared at the hospital on Wednesday night Regan had all but lost the ability to distinguish between then and now. The smell of the hospital, the persistent feeling of suffocation, and now Regan knew with hindsight the after-effects of concussion, had all combined to send her spiralling into confusion and panic. She’d been breathing plastic air and hearing hiss thump and thinking –
any minute now she’d be taken away and disappeared until there was nothing left of her but the machines hooked into her flesh hiss thump until she was nothing more than a shadow on the lives of those around her. The antiseptic smell got into her nose and she could taste hiss, thump plastic and the bubble of panic rose higher and higher in her chest.
She tried to explain all the things she needed to explain to McCoy, about Anita Van Buren and Marco and people making up for her mistakes, about the hospital and what would happen, about how much she needed to get out of there – but the words wouldn’t come out, not in order, and she couldn’t get her breath, and she had to get out of there and she couldn’t get free, couldn’t get away and she was going to disappear and this time it would be forever -
And then her panic had cleared enough for her to recognise the here and the now, and the here had been in Jack McCoy’s arms.
“Calm down, calm down,” McCoy said to her. “Calm down.”
“Don’t let them take me,” Regan begged him. “Don’t – ”
“Nobody is taking you anywhere,” McCoy said sternly, drawing her head down to his shoulder. He smelt of whiskey and women’s perfume and sex. It was a reassuring reminder that he belonged to the real world outside the hospital, a real world without antiseptic. And maybe if he belonged outside the hospital, Regan could believe that she did too.
She’d been wondering where her partner was, the question getting increasingly frantic as her panic mounted. In that moment, she’d realised she had her answer, for better or worse. Your partner is the one who turns up at the hospital and doesn’t care that you’re freaking out and doesn’t take no for an answer, that’s who your partner is, and Regan’s partner had her in an unbreakable embrace.
Relief washed over her. She allowed herself to lean against McCoy as her tears washed away the panic and guilt and fear, as his touch soothed the tension from muscles and the loneliness from her heart.
Waking up the next morning with a hangover of combined tequila and concussion, Regan had been embarrassed at the memory. At the time it had seemed entirely natural. The next morning it had seemed a terrible imposition.
When McCoy had called her to ask how she was and remind her to take as much time off as she needed, Regan had been relieved that he hadn’t said a word that might indicate he even remembered her panic.
Nor today.
Regan shrugged carefully out of her coat, turning to the office she used. She put her hand into the pocket of her jacket and ran her fingers over the metal shape of the cufflink there.
“Detective Benson, my clothes – from Wednesday – are they down in forensics?”
“Sure.”
“I had something in my pocket. My jacket pocket. I’m not sure it’s evidence of anything.”
“What is it?”
“A cufflink. A man’s cufflink. I’d like – if it isn’t needed – I’d like it back.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Regan closed her fingers on the tiny piece of metal that now carried so many associations for her. When she had been frustrated by McCoy’s seemingly capricious attitude, the cufflink he had dropped in the first raw moments of horror hearing what had happened Mary Firienze reminded her that he was a man struck by grief, and she should make allowances. When she had struggled with the demands McCoy placed on her, the requirement to lie not just to Gorton but to Casey Novak, she had gripped that cufflink to remind her of the first fresh pain of grief and steel herself to the task. When she had lain helpless, captive by Edward Walters, that cufflink had reminded her that her fate was not her fate alone.
And today, at One Police Plaza, she’d clenched her fist around that same cufflink and concentrated on turning her inchoate memories of terror and helplessness into the right formula of words that would let Anita Van Buren walk away from shooting a man armed only with a knife. I was suffocating – I knew I had seconds to live – he told me he was going to kill me -
Regan wasn’t sure she’d got it right. The thought that van Buren might get jammed up for protecting her made her gut twist. Jack will make sure she’s all right, she told herself. He promised.
At the door of the office she stopped dead, and then leaned back out into the hall to check that she was in the right place. Yes. But her desk was gone. Only Chen’s, with his careful collection of personal memorabilia, remained. Oh. Her heart gave a painful thump and her throat swelled. Guess I’m going back to Fraud. Guess Jack McCoy doesn’t need an assistant who can’t take care of herself, who gets drunk and jumped and needs rescuing, can’t blame him, he needs someone he can rely on, I was lucky to get this job in the first place and I should have known I could never keep it.
Then the athletic pennant tacked to the wall caught her eye: Seattle Storm.
Now why would Chen follow the Storm? Regan wondered. She took a step further into the office and looked around. A bulletin board held a couple of stories clipped from the newspapers: Paper Pervert In Prison read one, and Regan skimmed the text and realised it was about the Jennifer Walker case. Verdict: Forrest No Victim was the other, with a picture of McCoy leaving the courthouse after the Forrest verdict. If she looked closely, Regan could see her sleeve beside him, the only part of her not cropped out of the picture. It made her smile, and then wince as the expression pulled at the grazes on her cheek. Yeah, Jack, you’re the hero in everyone’s story.
Regan tossed her coat over her chair and opened the top drawer of her desk. Pens, pencils, bottle of Advil, legal pads in the next drawer, full bottle of scotch in a familiar brand in the bottom. The wall by the bookshelf held a dry-erase whiteboard calendar with dates for Regan’s upcoming court appearances written in Colleen’s neat handwriting.
The framed photo on the bookshelf gave her pause until she picked it up and recognised the grinning blonde in the picture – and if she hadn’t, the scrawled ‘ Lauren Jackson’ across the bottom would have told her.
When McCoy knocked on her door later that morning she held up the photo. “How’d you know she’s my favourite player?”
“I’m psychic,” he said with a sly grin, and then shrugged. “She plays the same position, it seemed like a good guess.”
Regan leaned back in her chair and looked around the office. “All this stuff,” she said, trying to find the words.
“ Colleen’s a demon on ebay,” McCoy said. “One more thing.” He took something from his pocket and turned to the door. Regan got carefully to her feet and took a few steps to see what he was doing. When McCoy took his hands down she realised he had been fitting a new name plaque to the holder on the door. ADA Regan Markham.
“What do you think?” he asked her.
“Looks pretty good,” Regan said, throat a little tight.
“Looks like it belongs,” McCoy said. He put his hand on her shoulder for a second. “How are you holding up?”
“I’m holding up,” Regan said.
McCoy gave her a penetrating look. “How’d it go at One PP?”
“Okay, I think,” Regan said. She made her way carefully back to her desk and lowered herself into the chair. “I’ve been a witness before – not as a victim, but the game’s the same.”
“Are you sure you should be here?” McCoy said, with a look that let Regan know he hadn’t missed how cautiously she moved.
“Best place for me,” Regan said flippantly, but she meant it, and perhaps McCoy read that in her face, because he nodded and didn’t press the point. “Is Lieutenant Van Buren going to come out of this okay?”
“I think so,” McCoy said. He put his hands in his pockets and leaned against the doorframe. “Walters didn’t have a gun, but he had a knife. The circumstances were clearly exigent.” He shrugged. “ Arthur and I will get into it a little bit, if we need to.”
“Will you keep me posted?”
“Sure.” McCoy said.
“ Jack,” Regan said, and reached into her pocket and fished out the cufflink she’d picked up from his carpet the morning their trial preparation had been interrupted by Don Cragen’s phone-call, the early morning call that had brought the bad news to send all their worlds askew. She held it out to him. “I found this. On your floor.”
McCoy came closer and stretched out his hand. Regan placed the cufflink carefully on his palm. McCoy looked down at it for a moment.
“I thought I lost it,” he said.
“No,” Regan said.
“You know,” McCoy said, “ Alex Borgia gave me these.”
“I’m sorry it took me so long to get it back to you,” Regan said.
McCoy closed his fist around the tiny piece of metal. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “It’s no big deal.” He looked sideways at her. “Are you coming to Mary’s funeral?”
“It seems like the thing to do,” Regan said, and then, uncertain: “Is it the thing to do?”
“It’s the thing to do,” McCoy reassured her. “Meanwhile, does the fact that you’re at your desk in your office – ”
“Looking at my press clippings on my bulletin board,” Regan added. “Checking my calendar for my upcoming court dates.”
“All of that,” McCoy said, smiling. “Am I to take that to mean you’re ready to work?”
Regan nodded.
“Good,” McCoy said. “ Jeremy McMillan’s lawyer filed notice of a diminished capacity defence this morning. Drug use and an easily led personality caused McMillan’s criminal acts.”
“Will it fly?” Regan asked.
McCoy shrugged. “You tell me,” he said. He reached one long arm and plucked a law report volume from her bookshelf. “Start with People v Hanover and work your way back,” he said, setting the volume in front of her. “I’m in chambers on this Monday morning.”
Regan smiled. “All right, Jack,” she said. “I won’t let you down.”
“Never thought you would,” McCoy said. His fingers lingered on the cover of the book, then brushed lightly over the back of Regan’s hand as he turned to leave. At the door, he paused, one hand on the doorframe, the other in his pocket. “Not for a minute, Regan.”
“Your confidence is greater than mine, then,” Regan said dryly.
“That’s why they pay me the medium bucks,” McCoy said, grinning.
“Because you’re more self-confident?” Regan asked.
“Because I’m a better judge of character,” McCoy said. He winked at Regan and was gone, leaving her staring after him.
After a moment she looked down at the law book he’d put on her desk. Turning to the index, she found People v Hanover and started to read. The case was a grim one, the ruling couched in the driest of legal language.
Regan smiled as she read, all the same.
.oOo.
the end
If you enjoyed ‘Ghosts’, stay tuned to this station for further instalments in the same series, and you might like to check out ‘Curiosity Caught’ and ‘Should Have Known’, the first and second stories in the series.
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