LITMIR.BIZ

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she blurted. “No.” She tried to push past him but he stood firm in front of her. “Just let me through. We’re done, aren’t we? Let me through.”

      Spencer took her by her arms to stop her from moving. She was shaking.

      “Please,” she said. “Leave me alone.”

      “Lily,” he said gently. He was still holding her arms, he almost brought her to him in an embrace; she was too stirred up to know what it was. “I’m sorry. I am. We’re just trying to find Amy.”

      “Oh, giving out traffic tickets on the LIE gives you experience in missing persons, does it?” Lily exclaimed, trying to wrest from him. Her knees were buckling from sadness. “No,” she said, furiously shaking her head. “No!” Even more adamantly. “Whatever it is you’re thinking, there’s a simple explanation.”

      “I’m not thinking anything.” He let go of her, and she stood still, but leaned against the dirty wall of the building. “You’re the one doing all the thinking. Because you’re the only one who knows whether his statement is true.” Spencer looked at the pavement. “And from your reaction, it seems to me that you know it can’t be.”

      Turning her head to look inside a window pane, the glass reflecting off her own filmed over glass eyes, Lily put her hands over her face, struggling to keep the tears back.

      When Spencer got back to his desk, he sat down heavily, looked around the office, and thought it was time to go—perhaps permanently. Harkman sitting across from him was by contrast jubilant. “Finally! A break in the immovable case. A lead.”

      “Yeah, a lead.” After a few minutes Spencer said, “I think Sanchez and Smith can handle it from here.” He turned to Harkman on the swivel chair. “I’m going to give this to them. I can’t do it, Chris. I have to get off this case.”

      “Which case? The McFadden case?”

      Spencer nodded.

      “What the hell are you talking about? We finally made some headway. A U.S. Congressman!”

      Blood ties. Brother and sisters. How Spencer craved a drink. “I know. That’s just the thing. I can’t do it.”

      “O’Malley, what’s gotten into you?”

      Spencer thought back to the white, wet buildings of Hanover, New Hampshire, to Dartmouth College, to the black shutters on his soul; thought back to Greenwich, Connecticut and the tangled web he had once weaved investigating another missing girl and the duplicity and manipulation of the ones closest to her. Their squalid story swallowed him. He couldn’t go back to that place twice. It took him years as a traffic cop on the Long Island Expressway before he could face being a proper investigator again. There were some things in life for which once was enough. There weren’t many of them. Many of life’s offerings were renewable pleasures, like sex, or renewable miseries, like alcohol. But this drowning in shallow waters was not something he wanted to relive even while saturated in Scotch.

      “O’Malley, you’re overwhelmed. Give your smaller cases to me. Concentrate on this one.”

      “I’m not overwhelmed. Stop psychoanalyzing me. This is precisely the one case I don’t want. I’ll keep the smaller ones. I got plenty else I need to be doing, and you, too. Sanchez and Smith are more than capable of taking over for us.”

      “I don’t want them to take over for us! This is a big case. A Congressman, O’Malley! There might be another promotion here for me and for you, too. I’ve got a family to think of. I’ve had three heart operations. What the fuck is the matter with you?”

      “Chris, I’m sorry. I just don’t want to do it. What can I tell you?”

      “But you’re the one who came to me with this!” Harkman exclaimed. “You’re the one who remembered reading what Andrew Quinn had said. I mean, what the hell? Why are you doing this?”

      Spencer wasn’t about to explain anything to Harkman. “You can’t change my mind. I don’t want to get mired in this. There’s too much baggage here for me. I’m putting Sanchez and Smith on it.”

      “No, you’re not, O’Malley.”

      Spencer’s clouded gaze cleared slightly.

      Harkman stood and came over to Spencer’s desk, leaning over him. Spencer moved away, and it must have seemed like wariness, thought it was nothing but distaste. “You selfish bastard,” Harkman said. “You think you’re the only one who knows things. But I know things, O’Malley, I know things about you, the kind that Internal Affairs would be very interested in hearing. I’ve been very good to you, but don’t fuck with me on this one, because I need this case. As always, you’re only thinking of yourself.”

      Spencer looked steadily at Harkman’s small angry eyes, at his swollen, contorted face. “Don’t come any closer to me,” he said, standing up himself, and pushing his chair away. “What could you possibly know about me?”

      Harkman backed away, half a step. “O’Malley, I promise you. You fuck me over, I’m going to fuck you over, and good. You want a leave of absence? I’ll make sure you get a nice long one.” Harkman stormed out of the office—like a wounded woman.

      Spencer sank back down at his desk. What the hell was Harkman talking about? Was he being selfish? Probably. He did not think of how giving this case to Sanchez would affect Harkman. He only thought of how it would affect him—whether he could handle it. He didn’t think he could. He couldn’t tell Harkman that what he wanted was … not to get personally involved, not to hurt Lily. If she was going to be crushed, he didn’t want her crushed at his hand. His recusal would be the kindest thing, the best thing for her—and certainly the best thing for him. Spencer felt the murkiness, instinctively sensed the muddy and shallow waters, the swamp of design instead of the ether of accident on Amy’s vanishing.

      His feeling for his partner changed for the worse. Even more than most people, Spencer hated to be threatened. Of course Harkman was just bluffing. Spencer did have some secrets to keep, and he kept them, certainly from his relatively new partner, practically a stranger. He grabbed his jacket and left.

16

       Reality: The Actual Thing that it Appears to Be

      Lily let him in, but so reluctantly she didn’t even open the door all the way. “I don’t know what you want from me,” she said coldly, but couldn’t help noticing his drawn face, the somber twist of his mouth.

      “I want you to come with me,” Spencer said, pushing the door open and walking in, “I want to go talk to your brother.”

      “I’m not going anywhere.”

      Spencer took a deep breath. “Do you want to help him or don’t you?” He walked into Amy’s room.

      She followed him. “How is talking to him going to help him?”

      He was looking around, swirling his hand through the air. “Lily, once again you’re deliberately misunderstanding me. You and I can go and talk informally to your brother right now in his home or my partner and I will have to pay him a police visit.”

      “Detective O’Malley,” Lily said, wringing her hands in supplication. “Don’t you understand? My brother, Andrew Quinn, is a U.S. Congressman

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