Free Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You by Laurie Lynn Drummond Page B

covered her arms and face and legs; blood gushed from her femoral artery. The perp lay partway on top of her, the barrel of her gun resting against his cheek; Katherine had managed to blow his head off, even as he stabbed her repeatedly, hepped up on PCP. She was barely conscious when the officers got there, whispering something they couldn’t understand. They threw her in the backseat of their unit and hauled ass down North Boulevard to the BRG, but her heart had stopped and she’d lost too much blood.
    Her funeral was something to see; the line of police cars stretched over a mile on the way to the cemetery; the department bugler played taps. We all saluted her casket.
    Her picture is up on the wall at Headquarters when you first walk in, behind a glass case. The Wall of Honor, we call it: all the BatonRouge city cops who’ve died in the line of duty. Far too many of them. After you walk in and out of there day after day, you tend to pass by it without really seeing their faces; the wall becomes more of a twitch deep beneath your skin that can’t quite be ignored as you turn down the hallway to the evidence room or crime scene division, or wherever your business may take you.
    Still, sometimes we do stop and linger, needing to study the too-long parade of faces—good cops we knew like Carl D’Abadie, Chuck Stegall, Warren Broussard, Betty Smothers, and Vickie Wax.
    Does Richard occasionally pause here as well, we wonder. Is his eye caught by Katherine’s face, more serious and far younger than we ever remember? Does he look at her, and look at Johnny, the two Cippoines up there on the wall? Does he stand here, like we do, and remember when the world seemed good and bright and we were all so alive and full of possibility.

L IZ
    â€œWho speaks for the dead? Nobody. As a rule, nobody speaks for the dead, unless we do.”
    â€”Detective Andy Rosenwieg,
from A Cold Case by Philip Gourevitch

L EMME T ELL Y OU S OMETHING
    Mango-colored sawdust spits and floats, filling the air as George cuts deeper into a stubby limb on the massive, twisted mulberry in my front yard. He has refused my offer of a ladder, and so, as he reaches the chainsaw above his head, his navy sweatshirt hikes up to reveal the gentle swell where back becomes buttocks and dives into a dark inverted Y. I grin and look away.
    Although he is only fifty-nine, George resembles an eighty-year-old walrus and moves as if his knees are permanently fused. Every morning and every afternoon, he walks his ebony pug past my house in a slow shuffle. I know he has a wife, though I’ve never seen her. I know he’s retired, but from what I can’t say for sure.
    â€œLemme tell you something,” he said by way of introduction several weeks after I’d moved into the neighborhood. “I like most cops. You gotta hard job. Most people don’t understand, but I do.”
    I’d thanked him politely, agreeing silently that the job was hard, but not in the way he might expect.
    â€œNice work you’ve done here on this house,” George had continued, barely stopping to take a wheezy breath. “Most people don’t care. They’ll let everything go to hell. I can tell, you’re not that kind of person.” He tucked in his lips, puffed out his cheeks, and nodded, his jowls jiggling, as he took in my newly tilled garden, just washed windows, recently edged grass. I squinted a little at my house, the yard, saw it through his eyes, and relaxed my shoulders, straightened my spine. Yes, I thought, I’m not that kind of person.
    I’ve lived here five months now, and I’ve learned that George likes to tell people something, sometimes several somethings, each time he sees them.
    Like this morning, for instance.
    â€œI’m gonna tell you something, Liz. Now, I’m not telling you what to do, but that mulberry will rot if you don’t cut those limbs flush and paint ’em. Simple thing,