Chapter Eight
The city was too loud.
Not aurally; weeks had passed, and although Annie’s hearing continued to improve, that improvement came at a measured pace. She heard only the loudest noises with absolute clarity. Everything else was muffled, a world swathed in cotton.
Her collarbone was healing nicely, according to her latest X-rays. The surgery on her ruptured eardrum should have been a success, too—if she still couldn’t hear well, it was because there had been too much damage to the hair cells, and they couldn’t be repaired. She couldn’t work, so she had tendered her resignation from the police force, much to her regret, and her friends there had thrown a party she could barely stand to attend, so thick was the air with regret and sorrow and anxiety about being near a deaf woman. As if it were contagious.
But she was having a harder time staying in her condo. The days had started crawling by, and she found herself staying in bed later each morning. Sometimes at night she sat up with the TV on loud, until the neighbor on that side banged on the wall hard enough to rattle a framed print. She had bought a telephone with a light on it so she knew when a call was coming in, and with the help of the phone company’s TTY device she could communicate that way, but she still preferred text message, email, or instant message. She longed for the day she wouldn’t have to use the TTY at all anymore.
Sometimes she just had to get out. She found herself going for walks in the desert. Phoenix’s South Mountain Park was the biggest city park in the United States, and there she could wander for an hour at a time without encountering another person. She loved that, because when she was near people they might as well have been screaming at her. The city was loud with emotion, fraught with feeling, and it wore her down. Her overabundant empathy had begun to fade somewhat, but not entirely—it seemed to exist in a delicate balance with her hearing, and only if the latter came back entirely would the former go away.
She hiked in the desert hills until she was soaked with sweat in spite of the winter chill, as if she could force the deafness out of her body, and with it the empathy, as if by replacing every drop of moisture she contained with new, fresh water, she would be born again. Born the way she used to be.
It didn’t work. She lost the couple of pounds she had put on in the hospital, and more, and she kept the weight off even though she wasn’t working an active job anymore. But it didn’t fix her.
When Morgan Julliard, an old friend of her father’s, emailed and asked for a meeting, she was hesitant. Morgan was a nice guy who had sent flowers and a card while she was in the hospital, and he had been in touch several times since. But he had been a cop, back in her dad’s day, and then a very successful lawyer, and now he ran a nonprofit organization that used DNA analysis to try to free wrongly convicted people from prison. If he wanted to get together for a “meeting”—his word—she feared there would be some emotional component to his agenda that she didn’t want to deal with.
Finally they settled on coffee, which they would buy at Bean-Anza, an independent coffee shop on Mill, near ASU, but consume while walking by the shore of Tempe Town Lake. There it would be quiet enough for her to hear, private enough for Morgan to speak loudly if necessary, and she could stay away from other people and their messy feelings. After a little more email nudging, Morgan agreed to buy both coffees and meet her by the lake.
It was the end of February. Phoenix’s winter had been surprisingly wet, but it looked like it was mostly gone, with only another storm or two likely to drop any rain at all before the long, dry spring took hold. Annie met Morgan on a Thursday morning when sunshine glinted off the water in shards as sharp as razor blades. He was a few inches taller than her five-seven, sturdy but not overweight. She’d known him since she was six, and he’d always had a ruddy complexion, with a brick-red tint to his skin lines around his eyes and mouth, a crinkled forehead, and tightly curled black hair that had picked up some silver over the decades, but not much.
When he saw her, he increased his pace. Holding the twin paper coffee cups carefully around her sides, he gave her a squeeze. “How ya doing, slugger?” he asked. He had called her that since she had kicked a particularly impressive goal in a soccer game when she was eight. “Everything okay?”
Morgan spoke just loud enough for her to hear, as if he knew the precise volume she needed. But then, he had always been great with her, and with her parents. If her father had ever had a best friend, it was Morgan Julliard.
“Been better,” Annie said. “But a lot worse, too.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re on the better side.” He studied the coffee cups, then handed her one. “Cream and sugar,” he said.
“Thanks, Morgan.”
As she had hoped, the walkways around the lake were sparsely populated—a couple of skaters, a family with two little blond boys on bicycles, a trio of hardcore walking women in shorts, floppy-brimmed hats and pedometers. She and Morgan started their stroll. He touched his own right ear. “How they doing?” he asked.
“A little better every week. I can hear you, anyway, as long as you’re at that volume.”
“That’s good.” He frowned a little. “What about the other thing?”
During a down moment, she had confessed her clairsentience to him in an email, then immediately regretted sending it. Instead of mocking her, he had been surprisingly supportive. “I think everybody has gifts they don’t use,” he had written. “Abilities most people never even learn about. Maybe it took a trauma to bring yours to the fore, but I hope you come to see it as a blessing.”
“A little less dramatic than it was. Less obtrusive. Still distracting as all hell, though. That’s why I wanted to meet here, where it would be quiet. Emotionally quiet.”
“Maybe you’re getting used to it, controlling it better.”
“I’m not sure ‘controlling’ is the right word,” she said. “But yeah, maybe I’m adjusting to it.” From Morgan, she picked up faint sensations of ease and pleasure. He was genuinely happy to see her, and perfectly comfortable in her presence. She would have taken comfort from that even if she weren’t an empath.
They walked in silence for a few minutes, Annie wishing she could hear the lap of water against the bank and the happy sounds of families and the calls of the birds flying overhead. Finally they reached a bench, and Morgan nodded an inquiry. “Sure,” she said, and sat down.
“I wanted to see how you’re doing, slugger,” he said as he sat beside her. He took a sip from his coffee cup. “Because I worry about you. Always have, ever since your dad passed.”
“I know,” Annie said. “I appreciate it.”
“Miss the job?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Boy, I know what that’s like.”
“I know, Morgan,” she said. She felt almost liberated, having a conversation that was no doubt oddly loud to anyone else but seemed normal to her. It was the first real conversation she’d managed to have since before Christmas. “I just keep feeling like I should be strapping on a weapon, carrying a badge—it’s like going out naked.”
“You’ll get used to it. It’ll take time, that’s all.”
“That seems to be the cure for everything.”
“In some ways, yes.” He was quiet for another minute, drinking his coffee, watching the lake. “Money holding out?”
“For now. Maybe not for too long. If my hearing keeps getting better, I might—”
“I have an offer for you, Annie.”
“A what?” She might have misheard him.
“A job offer.”
“I don’t do windows, Morgan.”
“I’m serious, Annicka. Maybe not a long-term thing, but Operation Delayed Justice has a case going that I think you’d be perfect for.”
She held her gaze on him for a long moment, trying to determine if he was joking. It didn’t feel like he was. His emotions seemed superficial, barely there, but she had the sense that he was being sincere. A faint smile played about his lips, but that was typical for him. “I’m a cop,” she said after a while. “Not one of your liberal do-gooders. Or a lawyer.”
“We’re not all liberals or lawyers. You’re a skilled detective, slugger, and that’s what I need on this.”
“What kind of scumbag would I be trying to set free?”
“He’s been accused of the double murder of a pair of teenagers,” Morgan said.
“Eeew, the worst kind. A kid-killer.”
“Did you miss the part where we think he’s innocent?”
Every killer claimed innocence, of course. Ninety-nine percent of them, anyway. They were all framed, railroaded, and if they did do it, if they were caught with blood dripping off their hands and the murder weapon clutched in their teeth, well then it was society’s fault, or Mother’s. Never their own. “Why do you think that?” Because he says so.
“He says he is.”
“Uh huh.”
“He’s maintained his innocence since the minute he was picked up, according to the records. I know, that’s hardly definitive. But the details of the case seem to support his version of things. You’ll understand when you see the file.”
“And why am I the perfect person for the job? Why not one of your regular investigators?”
He held his coffee cup between his hands, rolling it back and forth. “That’s the best part,” he said. “It’s in the middle of nowhere, New Mexico. Population is something like negative ten. If you’ve been having trouble because of all the people in Phoenix, then you’ll love Hidalgo County. Wide open spaces and nobody around for miles.”
“Sounds good,” she said. It really did. South Mountain Park was fine, but she couldn’t live there, and it wasn’t possible to avoid people the rest of the time except by hiding out in her condo. Even then, people came to the door sometimes. Getting out into the country for a while, even if just for long enough to continue healing, sounded heavenly. “How long do you think I’d have to be there?”
“That’s hard to say. A month, six months. However long it takes. We’ve had a couple of cases take a year or two. Others, with lots of handy DNA evidence, can be closed quickly.”
“Let me think about it,” Annie said. “How soon do you need to know?”
“A couple of weeks would be good. Poor guy’s been sitting in prison for four years. If he’s genuinely innocent, I’d hate to leave him there a whole lot longer.”
“I understand, Morgan. And I do appreciate the offer. I just need to see if I feel comfortable doing it. Given … you know, my present circumstances.”
“Of course. Think it over, slugger, and let me know.”
“I’ll do that, Morgan.”
He kissed her on the top of the head and left, and she sat on the bench a while longer. She hadn’t even discussed money with him. Operation Delayed Justice was a nonprofit group, which to her implied low wages. Maybe that was wrong—and maybe, compared to a Phoenix detective’s salary, it would be at least comparable. It had to be better than she was earning now, which was less than nothing since her bills continued even when her salary didn’t. Disability payments didn’t go far.
More important than the money, however, was the chance to get out of Phoenix. When she was a little girl it had seemed like a sleepy desert backwater, but as she grew up, so did the city. Now it was the fifth largest in the United States—no place for someone who wanted solitude. If she waited a couple of weeks to let Morgan know her answer, maybe her hearing would continue to improve to the point that she’d be okay with trying to conduct interviews and investigate a case. She doubted if the PD would hire her back anytime soon, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do police work.
Or something like it. As a cop, she was conditioned to assume that if people were arrested and convicted, they were probably guilty. She loved Morgan Julliard, but his organization had always rubbed her the wrong way. She understood that innocent people were sometimes wrongfully convicted, and any investigation that resulted in those convictions being overturned was probably a good thing. But her instinctive response was that if those people had been arrested, they must have been guilty of something, so society was no doubt better off with them locked away.
Even the name bugged her. Delayed Justice. Justice was an abstract concept, not something that happened in the real world. Police work had never been about justice for her. She had followed her father’s example, joining the force to put bad guys away and keep the streets safe for everybody else. Her dad had always seemed powerful and glamorous—friends with the mayor, respected by mobsters, appreciated by fellow cops and civilians alike. She had wanted to have those things too. Justice had nothing to do with it.
She decided not to make any snap decisions, but to give it a few days, see if her hearing kept getting better. See if she could stand to stay in Phoenix.
For now, that decision was good enough.