“Hold on,” Darius said, cradling the limp Tori in his arms, now on the sofa. “I hear help now,” he said, speaking to the 911 dispatcher as much as to the now nearly unconscious woman who had bled all over his sofa.
“You can hang up,” the dispatcher said. “They’re in front of the house now.”
Darius snapped his phone shut, slid a pillow from the sofa under the woman’s head, and flung open the door as a team of young, jacked-up, soul-patched paramedics swept inside.
“Hurry,” he said. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”
“What’s her name?” asked a young man with a port-wine stain crawling from under his bright white T-shirt collar.
“Tori Connelly. She says her husband’s been shot, too. You got to get over there. Across the street. There’s a madman out there somewhere.”
“Already on it, sir,” he said, as two other paramedics ran her vitals.
Darius stepped back to give them room. “I hope she’s going to be okay. I didn’t know how to stop the bleeding.”
“You did fine,” the first paramedic said. “Wound looks worse than it is.”
The second paramedic nodded. “Color’s not so good, but she’s stable. Let’s transport her now.”
Tori murmured something unintelligible as they rolled her out the door into the strobe of the aid cars and police.
“Take care,” Darius said.
In less than two minutes, the living room that had been the scene of the unthinkable was empty. Drops of blood still freckled the floor, the sofa, and the pillow that Darius had offered Tori. The TV droned with an infomercial for a chamois. Adrenaline still routed through Darius’s veins, but with less intensity. It had gone from chaos to quiet.
A light switched off.
He stood in the foyer facing a pair of cops, one middle-aged, one younger. Both rightly grim-faced. As they prompted him for details, Darius Fulton gave a statement about what had occurred. How he’d heard the knock, saw the terror on Tori’s face, and the story she’d conveyed about the intruder.
“Did she say anything about the man who shot her?”
“No. Just that he shot her husband, too.”
The younger cop noted the info on a pad.
“Who was shot first?”
Darius didn’t know and said so.
“Did she say how it was that she was able to escape?”
Darius shook his head. “No. I just assumed that she might have startled the intruder and was able to get out of the house.”
“Things like this just don’t happen around here,” he said.
The older cop shook his head knowingly. “Maybe not on this street,” he said. “But, yeah, this kind of stuff happens.”
Not usually around here.
“No, not here. Yeah, I mean, the Hilltop is ten blocks away, but this isn’t there.”
The meaning was clear and not without merit. The Hilltop neighborhood of Tacoma was the center of most of the city’s violent crime. While things had improved somewhat due to a consortium of police and community groups who sought to clean it up, it was still rough. Indeed, it was a world away from this tony neighborhood. This was a street more known for dinner parties, book club meetings, and wine tastings. It had always been so. Tacoma’s North End had once been the address of the most notable names in Northwest history, chief among them the Weyerhaeuser family. The lumber baron’s stately mansion was but a couple of blocks from North Junett.
Edmund Kaminski, a Northwest native who lived in nearby Spanaway because on a detective’s salary he couldn’t afford rent in Tacoma’s better neighborhoods, was on his way to investigate. He gave a quick check to his shirt collar and tie in the rearview mirror.
Looking sharp.
Kaminski had just turned the big 4-0. He’d taken up running to shed what his teenage daughter, Lindsey, called his “middle jiggle.”
“Better a middle jiggle than a full-fledged spare tire,” he playfully shot back, though Lindsey’s words stung a little—in the way that truth frequently does.
“I don’t know, Dad. You don’t watch it, you’ll be shopping for clothes at Sears automotive.”
The extra poundage was a symptom of a life off track. He knew it. Lindsey knew it. He’d found solace in long runs along the Thea Foss Waterway, with its views of Commencement Bay and Mount Rainier. Time to think. Time to wonder if he’d made any mistakes that could have altered the dissolution of his marriage to Maria. She’d given him the old “it isn’t you, it’s me” song and dance, and it just didn’t sit right. It didn’t give him a chance to play the role of the fixer. Even so, he doubted if he could make her love him if she no longer did.
He threw himself into his work while trying to negotiate the realities of being a Weekend Dad. On Saturdays he’d pick up Lindsey and they’d spend the day doing something fun together. Lately that meant a lot of time roaming the shimmering halls of Tacoma’s Museum of Glass. Seattle Mariner games were no longer as much a draw for a girl who’d had her nose and eyebrow pierced and dyed her tawny brown locks a fireman’s-boot black. Lindsey loved her dad, but she was changing.
The notion of all of that crushed him.
He popped a Rolaid into his mouth and immediately bit down. Detective Kaminski never waited for anything. Not even for an antacid to dissolve. He turned down a side street, and a bag of yard waste that had rolled from the curb acted like a speed bump, reminding him to slow down a little.
Always in a hurry.
While Kaminski didn’t know the specific house that had been referenced in the 911 call that evening, he surely knew the neighborhood. Lindsey had dragged him there when she was obsessed with actor Heath Ledger. The actor had filmed Ten Things I Hate About You in Tacoma, and a house on North Junett had been the home of his character’s love interest, played by Julia Stiles in the film.
“Heath didn’t really want to change Julia,” Lindsey said as they stood in front of the three-story white bungalow that had been featured in the movie. “He just wanted her to be, you know, herself. Changing someone never works.”
“Really,” he said, looking at Lindsey, pondering what it felt like when she blew her pierced nose.
“Yeah, changing someone isn’t love, Dad.”
Kaminski considered a hidden agenda wrapped up in his daughter’s words. Was this something that Maria had said about him? Had he really tried to control her? Was that what she’d meant by it not being about him, but her? That she could no longer take being the perfect wife, the detective’s wife?
“I can’t imagine, honey,” he said.
Lindsey looked at him and he sized up her expression. Like her mother, Lindsey was hard to read. Harder every day.
He turned down Junett and went just past the house used in the movie. Every light was on, and the place looked like it was floating above a perfectly coiffed front lawn. A Mercedes and a Lexus were parked in the driveway.
Living large in Grit City, he thought, his mind flashing to his one-bedroom condo in Spanaway that could be swallowed up in one gulp by the parlor of any home on this grand street.
It wasn’t hard to find the Victorian where the crime had occurred. It was a birthday cake explosion that screamed to the world to pay attention to its gingerbread curlicues and overwrought paint color scheme. That night, the bouncing red and blue lights of