"This is Powers. We're coming out."
"Affirmative."
"Mr. and Mrs. Marcus out there?"
The trooper glanced at Jimmy and dropped his eyes. "Affirmative."
"Okay. Out."
Annabeth said, "Oh, Jesus, Jimmy. Oh, Jesus."
Jimmy heard a screech of tires and saw several cars and vans pull up outside the barrier on Roseclair. The vans had satellite dishes on their roofs and Jimmy watched as groups of reporters and cameramen jumped out onto the street, jostling one another, raising cameras, unspooling microphone cables.
"Get them out of here!" the trooper up by the arch screamed. "Now! Move 'em out."
The troopers by the front barrier converged on the reporters and the shouting started.
The trooper by the arch spoke into his walkie-talkie: "This is Dugay. Sergeant Powers?"
"Powers."
"We got a blockage out here. The press."
"Clear them."
"Working on it, Sergeant."
Up the entrance road about twenty yards past the arch, Jimmy could see a Statie cruiser round the bend and suddenly stop. He could see a guy behind the wheel, a walkie-talkie raised to his lips, Sean Devine sitting beside him. The edge of another car's grille stopped behind the cruiser, and Jimmy felt his mouth dry up.
"Get them back, Dugay. I don't care if you have to shoot their Columbine-fucker asses. You move those lice back."
"Affirmative."
Dugay and three other troopers jogged past Jimmy and Annabeth, Dugay shouting as he went, finger pointed: "You are violating a closed crime scene. Return to your vehicles immediately. You have no clearance for this area. Return to your vehicles now."
Annabeth said, "Oh shit," and Jimmy felt the blast of the helicopter before he heard it. He looked up as it flew overhead, then back over at the cruiser idling up the road. He could see the driver yelling into his walkie-talkie and then he heard the sirens, a cacophony of them, and suddenly navy-and-silver cruisers came tear-assing from every end of Roseclair, and the reporters started scrambling back into their vehicles and the helicopter banked sharply and cut back into the park.
"Jimmy," Annabeth said in the saddest voice Jimmy had ever heard come out of her. "Jimmy, please. Please."
"Please what, honey?" Jimmy held her. "What?"
"Oh, please, Jimmy. No. No."
It was the noise? the sirens and screeching tires and yelling voices and echoing rotor blades. The noise was Katie, dead, screaming in their ears, and Annabeth was crumpling under it in Jimmy's arms.
Dugay ran past them again and moved the sawhorses under the arch, and before Jimmy realized it had even moved, the cruiser was slamming to a stop beside him and a white van tore around it on the right and blew out onto Roseclair, took a hard left. Jimmy could see the words SUFFOLK COUNTY CORONER on the side of the van, and he felt all the joints in his body? his ankles, shoulders, knees, and hips? turn brittle and then liquefy.
"Jimmy."
Jimmy looked down at Sean Devine. Sean stared up at him through the open window of the passenger door.
"Jimmy, come on. Please. Get in."
Sean got out of the car and opened the rear door as the helicopter returned, higher this time, but still chopping the air close enough to Jimmy that he could feel it in his hair.
"Mrs. Marcus," Sean said. "Jimmy, man. Get in the car."
"Is she dead?" Annabeth said, and the words entered Jimmy and turned acidic.
"Please, Mrs. Marcus. If you could get in the car."
A phalanx of cruisers had formed a double escort line on Roseclair and their sirens raged.
Annabeth screamed over the noise, "Is my daughter? ?"
Jimmy moved her because he couldn't hear that word again. He pulled her through the noise and they climbed in the back of the car and Sean shut the door and climbed up front and the cop behind the wheel hit the gas and the sirens at the same time. They streaked across the entrance road and joined the escort cars and moved en masse out onto Roseclair, an army of vehicles with screaming engines and screaming sirens screaming through the wind toward the expressway, screaming and screaming.
* * *
SHE LAY on a metal table.
Her eyes were closed and she was missing a shoe.
Her skin was a black-purple, a shade Jimmy had never seen before.
He could smell her perfume, just a hint of it through the reek of formaldehyde that permeated this cold, cold room.
Sean put a hand against the small of Jimmy's back, and Jimmy spoke, barely feeling the words, certain that at this moment he was as dead as the body below him:
"Yeah, that's her," he said.
"That's Katie," he said.
"That's my daughter."
13
LIGHTS
"THERE'S A CAFETERIA UPSTAIRS," Sean said to Jimmy. "Why don't we go have some coffee?"
Jimmy remained standing over his daughter's body. A sheet covered it again, and Jimmy lifted the upper corner of the sheet and looked down at his daughter's face as if peering at her from the top of a well and wanting to dive in after her. "They got a cafeteria in the same building as a morgue?"
"Yeah. It's a big building."
"Seems weird," Jimmy said, his voice stripped of color. "You think when the pathologists go in there, everybody else sits on the other side of the room?"
Sean wondered if this was an early stage of shock. "I dunno, Jim."
"Mr. Marcus," Whitey said, "we were hoping to ask you a few questions. I know this is a hard time, but?"
Jimmy lowered the sheet back over his daughter's face, his lips moving, but no sounds leaving his mouth. He looked over at Whitey as if he were surprised to find him in the room, pen poised over his report pad. He turned his head, looked at Sean.
"You ever think," Jimmy said, "how the most minor decision can change the entire direction of your life?"
Sean held his eyes. "How so?"
Jimmy's face was pale and blank, the eyes turned up as if he were trying to remember where he'd left his car keys.
"I heard once that Hitler's mother almost aborted him but bailed at the last minute. I heard he left Vienna because he couldn't sell his paintings. He sells a painting, though, Sean? Or his mother actually aborts? The world's a way different place. You know? Or, like, say you miss your bus one morning, so you buy that second cup of coffee, buy a scratch ticket while you're at it. The scratch ticket hits. Suddenly you don't have to take the bus anymore. You drive to work in a Lincoln. But you get in a car crash and die. All because you missed your bus one day."