"Woman with the restraining order?" Friel said. "Ex-husband said something about paper?"
"Said, 'Paper rules her life, don't mean it rules mine.'"
"He got twenty, right?"
"Twenty solid, yeah." Sean wishing someone had gotten her a stronger piece of paper. Her kid growing up in a foster home, wondering what happened, who the fuck he belonged to now.
The trooper walked away from Whitey, grabbed a few more uniforms, and they headed off for the trees.
"Heard he drinks," Friel said, and pulled one leg up onto the stage with him, held the knee up against his chest.
"I've never seen it on the clock, sir," Sean said, wondering who was really on probation in Friel's eyes, him or Whitey. He watched Whitey bend and peer at a clump of grass near the van's rear tire, pull up the cuff of his sweatpants as if he were wearing a Brooks Brothers suit.
"Your partner's out on that bullshit disability claim, pulled something in his spine so he's recuperating on Jet Skis, parasailing in Florida, what I hear." Friel shrugged. "Powers requested you when you got back. Now you're back. We going to have any more incidents like the last one?"
Sean had been expecting to eat shit, particularly from Friel, so he kept his voice perfectly contrite. "No, sir. A momentary lapse of judgment."
"Several of them," Friel said.
"Yes, sir."
"Your personal life's a mess, Trooper, that's your problem. Don't let it bleed back into your job." Sean looked at Friel, caught a charged-electrode sheen in his eyes he'd seen before, a sheen that meant Friel was in a place where you couldn't argue with him.
Again Sean nodded, sucking it up.
Friel gave him a cold smile and watched a news copter arc in over the screen, flying lower than the agreed-upon distance, Friel getting a look on his face like he was going to be handing someone severance pay before sunset.
"You know the family, right?" Friel said, tracking the chopper. "You grew up here."
"I grew up in the Point."
"That's here."
"This is the Flats. Bit of a difference, sir."
Friel waved it away. "You grew up here. You were one of the first on-scene, and you know these people." He spread his hands. "I'm wrong?"
"About what?"
"Your ability to handle this." He gave Sean his summer-softball-coach smile. "You're one of my bright boys, right? Served your penance, ready to get back on the ball?"
"Yes, sir," Sean said. You bet, sir. Whatever it takes to keep this job, sir.
They looked over at the van as something thumped to the floor inside and the chassis dipped toward the wheels. The chassis bounced back up, and Friel said, "You notice they always drop them?"
They always did. Katie Marcus, zipped in the dark, plastic heat of a body bag now. Dumped inside that van, her hair matting to the plastic, organs softening.
"Trooper," Friel said, "You know what I like even less than ten-year-old black boys getting shot by bullshit gang-war crossfire?"
Sean knew the answer, but he didn't say anything.
"Nineteen-year-old white girls getting murdered in my parks. People don't say 'Oh, the vagaries of economics' then. They don't feel a wistful sense of the tragic. They feel pissed and they want somebody to be led onto the six o'clock in shackles." Friel nudged Sean. "I mean, right?"
"Right."
"That's what they want, because they're us and that's what we want." Friel grasped Sean's shoulder so he'd look at him.
"Yes, sir," Sean said, because Friel had that weird light in his eyes like he believed what he was saying the way some people believed in God or NASDAQ or the Internet-as-global-village. Friel was Born Again all the way, although what the Again had been Sean couldn't say, just that Friel had found something through his work that Sean could barely recognize, something that gave solace, maybe even belief, a certainty underfoot. Times, to be truthful, Sean thought his boss was an idiot, spouting bullshit platitudes about life and death and the ways to make it all right, cure the cancers and become one collective heart, if only everyone would listen.
Other times, though, Friel reminded Sean of his father, building his birdhouses in the basement where no birds ever flew, and Sean loved the idea of him.
Martin Friel had been Homicide Detective Lieutenant of Barracks Six going back a couple of presidents, and as far as Sean knew, no one had ever called him "Marty" or "buddy" or "old man." To look at him on the street, you would have guessed he was an accountant or maybe a claims adjuster for an insurance agency, something like that. He had a bland voice to go with his bland face, and nothing but a brown horseshoe remained of his hair. He was a small guy, particularly for a guy who'd worked his way up through the state trooper ranks, and you could lose him easily in a crowd because there was nothing distinctive to his walk. Loved the wife and two kids, forgot to remove the lift ticket from his parka during wintertime, active in his church, fiscally and socially conservative.
But what the bland voice and bland face couldn't begin to hint at was the mind? a dense, unquestioning combination of the practical and the moralistic. You committed a capital crime in Martin Friel's jurisdiction? and it was his, fuck you if you didn't get that? and he took it very, very personally.
"I want you sharp and I want you edgy," he'd said to Sean his first day in the Homicide Unit. "I don't want you overtly outraged, because outrage is emotion and emotion should never be overt. But I want you pretty fucking annoyed at all times? annoyed that the chairs here are too hard and all your friends from college are driving Audis. I want you annoyed that all perps are so dumb they think they can do their heinous shit in our jurisdiction. Annoyed enough, Devine, that you stay on the details of your cases so they don't get the ADAs blown out of court because of nebulous warrants and lack of probable cause. Annoyed enough to close every case clean and ram these nasty bastards into nasty cell blocks for the rest of their nasty fucking lives."
Around the barracks it was called "Friel's Spiel," and every new trooper to the unit got it on day one in exactly the same way. Like most of the things Friel said, you had no idea how much he believed and how much was just rah-rah-law-enforcement shtick. But you bought it. Or you washed out.
Sean had been in the State Police Homicide Unit two years, during which time he'd amassed the best clearance rate of anyone in Whitey Powers's squad, and Friel still looked at him sometimes like he wasn't sure about him. He was looking at him that way now, gauging something in him, deciding whether he was up to this: a girl killed in his park.