Notes on an Execution(63)
*
It was an accident, what happened to the girls from 1990. It was a moment of passion, it was meticulously planned, it was a serial killer passing through town. It was someone’s father, someone’s uncle, someone’s wayward brother. Maybe—just maybe—it was Ansel Packer. At a certain point, the why of it ceased to matter, lost in the crucial question of who. The injustice felt brutal, unnecessarily savage. The years of thinking and watching, then the world’s inevitable forgetting. At a certain point, they all became Marjorie Lawson, spread-eagled on the floor, demanding something better.
*
Monday morning at the station, and the bullpen was bustling. Lieutenant Kensington rapped on Saffy’s office door, jaunty with two knuckles, his uniform freshly pressed, hair slicked back. His wedding ring glinted dully from his finger. Kensington’s wife had always hated Saffy—the troopers loved to spread rumors about Saffy and Kensington, rivals working side by side. She shook them off, along with her annoyance. Kensington was a prick, and a middling detective, but he glided up the ranks on the clean, easy strength of his charisma.
“The DA is asking for an update,” Kensington said, rocking onto his heels.
“We don’t have one,” Saffy said.
“What can I do?” he asked, his voice gurgling with empathy. Saffy marveled at the guts of him, standing there chastely, like he had not created this problem in the first place. Kensington had gotten drunk one night, recognized a member of the jury, approached the man on his barstool, and started talking. He’d been saved by his uncle, the long-standing and well-respected captain of Troop C. If Saffy had made Kensington’s mistakes, she would have been fired immediately.
“Get me Corinne,” Saffy said. She had perfected this tone, both warm and dismissive. She made a point to keep herself level at work—nothing like the previous captain, who had once punched straight through a car window.
Two days had passed since Saffy tailed Ansel to the Blue House, and the images haunted, clouding her focus. Even as she led that morning’s debrief, answered rambling questions, and assigned a list of tasks, Saffy pictured them. Ansel and that girl, calm at the diner’s table. The meeting had carried the blushing tension of a first date, a concept Saffy could not reckon with the fact of the girl’s mother, standing casual behind the bar. She hadn’t been able to sleep, remembering how Blue had looked at Ansel, so clearly yearning. She could not parse exactly what she had witnessed.
When Corinne poked her head into Saffy’s office, Saffy was massaging her temples, a headache looming. Corinne insisted on her first name—for this reason she evaded much of the troopers’ ribbing and leering, the address too feminine, brash and awkward on their tongues.
“Sit,” Saffy said.
“I’ve been reviewing the defense,” Corinne said, letting out a sigh. “It’s not good, Captain. If the DA can’t get the witnesses to talk again, I don’t think we can either.”
“We’re missing something,” Saffy said.
“Probably,” Corinne told her. “If so, it’s buried deep.”
Out in the bullpen, Saffy could hear the familiar hoot and holler of the boys, rowdy as always. Things had surely been different for Corinne in the NYPD, where Saffy had plucked her from the lower ranks—back in the Bronx, Corinne wasn’t nearly so isolated as a Black woman. Sometimes Saffy wondered if Corinne regretted moving here, accepting Saffy’s mentorship. Saffy had long been grappling with the contradictions of her job: the privileges her badge allowed, the fact that prisons were filled almost entirely with Black and brown people. She had felt the constant sting of ignorant people, the malicious and the well-meaning alike—she knew what it meant, to keep a gun on her hip. With Corinne here, Saffy felt distinctly less alone.
“We could go for intent this time around,” Corinne suggested. “All those calls Marjorie made to the police, the domestic incidents. We could lean harder on that, try to dig up more. But prosecution knows it’s shaky.”
Saffy pictured Greg Lawson’s face. Pale and pudgy, swollen alcoholic. Just another bad man, his head hung morose as he pled with the jury. This job was getting to her. Not the bodies, or the missing children, or the rampant opioids. It was this. Men like Lawson, who believed their very existences afforded them lawlessness. Men who had been handed the world, trashed it, and still demanded more.
“Are you okay?” Corinne asked, standing to leave.
Some nights after work, Saffy and Corinne drove to the diner down the highway for cheesecake and coffee—the same diner where Angela Meyer had gone missing. They speculated new suspects; they belabored old hunches. The case for Izzy, Angela, and Lila was still open, though no one had touched it in years; Saffy had outlined the basics for Corinne, painting Ansel Packer as one promising suspect in a pool of cold leads.
“I need your help with something else,” Saffy said, before Corinne could leave. “Shut the door.”
*
Saffy’s house felt particularly empty that night. She kicked off her shoes, locked her badge and gun in the front hall cabinet. The silence was oppressive—in the half-light of dusk, her living room looked sparse and lifeless, furniture looming in twilight shadow. She flopped onto the couch, pulled her phone from her pocket, and opened her personal email, the room glowing blue as her inbox refreshed.
Nothing.