Chapter 3: Patricia Callahan

“Patricia Callahan.”

The name was out of his mouth before he had finished deciding to say it, which happened to Delaney maybe once a year now and never in front of this many people.

The woman standing in the middle of the wrecked shop with gauze on one hand looked at him without alarm, without recognition, without much of anything he could put in a report, and said, “Twix. Yes.”

Both halves of that answer were doing work. He filed the answer and did not push it, because a scene was not the place, and this was a scene. He gave her a nod, the kind you give a person you will be talking to at length later, and went to look at what everybody had been trying to tell him on the radio.

The dead man was behind the counter, in the narrow walkway the staff called the pass, sitting against the counter’s inside face with his legs out like a man who had picked a bad place to rest. One gunshot, high in the chest. Nobody disputed who had fired it, which was itself remarkable, because the six people in the shop disputed nearly everything else.

The survivor had gone out on a board before Delaney arrived. What the survivor left behind was a pastry case with its front gone, a field of glass reaching the second table, blood in two systems, and, according to the paramedic Delaney caught on the sidewalk, a broken and burned left forearm, a facial situation, and a scalp laceration that had done its usual theatrical work.

“Burned,” Delaney said.

“Contact burn. Forearm. You could see the edge of it under the splint, real clean line.” The paramedic was young and wanted to be useful. “Like he leaned on a griddle.”

There was no griddle. There was an espresso machine, still on, venting a little steam into the wreckage at intervals, like nothing had been explained to it.

Delaney stood at the mouth of the pass for a while and did what he did, which was nothing, visibly. The gun was on a high shelf at the far end, parked behind a white jug of descaler, and the shelf was a good seven feet up. A towel had been laid over part of the glass field. A broom leaned against the counter with a dustpan balanced on it, and in the dustpan was a swept arc of glass, one arc, the job interrupted rather than abandoned. On the counter, square to the edge like a delivery someone had signed for, sat a folded blue tarp.

He looked at the tarp the longest.

“Who moved the weapon,” he said, to the room.

“I did.” The woman. Twix. She was sitting where the uniforms had put her, hands in her lap, the gauze one on top. “It’s behind the descaler. Nobody’s touched it since.”

“And the towel.”

“Mine. The glass was spreading on people’s shoes.”

“The broom.”

“Also mine.” Nothing in her voice was hiding. That was the thing he would try and fail to explain to the DA’s office later. She reported her own alterations to the scene the way a contractor walks you through a job site. “The tarp’s from the storeroom. That one they stopped me on.”

The uniform nearest her, a big kid named Ferreira, gave Delaney a look over her head, and the look said what the whole room was saying. Delaney didn’t return it.

“Somebody turn that machine off,” he said instead, because the steam was getting into the photographs.

Two techs looked at the machine, which had more levers than a locomotive, and did not move. From her chair, without turning her head all the way, the woman said, “Red rocker switch, bottom left, under the counter lip. Not the top one, the top one’s the boiler drain.”

The tech found the red rocker switch, bottom left, and the machine sighed and went quiet, and the shop was more wrecked without it, somehow, the way a house is more wrecked when the clock stops.

Delaney had been on his feet since six that morning and would be for a while yet. He got out his notebook and started at the beginning, which in his experience was never where anyone wanted him to start.

The camera was the first disappointment, and he had known it would be before he asked. One camera, over the register, aimed down at the drawer. It had recorded, in beautiful focus, a cash drawer opening, a bag being filled, a bag sitting on the counter, and then eleven minutes of a bag sitting on the counter while at the top of the frame, in a strip maybe four inches tall, pieces of things happened. An elbow. A steel pitcher, in frame for less than a second, moving laterally. Once, briefly, the top of a head that the tech could not attach to a person. The drawer had never been so well documented in its life. Everything that mattered had happened eighteen inches above the camera’s ambitions.

The witnesses were the second disappointment, in the specific way witnesses disappointed, which was by being certain.

The drywall contractor had seen her go over the counter. He was sure. Over it, like a hurdle. The college kid had seen her appear behind the shooter, his word, appear, and when Ferreira pressed him on the route she’d taken, the kid did a thing with his hands like a man releasing a dove. The coworker, Dee Nunes, had seen the milk hit and then, by her own account, seen nothing else because she was looking at the drawer bag, which she believed she had been made responsible for, a belief she was going to be working through for a while. Mara Reyes, the owner, had had her back turned at the moment of the shot, walking herself down the pass against instructions. The boy had seen it all from the floor of the office doorway and, being sixteen and terrified and smart, had given the most accurate statement of the six, which no prosecutor would ever lead with, because he was sixteen and terrified and owed the defendant, so to speak, three months of croissants.

None of them had seen the fatal shot in any way that survived a second question. They had seen before it, and after it, and their heads had built a bridge. Delaney had watched heads build bridges for thirty years. It wasn’t lying. It was carpentry.

What the physical evidence said, and said clearly, was this. The dead man, all six foot three of him, had been moving toward the front of the shop when the bullet met him coming the other way. The round had been fired from the register end by his own partner, from a range of about nine feet, on an upward line consistent with a shooter flinching backward as he pulled. Milk at steam temperature had gone into the dead man’s face at most a second or two before, along with the rim of a steel pitcher, which had left its signature on the cheekbone. Somebody had redirected two hundred and forty pounds of committed forward mass by borrowing its own momentum, and the somebody weighed one thirty, and the physics worked, that was the thing. He had a tech walk it twice with a tape measure. It worked. It just didn’t look like anything a person would plan, which, he was coming to believe, was because nobody had planned it. It had been improvised at a speed the room’s eyes couldn’t bill.

Then there was the arm.

The medical report came in the next afternoon and Delaney read it at his desk with the coffee he regretted, and the report was mostly what the scene had promised. Fracture of the left forearm, both bones, consistent with leverage against an edge. Facial fractures and lacerations consistent with the ceramic mug recovered at the scene and with the pastry case, in that order. And a contact burn, forearm, well demarcated, its pattern a match for the machine’s group head, with a note from the attending that the burn depth suggested sustained contact. Sustained, the attending had written, meaning not a graze, not a brush in passing. Meaning held.