After taking care of our bill, I stepped outside and found Tessa waiting beneath one of the orange-yellow vapor streetlights nearby.
She was writing something in the small notebook she often carries with her. When she saw me, she surreptitiously slipped the pen and notebook back into her satchel.
I decided not to pry.
The wind had picked up even more since we’d entered the restaurant, and it whipped her shoulder-length black hair around her head in a small frenzy. “So,” she said. “How many people were in there when we left?”
“Tessa, I don’t want to do this.”
“Sure you do, c’mon.”
“Let’s go, OK?”
She folded her arms. Leaned against the streetlight. I knew she wouldn’t budge until I answered her.
“All right. Sixty-two.”
“When we entered?”
“Forty-nine. How did you know I’d keep track?”
“It’s what you do. Which one of the servers worked there the longest?”
“Tessa-”
“You don’t know, do you? That’s why you’re avoiding the question.”
“Allison Reynolds. She was the one with six piercings in her left ear, three in her right. Based on her route proficiency, I’d say she’s been working at Geraldo’s for over two years. I heard a few snatches of dialogue. She’s from the Midwest, most likely south-western Michigan or northern Indiana.”
After a quiet moment. “You can’t turn it off, can you?”
I drummed an anxious finger against my leg. “You ready to go?”
“I don’t really want to go back to the hotel yet.”
I thought for a moment. I don’t remember exactly when, but at some point in the last couple months, I’d first started calling Tessa
“Raven.” She’d always reminded me of a raven, and sometimes the nickname just slipped out, as it did now, “Well, then, Raven, how about a walk beside the world’s only ocean?”
She shrugged. “I guess so.”
We grabbed our windbreakers from the car and found a stretch of sand that was damp enough to walk on easily but not so close to the water that we would have to be constantly avoiding the in-coming waves. We walked for a while, side by side, but also oceans apart. Every once in a while, a rogue wave would slap farther up the shore than the others and we’d scurry up the beach to stay out of its path.
Mists carried by the steady surf began curling around us.
After one of the bolder waves had chased us up the beach, Tessa said softly, “So do you ever wonder what it would be like? Being one of them? You know. On the other side? An arsonist, a killer, something like that? The people you help the cops find?”
Everyone is on the side of being human, of being fallible, but I knew what she meant. “Sometimes I do. Sometimes I wonder those kind of things. But I try not to get caught up dwelling on them.”
“It’s scary to think about, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” she said. “I’m glad you’re not like them.”
“Thank you.” A dim silence spread between us.
“Right?” She stopped walking and waited until I’d stopped as well. She stared at me through the moonlight. “You’re not like them, are you?”
“No, of course not.” I couldn’t tell her what was really bothering me. It was something I’d never told anyone. “Of course I’m not like them.”
It feels good, doesn’t it?
Yes, it does.
She stood there, a raven in the moonlight. “Something’s bothering you, isn’t it? Tonight, I mean?”
Sometimes I wish she wasn’t quite so astute. “I’m sorry, Tessa.
He’s been there, in the back of my mind. It doesn’t mean you’re not important-”
“The arsonist?”
“That’s right.”
And it was true, I was thinking about the arsonist. But it wasn’t the whole truth.
I was also thinking about someone else.
Richard Devin Basque.
We walked for half an hour, talking some, but mostly keeping our thoughts to ourselves. The moon inched its way higher into the sky, and eventually we sat down on some dry sand next to a clump of sea grass that the waves had deposited on the shore earlier in the day.
And as we sat together on the sand, I let my thoughts take me back thirteen years to my early days as a detective in Milwaukee; to the night I arrested Richard Devin Basque in that abandoned slaughterhouse on the outskirts of Milwaukee.