Page 7 of Darkness

Something else he’d never forget. He glanced at the clock on the bookcase, only to find it gone, too. Right. The clock had been Will’s. Morrisey checked his phone instead. Fuck. Past time for his meeting with the captain.

He took one long, heart-wrenching look and left the room.

Morrisey tapped twice on the wavy glass insert of the captain’s door, opaque enough to see blurry shapes but not make out details.

“Come in.”

Morrisey entered the office and firmly closed the door. No one needed to hear their conversation.

Captain Paul Gaskins’s pristine office, with bookshelves neatly lined and nothing out of place, was the polar opposite of Morrisey’s disaster of an apartment. Even the papers on the desk appeared to be carefully arranged using a ruler. What did they call that again? A place for everything and everything in its place.

One of those papers was Morrisey’s drawing of the mass murder. His final case with Will. He blinked hard a few times, swallowing against the lump in his throat.

Gaskins raised his gaze from his laptop, removing wire-rimmed glasses with one hand while rubbing his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of the other.

“I don’t look that bad, do I?” Morrisey caused many headaches in his day, but eye aches?

Yeah. Probably.

Gaskins popped the glasses back on his nose with a pensive expression, regarding Morrisey with enough scrutiny to make Morrisey squirm before announcing his verdict. “Honestly, you look like warmed-over shit. I’ve seen livelier three-day-old roadkill. Sit your ass down before you fall down.”

Damn. Morrisey had missed Gaskins’s deep baritone. And the captain speaking his mind.

Morrisey felt like shit, too, with the taste of old whiskey and ash coating his tongue that no amount of coffee or mouthwash improved. At least he’d found reasonably clean clothes to put on. Some days, getting a shower and shaving was a minor miracle, especially with a bass drum pounding his temples.

Drinking let Morrisey tune out the impressions he’d gotten from victims: from moments of joy to sheer terror, to others who’d seemed caught in terror for hours before their deaths. Let him push aside promises he’d made the living. But he owed the dead to use every method at his disposal to solve their cases. So, he touched them, experienced the horror of their last moments, and drank.

He lost sleep some nights, wondering if he could have done more for Craig if he’d gotten there soon enough to read him.

Morrisey tried for humor and took a seat. “Road kill wasn’t quite what I was going for. I hear ‘casually disheveled’ is in this year.” He blinked bleary eyes. The view didn’t improve. Same scowling face. Captain Gaskins somehow managed to be drop-dead gorgeous, even with his unwillingness to smile. Somewhere in his fifties, with specks of white showing in his otherwise black hair and a dark 80s porn ‘stache shot through with gray, he could’ve been a poster boy on officer recruitment ads. Rumor said he had been once upon a time.

The ad would’ve gotten lots of attention—including Morrisey’s.

Captain Gaskins wasn’t built like a Mack truck. Mack trucks were built like Captain Gaskins. Solid as a tank. A thin scar marred the deep tones of his face, from his eyebrow down to his square jaw and generous lips. He’d terrorized many a college football player as a defensive lineman for the Georgia Bulldogs In his younger days.

A framed poster of the team’s mascot hung on the wall.

Rumors said Gaskins had been quite the ladies’ man, too. And damned if his cologne didn’t make Morrisey want to tackle him for different reasons than sports. No unavailable man should smell so damned good.

Gorgeous, sure. Morrisey knew all these things superficially. Though the captain turned many heads, Morrisey would never pursue any interest. Sleeping with someone who could accidentally break him in half didn’t appeal to him much. Besides, the captain was straight and the boss.

Ogling out-of-reach guys, however, was so much safer than someone with the bad taste to return Morrisey’s interest.

Gaskins relaxed back into his chair, turning at an angle with the desk to stretch his long legs out in front of him. He spoke with a quiet voice, a nearly unheard-of feat. Maybe he’d strained his vocal cords yelling at someone earlier, necessitating a rest. “You could take more time off if you need.”

Hell, even losing a family member was only worth a week. Besides, sitting around the apartment with no company other than his own wasn’t doing Morrisey any favors. No one had ever accused him of being good company. “My time’s up. I’m back.”

Gaskins wrinkled his nose and gave a decisive head shake. “Oh, hell no, you’re not. You reek of old booze. Go home and get yourself cleaned up. Don’t return to this office until you’re no longer a disgrace to your badge.” He hushed his voice even more. “Look, Morse, losing a partner sucks. You and Murphy were tight. I get that. You worked so well together. But you can’t blame yourself for what happened. Hell, we all saw the guy every day. None of us had any idea what he planned. Even his wife didn’t know.”

Therein lay the problem. Will didn’t plan to off himself. The decision came spur-of-the-moment after one spectacularly lousy day. One minute fine, the next not—regardless of what anyone else said.

“I knew something was wrong. He’d been acting strange all afternoon. That last scene…” Will’s widow and kids didn’t deserve losing their husband and father, especially not in so gruesome a way. “I don’t get it. Things have been bad lately, but he should have said something to me.”

Instead, he went quiet, so out of character that Morrisey should have paid attention.

Bad case, return to the precinct, sit in your car.

End your life.

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