Page 20 of The Broken Places

Lennon came back into the room, where their desks sat next to each other, holding her own cup of coffee and sipping it as she walked slowly toward him.

She stopped to chat with a woman police inspector, bending forward slightly as she laughed. He didn’t like lying to her. He didn’t like lying in general, but especially to her. She acted sort of tough, but there was something vulnerable about her, something that told him maybe she’d been hurt. It was in the way she’d gazed at the people they’d passed, who were obviously suffering, on the streets of San Francisco. She was empathetic. She cared about others. Then again, maybe that didn’t have anything to do with something from her past. Maybe some people just came by that naturally.

Every once in a while, he still questioned his own assumptions, questioned what was innate under natural circumstances and what had to be learned in most.Practice knowing,a wise man had once told him.Everything you need to know is inside of you,he’d said, tapping Ambrose’s chest as though all life’s knowledge, his path, from beginning to end, were written on scrolls contained between his ribs. Or at least that’s what Ambrose liked to picture. It was all there, just inside, pressed against the underside of his skin.It’s just been covered up for a long time. So it will take practice. But it’s a worthwhile effort. Practice knowing.

And so he did. And one of those scrolls had told him that the crimes being committed here had everything to do with people he loved. Those imagined scrolls told him before he arrived that someone knew things they shouldn’t know, and now he had the evidence to back it up.

“Hey, Mars,” he heard from behind him and turned around. Lieutenant Byrd stood there, jacket on, briefcase in hand, obviously on his way out of the station. “I haven’t received your paperwork yet.”

Shit.His time here was ticking, and fast. “Really? Okay, I’ll call over and see what the holdup is.”

Byrd gave a nod and then raised his hand at the rest of the people working nearby and disappeared around the corner. Ambrose let out a long breath.

Lennon sat down in her chair as two officers came in, one stopping in front of the desk of the same female inspector Lennon had just been talking to. The other officer took a seat at an empty desk and bent his neck one way and then another.

“What’s up with you, Brymer?” Lennon asked.

“Sore as hell. I’ve been directing traffic for six hours. A woman jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge this morning.” He resumed stretching for a moment. “Shit. Who wakes up and decides to jump off a fuckin’ bridge?” He ran his hand over his buzz cut. “I’ll tell you who. Someone fucked in the head. You agree with that, Mars?”

Ambrose’s eyes moved slowly to Brymer. The guy was hoping to rile him or annoy him or test him or whatever he was doing, for some reason that Ambrose wasn’t even going to try to figure out. Maybe the guy was bored. Maybe he was annoyed that he’d had to do a job he thought beneath him because someone had decided to end their life on his watch. “Fucked in the head seems like as good a diagnosis as any,” Ambrose said.

Brymer huffed out a laugh, assuming incorrectly that Ambrose agreed with him. “It’s gotta be attention, right? To wanna go that way? You can’t just off yourself in your bathroom, you gotta jam up traffic for hours, make a spectacle. A big, grand exit where a dozen people have a ringside seat.”

Ambrose glanced at Lennon to see her staring at Brymer. “Yeah, attention whores are the worst, aren’t they, Brymer?”

“Sure are,” Brymer said, either ignoring her sarcasm or missing it completely. “Gotta make everyone else suffer for your issues.”

“Shut up, dude,” the other cop snapped. The name on his name tag saidC. KENNEDY. “Those people are suffering. My take? It’s notabout attention so much as certainty. You down a buncha pills or, hell, even cut your wrists and it might not work. Someone could find you, pump your stomach, bandage you up. But jumping off a bridge? You’re guaranteed to die, and quick.”

“Not true.” Several heads turned toward Ambrose, including Lennon’s. “Thirty-five people have survived that particular jump,” he said, his gaze meeting Lennon’s. “In 2000, there was a nineteen-year-old kid who attempted to commit suicide there.” He leaned back in his chair. “The second he went over that rail, he realized he’d made a horrible mistake.” Ambrose paused, looking at each of them in turn. “He hit the water headfirst at seventy-five miles per hour, four seconds later, shattering three sections of his vertebrae. He was alive, but he couldn’t move his legs. And in those four seconds, as he’d plunged toward the water, he’d realized he wanted to live.”

Lennon stared, lips parted as though she was semimesmerized. He liked that look on her face. Soft. It was soft. She’d lowered her guard completely, and all it had taken was a story.She cares. Her empathy is so obvious.And he liked that about her. It was rare. “What happened then?” she asked softly.

“He felt a bump beneath him,” Ambrose said. He bounced on his chair as though something were headbutting him from the seat, and Lennon gave a minuscule start. “Something was in the water.”

“Holy shit, a shark,” he heard Kennedy say.

Ambrose shook his head. “No. At first that’s what he thought, too, but it wasn’t a shark. It was a sea lion, and that sea lion bumped him again, and then again. It kept him afloat—kept him alive—by bumping him repeatedly so he didn’t go under, until a rescue boat showed up.”

Lennon tipped her head, her eyes still holding a vague sense of wonder. “Is that a true story?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d you hear it?”

Ambrose shrugged. “I don’t remember. But it stayed with me. It reminds me that some things can’t be explained.”

Her eyes hung on his. “And you like that? For a man whose job it is to find answers, that’s somewhat surprising.”

“I think it’s important to be able to determine when answers are necessary and when they’re not.”

She appeared to think about that for a moment. “Anyway, it’s a good story.”

He gave her a half tilt of his lips. “In the end, all we have are stories.”

She chewed on the inside of her cheek as she regarded him. “Tough ending on that bridge today,” she said after a moment.

“Yes,” he agreed, looking over at Brymer, who yawned and stood up. “It was.”

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