Page 63 of So Wicked

“Yeah. Good old days. Glad to see someone’s still keeping the old ways alive.”

Faith laughed. “Yeah, that’s me. Old soul in a young body. Well, young-ish.”

He shrugged. “Eh, age is just a number.”

“I wish that were true.”

They fell silent for a moment. Inside the donut shop, a very elderly woman leaned on the arm of her daughter and mumbled something under her breath. The daughter helped her sit, and the woman frowned at her, confused for a moment, before smiling widely and patting her arm. The daughter smiled at her mother, but Faith could see the pain in her eyes.

“I hope I don’t live long enough to lose my mind,” Slade said. “I couldn’t imagine putting my wife and kids through that.”

“It’s not like she has a choice.”

“No, I know. I just… hope it doesn’t happen to me.”

“Me too.” Faith sipped her coffee and decided a change of subject was in order. “What’s going to happen to Meredith Sawyer, you think?”

“A lifetime in a padded room taking happy pills,” Slade replied. “A lot of people fake insanity, but hers isn’t fake.”

“Where is she now?”

“Still at the hospital. They have her in the secure ward in a private room. She keeps asking if someone’s taking care of Ralphie.”

“Damn. She went quick, huh.”

"I guess so. The doctor I talked to said it happens that way sometimes. They go a little bit at a time and then all at once. Her neighbors told us that she started showing signs of slipping after her dog died. That usually means they were slipping for years before that and just didn't look it."

Faith’s brow furrowed. “So she was showing signs of mental decline and no one did anything about it?”

“People don’t want to step into a situation that isn’t their business,” Slade opined. “They probably assumed she had family or friends to help. And no one could have predicted she’d decline the way she did. How many people do you know start getting dementia and end up going on a killing spree where they try to absolve people’s sins by murdering them and laying them to rest using a warped modification of a Celtic ritual?”

“Still, they could have helped her. Even if she was harmless to others, she wasn’t harmless to herself. They could have called for a welfare check or taken her to the hospital. They could have gotten her the care she needed before it was too late.”

Slade smiled with a hint of bitterness. “Welfare checks don’t do as much as people think they do. All we would have done was show up, ask if she was okay, and then make sure she wasn’t injured and could tell us basic things like what day it was, who was the President, what her name and age were… Traffic stop questions, basically. We value individual privacy and freedom in America. It takes a lot to have someone removed involuntarily from their home.”

“Even still,” Faith insisted, “some sort of intervention would have been better than nothing. We could have protected the victims. Even if Meredith was destined for a psychiatric hospital no matter what, we could have sent her there without the blood of four innocent people on her hands.”

“Maybe.”

Slade’s pessimism was beginning to irritate Faith. She turned to him and asked, “Do you really think there was no chance? We should just throw our hands up in the air, say, ‘That’s the way it is,’ and just deal with it?”

To her surprise, Slade didn’t respond by apologizing or by defending his position. He cocked his head and thought for a while. Then he said, “I think that there need to be people who can accept things the way they are and people who can’t.”

“But how does anything change if people don’t believe theycanchange?”

“Slowly, painfully, and over a very long period of time. Just like things always change.”

Faith pressed her lips together and looked away. She understood the point Slade was making, but she reallycouldn’taccept it. “You don’t think they’d change faster if everyone could agree that they need to change and act on that?”

“That’s a huge if, Faith. Change requires sacrifice. For some people, change requires great sacrifice. I don’t know if it’s fair to expect others to sacrifice greatly so that the species as a whole improves. Maybe it is. Maybe people should be willing to make that sacrifice. Maybe it would be better to let go of a little personal freedom so that people like Meredith Sawyer aren’t allowed to rot until all that remains is the worst parts of themselves. I think there should be people like you who are fighting to say they shouldn’t be because it will raise awareness of these circumstances and maybe inspire people to take the initiative that governments won’t. I also think there should be people who can handle it when things don’t change the way they should because we can find ways to help people with the resources we have instead of ramming our heads into the wall and demanding resources we don’t have. It’s not a fun way to look at things, I guess. We don’t ever have everything we want. But a lot more people have enough.”

He finished the last of his coffee. "Anyway, I waxed philosophical and went on a tangent that only partly has to do with the case. I guess I've just been thinking about the reasons my captain gave me for why I need to let the case go and about why I didn't let the case go anyway. I've been trying to reconcile how he can be right and I can still be right. That's the closest I could come to an answer."

He leaned over and gave Faith a half hug. "Either way, I'm damned glad you came to visit us. If it helps, think about all the people who didn't die because we caught Meredith. Think of Dr. Carpenter, who got to go home to her children."

She smiled. “That’s the goal, right?”

“Always. Goodbye, Special Agent.”

---