Land of the Blind Read Free Page A

last time a man came in and opened himself up, unburdened his soul, when nothing was compelling him to do so? When was the last time someone gave you the truth?”
    “I don’t…” She feels flushed. “You want a confession without consequences?”
    “If you mean prison, I know that’s a possibility.” He pulls back a bit, smiles sadly, and Caroline begins to think that maybe this Loon really did something, maybe there’s more to this than delusions and skipped meds. “But this thing that happened,” he says carefully, “was the result of a lifetime of harassment. Betrayals and pressures. It will never happen…it could never happen again. It was a radiator boiling over.
    “Consequences?” He squeezes his eyes shut. “All I have left is consequences.”
    It is quiet for a moment. “Okay,” Caroline says. “You want to…confess.” She’s used that word a hundred times and it never sounded like this. “You want to confess without incriminating yourself. And then what? Go home?”
    He doesn’t answer, just looks down.
    “Well,” she says, “that would certainly speed up the criminal justice system.”
    It is Friday night. There are no other detectives in these back offices. It is one of the idiocies of police work: the criminals work nights and weekends, while the detectives are home for the six o’clock news. The office behind her is dark. What harm can there be in indulging this Loon for an hour?
    “Okay,” she says. “I’ll do it. I’ll hear your…confession.”
    “Thank you.” He looks around the room. “Okay.”
    They stare at each other for a few seconds more and he takes a series of deep breaths. Finally, he leans forward. “Do I start or—”
    “There are a number of—”
    “It’s just, I’ve never…how do you go about this?”
    “Well, usually we just talk. We can tape confessions. We can do it on video.”
    He looks uncomfortable with all of these options.
    “Sometimes we have the suspect write out his version of events and sign it.”
    The Loon perks up. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s it. I’d like to write it. Yes. It should be written down. With context and meaning. That’s the only way.”
    “I’ll get you a pad and a pen,” she says.
    “And some more coffee?”
    She grabs his cup and exits the interview room. She leaves the door unlocked; he’s not under arrest. All around her, the Major Crimes office registers its indifference to the semantic games of Caroline and this crank. After all, she thinks, a confession is a confession is…Dark computer screens track her across the room, colleagues’ family pictures watch from their perches on the soft cubicle walls. At her desk—no pictures—Caroline pulls a legal pad from the top drawer and grabs a pen. She walks out front and nods to the sergeant as she fills the Loon’s cup with stale patrol coffee.
    “So was I right?” The sergeant looks up from a snowboarding magazine. “He a fuckin’ wack job?”
    “A shithouse rat,” she says.
    “Yeah, I figured.” He returns to his report. “You gonna cut him loose?”
    “In a minute.”
    When she comes back the Loon looks uncertain, as if he’s having second thoughts. She sets his coffee down and he takes it gratefully.
    “Can I ask you something?” he says.
    She waits.
    “Have you ever been responsible for someone’s death?”
    She notes the timidity of the words. Not Have you ever killed someone but Have you ever been responsible for someone’s death . “Yes,” she answers, to both questions.
    “What was it like? For you?”
    “Better than for the dead guy,” she says. But he doesn’t respond to the joke and she remembers the feeling, the smell, the gun in her hand, the man no longer moving toward her, finished. “It was bad,” she says, more quietly.
    “Afterward, it was hard…personally?”
    She doesn’t answer.
    “I just wonder if it’s possible to live with something like that,” he says.
    No sleep, shallow breathing, hand vibrating,