"NOOO! NOOO! NOOO!"

"I know," I whispered in her ear. "I know."

"YOU DON'T KNOW SHIT!" she screamed in my face, clawing me away from her. I reared back, covering myself. One of her long nails had raked a red line diagonally across my forehead. Then she collapsed sideways to the floor.

"You don't knoooow!" she cried into the hardwood floor. "You don't know! You don't!"

Chapter 31

MIKE LIFTED BROOKE THAYER UP and put her on the couch in the family room. After I closed the front door, I spotted a blonde girl in pink Disney Three Princesses pajamas. She was staring down at me from the top of the stairs.

"Hey, sweetheart," I said. "Your mommy is going to be all right. My name's Lauren."

The adorable little girl said nothing. She just continued to stare at me with her big blue eyes.

"Maybe you should go back to sleep, honey," I said, taking a step up the stairs toward her.

She screamed then. In a pitch so high and violent, I had to avert my face and cup my ears.

Brooke shot past me up the stairs, the siren quitting immediately as the girl was scooped up into her mother's arms.

I stood there as the mother and daughter rocked back and forth. On a side table in the living room, I spotted a picture of Scott in his uniform. He had his arm around a pregnant Brooke. It looked like it was taken in a park somewhere. The sun was shining brilliantly.

When Brooke and her daughter started keening at the same pitch, I suddenly thought about the gun in my bag. I visualized it. The way its steel shone like chrome under the light. Its almost feminine curves. I imagined the cold of its barrel placed against my temple, the feel of its hair trigger on the second joint inside my right index finger.

I stood in Scott's house and thought of my gun, and of what I had done, and I wondered how much more of this I could take.

You're not a bad person, I tried to tell myself. At least you weren't before tonight.

Chapter 32

POOR BROOKE WAS STILL ROCKING her four-year-old daughter when a baby started crying from somewhere behind them in the upstairs hall.

Slowly, I climbed to the top.

"Do you want me to check on the baby?" I asked Brooke.

Brooke's eyes seemed to stare right through me. She said nothing, not a word.

"Try to find an address book in one of the kitchen drawers and call a family member to come," I called down to Mike.

I walked past Brooke, following the cries to the nursery at the back of the house.

A mobile of mitts and bats dangled above the crib, and there was a Mets night-light.

The baby boy couldn't have been even six months. I lifted up the tiny, wailing child.

His whole body trembled with each cry, a sound that seemed too big for his size. I cupped him against my chest, and he stopped crying almost immediately. I sat down in the rocking chair and held him close, thankful to escape the noise below for a short while.

Even under the wretched circumstances, I noticed how wonderful he smelled. How pure. I swallowed hard when he finally opened his big eyes. His big, warm brown eyes.

He looked exactly like Scott.

I was the one who started crying then. This baby in my arms no longer had a father, I thought.

Way to go, Lauren. Way to go.

"Give him to me," Brooke barked, suddenly charging into the room with a bottle. The baby boy seemed to smile at me as I handed him over to his mother. Brooke was still crying, but she seemed to be over the initial shock.

"Can I call someone for you?" I offered.

"I already spoke to my mom," Brooke said. "She's on her way."

She looked straight into my face for the first time. Her brown eyes were surprisingly kind.

"Look," she said. "I scratched you. I'm so sorry. I…"

"Please," I said quickly. "Don't you dare be sorry. You're the one who needs help now. You and your children."

"I want to hear you say it," Brooke said after a minute.

I stared at her, wide-eyed. Her features looked stark in the night-light, her eyes a void of shadow.

"What?" I said.

"I want to hear you say what happened to my husband. I appreciated your honesty before. The men will only try to protect my feelings. I need to know exactly what happened so I can try to deal with it. These kids need me to be able to deal with it."

"We don't really know yet, Brooke," I said. "We found him shot in a park, St. James Park in the Bronx. It's a known drug area."

Her face contorted, her lips quivering. Her left eye began to twitch.

"Ooooooh! I knew it," she finally said, nodding vigorously. " 'Undercover's a promotion, Brooke. They always watch my back.' Not always, huh, you goddamned idiot."

I racked my brain about what to say next in the silence that followed. The walls seemed to move in on me. I needed to get out of there. Something ripe was starting to churn in my stomach. I had to have some air.

What would I normally say in an investigation I didn't already know all too much about? I took out my notebook again.

"When was the last time you saw Scott?" I asked her, trying to act like a detective.

"He left around eight tonight. Said he had to go in for a few hours. He kept insane hours. Scotty was almost never home lately."

"He didn't say specifically where he was going, did he? Was there a phone call that preceded his departure?"

"Not that I can think of this second. No. I don't remember any call."

Brooke started bawling again all of a sudden.

"Oh, God. His poor mom and sister… they were so close. They're going to be… I don't think I could tell them. No, I… Could you? Detective…?"

"Lauren."

"Could you call her, Lauren? Scotty's mom, I mean. Will you make the call?"

"Of course," I said.

"Are you from his unit?"

"No," I said. "I'm from Bronx Homicide."

"Did you know Scotty?" she asked then.

In the silence, I listened to the splutter of Scott's son greedily finishing his bottle.

"No," I said. "We were out of the same precinct, but we never had the chance to work together."

"I'm sorry about what happened with Taylor. My four-year-old," Brooke said. "She doesn't respond well to strangers. She's autistic."

I stood there, breathless.

That was it.

It. The thing that finally took me over the top.

"I hope I didn't frighten her," I heard myself say as I nearly ran out of the room. "Could I use your bathroom?"

"Down the hall on your right."

The vomit came up a foot or more before I made it to the toilet. I threw both taps on to cover the sound of more retching. And left them on to cover the tea kettle-high primal shrieks that escaped my throat.

I used the entire roll of toilet paper, cleaning up. I actually took out my gun as I sat on the pink-carpeted toilet lid. I wondered if the coroner would put Death by Guilt on my certificate. I finally put the gun away and went downstairs. Not because I didn't want to kill myself anymore. I just thought that Brooke Thayer was having a bad enough night as it was.

In the kitchen, Mike offered to tell the mother.

"That's okay, Mike," I said, smiling insanely as I dialed the number from the open address book. "Why break precedent?"

I held the phone away from my ear after I told Scott's mother that her son was dead. I eyed my partner across the kitchen as we listened to the agonized sounds coming from the earpiece.

Mike lifted a crayon-scribbled picture from underneath a Blue's Clues magnet on the fridge and shook his head. One of the kids had drawn a two-headed dragon.

"You find the ones responsible," Brooke said to me as we made our way to the door a few minutes later. The two-year-old boy was up now, too. He was attached to the leg that the four-year-old had neglected. The baby in Brooke's arms started to cry again.