Point of Departure by Laurie Breton

Author:Laurie Breton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MIRA Books
Published: 2007-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

Rachel Winslow’s file was three inches thick and coated with dust. Lorna wiped the cover clean and opened it. Inside she found a jumble of typed memos, crime scene photos and handwritten notes. She paged through them slowly, skimming reports, examining the photos, giving careful attention to the interviews with witnesses.

The details were stark and straightforward: Rachel Winslow had been standing outside a crowded subway stop on a frigid December evening when some sociopath with a loaded gun had decided to play target practice. Two people had been wounded, neither of them seriously. Rachel had been the only fatality.

They’d never caught the shooter. It had been dark, and nobody’d gotten a good look at him. In the ensuing panic and chaos that followed the shooting, he’d simply melted away into the night. The cops had questioned witnesses, but none of them could seem to agree. The guy had been black; he’d been white. He’d been tall; he’d been short. He’d been a scrawny teenager; he’d been a middle-aged guy with a paunch. After a year with no progress whatsoever, the detectives had retired Rachel’s murder to the cold case files, and that had been that.

As a homicide cop, Lorna had hardened herself against violent death, but every once in a while a case managed to break through her brittle outer crust and get under her skin. This was one of those times. Everything in the file highlighted the senselessness of Rachel Winslow’s death. A young wife and mother, gunned down in public for no apparent reason except that she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She’d left behind a seven-year-old daughter, a grieving husband and two parents destroyed by the death of their only child.

It made Lorna think about things she usually tried to avoid thinking about: the fleeting, ethereal quality of life; the way happiness can be snatched from you in an instant, only to be replaced by a grief that would follow you around for the rest of your days, no matter how fast or far you tried to run. It reminded her of her own kids and how precious and brief her time with them really was, reminded her of how little of that time she’d spent at home with them lately.

Take tonight, for instance. It was almost ten o’clock, and here she was, still at her desk. Police work was easier, somehow, for her male colleagues, easier because society was more accepting of men who devoted their entire lives to the job, easier because they never suffered from mommy guilt. The crazy hours were the downside to being a cop. Your life was never your own. She’d lost count of the number of dinners she’d missed, the number of family vacations that had been cancelled because somebody was murdered at an inconvenient time. It had been Ed who’d raised the kids, Ed who attended the parent-teacher conferences and the school plays, Ed who’d carted them to basketball and Little League and dancing lessons and to the doctor for their shots.

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