Stephen White - The Last Lie

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

H. L. Mencken

PROLOGUE

S urveillance footage indicated that a woman drove her 2005 Hyundai Santa Fe to the front of the Boulder Police Department at seven forty-five on Saturday morning. The car entered the frame from the south, which meant the driver had turned onto 33rd Street from Arapahoe before she pulled to a stop at the curb opposite the main entrance. The SUV ended up on the wrong side of the road, where the woman sat almost motionless behind the wheel in the don't-even-think-about-parking-here zone for over eleven minutes.

A uniformed officer striding toward his patrol vehicle in the lot adjacent to the building noted the car with the engine running. He tapped on the glass of the driver's door with the tip of his key. The woman at the wheel did not acknowledge him. Not at first.

The officer raised his voice so he could be heard through the glass, instructing her to move her car. He gestured at the NO PARKING signs. There were so many of them, they could have been part of a public art installation.

Over an after-shift beer he would freely admit to another cop that he had little patience with citizens who acted as though simple rules--STOP, YIELD, NO PARKING--didn't apply to them. He considered the citations he wrote for most misdemeanor violations to be nothing more than comeuppance for violating gotta-get-along karma.

The shift he was finishing that morning hadn't been a good one. Before returning to the department to get some guidance from his sergeant on another matter, he had answered three domestic calls in a row. One right after the friggin' next. A double-wide off Valmont, a decent split-level with a great view below the Flatirons, and a gazillion-square-foot McMansion out near the reservoir.

He hated domestics, especially weekend, middle-of-the-night domestics. Every last one felt like Russian roulette to him. His domestic call mantra was "Knock on the door and fuckin' duck."

A half second before the patrol cop reached for his citation book, the woman in the parked car lowered her window and turned her head toward him. She did not, however, look at his face. He instructed her to remove her sunglasses.

She hesitated a beat too long before she pushed the shades up onto her forehead. Lady, he said to himself, I've had a bad night. Don't fucking push me. His usual partner, Missy Abrams, counseled him to have conversations with himself before he had them with citizens. He thought Missy would be pleased when he told her later that he'd been acting on her advice, though she wouldn't be thrilled with the exact nature of the internal dialogue.

"Progress," she would say. "Baby steps."

His first thought when he looked at the woman's face after she pushed the glasses up to her hairline was that someone had hit her in the eye. His adrenaline surged at the possibility that he had just stumbled onto his fourth domestic in a row. That would have been a dubious personal record. But further examination caused him to conclude that the woman looked more like she had started to remove her makeup and had stopped halfway through the process. That's what left her with smudged mascara and half-removed eyeliner. And that's why he'd initially thought she looked so bruised. Some tears were mixed in, too, he thought.

So. This woman had stopped removing her makeup without completing the job, and then she'd driven to the police station. She'd parked in a no-parking zone on the wrong side of the street with her engine running. And then she just sat there, crying.

He tried to make sense of that progression but drew a blank.

He was wishing he had just kept on walking to his cruiser. If he'd kept on walking, she would eventually have gone inside and spoken to Ruth Anne at the desk. Ruth Anne was, like, unflappable.

Or the woman would have just driven away, no one the wiser.

The woman's breathing changed suddenly and audibly. That got his attention. It started coming in rushed little inhales that were paired in twos followed by long silent exhales. He mistook the pattern for hiccups. The officer's ex-wife got hiccup jags that sounded similar.

The presence of the hiccups caused him to lean in a little closer to the open window. He expected to detect the telltale aroma of alcohol on the woman's breath. DUI? DWI? Or his recent favorite catchall, DWO--Driving While Oblivious. Texting, iPods, Big Macs, mascara, whatever. DWO was a small addition to state motor vehicle law that he felt was long overdue.

Had the woman been drinking? Maybe yes, maybe no. He wasn't sure. He decided to give her the benefit of the doubt. It wasn't a compassionate gesture. He just wanted her to move her damn car half a block down the street--on the other side, so it was pointed in the right direction.