Chapter 29 A Woman Scorned
As they left Palos Verdes and headed back downtown, Lauren checked her messages as she drove, speaking on her Bluetooth when she needed to reply. Carmen looked out the window. When Lauren had stopped using her cell, Carmen didn't notice.
Lauren glanced over quickly once or twice, and let Carmen work on whatever she was working on.
"You about ready?" Lauren finally asked.
"Huh? What?"
"I said, are you about ready to tell me what you're thinking about. You've been having an out-of-body experience for about ten minutes now."
"I have? Oh, yeah, I guess. I was thinking about Shane."
"How so?"
"I was wondering what it felt like to Shane to have a cold-blooded murderer for a father. Somebody who drowned her friend and lover. To have every cop west of the Mississippi on the lookout for him. To be the daughter of a murderer. To be one of the key people trying to find him, get him arrested, convicted and sent to Death Row. I think, what if it was my father or my step-father, you know, or somebody else in my family. And it's not one murder, it's now four. That's a lot of weight to carry."
"Yeah," was all Lauren could say.
"Then I think about the families of the mass shooters, like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, that guy in Las Vegas at the concert. Sometimes they are gun nuts themselves, the relatives, I mean. And sometimes they just know that the relative is a little out of whack, and they aren't too surprised when he goes nuts and kills fifteen people. They suspected he was dangerous, but there was nothing they could do about it. And then other times it's a total shock. They had no idea he was planning something."
"Gabe McCutcheon doesn't seem to fit anything like that, though," Lauren said.
"Can I ask you a question? When you worked homicide, how did the relatives of the murderers feel? Did you ever work a mass shooter?"
"No, not exactly. I worked a gang drive-by, three dead, two more shot-up. But that's not the same thing, either. Most of the homicides I worked with Marybeth, I guess the relatives' reactions ran the gamut," Lauren said. "They felt horror, some of them. A lot of self-protective denial. Disbelief. Shock. Not my little boy. Not my friend. Not my father. Not my neighbor. Once in a blue moon you'd get somebody who said, 'Yeah, I'm not surprised. He was a bastard. I knew he was going to do something one day.'" She drove for a minute. "Here's something I sometimes think about. What's worse, being the relative of the victim who got shot and killed, or the relative of the shooter who did it, and then he either went to jail for 20 years, or got shot himself. Two people dead and two families destroyed, and often more than two families, but is one family more hurt than the other? I've decided you just can't tell. Some families are completely shattered. Some find a way to heal, or deal with it, and eventually move on. There's some people even just blank it out, like it never happened. Grieving is hard enough, but how do you grieve for a family member who just killed seven people at his workplace and then got shot dead by police? Shane is going to be far different, because her family, such as it is, barely even exists. There's no real family there to shatter, no grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, except her brother, who she hardly knows any better than she knows Gabe. There's just you guys, her friends, and herself."
"It's gotta be harder on her than most people," Carmen said. "Shane is hypersensitive. Whatever her reaction is, it's going to be, like, ten times worse for her than for other people."
"I can't read her like you can," Lauren said. "What do you think she's feeling?"
"Anger. Hatred. Which is funny, because she's not good at either of them. She's got less anger and hate in her than just about anybody I ever met. I doubt she feels any embarrassment because she's related to Gabe. He's just DNA, a total stranger to her until a week before the wedding, and he went back to DNA right afterward. He's basically a very distant acquaintance she once met for an hour or two, but on the other hand also somebody who hurt her, repeatedly. A serial abuser, in a way. An abuser from afar. Is that even a thing? Well, that's what he was. A long-distance, far-away DNA-related abuser. And then a murderer."
"So how's she processing it?"
"I don't know. There's lots of stuff we can't talk about to each other. We're on thin ice like ninety-five percent of the time with each other."
"Everybody can see that."
"Is it that obvious? Yeah, I guess it is. And something this big, she's going to take a long, long time working on it. Mostly not working on it, more likely. When it's all over, we're going to have to keep an eye on her so she doesn't go off on a drug-and-alcohol three-week bender. That's how she deals with this kind of stuff. Self-medication."
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. What I worry about is, when it gets to the crunch, can we count on her?"
"No. You can't. You need to know that right away. She won't help Gabe, if that's what you mean, but I don't think you do. She'd be the last one to help him. But if it gets to the crunch, whatever it may be, it'll be just you and me. Shane's a coward. She'll freeze, or she'll run. Or both. You need to know that."
Lauren said nothing for a while. "My turn to ask a question. You own a gun?"
"No. I'm not allowed to have one on the ship, and it would be really silly anyway. I spend three-quarters of my life on board now, so I'm not even home all that much. When I am home I'm usually working a club, and they have their own security guys. And it's hard to carry a Glock 19 when you're wearing DJ booty shorts or leading a yoga class. I mean, where would I put it? No, don't answer that. And in the Castro in San Francisco, the definition of gang violence is when two queens scratch each other's eyes out. But the other answer you want is, yes, I know how to shoot a gun. Which brings up an painful story."
There was silence. "Well, Jesus Christ, you're not going to stop there," Lauren said. "Want me to pull over and beat you senseless, speaking of pain?"
Carmen laughed. "No, I was just replaying it in my head. It was one day when Shane and I were together. She had cheated on me with Cheri Jaffe, and then I cheated on her with Robin."
"That's your San Diego won't-come-out-of-the-closet Robin?"
"That's the one. Anyway, I had been giving Shane grief off and on for a while because she never talked about herself, never told me much of anything, and hardly ever asked me anything. So this one day she was in a pretty good mood, and she says tell me something about yourself. And I said I shot a gun once, it was loud. And Shane says she shot one once, too, and what else have I done? And then for no good reason except maybe revenge I told her I had cheated on her. And then, you know, it all went to hell. She pretended not to care and wouldn't talk to me, giving me the silent treatment, and then we were arguing and then we had fantastic make-up sex in the shower. That's how we finally got past the cheating-with-Cheri-Jaffe thing."
Lauren said nothing for a while. "Not a helluva lot about guns in that story."
"Mmmm, nope, guess not."
"Any idea when Shane shot the gun?"
"No. But the odds are about ninety-nine percent she was fucking somebody who owned a gun. Maybe a cop, maybe some sort of security person, who knows. But somebody who had a gun and they went out to a range somewhere and the woman showed Shane how to shoot. They probably went through a box of ammo and then fucked their brains out in the car in the parking lot, and Shane never saw her again."
"What about you? Where did you learn to shoot?"
"I told you my Uncle Mike worked at movie studios as an electrician. He knew all the other backstage technical people, and that included the armorers' sections. Some studios have their own in-house props departments that handle weapons, but many of them just hire companies that specialize in weapons. Production assistants like me call them up and we say, 'We're filming an episode of
NCIS Los Angeles
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