Unrevealed

her first at the meeting. Somehow, we’d figure out how to make it all right.
    So, right now, I’m sitting in my Mustang sucking down my twenty-second cigarette of the day and I’m about to go inside the Methodist church for the weekly meet-and-greet with the Basement People. I’ve been keeping an eye out for Ellen — I mean, Marge, but I haven’t seen her. The meeting starts in five minutes, and I want to get a good seat close to the bad coffee and bowls of shitty hard candy.
    I walk down into the basement and the mood is grim. There’re a few people crying and shaking their heads. I walk over to Joe, the guy who runs the meeting. He’s not looking great either.
    “What’s going on?” I ask him.
    “Sad news. I got a call yesterday. Ellen B. died.”

    “Fuck,” was all I could muster. “What happened?”
    “Car accident.”
    “What?”
    “She fell asleep at the wheel and ran off the road. Died on impact.”
    I felt the walls start to cave in around me. Marge took the bus to my office. She didn’t own a car. “How did you find out Ellen died?”
    “I got a call from her cousin,” Joe offered. “She said she found my number on the members’ phone list.”
    It suddenly made sense to me. “Right. Her cousin. Marge Challis?”
    Joe nodded.

    And so the cycle of life and death, reinvention and resurrection continue for Marge. I contemplated calling Frank, but I figured I’d need a stiff drink before I did that. To preserve my sobriety, I opted out.
    Like I said, in AA, you have to delve into why you drink and what triggers your need to disappear. Once you stop killing the pain with the bottle, you’re supposed to come alive and find out who you really are and why you choose to exist. But some of us…some of us choose to walk out of a burning building that is twenty-five minutes away from collapsing, and before we get to the end of the street where the debris isn’t so thick and the smoke has cleared, we’ve become someone else. And we believe in our hearts that the long shadows that stand just behind us will magically disappear just like the person we slaughtered. But those damn shadows are as uncompromising as we chose to be when we believed we could kill the past. They grasp us even more relentlessly.
    Somewhere out there right now, Marge Challis thinks she’s again shaken off the darkness. But when she wakes up tomorrow, there will be a little less light to guide her.

YOU CAN’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER
    I want to be up-front with everyone who is reading this. I had to be talked into writing it. You see, I’m a very private person, and I’m not someone who readily opens herself up to others. I’ve always been like that, ever since I was a kid. When somebody showed a passing interest in me or in my life, I’d wonder why he cared and what his true motive was. Chalk it up to having a hardcore cop for a father. I’m suspicious of people in general and more than a little cynical. But I bet any cop would tell you the same thing.
    For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Jane Perry and I’m a homicide detective here in Denver, Colorado. Technically, it’s Sergeant Detective Jane Perry, but most people I know just call me Jane. Being a cop is all I know how to do, and I’m good at it. That’s not arrogance,
that’s confidence. I am the job, as they say. If I were flipping burgers, my head would still be programmed as a cop. It’s in my blood. My dad was a homicide cop, and his buddies considered him top-notch. I didn’t follow in his footsteps to be like him. The last thing I want to be is like my father. I’m a homicide cop because I like to wrap my mind around the mysteries of why people kill other people. I like to get into the heads of the killers.
    I like to run around inside the victims’ heads even more. I can walk into a hot crime scene while the blood is still wet and death still hangs heavy in the air and I can hear the walls whisper their secrets. Sometimes I can hear the screams and pleas of the victims before they took their last breath. Not hear it like in my ear. It’s more like hearing it in my gut.
    God, I sound fucking nuts. But that’s the only way I can describe it. It’s not some kind of psychic shit. It’s so much deeper than that. I hear the dead with my gut . Yes. And it consumes me. And, believe me, it’s changed me inside forever.
    My former boss, Sergeant Morgan Weyler, who I now work alongside since my promotion to sergeant, is the one who