“That’ll be okay,” Roz said. “Lockhart, why don’t you ride downtown with Detective Pribek?”
***
There’d really been no need for it, but I’d sensed that sending Lockhart with me had been Roz’s casual way of laying a comforting hand on my shoulder after the morning’s events. At the precinct, no one was available to take a statement right away, so Lockhart left me at an unoccupied desk to wait. There, lulled by the familiar sound of the dispatch radio and swaddled in a strange man’s clothes, I rested my head on my folded arms and slept.
2
The three brothers were Croatian. They’d been in America about eight days, living with their parents in the crowded home of their assimilated aunt, uncle, and cousins, who’d been in Minneapolis over a year. The boys still weren’t totally on Central Time, and they often woke when their father and uncle got up at four to go to their jobs at a snack-foods plant.
The brothers were also enamored of their cousins’ bicycles, which they had just learned to ride. That morning, awake and adventurous as kids of that age often are, they went out for a ride after their father went to work, even though they’d been forbidden to take the bikes out without supervision.
It was the boy perched on the handlebars that had gone over the railing when his brother lost his balance and let the bike wobble. That same brother, the oldest, had jumped into the water after him. He’d survived the rescue attempt; it was the younger brother, small and thin, who’d been sucked down to die.
The parents had insisted on coming downtown the day after the accident to thank me. They were accompanied by their relatives, who spoke fractured but passable English; I was accompanied by our department spokeswoman, who seemed as uncomfortable as I was. It was an encounter that was linguistically awkward and terribly sad, and I wished they hadn’t bothered.