Tina Whittle_Tai Randall Mystery 01 by The Dangerous Edge of Things

the binoculars once again.
    “Okay, fine, I was snooping—so what? Trey’s a secret agent. If he didn’t want people snooping in his desk, he should lock the drawers.”
    “He can’t. If anything goes wrong, the EMTs need access to those files.”
    “Why?”
    Garrity sighed. “This is where it gets complicated. You might want to sit down.”
    I sank down cross-legged on the grass. Garrity did too, propping his back on the tree and stretching out his legs. Across the meadow, the dog’s tail swept back and forth like a metronome, while at the other end of the field, the padded bad guy staggered to his feet for a second attack. I envied that dog—it had somebody to tell it what to do.
    Garrity kept his eyes on the demo. “What did you see in those folders?”
    “Bunch of legal papers. Your name everywhere. Some head x-rays.” I signed and reached into my tote bag. “Like this one.”
    “Where did you—”
    “It was an accident. I’ll put it back, I promise.”
    Garrity took it with a frown. “This is an MRI scan, one slice of it anyway. You’re not a doctor, or you would have noticed the subdural hematoma, right in the frontal lobe.” He handed it back to me. “The diagnosis was coup contrecoup. Closed skull injury. Which means that compared to a normal brain—”
    “Normal?”
    “Uh huh. Because Trey’s isn’t. Not anymore.”
    I hung out with this knowledge for a little while. Damn, why’d I picked this scent to follow, the one that was suddenly uncomfortable and complicated and very personal.
    “So what happened?”
    “Car accident. Killed his mom at the scene, put him in a coma for five days. He came out of it, of course, but it left permanent cognitive impairment.”
    “Are you telling me he’s brain-damaged?”
    “Actually, I prefer screwed-up.” He said this without a hint of a smile. “The technical term is TBI—traumatic brain injury. But Trey doesn’t care what you call it, that’s part of how he’s screwed-up.”
    I felt light-headed. This wasn’t making any sense, but then again, it made perfect sense. I remembered the faint silvery scars at his temple, in the middle of his chin, the prescription medicine in the drawer.
    “But he seems so—”
    “Well, he’s not.” Garrity’s tone was sharp. “Don’t get me wrong, he’s still smart as a whip. You saw his office, right? He can find anything in it in two seconds. His brain’s the same way—one giant flowchart filled with rules and subsets of rules and addendums to rules. Memory like a bank vault.”
    “He doesn’t forget,” I repeated, feeling dazed. “He told me that. I thought he was just trying to piss me off.”
    “No, just being blunt-ass honest. He has no sense about what to say, what not to say. He lets things slip if he’s not careful, which is why he stays so damn quiet most of the time.”
    I swore under my breath. I’d noticed that too, the nonsequiturs, the pauses, the cautious bare-bones responses.
    “He has trouble finding words sometimes. There’s some amnesia, mostly the two years before the accident, and some damage in comparative analysis. He thinks in a straight line now, lots of focus, but no periphery. No shades of gray. Right or wrong, yes or no, stop or go.”
    “Is this why he’s not a cop anymore?”
    “Yes.”
    It was a clipped response. I waited for him to continue, but he changed the subject suspiciously fast.
    “Look, I’ve known him for ten years. He was my best man when I got married, he was there when my kid was born, there when I got divorced. We played poker and drank beer and went to Braves games and then one night—bam!”
    He bit his words back. I didn’t pry further. There are minefields in everyone’s psyche, and the best thing you can do when you realize you’ve stepped into one is to stop moving. So I did. We sat in the quiet shade, cocooned in bird song and traffic murmur and distant applause as the dog readied for attack once more. Garrity crumpled up his