“Oh, that’s just perfect.”
“I was hoping the three of us could be friends.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I care for you, Jude.” Mercy struggled on. “I don’t think it’s healthy for you to be so angry about this.”
“I don’t think it’s healthy for you to have two girlfriends.”
“Let’s not play tit for tat. Elspeth was fine about coming here. She wanted to meet you.”
“Well, I didn’t want to meet her,” Jude said tersely. “But you didn’t bother to find that out. How did you expect I’d react to this…ambush? Don’t you know me at all?”
“I expected you to behave like an adult.” Mercy’s voice shook.
“Define adult. If it’s a passive butch plaything you want—and, for the record, that doesn’t seem to be the case when we’re fucking—then you picked the wrong person.”
“This is not about how we have sex.” Mercy’s face was a study in frustration. “And please keep your voice down. I’m not ready to take out a public notice about my love life just yet.”
“And I’m not ready to pretend this is okay with me just to make you comfortable.”
Mercy sighed. “I knew this was a mistake.”
“Then why come?”
“I don’t know. I guess I thought if you met her, you’d see how wonderful she is and you’d understand why I can’t just let her go.”
Jude felt like someone had just slammed a baseball bat into her gut. “Are you telling me you’re
in
love
with her?” Not once had Mercy ever mentioned the L-word to her. Not even in the throes of passion. Jude thought she was allergic to it.
“I’m not sure.” Color rushed to Mercy’s cheeks. “She’s been so good to me. I had a hard time when my father died. It made all the difference knowing she was there for me.”
Was Mercy
trying
to hurt her? Jude was assailed with memories of her own futile attempts to offer support and consolation during that time of loss. Mercy had kept her at a distance, not once opening up. Jude had respected her privacy. Was she now condemned for that? A suspicion flashed across her mind: Mercy found Elspeth safe. Jude had long ago learned to respect these whisperings from the unconscious, so she gave the thought some room, and the anger drained away.
Trying to build some kind of bridge, she asked gently, “What do you want that I’m not giving you?”
Mercy’s face showed nothing, but her pupils gave her away. The question had hit home. She skirted around it, all the same. “Jude, you’re an excellent lover.”
“That wasn’t what I asked.” Jude moved closer, shielding Mercy from the room. She ran her fingertips over the inside of Mercy’s wrist. It was as close to a kiss as she dared in public. “Please talk to me.”
Mercy looked pointedly past her to the others in the room. “This is not the time or place. We both have work to do.”
Jude swallowed her frustration. There was never a time when Mercy was willing to discuss where their relationship was going. Every time Jude raised the topic, she found a way to avoid it. Yet, apparently she had the intimate, personal connection with Elspeth that she denied Jude.
It dawned on Jude that this was a form of fidelity. Mercy could be sexually intimate with two partners, but she was only emotionally intimate with one…with Elspeth. Something raw and hot rose from deep inside, and for several seconds she couldn’t breathe. She felt stricken. Blood rushed in her ears. Tears prickled and she looked down at her boots, humiliated and willing herself to get a grip. No one had hurt her like this for a long time.
“Let’s meet.” Mercy’s code for getting together to have sex.
Jude’s hands shook. She shoved them into her pockets and said casually, “That would be pleasant, but I don’t have the time right now.”
Mercy looked her dead in the eye. “I don’t desire anyone the way I desire you. Isn’t that enough?”
Jude wanted it to be enough. She let herself think about Mercy naked and slippery, rocking against her, begging for release. Her body immediately let its needs be known, flesh and skin at odds as a chill of desire spread goose bumps over the heat of her limbs. She wanted Mercy desperately. She ached for her, and she hated how it weakened her resolve. This yearning was like an illness. The more she tried to treat it by giving in, the more barren she felt every time they said good-bye. She loathed her helplessness. She hated that she’d allowed Mercy to dictate the terms of their relationship from day one. What was
that
about?
Angry at herself as much as Mercy, she said, “Whatever,” a response she knew infuriated her fickle lover.
Predictably, Mercy responded, “That’s not an answer!”
Jude shrugged. “As you said, this is not the time or place. We’re investigating a possible homicide, and Ms. Harwood is not authorized to be here. I need for you to escort her out.”
She started walking. Mercy kept pace with her.
“Don’t do this,” she implored in a harsh whisper.
“Do what?” Jude asked.
“End us.”
Jude stopped, far enough from the others that they would not be heard clearly. Facing Mercy, she rolled the dice one last time. “Does it matter?”
The question hung between them, imposing a leaden calm the way an earthquake did before the tremors began.
Tears sparkled in Mercy’s eyes. “This is pointless. You’ll never understand.”
“You’re right,” Jude conceded bitterly. “I never will.”
Chapter Seven
Known to his buddies as Gums, owing to party tricks involving his false teeth, Hank Thompson was older than the other losers he ran with, a man whose claim to fame was that he had been struck by lightning and lived to tell the tale. He wasted no time sharing this God-given reprieve with Jude, whose luck it was to be taking down his statement at 7:30 a.m. when she hadn’t had coffee.
“The Big Guy strikes you down—you sit up and take notice,” he announced with blinding logic. “Right after that, I made a pledge.”
Jude could hardly wait.
“I live a monastic existence,” her subject confided. “No worldly distractions. Neither of the flesh, nor a material nature.”
Jude interpreted this to mean he was unemployed, lived in a dump, and couldn’t get laid. She said, “So, you’re on welfare?”
Gums sucked a breath noisily past the thinnest lips Jude had ever seen. “The Big Guy sees to it that I have the time needed to study on His word.”
“Where does the tequila drinking fit in?”
“The elixir helps me receive my visions.”
Jude pictured the defense wetting themselves when they got their first look at this witness. Inwardly groaning, she went with the flow. “Did you have a vision on the evening of Saturday, March tenth?”
“I was tasked with a foul duty.” He smoothed his thinning salt-and-pepper hair. “The slaying of a minion of Satan himself. I speak of a goat that caused offense to a virtuous lady.”
“I see.” Jude flipped through her notes, buying a little time to think about her line of questioning. She needed to confirm Matthew Roache’s story and find out if Thompson had an agenda of his own that could have led him to kidnap a small child from a woman who had no money. “Who is this virtuous lady?”
“Heather, sister of Matthew. He is unworthy, but she is radiant in God’s eyes.”
Jude contemplated the possibility that this witness had abducted and probably murdered Corban Foley and was busy setting up his insanity plea. On the other hand, it seemed plausible that someone who’d survived being struck by lightning might be missing some key brain cells.
“Why did you vandalize Tonya Perkins’s home?” she asked.
He got worked up and started along a deeply nutty track in which all women, with the exception of the fair Heather, were sent to tempt weak mankind, and Tonya was a demon in disguise. When he got really loud and flecks of foam began to gather in the corners of his mouth, Jude handed him a glass of water, insisting, “Calm down and drink this, Mr. Thompson.”
He took the water and lifted his gaze heavenward. “The Big Guy has his eye on me,” he said with satisfaction. “I thirsted and He sent water.”
Once his breathing had slowed down, Jude asked, “Mr. Thompson. Are you on any medication? Pills?”
“I can’t take those. God stops talking to me.”
“I see.” A delusional individual off his meds is at the home of a missing child on the evening of his disappearance. Reasonable doubt didn’t get any better than that, assuming they could make a case against Wade Miller in the first place.
Gloomily, Jude surveyed her subject. Every instinct she had told her Miller was responsible for whatever had happened to Corban Foley, but she knew better than to conduct an investigation with an attachment to any one theory of the crime. Foregone conclusions spelled trouble; it was fatally easy to overlook important clues if you couldn’t see past your own beliefs. Twenty years ago, a guy like Thompson wouldn’t have made it out of an interview room without signing a confession. Death row had seen plenty like him over the years. She had to find some way to rule him out unequivocally, or back up any confession they extracted with a mountain of hard evidence.
“Tell me, how do you think God feels about a woman like Tonya rearing an innocent child,” she asked in a conversational tone. “Do you think he might be concerned?”
“Certainly.”
She framed a hypothetical; these often yielded insights, especially from offenders deep in denial. “If you were God, what would you do about that?”
Thompson grew restless, wringing his hands and shifting in his seat. “I don’t know. I’m not God.”
“Mr. Thompson, did God ask you to take Corban Foley from his mother’s home?”
His wild eyes stilled momentarily and he said with conviction, “No.”
“Tell me what you did when you arrived at Ms. Perkins’s house.”
“We smashed the windows, and I cast forth the head of Satan’s minion.”
“Where did you cast it?”
“Into that she-devil’s lair. I threw the hat in there, too.”
“What happened then?”
“We drove away and I took more of the elixir of truth. Then God delivered a message unto me.”
“What was that message?” Jude prompted.
“I wrote it down.” He reached into his pants pocket and produced a grubby piece of paper folded into an origami swan.
Jude unfolded it and flattened it out on the table as best she could. The note said,
Admit yourself.
Hank Thompson stared down at it, apparently mystified. “Do you know what it means?”
Jude felt sad. What it meant was that her subject, once a successful builder and candidate for local office, as described by the deputy who’d briefed her earlier, was still in there somewhere. Lost. Trying to find a way back to his sanity.
She took one of the hands he could not keep still and said, “Hank?”
Something calmed once again in Thompson’s eyes, and for a split second Jude thought she glimpsed a rational being.
He said, “Heather calls me Hank, too.”
Jude smiled at him. “Listen, Hank. I think God wants you to go to a peaceful place where you can rest. I have a feeling that’s what the message means. If you like, one of the deputies can drive you to a place I know about. A hospital.”
Alarm jammed his expression. “Is Heather there?”
“No, but l can speak to her about visiting you.” Trying once more to reach the part of him that could still reason, she said, “Hank, please think carefully. Do you know where Tonya’s little boy is?”
He shook his head. “Want me to ask God?”
Why not give the troops something to snicker about when they reviewed the interview tape? “Knock yourself out,” she invited.
Thompson got down onto the floor and prayed in the
sudjood
position of a Muslim, his forehead on the floor. The deputy standing at the door mumbled something about domestic terrorists. Jude thought,
Not even close.
When their subject had communed with the Big Guy long enough, he scrambled back up and sat at the table once more.
“Well?” Jude asked.
“I need elixir.”
“God only answers your prayers when you’re drunk?”
Thompson gave her a look. “He said you’ll find him.”
“Did he say where?”
“God doesn’t answer for the Devil,” Thompson informed her snippily. “Make no mistake. This is Satan’s work.”
*
“Tell them to go away,” Tonya complained. Media vans and reporters waving big fluffy microphones had her sister’s place surrounded. She wished she’d never come here after the police sent her home, but she couldn’t afford a motel.
“Are you crazy?” Amberlee poured herself into her tightest black jeans, tucked in her white stretch lace top, and started trying on different pumps. “Everyone’s out there. Channel Nine News. Channel Four. CNN. MSNBC. No way are you hiding in here for the rest of the day. Get dressed.”
“What for? I’m not going out there.”
Amberlee fastened the ankle straps of the cherry red platforms she’d picked out. “You can blow this chance if you want, but I’m not that stupid.”