"Of course not."
"Oh, come on. Why don't you admit that when you aren't around death, you aren't whole? You aren't complete?"
His intelligence and the skill with which he manipulated the conversation surprised her.
"Did you have anything to do with the recent murders?" Her stomach knotted at the question.
His attitude suddenly changed. "Fuck you." He was through with the game.
She'd been in a lot of dangerous situations in the course of her career, and had prided herself on remaining unflappable. This was different. After joining the FBI, she'd become tough and hard and fearless. But returning to your past had a way of screwing things up. Had a way of poking holes in that new person until pretty soon you were leaking like a sieve.
The old Mary was sitting on the seat next to Gavin Hitchcock. The old frightened, weak, young, vulnerable Mary.
"I've heard enough of your bullshit." Without another word, he got out and walked away, his shoulders hunched in his saggy, brown corduroy jacket.
Gavin Hitchcock sat down on the bus stop bench. He'd missed the 6:50, thanks to the woman pulling away from the curb and disappearing down University. He usually drove to work, but he'd run out of gas money and had been forced to take public transportation. Everything was fucked.
Mary Cantrell. He remembered her from the trial. Remembered her white face, her big eyes. Sitting there stone-faced, describing everything so graphically that a juror puked and another one fainted. He'd always figured it was the passionless eloquence of her testimony that won the jury over and lost him all sympathy.
He'd been intrigued with her just now because she was Gillian's sister. Otherwise he wouldn't have bothered talking to her, and he certainly wouldn't have gotten in her car.
His bus finally showed up. It pulled to the curb, and he got on.
It wasn't crowded. It was just him, a few homeless people, and the crazy lady who worked the night shift at a nursing home preparing food for the next day. She never quit talking. Now she was engaged in a one-sided conversation with the bus driver, who'd driven the route long enough to know not to give her any encouragement by answering.
She finally gave up and moved to another seat, close to a homeless guy who was on his way to nowhere.
She was going on about the road construction, and how the buses were always behind, and how she had to leave home an hour early because yesterday she was late for work. Blah, blah, blah.
"Hey, lady," Gavin said, raising his voice to be heard above the shifting gears.
She looked at him, eyes alert and eager now that she had a participating audience.
"Why don't you shut the fuck up?"
She was instantly defensive. "Why don't you shut the fuck up?"
"Nobody wants to hear the shit that's pourin' from your mouth."
"I ain't got no shit in my mouth," she said, hands at her waist, head bobbing.
"Somebody should put you out of your misery."
She let out a short, one-syllable scream. Kind of like a single beep from a car alarm.
"What the hell's going on?" the driver asked, looking at Gavin in the rearview mirror.
"Oh, come on. Haven't you had the same thought? Listening to her blabbin' on and on and on. Haven't you at least wished she'd trip and hit her fucking head on the curb when she's getting off the bus? How 'bout you?" he asked, motioning to a man sitting huddled in the corner with a stack of old newspapers. "Haven't you wished somebody'd just make the bitch shut up?"
The little man shook his head.
The driver pulled to the side of the street. Gavin noted it wasn't a scheduled stop.
The doors opened. "Get out," the driver said.
"There you go, lady," Gavin said with satisfaction.
"I'm talking to you. Get out before I call the police."
The woman let out a high-pitched laugh and clapped her hands in a frenzy of excitement.
Gavin pushed himself up and lunged out the door.
He shouldn't have opened his mouth.
Another thought hit him: It would never have happened if the Cantrell woman hadn't antagonized him.
Behind him, the bus's hydraulics hissed as it pulled away.
His head was beginning to throb. He put a hand to his temple. He could feel the artery pulsing. With each pulse, his headache got worse.
Had to get home.
He staggered down the sidewalk, feeling the change coming, the darkness that would drag him down and smother him.
Keep going. Only a few more blocks. A few more steps.
He watched his boots slide across the cement, toes scraping, catching on cracks.
He could feel his muscles hardening. His penis became engorged, growing as huge as an arm, throwing him off balance.
Walk. Walk.
When he was little, his grandmother used to talk him out of his fits. She would distract him.
"Look at the pretty flowers. Look at the tree. See how the leaves are whispering? Telling you to breathe gently, telling you to breathe softly. Grandma's here. Grandma's here to catch you. Grandma's here."
His grandmother died when he was ten. Murdered in her own kitchen while two apple pies cooled in the window. Gavin had found her there, on the kitchen floor, her throat slit with a butcher knife. He'd tried to run, tried to turn and scream, but the blackness had come over him with the thickness and weight of a heavy blanket.
See the flowers. See the pretty flowers.
He was found unconscious, with blood on his hands, lying next to his dead grandmother.
Walk, walk.
It was coming. Coming fast.
His muscles began to contract, his penis shrank. He tried to run, but couldn't. There was his house. He could see it, just past the two-story brick apartment building.
Run, run, run.
I can't.
You can. You can do anything.
He moved faster. Crossing the last street, he fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a set of keys.
Keys to the Kingdom. Keys to the Kingdom.
Around back. Past the shed and the flower garden.
To the kitchen. He unlocked the door and fell inside.
Gavin came awake with a jolt. Disoriented, he finally realized he was lying in the dark on the kitchen floor. He dragged himself to a sitting position. His hair was soaked and plastered to his head, his clothes were drenched. He put a tentative finger to the corner of his mouth. Dried blood. He could feel his tongue, thick and swollen and sore.
In his confusion, his first thought was to call Gillian. But she'd told him not to call her again. When he was in prison, she wrote to him. She even came to see him. And when he got out, she was there waiting for him.
He thought she loved him. He thought she'd been waiting for him all that time. He thought he would go to her place, and they would live together, maybe even get married. But when he told her how much he loved her, she got weird, pushing him away.
"Gavin, no," she'd said as he clung to her, struggling to pull her close, struggling to kiss her. He could see unease in her eyes, and he suddenly felt like crying.
"I thought you loved me," he said.
"I do love you. But not that way. I love you as a friend."
Friend? Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. No, no, NO!
His future, the future he'd dreamed about all the years he'd been in prison, dissolved before his eyes.
A friend.
It was so hard. Hard to keep going. He just wanted it to end. He didn't want to get cancer or anything; he just wanted it to be like a pulled plug. Over. He just wanted it over.
He shoved himself to his feet and turned on the light. Opening the nearest cupboard, he pulled out a bottle of whiskey, unscrewed the cap, and took a long swallow. He spent the next several minutes drinking and leaning against the counter, waiting to stabilize. He wished to hell he had something better than alcohol, but he hadn't been out of jail long enough to make any drug connections.
He hadn't had any attacks in a long time. It had been so long that he'd quit taking medicine, but now he'd had two attacks in one week.
The visit from Gillian's sister had brought on this second one. That was obvious.
Finally steady enough to walk, he made his way down the hall to the bathroom, where he took a piss.
The house had belonged to an old lady who'd spent the last ten years bedridden. The place had been so run-down and had smelled so bad that nobody wanted to rent it. An ex-con and convicted murderer didn't have much chance of finding a place to live or getting a job, but Gillian knew some people, and she'd helped him.
The place still looked like an old-lady house—with floral wallpaper and shit. Some of her clothes were still hanging in the closet. Jars of canned food lined the basement shelves. He'd originally planned to give the place a coat of paint, but he didn't give a shit anymore. He'd managed to hang some of his black-and-white photos before deep depression had washed over him. He had more photos. Lots more . . .
He didn't have much furniture—he kept his clothes in cardboard boxes under a bed that was shoved into the corner of the room. Bad feng shui, he sometimes mockingly told himself, but what the hell? The house and everything about it was a reflection of his soul.
In the living room, he pushed around some open boxes until he came to the one with pictures of apples on it. He dug down past phone books and porn magazines until he found the bundle of envelopes—letters from Gillian.
He took them into the kitchen. He pulled out a plastic lighter.
One by one, he held up the envelopes and let the fire lick one corner until the paper burst into flame. He dropped them in the sink where they curled and burned, continuing until there was nothing left but a pile of ashes.
Love, Gillian.
Gillian. She was the perfect woman. He was afraid he'd never find anyone as perfect as her again.
Chapter 6
Gillian stood in the observation room of the Minneapolis Police Station. Beside her was a student intern named Ben Collins. From the second Ben had stepped into the BCA building for his first day on the job, the poor kid had been labeled a lost cause.
His hair was dyed jet black and combed down over his forehead. His fingernails were usually painted purple. If he'd gone to see a band the night before, he could almost always be counted on to have remnants of eyeliner lingering between his lashes. But it wasn't his unconventional looks that made people reluctant to work with him. He talked. All the time. And not about anything remotely related to what was going on. Three people had taken him for a test drive, and none of them had been able to stand him for more than a day. They were getting ready to kick him out of the intern program when Gillian stepped in and offered to be his mentor. She thought he was a nice kid. He just needed to learn to curb his impulsiveness and stay focused.
Less than twenty-four hours after the third victim had been found near Lake Harriet, Gillian and Ben were sent out to interview suspects. The most recent victim had been identified, and when they flashed her photo, a housemate of one of the suspects recalled seeing her at their place a couple of times.
The suspect's name was Sebastian Tate, and his rap sheet was two pages long. At twenty-eight, he had a record of assault and battery, plus two rape charges. Somehow he'd never served time.
So now she and Ben stood in front of one-way glass as Tate was led into the interview room by Detective Wakefield. The door clicked closed, and Tate glanced around, then immediately walked to the window. He rapped his knuckles against it. "Anybody in there?" He put his face two inches from the surface.
"This is so cool," Ben whispered. "Just like The Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould playing Philip Marlowe. Ever see that movie?"
Actually she had, but didn't want to encourage Ben's chatty conversation. Once he got going on a movie, he didn't stop. "I'm not sure."
Tate began making faces.
Ben let out a loud snort. "If you saw it, you'd remember. Elliot Gould is the coolest. He gets called in, and he's fingerprinted; then he starts wiping the ink on his face while he's lookin' through the one-way glass. It's so cool. You should rent it. They have it at Intercontinental Video. They have everything at Intercontinental."
"I'll have to look for it sometime," Gillian said dryly. There were only two years between them, but sometimes she felt like his mother.
Detective Wakefield finally got Tate corralled so they were sitting across from each other at the long, narrow table.
"What is your full name?"
Tate turned to the glass and smiled. "Sebastian Griffin Tate."
"How old are you?" Wakefield continued.
"Why don't you just invite them in?" Tate asked, obviously enjoying his stardom. "Whoever's behind the glass."
Wakefield lifted his eyebrows and looked in the direction of Gillian and Ben. What do you think?