Peter stepped aside. Jo stalked past him, then turned and waited for Becca. Emily shook her head at Peter and followed Jo. Becca took Peter’s arm and walked with him, ignoring his surprise and discomfort. She knew this kid. She had worked with him a hundred times in entry-level positions.
“Peter, the work you’ve chosen to do. It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.” She gave the kid’s arm a friendly squeeze. “You’ve got to learn to pace yourself. I can see how passionate you are about your job, but your kind of passion burns us out. If you don’t learn to take care of yourself, you’ll flame out and be gone from this work in two years. That’s a promise.”
“Okay,” the kid whispered. He looked a little dazed.
“Good luck.” Becca squeezed Peter’s arm again, fond of him because of his genuine zeal and devotion. Equally sure he’d be gone in two years. She released him and summoned all her energies to meet a murderer.
John William Voakes was her nightmare of what Rachel might become — skeletally thin, weak to the point of infirmity. Shriveled and trembling, he sat crab-like in the cushioned wheelchair, his bony hips not filling the width of the seat. His balding, freckled head was lolling to one side, and Becca couldn’t see his face. From a remote corner of her mind, she could empathize briefly with Peter’s protectiveness toward his fragile client. She and Jo, Peter, and Emily, stood in a small circle around the chair.
“John, you’ve been expecting this visit.” Emily’s tone was oddly flat, devoid of sympathy, and she darted Becca and Jo a look of warning. “I know you’re ill, but you’re much more alert than you’re pretending to be.”
And John William Voakes rose smoothly from the chair, his head bobbing up, strength suffusing his thin limbs, and Becca took a ragged step back. His short, stumpy form stood erect easily, and his rheumy eyes lit up when he saw Becca. A snapshot of his merry, smiling face went off in her mind, and she knew she would carry the image the rest of her life.
Jo moved swiftly between them, just a small step, but one that placed her squarely between Becca and Voakes, and Becca lowered her head and released a small gasp of relief.
“If you feel you’ve delivered enough shock value, John, I’ll ask you to sit down.”
Emily didn’t raise her voice, and Becca trusted Voakes wasn’t doing anything too alarming. She imagined him and Jo Call locking eyes, and was glad she couldn’t see it. Then she decided she had to see it. She moved from behind Jo and regarded the man fully.
John William Voakes was indeed studying Jo avidly, his head cocked to one side. And inevitably, Becca was reminded of the banality of evil. She had looked into the faces of fathers who tried to smother their infants because they cried at night, and most of them held this same bizarre, discordant look of normality.
Apparently, his little surprise had cost him. Voakes was weaving on his feet now, and the color was draining from his face. Jo’s silent immobility, her flat gaze, might have prompted this weakening, but he was obviously a sick man. He looked at Becca again.
The lower lids of Voakes’s colorless eyes were rimmed in moist red. He held out his hand to Becca, and his voice was gentle and wetly sibilant. “Hello, Clarice.”
Becca stared at him, ignoring his hand, and he lowered it to his side.
“I’m sorry, Miss Healy.” Voakes smiled again. Typical of Western State long-timers, his dental care had been lacking. “I’ve wanted to greet you with that for years.”
“John, I told you to sit down. Now,” Emily said. “It wasn’t a suggestion.”
Peter started as if nudged awake and brought the wheelchair around behind Voakes. He had to touch the back of its pedals against Voakes’s legs gently before he broke his gaze from Becca’s and settled stiffly into the chair. She could smell him from where she stood, a mixture of fresh earth and rank sweat and illness.
“Let’s do this back in your room.” Emily’s voice hadn’t warmed. “It’s past time for your afternoon meds. Peter?”
The big kid pushed the wheelchair slowly away from the garden, allowing some distance to grow between them. He leaned down and murmured something to Voakes, who nodded limply, his fatigue authentic now.
“We had one of our units outfitted for hospice services.” Emily walked with them, her sandals clocking slowly on the cement walk. “There’s room for a hospital bed, IV stands, and the chair. Nurses from the hospice at Swedish Hospital visit morning and night to keep him comfortable.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Jo might be asking for an estimate on a plumbing repair.
“Colon cancer, widely spread. He’s on palliative care. No further treatment is possible, so they’re just keeping him free of pain.”
“That’s kind of them.” Jo waited while Peter inserted a keycard to unlock a private cottage at the edge of the walk. “He’s being kept separate from your other residents?”
“They avoid him. He’s hardly an escape risk, but we never leave him unattended. Let’s let Peter get him settled.” Emily stopped them outside the door of a spacious bedroom. They watched as Peter parked the wheelchair beside the white bed and helped Voakes into it. He moved with the wincing hesitance of an elderly man with a terrible disease.
“So basically, he was brought here to die,” Jo said.
“He was allowed to come here because he’s dying. As a young man, John used to make his living as a gardener. He filed a plea to spend his remaining time here, tilling vegetables that will go to area food banks.”
“Giving back to the community,” Jo said dryly.
Emily shrugged. “It’s a matter of months. Maybe weeks.”
Becca was fixed on Voakes, and she started a little at Emily’s touch on her arm.
“Are you all right with this? It’s got to be hard for you.”
“I’m fine. Thanks, Emily.” Becca meant it, on both counts. They entered the bedroom, which smelled sharply of disinfectant.
“So this is supposed to be fifteen minutes.” Peter sounded brash, perhaps to atone for his earlier face-off with Jo. He handed Voakes a small paper cup and a plastic beaker with a straw, and waited until he downed the pills with two painful swallows. “That’s all he’s got in him, once these meds knock him out. You still okay with this, John?”
Peter seemed to hope for some denial, but Voakes nodded weakly, sinking back against the stiff pillow. Peter raised the railing on the bed and elevated its front so Voakes sat erect. No effort was made to supply chairs for them, but Becca would rather stand. In addition to the disinfectant, the room was filling with the odor of a sweaty, dying old murderer. She felt Emily’s gaze on her and realized the floor was hers.
“I want to ask you about the summer of nineteen seventy-eight.” Becca was relieved. Her voice was steady, and she could feel Jo’s solid presence behind her. “You were living in Seattle at that time, right?”
“Yes.” Voakes eyes were closed, his stubbled face gray and slack.
Becca knew of no delicate way to phrase this, and delicacy wasn’t called for. “I want to know if you shot two people in a home on Capitol Hill, in June of nineteen seventy-eight. Three years before the deaths of the Walmac family.”
“You might have me mixed up with James Anthony Williams.” Voakes’s voice was thready, but it had lost the wet, lisping tone. “Don’t worry about it. It happens all the time.”
“What?”
“James Anthony Williams. Gary Leon Ridgway. Westley Allan Dodd.” Voakes thumbed spittle from the corners of his mouth. “The multi-murderous in this part of the country seem to go by more than our fair share of names, don’t we?”