I quit.
Maybe he’ll sign on with the TBI, the FBI, the FYI—for your information, Monique, nobody jerks me around like this.
I quit.
Then why are you sending Sykes on a mission in the middle of the night? another part of his brain asks him. A minor technicality. Just because he quits Lamont doesn’t mean he’ll quit the Vivian Finlay case. It’s personal now. Some man in scarlet screws with him, insults him, and it gets personal. Win drives through an intersection, barely slows at the stop sign, turns left near the fire station, onto the narrow street where Lamont lives on a sliver of an acre in a nineteenth-century pale plum house, a Queen Anne Painted Lady, showy and intricate and formidable, like its owner. Her property is dense with crepe myrtles, oaks and birch trees, and the dark shapes of them rock in the wind and water drips from branches and leaves.
He parks in front, turns off his headlights, cuts the engine. The front porch light isn’t on, no lights along the property are on, and only one window is lit up, the one on the second floor to the left of the front door, and he has one of his feelings. Her Range Rover is in the cobbled driveway, and his feeling intensifies. If she’s not home, somebody picked her up. Well, big deal. She could have anybody she wants, so her date du jour picked her up, maybe took her to his place, big deal, but the feeling persists. If her date du jour is inside the house with her, where’s his car? Win tries her home phone and gets voicemail. He tries her cell phone and she doesn’t answer. He tries it a second time. She doesn’t answer.
Some man in a red scarf sending him on a wild-goose chase, making a fool of him, threatening him, taunting him. Who? Win worries about what’s going to appear in the news. Maybe Lamont’s idiotic press release is screaming through cyberspace, landing all over the Internet. Maybe that’s how the man in the red scarf found out about At Risk, about Win, but it doesn’t make sense. As far as he knows, Vivian Finlay wasn’t from New England, so why is some man in New England interested enough in her case to go to all the trouble to call Win, set up a phony meeting, and taunt him?
He continues staring at Lamont’s house, at her densely wooded property, looking up and down the street — for what, he doesn’t know. For anything. He grabs the flashlight and gets out of his grandmother’s prehistoric-looking car, keeping up his scan, listening. Something doesn’t feel right, feels worse than not right. Maybe he’s just rattled, expecting something not to feel right, getting spooked the way he did as a boy when he started imagining monsters, bad people, bad things, death, having premonitions because it’s in his blood, as his grandmother so often declared. He has no gun. He follows the brick walk to the front porch, climbs the steps, looking, listening, deciding that what he’s really uneasy about is Lamont.
She won’t be nice about this. If she’s with someone, she’ll have Win’s head. He starts to ring the bell, looks up at the same time a shadow moves past the curtained, lighted window directly overhead. He stares up, waiting. He shines the flashlight at the brass mailbox to the left of the front door, lifts the lid. She didn’t pick up her mail when she came in, and he remembers what she said about a key box. He doesn’t see anything like that.
Water drips in big, cool drops from leaves and smacks the top of his head as he goes around to the back of the house, where it is thickly wooded and very dark, where he finds the key box open, the key still in the lock, the door ajar. He hesitates, looks around, listening to water dripping, shining the flashlight in the trees, the shrubbery, directing the beam back to something dark red between two boxwoods, a gas can with rags on top of it, wet from the rain but clean. His pulse picks up, begins to race as he silently steps into the kitchen, hears Lamont’s voice, then a male voice, an angry male voice, on the second floor, the room with the lighted window above the front door.
He moves fast up wooden stairs that creak, three stairs at a time, cuts across a hallway that creaks. Through an open doorway he sees her on the bed, nude, tied to the bedposts, a man in jeans, a T-shirt, sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking her with a pistol.
“Say it, I’m a whore.”
“I’m a whore,” she repeats in a shaky voice. “Please don’t do this.”
Left of the bed is the window, the drapes drawn. Her clothes are strewn on the floor, the same suit she had on hours earlier at dinner.
“I’m nothing but a filthy whore. Say it!”
Overhead is a large art glass chandelier with painted flowers — blue, red, green — and Win hurls the flashlight and it crashes into the chandelier and it shatters and sways and the man jumps up from the bed, whips around, and then Win has him by the wrist, struggling to get the pistol away from him, the man’s breath in his face, reeking of garlic, and the gun fires into the ceiling, just missing Win’s head.
“Drop it! Drop it!”
His voice sounds muffled and distant in his ringing ears as he struggles, and the pistol fires again and again and the man’s grip suddenly goes limp. Win grabs hold of the gun, shoves him hard and he collapses to the floor, blood flowing out of his head, pooling on the hardwood, quiet on the floor next to the bed, bleeding, not moving, a young, Hispanic-looking man, maybe in his teens.
Win yanks a comforter over Lamont, frees her from the electrical cords lashing her to the bedposts as he repeatedly says, “It’s all right. You’re safe now. It’s all right.” He calls 911 on his cell phone and she sits up, pulling the comforter around her, gasping for breath, shaking violently, eyes wild.
“Oh God,” she says. “Oh God!” she screams.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, you’re safe now,” he says, standing over her, looking around, watching the man on the floor, blood and bloody shards of colorful art glass everywhere.
“Is he the only one?” Win yells at Lamont as his heart pounds and his eyes dart around, his ears ringing, the pistol ready. “Is there anybody else?” he shouts.
She shakes her head, her breathing rapid and shallow, her face blanched, her eyes glazed, about to pass out.
“Deep, slow breaths, Monique.” Win takes off his suit jacket, places it in her hands, helps her hold it up to her face. “It’s all right. Breathe into it like it’s a paper bag. That’s good. Good. Deep, slow breaths. No one’s going to hurt you now.”
5
Monique Lamont wears a hospital gown inside an examination room at Mount Auburn Hospital, but a few blocks from where she lives.
It is a nondescript room, white, with an examination table, the kind with stirrups, and a counter, a sink, a cabinet filled with medical supplies, swabs and specula, a surgical lamp. Moments earlier, a forensic nurse was alone in the room with Lamont, examining the powerful district attorney’s orifices and other very private areas of her body, swabbing for saliva and seminal fluid, plucking hairs, getting fingernail scrapings, looking for injuries, taking photographs, gathering whatever might be potential evidence. Lamont is holding up amazingly well, maybe bizarrely well, playing the role of herself, working her own case.
She sits in a white plastic chair next to the white paper-covered table, Win on a stool across from her, another investigator with the Massachusetts State Police, Sammy, standing near the shut door. She had the option of being interviewed in more civilized surroundings, her home, for example, but refused, made the rather chillingly clinical observation that it was best to compartmentalize, keep related conversations and activities to the confined spaces where they belong. Translated: Win seriously doubts she’ll ever sleep in her bedroom again. He won’t be surprised if she sells her house.