I saw her car first, cloaked peacefully in snow, parked before the old wooden home of mutual friends who were out of town for a few weeks. Windows were glowing along the first floor, the porch light reflecting off the knifelike shards from the front door’s shattered right sidelight, the one nearest the dead bolt.
I was out of the car before I knew what I was doing, and stopped halfway to the house, torn between impulse and training-the latter telling me to go next door, to find a phone, to get backup… and to run the risk that in that time, Gail would be made a victim all over again-this time, perhaps, of murder. I continued up the steps.
The doorknob turned noiselessly in my hand, and I quietly stepped inside, avoiding the broken glass to my right. Snowy footsteps, barely melting and broadly spaced as if from someone running, led toward the rear of the building, to beyond the closed kitchen door. Standing still and silent, I could hear the murmur of tense, angry voices.
I pulled my gun from its holster and gently went down the hall, constrained by the knowledge that this was the only access to the kitchen from the front of the house. At the thick wooden door, while the two voices were still too muffled to understand, I could tell Duncan’s was closer than Gail’s, giving me hope that I might be able to come up behind him.
It wasn’t much, but it didn’t matter in any case. A sudden shout by Gail ended the debate and sent me flying through the door in a low crouch.
What I saw was later etched in my memory as a portrait of matched opponents: Phil Duncan, still in his overcoat dusted with snow, holding a knife, his face set with almost demonic determination, and Gail, in jeans and a turtleneck, armed with a carving knife, facing him with equal aggression. Both stood like combatants, a small table between them, highlighted like prizefighters by the harsh fluorescent panels overhead.
That portrait, however, lasted only a split second. Carried by the momentum of my entrance, I overcompensated, bringing my gun around to bear on Duncan and staggered against one of the kitchen chairs.
It was all he needed to drop low and throw his weight against the table, sending one corner of it into the pit of my stomach.
The pain seemed to lift me up like an explosion, blinding me, deafening me, sending my mind reeling back to a dark, dank tunnel far underground. Now as then, I couldn’t feel the floor as it came up to catch me, nor could I operate the gun in my hand. I could only watch as Duncan moved to my side, as swift as a cat, and see Gail, who turned and ran to the far side of the room, disappearing from my line of view behind the upended chair now before me.
One foot on my gun hand, the blade of his knife held just under my eye, slanted toward my brain, Duncan pushed the chair aside to reveal Gail standing by the back door, near a row of hanging coats, Mary Wallis’s pistol in her hand.
Fighting to overcome the white-hot pain from my reopened stomach, I heard him address her in a careless, mocking voice. “Drop it, or the knife goes in.”
Gail shifted slightly, setting her feet better, bringing her other hand up to clasp the gun in a classic shooter’s stance. Despite the anxiety on her face, the pistol didn’t waver.
“He either dies for your dubious virtue, or I let him live to see you get one last good fuck-right here, on the floor. What do you say?”
Arrogant to the end, he slowly reached for the pistol near my immobilized hand.
“I don’t think so.”
The shot exploded off the walls, instantly matched by Duncan’s high-pitched, hysterical scream, filled with agony and outrage. The knife vanished from my cheek as he was spun away from me by the force of the bullet smacking his kneecap, its blood splattering us both.
He rolled on the floor near the corner, both hands trying to contain the devastating damage, covered with blood and splinters of bone. He screamed, over and over, his pale face contorted. “You bitch. You fucking bitch. You think this is going to end it?”
“I hope not,” she finally answered, “it’s your turn to suffer now.” And she reached for the phone.
25
Nurse Elizabeth Pace came into the hospital room, and seeing Gail sitting next to my bed, she checked the catheter in my forearm, closed off the line, and replaced the near-empty bag with a new one. “I heard tell you were unkillable, Lieutenant. You’re not trying to test that theory, are you?”
I smiled weakly. “Not willingly.”
She filled out something on a clipboard and then fixed us both with a clinical eye. “Good, because you almost flunked this time.” She reached over and squeezed Gail’s hand. “How about you? Over the worst of it?”
Gail nodded. “Getting there. Thank you.”
Pace nodded, smiled, and left us alone.
It was more than a week later-my first day out of ICU. Philip Duncan, crippled and in another part of the same hospital, had confessed to the rape, basking in his cleverness. We’d already located a court clerk in Greenfield who remembered him spending hours going over the public records there, exhibiting a keen interest in Bob Vogel-a man whose style he could copy, and whose fate he could seal. And now that we knew who to look for, we’d found other evidence of Duncan’s stalking of Vogel-a sighting of him near the yard man’s garage at the time of the fire; a screwdriver in the trunk of his car, smeared with the same motor oil Vogel used; a receipt for malleable molding wax. Still, a confession never hurts.
Of course, Duncan’s plan had called for Vogel to wind up back in prison, and when our case had begun to unravel, so had Duncan’s debatable grasp on reality. By the time Sammie Martens had provoked him in his home, the cold-blooded ruthlessness that had served him so well turned on itself and had sent him raging into the storm.
Goss had been right about the rapist’s penchant for collecting. When Tyler had led a team into Duncan’s house, they had found not coins or stamps or Early American milk bottles, but keys. Over the years, greatly aided by a profession which gave him access to hundreds of houses and dozens of other realtors, Duncan had copied, labeled, and collected keys. At night, recreationally, as some men go to bars or the movies, he would enter other people’s homes-usually those belonging to single women. What he did there still wasn’t clear; Megan suspected that he probably masturbated or walked around the places naked, establishing a bizarre, private ascendancy over the owners. But Duncan himself wasn’t talking about that yet. What mattered to us was that one of those keys had Gail’s name on it.
All of which made Stanley Katz a very happy editor. With the furor following Duncan’s arrest dying down, most of the out-of-town media had headed home. Tony Brandt had made a point of giving Katz everything he could on the case, and making the Reformer the news conduit to the rest of the world-or that part of it which still showed any interest. The effects of this on the Reformer’s future were yet to come, but in the meantime, press/police relations had never been cozier.
Things had not turned out as successfully for James Dunn. On the second Tuesday of a snow-free, balmy November, with the season’s first storm a mere freak of nature for future almanacs, Jack Derby had been elected the new State’s Attorney for Windham County by a considerable margin.
Gail had also made political news. She’d resigned from the board of selectmen and announced her intention to return to law school, resuming an educational path she’d interrupted twenty-five years ago to “drop out” and move to Brattleboro.
She’d been detailing her plans when Elizabeth Pace had come in to check on me. “There’s something else,” she added, once we were alone. “I think I’ll sell the house.”
It didn’t come as a surprise. Her persistent reluctance to do more than drop by and pick up the odd item or two had warned me of that. But it still caused a cool tremor to run through me. Combined with her school plans, the sale of her home didn’t bode well for her staying in the area.