And he was there because Joe had all but moved the earth to get him there, seeing qualities in the man Gail had never glimpsed. The fact that he was also Sammie Martens's boyfriend-which to Gail ranked among the craziest of notions-did make, she conceded, for a typically human contrariness she couldn't help but applaud.
She was still staring at Willy's desk when Sam's voice asked from behind her, "You okay?"
She turned and sat on the edge of Joe's desk. "No," she admitted. "I just came from Laurie Davis's apartment. There was a strange man there."
Sam stared at her blankly for a moment. "Right," she finally said, "the shooting from last night. Sorry. It's not our case, so I guess I zoned out. What were you doing there?"
"She's my niece."
Sam's brows furrowed. "Ouch. Too bad."
Gail stared at her. No "I'm sorry to hear it" or "Gee, tough break." That was it: "Too bad." It was the kind of reaction Gail imagined Sam had worked long and hard to make instinctive-a tough guy's response. One of the boys.
And yet she knew Sam wasn't one of the boys. Through her own observations and from what Joe had told her, Gail saw Sammie Martens as very much a self-made woman: From a lousy childhood, to some tough military training where she'd volunteered and succeeded at everything she'd tried, to a street cop who'd made detective in record time, and now to the VBI, she'd made it a point to make sure no one regretted passing her up the ladder.
And, of course, she'd paid the price.
Gail knew Sam wasn't as hard-bitten as she pretended. She knew about the string of loser boyfriends, the loft she called home that was full of exercise equipment and cop training manuals. She also knew there were times when Sam came to Joe for comfort and solace, responding to what Gail suspected was a commingling of father image and hero worship.
But just as Gail could see Sam in the almost dreary, black and white light she'd chosen for herself, she could also see the younger woman in more complex terms-as someone almost to envy on one level and to pity on another. In limbo. And painfully aware of it.
"Did the man do anything to you?"
Gail blinked at the question, still lost in her musings. "No. It was all implied-the way he looked at me, the way he stood too close just before he left."
"You get a name?"
Gail again thought of Sam's lack of spontaneous warmth. Not "How horrible" or "I hate it when they do that."
She shook her head instead of answering.
"But you knew he wasn't supposed to be there."
It wasn't a question, nor was it an accusation. It merely hovered between the two, challenging Gail to go into more detail. She began wondering if this conversation was such a great idea, coming straight on the heels of an encounter that had stirred a repressed nightmare. She worried she was reading too much into everything now.
She looked at Sam a little haplessly. "I know it sounds stupid. I hadn't seen my niece in a long time. But to find out she's been shot, is an addict, lives in poverty, and tried to rob a place at knifepoint. It's a little much, I guess. I suppose you're right. The guy was probably just someone living down the hallway." She laughed uncertainly "Came by to borrow a cup of sugar, right?"
Sam's professionally neutral expression changed. She shook her head slightly, as if confused, and then motioned to the guest chair between the two desks. "Have a seat, Gail. I didn't say this guy was legit. I wanted to know if we could nail him with anything. What did he look like?"
Gail took the chair and gave the best description she could, feeling a resurgence of the fears that had gripped her at the time. As she recited his features and Sam took notes, Gail became sensitive to an odd but familiar mix of emotions building within her, not the least of which were anger and resentment that she'd been put in this position once again.
She'd almost lost her bearings at the time of her rape, her brain twisting away from her bruised body, her mind going on journeys of its own, far from her friends and the events unfolding around her. She'd worked goddamned hard to get it all back and to rebuild a life loosely based on what had predated it.
As she spoke to Sam, she saw not only the man she'd just met-and the ghost he represented-but the circumstances that had led her to him: her niece, what she must have gone through before trying to rob that store, the fact that she'd had no one to turn to, as Gail had had in her time of need.
By the end of her recitation, after Sam had said, "I'll get this downstairs to the boys in blue. They'll probably know this jerk right off. We'll get him for you," Gail found she was barely listening.
She got to her feet. Despite Sam's reassurances, Gail now felt remote from this conversation. The news of Laurie being shot, Joe's fatalism about it, the man at the apartment, the very details she'd cataloged entering this office, had all intertwined to cut her loose from the logical, reasonable world she usually inhabited with ease and comfort. With Sam's words barely an echo in her ears, she moved toward the exit feeling alone and distracted, in dire need of a course of action.
And utterly responsible for doing something on Laurie's behalf.
Chapter 5
Joe Gunther sat on the windowsill and hitched a leg up, wedging his foot against one frame and his back against the other. The VBI office was on the second floor of Brattleboro's old Municipal Building, once a high school and built in the 1800s. It looked pretty ugly from the outside, had lousy heating and cooling, was poorly laid out and crammed with people, but its windows were huge, could be opened, as this one was now, aqnd had really comfortable sills for taking in the summer sun.
It was late in the afternoon. There was a unit meeting planned for half an hour from now, but for the moment, the office was empty. Joe knew that Sammie Martens was downstairs consulting with the PD and would be back momentarily, but that didn't diminish his pleasure at having the place to himself, even if briefly.
Joe was a loner by instinct. Married once as a young man, widowed not too many years afterward, and left without children, he'd gone through a long period getting used to a life alone before meeting Gail at a political function. At the time-and often to this day-people thought them an odd match. He an old-fashioned, lifelong cop, born on a farm some sixty miles farther north up the Connecticut River, and she a New York-born, hypereducated rich liberal. But they had their common ground. Both were independent, hardworking, committed to their jobs or causes, and armed with a strong sense of right and wrong.
And both seemed to need as much time apart as time together.
He'd wondered about this once, even fretted a little in the early days, thinking of the unlikeliness that two halves of a couple could actually share this particular trait for more than a few months. But he didn't worry about it anymore. They'd gone through so much by now, including living together briefly following her rape, that they'd found a comfortable niche they could share, despite it being both unconventional and perhaps inexplicable even to themselves. All that counted was that it worked.