“ It'd take a guy who really knew what he was doing to hit the mark twice,” he replied. “Now, what about thrice?” His eyes lit up with the cooler he held to her eyes. “My damnable vacation into prairie hell best not have been for nothing.”
“ You've got to be bushed, John. Hell, it's almost nine and you've gone through an exhumation, an autopsy and what must've been the longest flight in history from Illinois to here-”
“ Three stopovers, and when the military says stopover, you get a real stopover! But I won't rest until I know. You go on. I'll just see what this tells us.”
“ You sure?”
“ Determined is the operative word.”
She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Makes it all worthwhile, and my life complete,” he said.
This made her laugh. “Good night, and keep all this under lock and key.”
“ Now who's paranoid?”
“ Better safe than sorry's all.” She left for her office, leaving J.T. to finish up. One match was nice, but the findings could be refuted if interpreted wrongly by others, a thing that happened more often than not in forensic science. But two, if J.T. could pull it off, would be unassailable. They could then begin to search for the kind of awful weapon that the killer had used. The investigators could then see the hacksaw for what it was.
In her office she hung up her lab coat, looked about her desk, wondering if there were any reports she needed to take home with her. She lifted a couple of files she'd been meaning to rummage through, some early work on the Tort 9 killer type. She wanted to see what research had been done. It was indeed scant from the size of the files.
Suddenly, there was someone at her door. She saw the shadow cross her desk, and she was startled when she looked up to find Boutine leaning against the dooijamb, looking shaken, his clothes looking as if slept in, his hair wild, the normally focused eyes unable to look at her.
“ Otto? Are you all right? I've been trying to reach you and-”
“ It's Marilyn… my wife…”
She came to him, her breath coming in short gasps. “She… she's gone, isn't she?”
“ Odd how it happened,” he croaked. “She… she came out of her coma, just briefly… asking for me. When they got hold of me, I raced to Bethesda. Got there and she was gone back into coma. I stayed and stayed, trying to bring her back around, and for a brief moment, I felt her hand squeezing mine. Doctors said it was just a convulsion, a spasm, but I knew it was… was more than that… and then she just… just left… went… flatline.”
She took him into her arms, holding him. Over her shoulder, he said, “Hospital staff was busy, and for a time no one noticed the flatline, no one but me, of course. I… I sensed she wanted to go… had to go. I didn't call for anyone. I just let her go.”
His frame rumbled with pent-up tears. She held onto him. After a while, she suggested, “You shouldn't be alone tonight, Otto. Why don't you come home with me?”
He pulled away from her. He never looked confused or out of control. It was difficult for her to believe this was the same man, and yet the depth of his feeling for his wife touched her. “Come on… to hell with appearances,” she ordered him.
“ I don't want to impose on you any longer.”
“ Then why'd you come to me?”
He could say nothing.
“ Impose. That's what friends are for, especially at times like this.”
He allowed her to lead him away.
# # #
Otto was weak with exhaustion and grief. She led him through doors, into the elevator and into her place as if guiding the blind. It wasn't the Otto Boutine she had always known. Once at her place, after he went through a halfhearted walk-through of the apartment, commenting on how it was both warm and bright all at once, he quickly found the sofa, and for the rest of the evening would remain there.
Jessica broke out a bottle of wine and they drank it and nibbled at cheese and crackers until the wine was gone and he asked if she hadn't something stronger. She returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Scotch, to which he approved, asking for it on ice, neat.
“ What about something to eat?” she asked.
“ The Scotch'11 do.”
“ I'm going to fix myself something. Are you sure-”
“ No, nothing… I couldn't eat.”
So she settled down with him there, not eating either. He began to talk about Marilyn, about her enthusiasm for her work. She had been a civil case trial lawyer. They had met when he was on a case that took him to California. Her family was in San Diego, some of them flying to Virginia now for the wake and the funeral. As for him, it was true what she had heard-that he was without family. He'd been orphaned at the age of eighteen. Afterward he'd done a stint in the army, where he'd learned self-discipline. He had finally chosen police work at a very early age. He had come up through the system and had made of his life what it was now.
“ Took me away from Marilyn a lot,” he said flatly. “We'd be at a wedding, a party, some other thing-once our own anniversary-and I'd be called away. She was hurt. As understanding as she was, she was hurt.”
“ Otto, people like us, we're on call twenty-four hours a day. That's just the way it is. Don't beat up on yourself.”
“ Just… there was just so much I wanted to say to her,” he said, the usual timbre of his voice cracking.
She went to him, her arms inviting him into her, and he buried his head in her breasts. They held, swaying in silence for some time that way.
“ You've got to get some rest,” she told him. “And so do I.”
She got up, located some pillows and a blanket and brought these to him. She turned down the lights and the soft sound of a Strauss waltz she'd earlier placed on the CD player. She removed his shoes and made him lie down beneath the covers, his head on the pillows.
But he kept talking as if he could not stop. He told her about how he had met Marilyn, about trips they had taken together and things they had shared, from horseback riding and tennis to favorite books.
“ We once went snorkeling in the Florida Keys for a week. What a place… what a time.”
“ Otto, we all feel guilty when we lose someone. We all wonder if we said 'I love you' often enough or with enough conviction and feeling. We all regret some things we've said, done-”
“ What if I did the wrong thing?” he asked point-blank. “Maybe… maybe I should have raced down the damned hall and screamed for help, and maybe-maybe-”
“ No, Otto. You did what you felt was best for her. You didn't do anything wrong in letting her go in peace and with dignity. You know that as well as I.”
“ Do I? Christ, Jess, the night before I… I had a dream about… about you, and about me.”
“ Otto, that's not-”
“ And before that, in Wekosha-”
' 'That has nothing to do with your feelings for Marilyn, or what you did, Otto. What you did, you did out of love and tenderness.”
He began to tell her more about his daily routine with Marilyn, and how he had come to miss that so much since the incident that first took her from him. Since then his life was a misery, a living medical hell of hospital waiting rooms and bills and a growing hopelessness like a cancer that had begun to overtake him and overwhelm him.
And in the meantime, he had to present himself as Otto Boutine to the rest of the world, as a man without a soft millimeter of flesh. “And now I'm reduced to what you see before you,” he said apologetically.
“ I see a kind and a gentle and a tender and a caring man,” she replied, “and that is all I see.”
She kissed him and she thanked him.
“ For what?”
“ For being a good man.”
He started to protest, but she pressed her fingers to his lips. “Sleep now, rest.”
He closed his eyes and she silently left him and retreated to her bedroom, where she slipped into a nightgown and robe. From there she made her way to the bath and warmed the shower water before stepping in. Under the gentle, pulsating water she felt herself melting, the nerves loosening their tight grip on her. The warm water, growing hotter and hotter as she turned up the tap, relaxed her almost to the point of sleep.