I had no idea of the time when I crept into our bedroom. My head hurt, my brain was in a fog, and my body felt numb. Conyer had been shipped up to Burlington for autopsy, a preliminary post-shoot investigation had been conducted by the state police, the state’s attorney’s office had been notified, and Jack Derby himself had showed up to be briefed. So far, everyone was calling it righteous, which did little for the soul.
Gail stirred as I tried to remove my clothes quietly in the dark.
“Joe?”
“Yeah. It’s okay. Go back to sleep.”
“What’ve you been doing?”
“A little late-night workout with the boys.”
She reached out, turned on the light by her side of the bed, and squinted across the room at me. “What’s that mean?”
I was sitting on the edge of a chair with one shoe in my hand. I didn’t want to have this conversation. Enough had been said tonight already. I needed to think quietly, if not sleep, and put the image of Conyer collapsing in on himself into that mental cupboard where I kept all its brethren.
“There was a shooting and a long post-shoot. Everyone’s fine, though, except the bad guy.”
The squint faded as her eyes adjusted to the light. “You don’t look so fine. And what’s with the ‘little late-night workout’? You hate that John Wayne crap.”
I stared at her for a long moment, struggling to sort out my reactions. Her initial show of concern was so at odds with this last comment, I wasn’t sure where to start.
“Sorry,” I said lamely.
“Who was killed?” she then asked.
I sat back, dropped the shoe, and rubbed my eyes, feeling the echoes of question after question lapping against my head like waves on a fragile sand dune. Of all the people I’d spoken to tonight, she was the most important to me, but it took all my reserves to merely say, “Billy Conyer.”
Her brow furrowed. “Sounds vaguely familiar.”
“Friend of Brenda Croteau.”
She sat up angrily. “What? I don’t understand. You’re not working the Croteau case. What’s going on?”
I got up slowly and crossed the room to sit on the bed beside her, resolved to go through it one last time. “We got a lead on who killed Resnick. Turned out to be Conyer. We raided his place tonight-thought it was a one-room apartment. He’d chopped a hole into the apartment next door, and the one beyond that, and that’s where he was sleeping. I don’t know if it was for security or just because he thought it’d be fun. But when we broke through his door, all we found was an empty room. He came bursting into the hallway two doors down, gun blazing, and we had to take him down. I have no idea how or whether he’s connected to your case. When his name first came up, I should have let you know. It slipped my mind. He never played more than a bit role in the Croteau research-I think Janice Litchfield mentioned him once in passing. Sorry if I messed you up.”
She put her hand on mine, suddenly more conscious of my state of mind. “I’m the one who’s sorry. Talk about misplaced priorities. Was it bad?”
“We used shotguns-pretty ugly.”
“Did he shoot at you?”
I nodded. “Marshall caught one in the vest. He was the only one hit. He’s fine.”
Following a long silence, she murmured, “I can’t imagine what that would be like.”
God knows Gail had gotten her lumps over the years, either seeing me being patched up in the hospital or suffering herself at the hands of her own assailant. But she’d still always viewed my world as a bit of an abstraction, even now that she was a prosecutor. She didn’t share my knowledge of the streets, or of the people inhabiting them. It was an ignorance I had taken for granted so far, but which had lately begun to chafe on me, especially now that she was deciding which of my collars got deals and which went to jail.
Without being fully aware of it, I’d come to see her differently in her new job. From rape victim to fighter to law student to the present, she’d built herself over, with motivations and goals far different from those I’d known when we’d met. I’d done what I could to be supportive-moving into this house, in which I’d never felt fully at home, encouraging her when she’d given herself totally to her law studies. But I realized that the distance I was feeling between us wasn’t solely due to her gaining speed and my staying put. It also involved a discomfort on my part with living so close to so much constant energy.
She squeezed my hand to remind me that I hadn’t said a word for several minutes. “You okay?”
“I will be,” I said. “I’ve been through shootings before. I just have to give myself a little time to process it.”
“I’m sorry I mouthed off.”
It was a comment normally deserving of a dismissive, “It’s all right,” letting the trauma of the shooting act as a cover-up for unspoken feelings. But, paradoxically, I didn’t have the strength right now to take a quick and easy out.
“Maybe that’s become par for the course lately, on both our parts,” I said tentatively, unsure where I was heading, or even why.
Her hand slipped off of mine. “What do you mean?” Her voice was careful.
“That we’ve changed.”
I knew I should say more, but I couldn’t find the words.
She surprised me by simply saying, “I know.”
I turned from staring at the floor to meet her eyes, astonished that she might have been sharing what I’d thought were one-sided misgivings. “You feel the same way? What happened?”
She looked at me sadly. “Maybe more than we could handle, starting with who we are and where we came from.”
I understood what she meant. She was a child of privilege, and I the son of a make-do farmer. We’d come like travelers down separate roads and had found peace and joy on a common path. Our pasts, and the influences that had forged us, hadn’t much mattered in a shared but busily distracting life.
We’d even prided ourselves on surviving tests of fire-the stresses of my job and its dangers, the political wrangles Gail had been sucked into over the years. We’d seen those as the worst of hurdles, easily jumped.
Until we’d hit the rape.
I touched her cheek with my fingertips. “I love you, Gail.”
She smiled, barely. “So what do we do?”
I kissed her. “Go to sleep. Trust to instinct. This’ll work itself out. I don’t know how-I’m not even sure what the problem is, really-but we’re friends first and foremost, and I think that’ll see us through.”
We left it at that, but it was a restless night, filled with things left unsaid.
16
The morning after, I could still smell the gunpowder in the stagnant air of the hallway. It was very quiet, the street sounds barely audible through the walls. Yellow police tape had been strung up to isolate the entire floor, adding to the museum-like quality of the place. Conyer’s blood had dried to a nondescript brown.
I paused on the landing and looked down the corridor, beyond the coagulated pool and the scars the buckshot had left along the walls, trying to put aside the memories for the job at hand. It was hard to forget the bright flashes from Conyer’s pistol, not knowing if I would suddenly feel the numbing impact of a bullet.
Ron Klesczewski stepped into my line of vision from a side door, snapping me out of my reverie. “Hi, Joe. Heard you were headed this way. You get any sleep?”
From the look in his eyes, it was obvious he knew I hadn’t. “No.”
He smiled sympathetically. “Well, we may have lost out on a chat with Billy Conyer, but he left enough behind to keep us busy for a while.”
I drew abreast of the door we’d forced open just eight hours earlier. Given the outcome of that visit, our search of Conyer’s digs had been delayed by the post-shoot team’s priorities.
I peered over Ron’s shoulder at the room beyond. “I just hope it’s enough. I want to get moving on this.”