"Yeah," she told David. "I played with dolls."
"Hmmm." He squinted his eyes and appraised her. "There's something you're not telling me."
"So, you think this glove's okay?" She pulled it off and tucked it under her arm. "What about Ms one?" She lifted a red glove from the shelf hook. "I kind of like it. Or what about that pretty blue one?"
"The brown glove is better."
"It's more expensive."
"With a glove, you get what you pay for."
She put the red glove back and picked up a ball.
"That's a hardball. You need a softball. Here." He plucked two from a wire barrel. "One more thing…" He perused the shelf until he found a small brown bottle. "Glove oil. You have to oil the glove, put the ball inside, then tie it closed so it will get a good shape to it."
"How has this gotten so complicated?" She shook her head in bafflement. "We're just going to play catch. Play"
"Play takes work."
David picked out a glove for himself. Something that took a little longer, because he was even more particular about his purchase than he'd been about Elise's.
"Stay where you are."
He gave her a slow, lazy throw.
She had no choice but to try to stop it, just snagging the ball with the top of her glove. She didn't toss it back.
"I'm assuming you played a lot of ball, so why don't you have a glove that already fits you?" Elise asked as they walked to the checkout area. "That's already formed to your hand?"
"I do, somewhere. It could be at my mother's in Ohio, or in storage in Virginia."
"I can't imagine my life being that scattered."
"They're only things. Material possessions."
He tossed the ball straight up and caught it in the glove. "You don't strike me as materialistic."
"No, but I become attached to my possessions in an emotional way. Like my car. It has over one hundred fifty thousand miles on it. I know I should get a new one, but emotionally I'm not ready. I can't let it go. I've had it so long that it's a part of me. An extension of who I am."
He got in line and put the glove with the ball inside on the conveyor belt. "Your car is a piece of shit."
"But it's my piece of shit." She thought over what she'd just said. "Figuratively speaking."
"Of course."
"I'll probably get attached to this ball glove if I use it long enough. Especially if it eventually forms to the shape of my hand and only my hand."
She was already feeling herself becoming fond of it. She particularly liked the way it smelled.
Their items were rung up separately.
"Some people believe objects take energy from their owners," Elise said once she'd paid and grabbed the noisy plastic bag. "And when they absorb so much, they begin giving it back."
David paused as the automatic door opened. "So does that mean there's a part of me packed away in the bottom of a box, in a shed in my mother's backyard along with my Matchbox cars and microscope?"
The image he suggested gave her a strange, sorrowful feeling in her chest. "I think you should find the glove."
He laughed.
"I'm not kidding."
"I know you aren't."
Elise's phone rang.
Headquarters. Their brief foray into normalcy was over.
James LaRue had been caught and was at that moment being escorted back to Savannah.
Chapter 32
"Your visitors are here."
James LaRue stuck his hands through the small rectangular opening in the cell so the guard could slip a pair of handcuffs around his wrists. The heavy cage door was unlocked, the sound of metal against metal reverberating hollowly.
LaRue shuffled out, his slippers making a shushing sound against the glossy cement floor. He was led through a series of locked doors to a small, brightly lit room with surveillance cameras high on three walls and an inner observation window of reinforced glass.
Sitting at the table was Detective Elise Sandburg. With her was a guy with dark hair and an angry face.
They were both dressed like they were ready for a funeral.
An omen?
He sat down across from them, annoyed to find that the chair was difficult to get into gracefully because of the short chain used to anchor it to the floor.
So. There she was. The woman he'd drugged.
For a moment he found himself distracted by her strange eyes. They were multicolored, with dark lines going through them.
She was attractive, something he didn't recall because he'd been so fucked-up at the time. She was also very cool. Very together. Just like you'd think a detective would be, only prettier.
The guy… he was rougher around the edges. With the look of someone who needed some kind of fix. Maybe alcohol. Maybe drugs. Maybe even legal medication prescribed by a doctor who liked to keep his patients happy.
LaRue experienced a wave of panic.
He'd been panicking a lot lately.
What a stupid thing for him to do. A stupid, stupid thing. But it had seemed so logical at the time. Funny how that kind of thing worked. The guy-he would surely understand that. He'd surely done some stupid things while under the influence.
Now there was a good chance LaRue himself might end up in prison with murderers. With pedophiles. Where beasts with shaved heads and tattoos raped guys like him.
He looked from one to the other, hoping he didn't appear as desperate as he felt.
"Hey-" He glanced up at the guard.
She was a large, tough-looking woman he'd managed to coax a smile out of a few times. "Would it be possible to get something to drink?" he asked. To his visitors, Tie said, "Would you like something? Soda? My treat."
Detective Sandburg shook her head and, with a twist of her lip, said, "I'll pass."
LaRue inwardly cringed. Oh, shit. Last time he'd offered her something to drink, it had been laced with tetrodotoxin.
"Me too," said the guy.
She was pissed. Of course she was pissed. They were both pissed. Why wouldn't they be? But it wasn't as if he'd killed her. It wasn't as if he'd meant her any harm.
"Okay."
He waved his linked hands nervously in the air, as if to shoo away his bad idea and the time he'd already wasted. These were important people. Busy people.
"Stop wasting our time, LaRue."
Wow. Apparently the guy was a mind reader.
"I'm sorry," LaRue said. "And you are?"
"Detective Gould."
"Nice to meet you." He slid his hands across the table, cuffs jingling.
Gould leaned deeper into his chair. "I don't shake hands with people who poison my partner."
Double shit. "I don't know what you're talking about." LaRue pulled back his hands.
"You don't remember giving my partner a glass of water laced with tetrodotoxin?"
LaRue shook his head.
"But aren't you an expert on the stuff?" Gould asked.
"Well, yeah."
"Don't you sometimes have it in your house?"
"Hey, I can't help it if she somehow came upon some when she was snooping around my place."
"You mean, a glass laced with TTX just happened to bump into her mouth? Didn't you in fact offer her a drink? Didn't you in fact hand her the glass?"
This was bad. Really bad. Whatever happened, LaRue had to make this convincing. The rest of his life could depend on it…
"You have no proof of anything."
"I collected pieces of broken glass," Elise said. "Took them to the lab. Guess what they found?"
He let out a long breath. Shit, shit, shit.
"Tetrodotoxin," she said. "On a glass from your house. A glass you handed to me."
"Don't lie to us," Gould said. "Because we already know all the answers."
"Not everything. You can't know everything."
"We'll see about that."
They interrogated him for three hours.
Thank God nobody smoked. That would have been bad, because the room was small, and something like that could have really gotten LaRue's asthma stirred up.