A hint of the smile reappeared in her eyes as she added, “That, of course, is strictly between you and me.”
Hillstrom’s confidence in the crime lab was well placed. One day later, David Hawke, its director, called Joe from Waterbury. In the tradition of how things worked differently in Vermont from the way they did most other places, Dave and Joe were old friends, given to working outside-or at least parallel to-official channels. Not content with just sending paperwork to each other in the standard formal fashion, they were equally prone to using the phone or at least an e-mail to add a personal touch.
“Long time, Joe,” Dave said after the two of them had exchanged greetings. “How’re you enjoying being the other half of a politician?”
It was a pertinent question, of course, and typically asked by a scientist who had to deal with legislators to an inordinate extent, while wishing he could spend all that time behind a microscope.
It was also a question that cut deeper than Hawke could know. Upon returning from Newark, Joe had only spoken to Gail once on the phone, and that only briefly. She’d been on her way to some evening political function and had sounded distracted and under pressure. He’d kept it short and upbeat and hadn’t called again. For her part, she hadn’t called back at all yet.
“Not too bad,” he said vaguely. “I mostly just stay out of the way. You get lucky with any of that stuff your boys and girls collected from St. Albans Bay?”
“Mostly still plowing through it,” Hawke admitted cheerily, knowing that any findings would be unexpectedly early. “But I did get a fix on that little patch of scalp Hillstrom sent me. I thought you’d like to know right off. The residue around the puncture wound is about as Vermont as any I’ve dealt with-number one on our list of known substances, in fact.”
“All right,” Joe played along, “I’ll bite.”
“There are technical terms,” Hawke went on, “but I’ll try to keep it simple. It’s cow shit.”
Joe didn’t respond. He was too busy trying to fit the information into all the other puzzle pieces he had floating around inside his head.
“Good news or bad?” Hawke wanted to know. “If it helps, there were also traces of hay.”
“It definitely helps, Dave,” Joe finally said. “I’m not sure how yet, but it definitely helps.”
Chapter 22
Gino Famolare pulled out of traffic into a convenient parking space directly across the street from his destination. He sat there for a moment, his eyes still fixed forward, his hands on the wheel.
He blinked once, slowly, and let out a sigh as if he’d been in suspended animation for the last several hours. Which he might have been, for all he knew. He was so numb-had been for so long, it seemed-that he had no idea when he’d last eaten, changed clothes, or even used the bathroom.
He focused on releasing the steering wheel, watching his hands drop to his lap as if they belonged to someone else. The radio was on, he noticed, but not tuned to any station. Whatever had been playing back in Newark had long since been left behind. Now there was only static, which, given his mood, was about right.
He switched off the ignition and sat there listening to the engine ticking.
He missed her so badly, it was a physical pain in his chest, like the building of a heart attack. But worse. Had to be worse. He’d heard heart attacks described as crushing or radiating. But this was less a pain and more like a combination of every childhood nightmare, every unrequited longing, every shock of betrayal. He didn’t know how to manage it, what to do with it, how to channel it.
But he was working on that last part. If sorrow and loss could be softened by action, he knew the right action to apply. That was one thing he had no doubts about.
He saw a girl walking down the opposite sidewalk, heading his way. She was slim, dressed in jeans and a short jacket. The pants were hip-huggers, and she was wearing a crop-top sweater which revealed her flat stomach. She looked nothing like Peggy except in the broadest possible way, but she was young and athletic and attractive and clearly full of the sort of confidence that beauty bestows upon a woman, even when she herself may not know enough to trust it.
Peggy, of course, had been luminescent. This girl, now drawing near and about to pass his line of vision, was merely eye-catching by comparison. She didn’t have Peggy’s inviting aura of innocence and experience combined, that made her look both like a child and the picture of every man’s sexual fantasy come suddenly and tangibly alive.
Gino remembered when he’d first met her. At a party. His cousin’s birthday. There’d been a crush of people. He hadn’t been in a mood to go out, but life at home had become something to avoid. So he’d stood in a corner, generally unengaged, nursing a beer.
He’d seen her enter from across the room, a beauty so remarkable she seemed to carry her own light within her. He watched her, as he imagined most men did, as an unobtainable object of desire, suitable only for dreams, and was already relegating her to a mental picture gallery when she veered toward him in order to share his piece of wall. It turned out that she, too, didn’t like crowds, didn’t want to be here, but wanted to be back home even less.
From then on, whatever Gino imagined about them came true, and almost as quickly. As in a movie come to life, his opening lines drew laughter and pleasure. In what seemed moments, she was touching the back of his hand while she talked, or resting her fingers on his arm. He opened up, unused to such receptiveness, shared more than usual, finally admitting to things he almost dared her to reject-he was married, had two kids he disliked, drove a truck, worked on the docks. Nothing dampened her warmth, her clear desire to stay in his company. Their leaving the house together felt seamless and natural, their ready agreement to retire to a nearby motel, their natural, easy, incredibly satisfying choreography in bed. Afterward, sheened with sweat, still breathing hard, he looked down into her face, her damp hair stuck to her forehead, and fully expected to see her pleasure fading away. A one-night stand. A good roll in the hay. Ships passing in the night. All the rest.
Instead, he found her eyes bright, happy, hopeful, and pleased, taking him in as if he were the promise of the future incarnate. She reached up and took his face in her hands and kissed him with such passion and relief that he knew then and there that he’d been blessed. They made love three times that night, something he hadn’t attempted in years, and parted, finally and reluctantly, as if neither one might survive the separation, however brief.
And Gino made sure their times apart were only brief. He became a man obsessed, calculating his every move around when they could next get together. He bought her gifts, clothes, exotic underwear, a town house. They made love in its every room, from the basement to the attic; they tried positions they’d never tried with anyone else; they spent countless hours in bed, simply wrapped up in each other, as if letting go would risk drowning in the separate sorrows they never shared, but both knew existed.
On the surface, it was no meeting of equals. He was old enough to have fathered her, for one thing, but it was precisely the age disparity that she hungered for the most. She catered to his whims, his appetites, his need for her, while he supplied the mature shelter and security she’d yearned for all her life. It was arguably lopsided, unhealthy, and grossly manipulative, but in its excess, it was also as numbing as a narcotic and equally addictive.
And now it was over-violated and trampled not just by bad luck, but by the very factors that had already once pushed Gino to the edge of near terminal grief.