“You told her?” It was asked without inflection.
For the first time, a small alarm went off in his head. “He did kill a kid. Burned him alive.”
“I read the papers, Joe. Every day.”
He pressed his lips together, silenced by the ice in her voice.
“How did the wife take it?” she asked.
“Not well, and it still didn’t get us anything. As far as we could tell, he kept her and their daughters in the dark about his activities.”
Gail slid forward in her chair and began to stand. Joe reached out to take her hands, but she quickly moved them away and stood on her own. He stayed put, looking up at her.
“Are you okay?” he asked lamely.
She walked to the far end of the small room, putting the table between them again. “That’s not a serious question, right?”
About the only time he had ever seen her so on edge was during the days and weeks following the rape.
“No. Of course not. I’m just hoping to put things right.”
Her face darkened. “So far, it doesn’t sound like you’ve done too well. Besides helping to get a girl killed, destroying a man’s otherwise clueless family, and then siccing the same wacko on me, have you gotten any closer to making the world a safer place?”
He was stunned into silence. Never before had she spoken to him with such contempt.
He rose, too, and moved to the door. “I’m going to put you up at a motel, at least for the rest of the night,” he said. “You have any preferences?”
“I want to go home. That’s where I feel safest.”
Joe hesitated.
“Do you have the slightest shred of evidence this man is even in the state, much less watching my house?” she asked him.
“No. But we don’t know he isn’t, either. He’s very upset, Gail, and-”
“I know the feeling,” she interrupted.
He took a breath. “And very determined. The threat he made against you is like a blood oath. We-I-have no reason to think he won’t act on it. I can’t let that happen. I love you too much.”
There was a prolonged stillness between them, punctuated only by the slight humming of the fluorescent lighting overhead.
She scowled suddenly and touched her forehead with her fingertips, as if acknowledging a headache. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“It’s all right.”
“I’m tired, is all.”
“I know. That’s why I suggested a motel.”
“Not that way,” she explained, her eyes sorrowful. “I’m tired of this kind of stress-I’ve got enough of my own. I’m running out of reserves.”
He took a step toward her, gripped by her implication and the fear it ignited within him-one that had grown over the last couple of years. “We will get him, Gail.”
She sighed deeply. “That’s not what I mean.”
He knew what she meant, but he didn’t press her-didn’t want the words out in the open.
“I tell you what,” he said instead. “Let me put you in a safe place for the rest of tonight and tomorrow, while my guys check your place from top to bottom. After that, you can go home. But it’s got to be with twenty-four-hour-a-day protection, both there and at work. Discreet, if you want, but around-the-clock.”
He’d expected resistance, but when it came to personal safety, he should have known better. Both her house in Brattleboro and her Montpelier condo were minifortresses, rigged with locks, lights, and alarms.
“Okay,” was all she said.
Gino didn’t linger for long, but he did take the time to gloat a little, at least. He watched as several unmarked cars drove up the street and parked at various locations along the block. A group of casual-appearing men and women, some carrying oversize briefcases, convened on the sidewalk before Gail’s address, hovering like disorganized guests looking for a leader, until one of them worked the front-door combination and let them all in.
With a satisfied backward glance at the small pile of cameras that he’d just removed from the same premises, Gino started his engine and gently pulled away from the curb.
Joe pulled into the Cutts farm dooryard and got out of his car, feeling the soft give of black soil beneath his shoes. It was officially mud season by now, when a half year’s worth of subsurface ice finally yields to warmer temperatures and turns all of New England into a soggy sponge for a few weeks. People who think nothing of ice and snow view mud season with loathing for what it does to roads, lawns, and the rugs of front parlors.
“Did you catch who killed my son?”
The voice was loud, sharp, and querulous, as always, but where he’d previously thought of it as an incoming mortar round, Joe was now disposed to consider its complexity. Given what he’d learned since that first snowy day, his presumptions about this family, and certainly about this one member of it, had undergone serious revision.
“How are you, Marie?” he asked, approaching.
“How do you think? You not going to answer the question?”
He put one foot up on the porch and stood looking at her. “We’re a lot closer than we were.”
“What’s that mean?”
“We have a better idea what happened, for one thing.”
She pointed at the remnants of the barn, stark and foreboding. “That doesn’t tell you what happened? It sure as hell tells me.”
He didn’t argue the point. “You see it for what it did. I wonder what brought it about.”
She frowned. “What are you doing here?”
“Did you know a man named John Samuel Gregory?”
“No.” The answer was immediate.
“You get the paper or listen to the news?”
“Why?”
“Because he was found killed in his condo in St. Albans Bay. Murdered.”
Marie’s scowl deepened. “Why would I care about that?”
“He was here, at least once.”
“The hell you say.”
Joe came onto the porch. “Could I come inside for a second? I want to show you something.”
“Inside? What?” she asked, startled.
“It’s something in the kitchen.”
Almost despite herself, Marie stepped back to let him in. He crossed the front room to the kitchen and walked over to the corkboard covered with drawings, postcards, business cards, and whatnot. He scanned the board’s entire surface in vain.
“His business card was stuck here. I saw it last time.”
“So what?”
Joe reached into his pocket and pulled out a card of Gregory’s that he’d gotten from Jonathon earlier. He handed it to Marie. “It looked like this one. Gregory was a young guy, longish hair, fancy dresser, drove a Porsche.”
Marie returned the card. “Stupid car for up here. I remember him. Not the name. I didn’t like him-too stuck on himself.”
“What did he want?”
She turned on her heel disgustedly and crossed to the sink. “If I didn’t dislike you so much, I’d feel some pity for you. You married? I’ll send your wife a get-well card. You want coffee?”
Joe played along. “Sure. Thanks.”
“He was a Realtor. What do you think he wanted?”
“Did he float a price?”
She was busying herself at the stove, having filled a pot with water. “Not to me, he didn’t. I passed him off to Linda.”
“How did that go?”
She turned to glare at him. “What the hell does this have to do with anything? They talked awhile and he left, and that was that. It was a no-sale.”
“How much did he say it was worth?”
Her face closed down, and she returned to the sink, removing two mugs from a row of cup hooks above the window. “I don’t know.”
Joe addressed the back of her head. “Linda didn’t report the conversation?”
“Maybe, I don’t remember.”
“Maybe?”
Her shoulders slumped. “It was three times what the place is worth.”
“That’s quite a figure.”
Slowly, not wanting to turn around, she spooned instant coffee into each mug. “Not really. It’s what the flatlanders are paying nowadays.”
“And you weren’t interested?”
“Nope.”
He didn’t speak for a few moments, watching her ready the coffee, load up a tray, and bring it over to the large, catchall dinner table, which was presently hosting a pile of Lego bricks at its far end.