“I’m in love with Gideon,” I said bluntly.
His hands went still on the decanter. Then he picked up his glass and finished the shot. “You think I’m blind?”
“We’re leaving,” I told him. “I’m pregnant.”
Thomas sat down. He buried his face in his hands and started to weep.
I stared for a moment, torn between comforting him and hating myself for being the one to reduce him to this, a broken man with a failing sanctuary, a cheating wife, and a mental illness.
“Thomas,” I begged. “Say something.”
His voice hitched. “What did I do wrong?”
I knelt in front of him. I saw, in that instant, the man whose glasses had fogged in the steamy heat of Botswana, the man who had met me at the airport clutching the roots of a plant. The man who had a dream and had invited me to take part in it. I had not seen that man for a very long time. But was it because he’d disappeared? Or because I’d stopped looking?
“You did nothing,” I replied. “It was me.”
He reached out, grasping my shoulder with one hand. With the other, he smacked me so hard across the face that I tasted blood.
“Whore,” he said.
Clutching my cheek, I fell backward. I backed away from him as he advanced toward me, scrambling to get out of the room.
Jenna was still asleep on the couch. I raced toward her, determined to take her with me as I walked out the door this last time. I could buy clothes and toys and anything else she needed later. But Thomas grabbed my wrist, wrenching it behind me, so that I fell again and he reached our child first. He picked up her small body, and she curled into him. “Daddy?” she sighed, still caught in the web between dreams and truth.
He wrapped his arms around her, turning so that Jenna was no longer facing me. “You want to go?” Thomas said. “Be my guest. But you want to take my daughter with you? Over my dead body.”
He smiled at me then, a terrible, terrible smile. “Or better yet,” he said. “Over yours.”
She would wake up, and I would be gone. Her worst fear, come true. I’m sorry, baby, I said silently to Jenna. Then I ran for help, leaving her behind.
VIRGIL
Even if I’d been able to find the body that was buried ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to get a court order. I don’t know what I was thinking I’d resort to, shy of sneaking into a graveyard, Frankenstein-style, to dig up a corpse that I had assumed was Nevvie Ruehl. But before a body is released to a funeral home, the medical examiner does the autopsy. And the autopsy would have had a DNA sample taken by the state lab, stored somewhere in FTA card files for posterity.
No way in hell am I going to be able to get the state lab to cough up evidence to me, now that I’m a civilian. Which means I have to find someone they would give it to. So a half hour later, I’m leaning on the ledge of the evidence room at the Boone PD, sweet-talking Ralph again. “You’re back?” He sighs.
“What can I say? I missed you desperately. You haunt my dreams.”
“I already took a chance letting you in last time, Virgil. I’m not risking my job for you.”
“Ralph, you and I both know that the chief wouldn’t give this job to anyone else. You’re like the Hobbit guarding the ring, man.”
“What?”
“You’re the Dee Brown of the department. Without him, nobody would have even known the Celtics existed in the nineties, right?”
Ralph’s wrinkles deepen as he grins. “Well, now you’re talking,” he says. “It’s true. These young guys don’t know their ass from their elbow. I come down here every morning and someone’s moved crap around, trying to classify it some newfangled computerized way, and you know what happens? Shit gets lost. So I move it back where it belongs. You know what I say—if it ain’t broke …”
I nod like I’m hanging on his every word. “This is what I’m talking about. You’re the central nervous system of this outfit, Ralph. Without you, everything would fall apart. That’s why I knew you were the right guy to turn to for help.”
He shrugs, trying to look humble. I wonder if he realizes I’m good-copping him, buttering him up so that I can get something out of him in return. Up in the break room, officers are probably still talking about how he’s senile and so slow-moving that he could drop dead in the evidence room and no one would notice for a week.
“You remember how I was reviewing an old case, right?” I say, leaning closer, so that he’s in on the secret. “I’m trying to get a DNA sample from the blood that was taken by the state lab. Any chance you could place a few calls, make that happen?”