They checked him in with familiarity and a quiet “Morning, deputy” and then escorted him into the visitation room. He was afforded privileges here that others were not, a level of privacy and trust that others were not, because he was police. And because they all knew the story.
She was alone in the room, waiting for him at the other end of a plastic table, and when he saw her his breath caught and his heartbeat stuttered and he felt a fierce, cold ache low in his back.
“Jacqueline,” he said.
She rose and offered her slim, elegant hand. Warm, gentle fingers in his cool, callused palm, and he found himself, as he always did when they touched, wetting his lips and looking to the side, as if something had moved in the shadows at the edge of the room.
“Hello, Kevin.” She took her seat again, and he pulled up a plastic chair that screeched coming across the floor and sat beside her. Not all the way at the opposite end of the table, but not too close, either. Purgatory distance.
“Are you well?” he said.
“Yes.”
Her voice took that distance between them and melted it like ice in a fist. It was so knowing, so intimate, she might as well have been sitting in his lap. The ache in his back pulsed.
“You look good. I mean… healthy.”
Looked healthy. Shit. If all she looked was healthy, then there were starlets all over Hollywood who looked sickly. She was the kind of beautiful that scorched. Tall and lean, with gentle but clear curves even in the loose orange inmate garb, cocoa-colored hair that somehow held an expensive salon’s sheen after five years of prison care, cheekbones and mouth sculpted with a master’s touch. Full lips that looked dark against her complexion, which had once been deeply tanned but was now so white he could see the fine veins in her slender neck. Blue eyes that he could not, even after several years, meet for more than a few seconds.
“They treating you okay?”
“Yes, Kevin. As well as a place like this ever can treat someone.”
Kevin. She said it in the sort of voice that should carry hot breath against your ear. Nobody called him Kevin. He was Kimble, had been since childhood, one of those boys who inexplicably becomes identified by his last name.
“Good,” he said. He was staring at the floor to avoid her eyes, but now he saw that she had hitched those loose prison pants up slightly, so that her ankles were exposed above the thin sandals. Her ankles and a trace of legs. Long, sleek legs. She leaned back in the chair now and crossed her feet, pushing them closer toward him, which made him flush and lift his head.
“How is your back?” she said.
He was silent for a moment. His jaw worked, but he didn’t speak, and this time he was able to meet her eyes.
“Fine,” he said.
“I’m glad.”
“Sure.”
She smiled at him, rich and genuine, a smile you were never supposed to see in a place where faces were so often dark and threatening or unbalanced and psychotic.
“I’m so glad. I always worry, you know. I worry that it pains you.”
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
This was the game. This was the perfected exchange, performed each month as if they were rehearsing for some stage show and needed to keep sharp. Why did he drive up here? Why in the hell did he make these visits?
“I’m sorry, I don’t remember,” she said, and he wondered how many times he’d heard those five words now. First in a handwritten letter to him in the hospital, then in interview rooms, then at the trial and every visit that had been made since. She was always sorry that she didn’t remember.
“You’ve told me, Jacqueline,” he said, his voice stretched. “Let’s not worry about that.”
“You know how badly I wish I could, though. For you.”
“I know.”
She smiled again, this time uncertainly. “I appreciate you making the trip. I always do.”
“It’s nothing.”
“You’ve been so good to me. The one person above all others who shouldn’t be, and you’re the one person above all others who is.”
“You don’t belong in here,” he said.
She sat up straighter then, sat up with excitement, and said, “Didn’t they tell you I get to leave?”
He cocked his head and frowned. “Leave?”
“I thought for sure they’d tell you,” she said. “I mean, I’m always sure they talk to you about me. Don’t they?”
If there was one date Kimble knew absolutely, knew surer than Christmas or his own birthday, it was the scheduled parole hearing of Jacqueline Mathis. She was not leaving this prison. Not yet.
“Jacqueline, where are—”