“I am confident. If the death was not the subject’s goal, then it was not a suicide. By definition.”
“So even if a man killed himself, but there was evidence that he’d been compelled to in some way—”
“Wyatt, stop. Stop talking like this. Are you going to hurt yourself?”
Silence.
“Wyatt?”
“I wanted to know if there was any difference in the way you’d investigate,” the man said, his words clearer now, less of the bourbon speaking for him. “Do you pursue the root causes of a suicide in the same manner that you would a homicide?”
Kimble drove along in the hiss of tires on rain-soaked pavement for a time, then said, “I pursue the truth.”
“Always?”
“Always. Don’t give me anything to pursue today, Wyatt. I’m not joking. If someone has been hurt, you tell me that right now. Tell me that.”
“No one has been hurt yet.”
“My thoughts aren’t your concern, deputy. You have many concerns around you in Sawyer County, some of them quite serious, but my thoughts aren’t the problem.”
“I’m going to give you a number,” Kimble said again, “and ask you to call it for me, please. You called me early, and on a private line, and I’ve given you my time and respect. I hope you’ll do the same for me.”
“Certainly, sir. If there are two things I’d hope you might continue to grant me in the future, it is your time and respect.”
French’s voice was absent of mockery or malice. Kimble gave him the number, a suicide assistance line, and he could hear scratching as Wyatt dutifully wrote it down.
“Take care of yourself,” Kimble told him. “Get dried out, get some rest. I’m worried about the way you’re talking.”
“What you should be worried about is that I’ll choose to live forever. Then you’d really have your work cut out.”
It was the first time any of Wyatt’s traditional humor had showed, and Kimble let out a long breath, feeling as if the worst of this strange call was past.
“I’ve dealt with you for this long,” he said. “Wouldn’t be right not to keep at it.”
“I appreciate the sentiment. And deputy? You be careful with her.”
Kimble was silent, lips parted but jaw slack, and didn’t realize he’d let his foot off the accelerator again until a minivan rose up into his mirror with an accompanying horn, then an extended middle finger from the driver who swerved around him. Kimble brought his speed back up and said, “Who do you mean, Wyatt?”
“The one you’re going to see,” Wyatt French told him. “Be very careful with her.”
His voice had the low gravity of someone speaking at a wake. When Kimble finally got around to responding, offering up an awkward attempt at denial, he realized that the line was dead.
There was no time to call back from the highway, because the exit for the women’s prison was just ahead, and Kimble had no desire to hear the old drunk’s strange voice again anyhow. Let him sip his whiskey inside his damned lighthouse in the woods. Let his disturbed mind not infect Kimble’s own.
He set the phone down and continued up to the prison gates.
2
A LONG, SINISTER BRICK STRUCTURE, the women’s prison had been built back in 1891, a hundred and twenty years before it would house an inmate of interest to Kimble. Approved adults could begin arriving at 6 A.M., but the parking spaces were empty when he pulled in. Kimble was always the first one in the door. He liked to be alone in the visiting area, and he liked making the drive in the dark.
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.”
“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.”
