“I am, too,” Jesse said. “Have you not had sex with your husband for three years?”
“At least,” she said. “And before that, it was no good.”
She looked at Molly.
“I had to work so hard just to . . . get him ready.”
Molly nodded.
“All he wanted to do was look and take pictures,” she said. “I’ll bet there’s five hundred nude pictures of me in his computer.”
Jesse nodded.
“That’s why we joined swingers. I’d get sex out of it. I didn’t want to cheat on my marriage.
But I like sex. I need it. And he got something out of it without cheating on his marriage.”
Jesse nodded again.
“And it didn’t occur to you that he might be the Night Hawk?” Jesse said.
She shook her head.
“The closest I got,” she said, “was to think, Wow, here’s a guy with the same hang-ups Seth has. But then I’d think, Good, Seth has the swingers. ”
“Hard, anyway, to think your husband would do such a thing,” Molly said.
“But he did,” Hannah said. “He did, he did, he did.”
“It was you who told him we were going to have a meeting,” Jesse said.
“Yes,” Hannah said. “He calls me on his cell phone now and then. It’s awkward. I’m straining for conversation.”
“Did you tell him about having the meeting?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell him about our conversation?” Jesse said.
“No,” she said. “The disgusting little pervert. How could he do this to me. I’ve tried, Jesus, I’ve tried. I wanted so much for this to work.”
“You love him?” Molly said.
“Half his female grad students were in love with him,” Hannah said. “Literary, masculine, adventurous. They thought he was Hemingway. And he cultivated it. Safari jackets, aviator glasses. He even used to have a beard.”
“And you were the one that got him.”
“Lucky me,” Hannah said.
“Do me a favor,” Jesse said. “Next time he calls, tell him about this conversation. I want him to know that you know, and I know.”
“I can’t talk to him anymore,” she said. “He makes me want to vomit.”
“It’ll help us finish this,” Jesse said. “He hasn’t hurt anybody yet, but he might. And he might miscalculate and get caught and somebody’s husband will kill him.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “After what he’s done to me? Fuck him.”
“Care about the women he may traumatize, care about the husband who might kill him and have to live with that for the rest of his life.”
She looked at Jesse for a while as if he puzzled her.
Then she said, “I hadn’t thought of it from that angle.”
“Tell him enough so he knows we know,” Jesse said.
Hannah nodded.
“How the hell am I going to write my dissertation?” she said.
66
“MY MOM said I should write you some kind of thank-you note,” Missy Clark said when she came into Jesse’s office. “But I said to myself, No, that sucks. I don’t even know what to say.
So I came to see you.”
“Good,” Jesse said, and gestured at a chair.
“I was right about you,” she said. “You’re nice.”
“I am,” Jesse said.
“When I saw you at the school, I thought, He’s a nice man .”
Jesse smiled.
“And you were right,” Jesse said.
“Well,” Missy said. “And don’t you know it.”
