noise. Sat staring at the screen without seeing it.
There was a tight strain of anger in him now. Troxell. The world at large. But mainly it was for himself, for letting the loneliness and the grief get to him again and because he still couldn’t get Risa Niland out of his mind.
16
Lynn Troxell wasn’t alone when I showed up at her home for our late Friday morning appointment. I wouldn’t have minded if her other visitor was Charles Kayabalian. I wanted to talk to him, in fact had tried to arrange a joint meeting with the two of them, but he was tied up and unavailable until later in the day. A one-on-one conference with Mrs. Troxell was the next best choice. I wasn’t prepared for or comfortable with a one-on-two with her and Drew Casement.
The way she looked didn’t help the situation much, either. Dressed in a black pants suit and a dark blue blouse, no color anywhere, her face pale without makeup, her expression bleak and that quality of deep sadness more pronounced. Expecting the worst and put together accordingly. Another mourner.
She greeted me gravely, as a widow might, and ushered me through a formal living room filled with the kind of antique furniture nobody ever sits on, into a large and more comfortable family room with a row of windows overlooking a rear garden. And there was Casement, on his feet and wearing an expression to match hers. At least he didn’t look like he was on his way to a funeral: light blue golf shirt and beige slacks, the picture of health with that tanned skin and rugged manner.
I couldn’t keep a frown off my face when I saw him. He said, “Lynn said it’s okay for me to be here. I’m just as worried about Jim as she is.”
She said, “Please, it’s all right. I want Drew to stay.”
It wasn’t worth arguing about. “Whatever you say, Mrs. Troxell.”
She did the hostess thing, offering coffee or something else to drink, and I declined, and we all got settled in a little half-circle, her on a rose-patterned sofa and Casement and me on chairs. Out in the garden there were pale sunshine and noisy birds working around a pedestal feeder, but in here it was hushed and darker than it should have been despite all the light outside. Too much melancholy on my mind, maybe, but the atmosphere was such that I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear sepulchral music playing soft and low in the background.
Nobody said anything as I opened my briefcase and took out the report Tamara had prepared. She and Runyon and I had held a conference earlier, after I looked at the digital photos he’d taken, and we’d agreed on the only viable course open to us if we wanted to avoid potential repercussions. So the report was a slightly doctored account of our investigation-accurate except for any mention of Runyon’s illegal trespass last night and details on what he’d found in the rental unit. The Erin Dumont case was a focal point, but presented in allusions and inferences couched in general terms-“confidential sources indicate” and “we have good reason to believe.” None of us liked doing it this way, but we liked the prospect of heavy legal expenses and possible license suspensions a hell of a lot less. Sometimes you have to bend the rules a little to get at the truth, and when you do that, sometimes you have to bend them a little more for maintenance reasons. It’s that kind of business; it’s that kind of cover- your-ass world.
Immediately I handed the report to Mrs. Troxell, Casement got up and went to sit beside her on the sofa so he could read along with her. I looked out into the garden and watched the birds chattering at the feeder. When I shifted my gaze back to the two of them, Mrs. Troxell’s face was the color of buttermilk and Casement had his arm around her shoulders. The only change in his expression was a tightening of the muscles bracketing his mouth.
She finished reading the last page, sat so rigidly she seemed almost to have stopped breathing. It was nearly half a minute before she moved, a sudden spasmodic lifting of head and breast. “God,” she said, “all of this… I can’t…” She could not seem to articulate the rest of what she was thinking, shook her head and fell silent.
Casement said grimly, “Worse than we expected. A lot worse.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You sure about Jim seeing what happened in the park, not doing anything about it?”
“If we weren’t, it wouldn’t be in the report.”
“So that’s what set him off on all the rest of it-the trigger we were talking about yesterday. Guilt, not being able to face himself.”
“Evidently.”
“Christ. Funerals, cemeteries, a rented hideaway, night walks on the beach-”
Lynn Troxell found her voice. “Jim has always been drawn to water,” she said distantly, not quite a non sequitur. “The ocean, lakes, rivers. They have a calming effect on him.”
Casement said, “He needs more than water. Prozac or Ritalin, maybe.”
“I suppose so, but…” She shuddered and looked at me. “I don’t understand about the granny unit. What does he do there?”
What does he do? I thought. He wallows in death, that’s what he does. But I said, “What he can’t do here because he’s afraid you’ll find out and he wants to spare you.” And spare himself at the same time.
“Reads newspapers looking for violent crimes,” Casement said, “so he can attend the victims’ funerals. Broods. Christ knows what else.”
“How can he be that obsessed, that… sick and I didn’t have any idea of it?”
“Don’t go blaming yourself, Lynn. He’s so closed off, nobody could’ve known how bad he is.”
“I should have,” she insisted. “I knew about the murders he saw as a child, I should have realized…”
Casement tightened his grip on her shoulder. He said to me, “The other thing we talked about yesterday… you think he could be building up to suicide?”
I gave him a sharp warning look.
“No, it’s all right, Lynn and I talked about that, too. I told you, we don’t have any secrets.”
She said, “I can’t imagine Jim doing a thing like that. I just.. can’t.”
“I can,” Casement said, “and I wish I couldn’t. What he said to me that day, the look on his face-he’s capable of it, all right.”
“What are we going to do?” Then, desperately: “We have to do something!”
“Talk to him,” I said, “convince him to get professional help.”
“A psychiatrist?”
“He wouldn’t agree to it,” Casement said.
“He might. What other choice do we have?”
I said, “Frankly, none that I can see.”
She blinked, frowned, pulled her shoulders back the way people do when a sudden thought strikes them. She asked me, “The police… you haven’t told them about Jim being a witness?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you have to?”
“I’m obligated to. Withholding information in a homicide case is a felony, no matter who does it or what the reason.”
“When? How soon?”
The correct answer to that was immediately. The one mitigating factor in favor of a delay: two months had already passed since Erin Dumont’s murder, and assuming that what Troxell had scrawled in his notes was the whole truth, he had no specific knowledge that could lead to identification and arrest of the perp. But then there was the unknown factor: his mental state. How close was he to acting on a suicidal impulse? No way to tell from outward appearances. Confronting him might shock him into facing his illness, force him to take action to help himself. It might also push him over the line into an act of self-destruction. For that matter, so might being detained as a material witness, having the truth about his cowardice come out that way. A risk in any case, and not my decision to make.
I said all of this to Lynn Troxell, adding, “I can give you a little time if you want it. The choice is yours.”
“How much time?”
“Until Monday morning. Either your husband goes to the police voluntarily by then or I’ll have to do it and
