“ Otto, we all feel guilty when we lose someone. We all wonder if we said 'I love you' often enough or with enough conviction and feeling. We all regret some things we've said, done-”
“ What if I did the wrong thing?” he asked point-blank. “Maybe… maybe I should have raced down the damned hall and screamed for help, and maybe-maybe-”
“ No, Otto. You did what you felt was best for her. You didn't do anything wrong in letting her go in peace and with dignity. You know that as well as I.”
“ Do I? Christ, Jess, the night before I… I had a dream about… about you, and about me.”
“ Otto, that's not-”
“ And before that, in Wekosha-”
' 'That has nothing to do with your feelings for Marilyn, or what you did, Otto. What you did, you did out of love and tenderness.”
He began to tell her more about his daily routine with Marilyn, and how he had come to miss that so much since the incident that first took her from him. Since then his life was a misery, a living medical hell of hospital waiting rooms and bills and a growing hopelessness like a cancer that had begun to overtake him and overwhelm him.
And in the meantime, he had to present himself as Otto Boutine to the rest of the world, as a man without a soft millimeter of flesh. “And now I'm reduced to what you see before you,” he said apologetically.
“ I see a kind and a gentle and a tender and a caring man,” she replied, “and that is all I see.”
She kissed him and she thanked him.
“ For what?”
“ For being a good man.”
He started to protest, but she pressed her fingers to his lips. “Sleep now, rest.”
He closed his eyes and she silently left him and retreated to her bedroom, where she slipped into a nightgown and robe. From there she made her way to the bath and warmed the shower water before stepping in. Under the gentle, pulsating water she felt herself melting, the nerves loosening their tight grip on her. The warm water, growing hotter and hotter as she turned up the tap, relaxed her almost to the point of sleep.
She didn't remember stepping from the shower or brushing her hair when she found herself climbing into bed. Her head, still damp, touching the pillow, seemed to drift off on its own, away from her body. A part of her had wanted to find Otto in her bed when she stepped from the shower; another part of her was glad that he was in the other room. He would need time. He was wounded, in much pain, feeling such guilt. If anything happened between them tonight, it would only add to his pain and guilt. She didn't want to add injury to the wound he already felt, despite her certainty that Otto had nothing whatsoever to feel guilty about.
She dreamed of Wekosha as she had every night since examining the dead Copeland girl. All the ugly details she expected to see in her dream were replaced, however, with a soft, hazy glow, shading the horror, and in the place of the horror stood Otto. Otto was reaching out to her amid the surrounding carnage, his expression like that of a little boy who had lost his way. She reached out, taking his hand and wondering what kind of a future they might have together when the hand she held, and the arm that held it, came loose from Otto with the sound of soft suction.
“ He makes fools of us all,” Otto's dream presence said in a resonating voice while her dream self tried desperately to replace his arm where it had come off at the socket.?
THIRTEEN
“ You were right! God, you were right all along, Jess, and now we've got the killer's signature on all three victims!” J.T. danced about Jessica while giving her the results of the final analysis. “Same identical cut, almost invisible with the deterioration, but damned if it isn't there.”
“ The tube cut, like a straw mark? Show me.”
He did so and they were both silent for a long time. It was like finishing a marathon. She felt as if her energies were scattered and J.T., up all night, felt spent, that he could go no further, despite the apparent victory. “We've got to show this to Boutine and his P.P. team, but it'd be a hell of a lot more effective if we could pinpoint exactly what kind of weapon the bastard used. What caused the circle cut in the jugular?”
“ I've got to get some sleep,” J.T. said flatly. She saw from the pallor of his skin that he truly did need some rest, and perhaps a decent meal.
“ Yeah, J.T.,” she offered, “you'd better get some sack time. You did great, both in Illinois and here.”
“ Oh, that reminds me,” he countered, brushing his dirty hair from his forehead with a heavy hand, his eyelids half-closed. “Somebody's going to have to reimburse me for unexpected expenditures on the trip.” He slurred the big words with his drowsy delivery.
“ What expenditures?”
Yawning, he replied, “I told you about the mix-up in the coffins, right? Anyhow, I had to replace the price of a casket out-of-pocket.”
“ What?”
“ Without going into the details, I had to use plastic money to make restitution for a damaged casket.”
“ The Trent girl's?”
“ That'd be too easy. No, it was for the other one they dug up by mistake.”
“ That's going to take some creativity on the requisition form.”
“ Just so I get it off my VISA!” he shouted as he rushed out.
She chased a bit of the way down the hall after him. “Can you imagine Hardy? He'll quote me chapter and verse from the agency code book of purchasing practices and-”
J.T. shouted from between closing elevator doors, “Tell Hardy he can jam his actuary tables up his ass!”
She laughed along with anyone else in the hall who had heard. Everyone knew Hardy's reputation and so J.T.'s words were not wasted; they would likely be repeated throughout the day.
But she was the one who had to deal with the likes of Albert Hardy. She knew how very difficult it was going to be to get J.T.'s money back. The agency could tie it up forever if the bow-tied Hardy decided to question and point a finger, claiming that the gravediggers and local authorities were in error, and not the FBI agent.
Still, she found the image of Hardy exploding over a bill for a casket purchased in Illinois by John Thorpe humorous, and it cheered her, an emotion she had been in short supply of for a long time.
John had been so tired when he'd torn away his lab coat and ambled out that she wondered at his having found the elevator at all. She had not gotten much sleep herself, having talked most of the night away with Otto, mostly about the pain and difficulty he had suffered since his wife's aneurysm, and the anguish of having now lost her for good. This morning, she had left ahead of him, jotting down a note, telling him to use the apartment for as long as he needed, and promising to be on hand at the ceremony planned for his wife. It was to be a simple, quiet affair, the body being cremated.
She tried to get her mind back onto the case. She wanted to have every conceivable angle covered for the next day when Otto would return to work. She wanted to bowl him over with their findings and blow away his team.
Aside from the results on the Iowa and Illinois exhumations, she had a mammoth stack of medical supply catalogues to crawl through. Besides the catalogues provided by Mark, there were some tubes and hard plastic items, any one of which might be the killer's tool. She'd have to narrow the field considerably, and then, selecting what proved probable, take SEM photos of the tips of these in search of a likely matchup with the strange and deadly wounds made to the throats of three small-town, midwestern women.
She went into her office and saw the stacks of calls and files, all work that needed doing, all items she had back-shelved since the night she had left for Wekosha for her first encounter with Candy Copeland and the phantom they sought to expose.
Necessary budgetary forms, charts and files that needed her attention, had fallen by the wayside, along with the departmental efficiency rating this month. This was going downhill so fast she felt as if ensnared in a California mud slide. Going the way of the toilet, she thought, and she knew she was leaving herself wide open with the Hardys of the agency. However, she reminded herself, she was now working for Boutine, one of the most influential
