front window, he could see the unmistakable outline of a police officer waiting at the front door. He became perfectly still, not even daring to breathe.
The cop had a bunch of papers in his arm, and the papers looked for all the world like a picture of Nathan.
“Jesus Christ,” Nathan whispered. “They found me.”
But the cop wasn’t acting like he’d found anything at all. He was acting like he was looking for something. He rapped on the door a second time, then peered through a cupped hand into the darkened living room, after checking over both shoulders to see if anyone was watching. Nathan would swear that they looked right at each other.
Still, there was no reaction. For the second time in as many days, he’d come eye to eye with his enemy, and nothing had happened. After perhaps fifteen seconds more, the cop slid one of the papers behind the screen door, then turned and walked away.
For a long time, Nathan stayed frozen to the floor. He couldn’t have moved if he had wanted to. As the adrenaline drained from his system, he felt light-headed and sick to his stomach. He rose to his knees, then swung himself back onto the sofa, where he allowed himself the slightest smile. They’d been fifteen feet away from him, and they still missed. Someday he hoped he’d have the opportunity to tell them about it.
Someday.
Into his darkness crept a tiny ray of light. Where just moments before there had been only bleakness and the future had seemed unbearable, there now was reason for hope. His dad had once told him that hope was the most valuable possession a man could own. When he’d first said it, Nathan hadn’t known what he’d meant. Now it was clear. Hope was where tomorrow resided.
His eyes fell once again to the gun in his hands. With its hammer drawn back and poised to fire, it looked evil, like a single-toothed serpent, offering such simple, permanent solutions to life’s difficult problems. In the diminishing light of the evening, he realized the shame of what he had nearly done. A shiver wracked his body as he remembered his finger tightening on the trigger he could barely reach.
If it weren’t for the cop at the door, he’d be dead now; yet it was the specter of encountering the police that had driven him to peer down that huge muzzle in the first place. He’d visited a place in his soul where he hoped he’d never return. What frightened him the most was how easy and effortless the trip had been.
Nathan let the gun slip from his hand onto the carpet, and, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes, he started to cry.
Over a hundred miles away, Lyle Pointer swung his Porsche onto the Beltway heading north. In the uniform he wore, he looked just like a police officer.
Chapter 23
Jed had assumed that Ricky lived alone. There was no record of a wife, and none of the JDC staff had mentioned anything about a significant other. He was certain the question had been asked; it was standard procedure. When he requested the key to look around the apartment, though, the manager told him that Ricky’s girlfriend was still there and could let him in. Her name was Misty.
The Brookfield Garden Apartments were built in the early sixties to meet the county’s growing need for affordable housing, mostly for young military families. Somewhere along the line, the owners of the complex had landed subsidized housing contracts from both the state and federal governments, and now it was on the police dispatcher’s Trouble List: two cops minimum for any disturbance call.
Physically, there wasn’t much difference between these garden-style apartments and the garden-style apartments in Fairfield that continued to attract the young professional crowd. Except, of course, that these grounds were littered with trash, the chains on the swing sets were rusted, and the in-ground swimming pool hadn’t seen water in a decade.
Misty. Now there’s a name, Jed thought as he ambled up the stairs to the second floor. In his mind, he’d pegged Ricky’s girlfriend as a big-boobed bimbette, with frosted hair and a Texas accent. Probably worked as an exotic dancer. As he rapped on the hollow door, he held his badge up next to his chin, where it would be visible through the peephole. He kept his right hand free, just in case, pressing his elbow against his side to double-check on the Glock. In this complex, you could never be too careful.
He was about to knock a second time when he heard the knob turn and the door was pulled open, releasing a pulse of refrigerated air into the thick heat of the day.
Jed’s assumptions couldn’t have been further off the mark. The woman he faced looked no more exotic than a grieving housewife. She was young, maybe twenty-five, neatly dressed in a cheap shorts set. She wore her shoulder-length brown hair tied back in a tight ponytail, which she had clipped up to the back of her head. From a distance, she would have been attractive, but up close, her only visible feature was a deep red scar that traversed the bridge of her nose and continued under her left eye, nearly to her ear. The lines of the wound were too deliberate to be anything but an intentional act of violence. Jed fought the urge to look away, concentrating intently on her eyes. She had been crying.
“Are you Misty?” Jed asked.
“Mitsy,” the woman corrected, shifting her eyes from Jed’s face to his badge and then back again. “About time you got here.”
“Beg pardon?”
“I said it’s about time you got here. I had to hear about Ricky on television. Y’all could’ve at least shown the courtesy of telling me in person.” Her voice sounded strained. She stepped back and to the side, inviting Jed to enter.
As he crossed the threshold, Jed broke eye contact and fumbled for his notebook. “Well, fact is, ma’am, we didn’t know that Mr. Harris had a… well, significant other.”
Mitsy kind of snorted and shook her head as she retreated deeper into the apartment. “Jesus. You guys are something else. Significant other. You make it sound so romantic?’ She disappeared around the corner into the kitchen.
“I need you to stay out here, please,” Jed called. He fought the urge to draw down.
Mitsy came back around the corner with a half-empty Budweiser longneck. “Relax, officer, I don’t own a gun.” She slumped heavily into the sofa, sending a puff of cushion stuffing into the air, and gestured to a sagging La-Z-Boy. “Take a load off,” she said.
“No thanks, I’d rather stand,” Jed replied. The apartment was decorated in early yard sale, but it was clean enough, and Jed saw none of the accumulated dust and food trash he had come to associate with Brookfield Gardens. “Are you here alone?”
Mitsy nodded pensively. “I am now,” she said, all but finishing her beer in one extended guzzle. A scattered pile of empties lay on the floor near the shipping crate that served as an end table. “So, are you gonna catch that little son of a bitch or not?”
“And who would that be, ma’am?”
Mitsy looked at Jed, then shook her head in disgust. “Who would that be, ma’am,” she mocked. “Who the hell do you think? How many little son of a bitches are you looking for?”
“Look, Ms., uh…”
“Cahill. Mitsy Cahill.”
“Ms. Cahill, look. I know this isn’t pleasant, but do you think… “
“Sit down, goddammit!” Mitsy shouted, her eyes wet. “Just sit down and talk to me, will you?” Tears splashed down her cheeks as she blinked, and she wiped them with her fingertips in a futile effort to preserve her makeup. She took a deep breath and composed herself, then softened her expression as she again motioned to the chair. “Please,” she said, much more quietly. “It’s been a very lonely, very difficult day. I’m thrilled to have the company. Please.”
Jed shifted his stance uncomfortably, checked his watch, then sat down in the worn-out La-Z-Boy. It was like sitting on the edge of a well.
“So,” Mitsy declared, using the word as a sentence, an icebreaker. She forced a smile. “Nobody knows
