'Your Honor, objection.'
'You went upstairs to get the gun-'
'Objection.' Hardy's voice had gone up several octaves. Villars banged on her gavel. Powell rolled over both of them, at the top of his voice, moving closer to Jennifer.
'Now, suddenly, this became the moment when you must act. He said he was taking his money back, isn't that it?' Finally, in her face'Isn't that why you killed him?'
Exploding out of the witness chair, nearly knocking it over, Jennifer lunged at Powell, her face distorted. 'No. I didn't kill him, you son of a bitch!'
'Sit down, all of you. Mr. Powell…' Villars slammed her gavel.
Jennifer, out of control, was screaming.
'Order! Order! Bailiffs!'
But even the bailiffs stood back, letting Jennifer wind down until, spent, she pulled the chair upright again and lowered herself back into it.
Powell stared at her. His shoulders sagged. 'I just don't understand why you had to kill Matt,' he whispered. Turning, he said he had no further questions.
It took the jury two ballots, two hours and seventeen minutes. It was, as the law prescribed it had to be, unanimous. And it was for the penalty of death.
Part Five
50
Hardy woke up sweating, gasping for air, the green room closing in around him as the almond-scented, corrosive gas burned its way down his windpipe, into his lungs, exploding them inward, leaving him in mute agony – in his dream, the scream woke him. In life, in this style of death, the scream would be silent, choked off the instant it was born.
It was all right. He was in his bedroom, Frannie curled in sleep next to him. The clock next to the bed said it was a little after three o'clock – he'd been asleep almost two hours.
He got up and went naked into the bathroom to throw water on his face. He'd been sweating – his hair was stuck to the side of his head. Gulping water and aspirin, he pulled at the skin around his eyes – the blackened circles under them didn't smudge away.
At the front of his house, still undressed, he sat in his armchair. It was cold, colder than it ever got. After a couple of minutes he heard footsteps and Frannie was next to him.
'Bad dream?' She sat on his lap, her arms around his neck. 'You're all clammy,' she said.
He couldn't talk. Her hands moved over his head, smoothing his hair. He had his arms around her and held her tight against him.
'I'm going to get a blanket.'
When she got back he was shivering. He couldn't stop. She put the blanket over him, then went to get another comforter. When she returned he was out again, breathing heavily. She tucked the extra blanket around him, rubbed a hand across his damp and burning forehead and lay down in the windowseat under an afghan, her head on a sitting pillow near her husband's knees.
He woke up again. It seemed to be a long time before dawn.
Still in the chair, he listened in the darkness, trying to hear something beyond the sounds of his quiet house – Frannie breathing on the windowseat beside him, the aquarium gurgling away in the back, in their bedroom.
Something – he thought it might have been a noise – had gotten into his consciousness.
A chill shook him, bringing with it a sudden jolt of fear. If he was on to what he thought he was, suppose there was someone trying to make it impossible for him to tell what he might know?
He didn't remember getting into bed. He didn't remember getting to this chair, or why Frannie was here. Throwing off the blanket, he realized he must have come in, taken off his shoes and collapsed.
His guns!
His guns from his cop days were locked in his safe. When Rebecca had moved into what had been his office he had moved the safe out behind the kitchen, on the top shelf over his workbench. Now, woozy and stumbling, he forced himself up, back through the house, turning on lights as he went.
The safe was untouched.
He opened it. The guns were still there. He really was losing it. No one was coming for him. Not here. Not at his home.
And then it occurred to him that maybe Larry Witt had thought the same thing. And so had Simpson Crane. And both had been shot with their own weapons in their own houses Ridiculous.
The. 380 in his hand, shivering, he decided he'd finish making sure. There wasn't much of the house left to check. Vincent's room, Rebecca's, his own bedroom. He passed back through the kitchen, dining room, living room, back up the long hallway, turning lights off behind him. Nothing. He was crazy.
He looked at the loaded gun in his hand, knowing that this was how domestic accidents occurred. A half-dark house, a wife or child walking in unexpectedly while the husband holds a loaded weapon, thining he's heard somebody break in, that somebody might have a reason to.
He went back to the work room. As he was putting the damn thing back in the safe, it came to him suddenly. His legs went mushy on him. No, it was too grotesque to consider. He had to sit.
Larry had finally hit Matt. And more than once. Maybe Matt had come in during the fight and taken sides with his mother, pulling at his dad to leave his mom alone, and Larry had lost it entirely with the boy, smashing the gun he was holding into the side of his face. And then realizing what he'd done, that this couldn't be covered up or undone. The boy, maybe with a broken jaw, a living indictment of what Larry had become, of who he really was. His career would be over, his carefully ordered, totally controlled life… And in a beat, as Matt lay on the floor by the bathroom and Jennifer begged him to stop, the only solution had come to him. Destroy the evidence of what he'd done. A bullet would erase any sign that he'd ever hit his son. They could never say that.
And then there would be nothing left, no point in continuing your life, so you turn the gun on yourself.
But before he does, he turns to Jennifer and says, 'This is all your fault.' And, being who she is, she at that moment, and beyond, believes him.
Hardy, on the floor in the workroom, followed it through to the end. But of course it couldn't have happened that way. The gun being gone eliminated that possibility.
Except if Jennifer, blaming herself as she always did for the fight and everything it precipitated, removed the gun herself, took it to the dumpster? That way it wouldn't be Larry's fault. The precious reputation of Dr. Larry Witt would be saved. And she – Jennifer – she'd get what she deserved for having started it, for being who she was.
It was too twisted. It couldn't have been that.
And yet some of it did fit – Jennifer's unyielding denial that she had killed her son and husband. And, more chillingly, he thought, it fit her profile – self-hatred, guilt, the need to be punished. Because, in fact, her immediate feeling when it was done was her guilty joy that Larry was dead. She'd hated him, hated everything he'd done. Though she almost couldn't physically bear the loss of Matt, it didn't – in that first instant flush – diminish her overriding happiness that Larry was gone. That she was free of him at last.
And if she could feel that way right after losing her son, then she had to feel she truly was without a sould and deserved whatever punishment society gave her. In fact, she would help it. She had helped it. She was doing this to herself.
