the numbers of Karin and Wade, in case you’ve lost them. Karin can come anytime, Wade, up until six in the morning.”
“What about Phyllis?”
“She’s in N’Orleans this week, y’all,” he drawled. “Playin‘ with the bubbas and all them good ol’ boys, hot damn.”
“Have a good time, Jon,” said Lee.
“You too, darlin‘.”
The house seemed to expand when he left, and suddenly, unexpectedly, Kate was aware of a touch, just a faint brush of unease at being alone with Lee. She wondered at it, wondered if Lee felt it, and decided that she couldn’t have or she would say something.
“I feel like my mother has just left me alone in the house with a girlfriend,” Lee said.
“I was just thinking how quiet it was.”
Without taking her eyes from Kate’s, Lee reached down and freed the brakes on her chair, backed and maneuvered to where Kate sat, laid her hand on the back of Kate’s neck, and kissed her, long and slow. She then backed away again and returned to her place, leaving Kate flushed, short of breath, and laughing.
“Necking while Mom’s away,” Kate commented.
“Different from having her in the next room.”
“I’m sure Jon would love it if you started calling him Mom.”
“You still don’t like him, do you?”
“I like him well enough.” That Kate detested having any person other than Lee in the house, no matter how easy to live with, was a fact both unavoidable and best not talked about.
“You don’t trust him.”
“With you, with the house, I believe he is a thoroughly responsible and trustworthy person,” Kate said carefully. “He is absolutely ideal as a caregiver for you, and I think we’re very, very lucky to have him. If there’s anything about him I don’t trust, it’s his motives. He’s a blessing from heaven, he works cheap, he even knows when to disappear, but I can’t help having a niggling suspicion that we’re going to have to pay for it somehow in the end.”
“Transference with a vengeance,” Lee agreed. “Every therapist’s nightmare, a client who gets his foot in the door. However, I think Jon Sampson’s a much more balanced individual than he appears. He plays up the ‘patient turned powerful doctor’ role in order to defuse it, and he is aware that one of his motives in taking the job was his lingering guilt at having a part, however minor, in my being shot. He’s clearly focused both on his sense of responsibility for what happened to me and on how invalid the guilt is, and he’s working on it. It’s a complex relationship, but I still don’t think I was wrong to allow it.”
“You’re probably right. I just get suspicious when someone wants to ingratiate himself.” Kate paused, remembering Beatrice Jankowski’s similar description of the dead man John. Odd, the coincidence in names, although come to think of it Jon’s name had been chosen to replace the hated Marvin his parents had blessed him with. Though what was to say John was not an alias, as well? Beatrice thought so. Another thing to ask Brother Erasmus tomorrow, if she found him. She put the forkful in her mouth and looked up, to see Lee gazing at her with an odd, crooked smile on her face.
“What?”
“You really are back into it, aren’t you?” Lee said.
“Back into what?”
“You know what I’m talking about. You were suddenly miles away, thinking about the case.”
“Was I? Sorry. Funny, Al said pretty much the same thing today. I guess you’re right. This case is different. It’s… interesting. Could you push the salad over here?”
Silence, and the sounds of fork and plate, and then Lee spoke, deliberately.
“For a while there, I thought you might quit.”
“What, resign? From the department?”
“You’ve been hanging by a thread for months, and I got the distinct impression that going back into partnership with Al was a final trial to prove to yourself how much you hated the job.”
“I don’t hate the job.”
“Kate, you’ve been a basket case. You’d hate any job that did that to you.”
“Don’t exaggerate.”
“It’s true. You’ve been a classic example of posttraumatic stress syndrome. I’m not saying without reason, sweetheart. I mean, I know you’re Superwoman, but even a Woman of Steel can develop metal fatigue.”
“I’ve just been tired. I’ve been working too hard.”
“Bullshit,” Lee said politely. “You’ve spent months doing nothing but type reports and worry about me. You’ve been through hell, Kate. First the man Lewis and then, when you got your feet under you again, the Morningstar case steamrolled over you.”
“So what do you want me to say?” Kate demanded. “That I’m not quitting? Okay, I’m not quitting. We can’t afford it, for one thing. We’d starve if I went private.” Which, she realized belatedly, revealed that she’d at least considered it, a point that Lee did not miss.
“You know full well that with your reputation in the city, if you went into private investigations, within a year you’d be making twice what you do now.”
“Not twice,” Kate protested feebly.
“Damn near. So don’t use salary as an excuse.”
Anger did not sit well on a face so carved by pain’s lines as Lee’s face was, and the sight made Kate rise up in wretchedness and despair.
“You want me to quit? I’ll quit. I’ve told you that before, but you have to say it. All right, I thought if I hated the job enough, I’d want to resign on my own, and that would make you happy. But I didn’t. All I hated was being away from my job. I will quit if you ask me, Lee, but if you don’t, all I can say is, I’m a cop. I am a cop.”
Lee’s features slowly relaxed and the lines lessened, until she was smiling at Kate.
“Your resignation would not make me happy, sweetheart. I’ve never much liked your job, and now it just plain frightens me, but I don’t want you to quit. You are a cop, Kate, and I love you.
¦
FIVE
¦
The sun came out while Kate was driving across the Bay Bridge the next morning, and the hills behind Berkeley and Oakland were green with the winter rains. The departmental unmarked car had something funny about its front end, so rather than wrestle it through the side streets, Kate stayed on the crowded freeway, got off at University Avenue, and drove straight up toward the University of California’s oldest campus, squatting on the hill at the head of the broad, straight avenue like an ill-tempered concrete toad. At the last possible instant, Kate avoided being swallowed by her alma mater and veered left, then right on the road that followed the north perimeter. Between university buildings on the right and converted Victorians and apartments on the left, she drove until she came to a cluster of shops on a side street and one of the main pedestrian entrances to the campus, a continuation of Telegraph Avenue on the opposite side. She turned up this street away from the University of California, moving cautiously among the crowds of casually earnest students and suicidal bicyclists, and in two hundred yards found herself in a different world. As she had remembered, the university crowds seemed miraculously to vanish, leaving only the serious-minded graduate schools of divinity and theology and eternal truths.
There were also more parking spaces. She fought the car into one, fed the meter, and then walked back down the hill to indulge in a few minutes of nostalgia. The Chinese restaurant was still there, and the pizza-and- beer joint in whose courtyard, in another lifetime, Lee the graduate student had oh so casually brushed against the arm of Kate the junior-year student, Kate the unhappy, Kate the unquestioningly hetero, leaving a tantalizing and only half-conscious question that would crop up at inconvenient moments until it was finally resolved almost two years later: Yes, Lee had meant it.
The espresso bars and the doughnut shop, the scruffy bookstore and the art-film theater, shops selling clothes and pens and backpacks, all crowded into one short block. Browsing the windows in bittersweet pleasure, Kate’s attention was caught by a display of unusual jewelry made of some small scraps of odd iridescent plastic.
