out of the illumination from the streetlights, moving at a rate that risked a mighty fall. With the luck of the mad, her feet managed to miss the patches of loose gravel and the raised edges of paving stones, the passing cars were always just through the crossings or else down the block, and the clots of people and the dog-walkers were always on the other side of the street.
Gradually, as her resentment cooled and her muscles warmed, she found her pace, and in the end she ran a lot farther than the original spiteful six blocks she had intended. She circled around the base of Russian Hill and came up the steep wooden stairs of Macondray Lane, at the top of which she stopped, bent over with her hands on her thighs to catch her breath. She cooled off by jogging slowly down Green Street and doing some belated stretches, and when she reached her front door, she was considerably more rested than when she had started out.
She paused in front of her door to pick a frail pansy from Jon’s windowbox, carried it through to the kitchen, presented it wordlessly to Lee, and then put her arms around her partner. The two women stood in the silent embrace, wrapped up in each other, restored. It was Lee who moved first to break it off, by murmuring Kate’s name with a question attached to it.
“Yes?” Kate responded into the hollow of Lee’s throat.
“My love, you really, really stink.”
“I know,” Kate said. “I know,” and she went off to luxuriate in a long, hot shower.
Dinner was not reheated leftovers. Dinner was a more or less vegetarian stroganoff with red wine, eaten by candlelight. Kate had not realized how starved she was until her plate was empty—for the second time. She drained her glass, sat back in her chair, and closed her eyes, feeling the hum of satisfaction running through her very bones.
Of course, she was fully aware that underlying the entire string of events from the moment she had come in the door was that ominous little phrase, “Honey, we need to talk.” She had been neglecting Lee, and at a time when there were issues standing between them, issues that would rapidly calcify if left to themselves, requiring major demolition efforts later.
But Lee was right, and Lee was good, and Kate would not force Lee to do it all herself. Besides which, she did want to talk to Lee.
Talking to Lee had become a high priority in Kate’s life, ever since the long, lonely months of fall and winter when she had feared she was losing her beloved. Talking, and laughing and loving and just being with her, and if it cut into the hours Kate could spend working a case, it also seemed to make her more rested, more what Lee would call “centered,” and with that came increased efficiency in her working hours. So Kate told herself, at any rate, and so she would believe.
It had been eight months before, at the end of summer, when Lee had left her, pushing Kate away in a particularly brutal manner. Kate thought it final. Instead, with the new year came a glimmer of hope, shining through a hellish and highly personal case involving the kidnapping of Al’s stepdaughter Jules, and when that case came to an end, miraculously Lee was still there.
A new Lee, a different Lee from the wounded, angry, and confused person who had fled north to her aunt’s island on the Canadian border. This was closer to the strong and purposeful woman Kate had first met, but with a depth and stability that only the profoundly damaged attain. Lee had all but died, and then over the next two years she had been reborn. Kate did not yet know just what her lover had become, or what their relationship would become. All she knew was that Lee still chose to be with her; the rest of it would find its way.
“God, that was good,” Kate said with a sigh. “Would you marry me?”
“I’m already married to you,” Lee pointed out.
“Would you marry me again, then? Maybe if we do it twice, you won’t need to do anything drastic like running off to your Aunt Agatha’s to get my boneheaded attention.”
“That isn’t exactly why I did it,” Lee protested.
“No, but that was one of the results.” Kate pulled her napkin off her lap and dropped it onto the table, pushing her chair back and walking slowly around the table toward Lee. “You have my attention, my complete attention, and nothing but my attention.” At the last word she reached Lee. Bending down, she slipped one arm behind her lover’s back and one under her knees, and picked her up. The romance of the gesture was undermined by the involuntary grunt of effort she let out and the way she staggered across the room, accompanied by Lee’s giggling shrieks of alarm and protest. At the sofa, Kate stumbled and, although Lee did end up on the cushions, Kate fell on top of her in a tangle of limbs and a brief crack of skulls.
They disentangled themselves and sat for a minute, rubbing their heads and recovering their breath.
“So much for romance,” Kate grumbled. “I think I have a hernia or a slipped disk or something.”
“Poor dear,” Lee cooed, and took Kate’s head in her hands to kiss her bruise. The kiss lingered, and moved down to the lips, and suddenly Kate sat up.
“This is where Jon comes in,” she said warily. “Where is he?”
“I told him if he didn’t take the night off and go away, I’d fire him.”
Kate reflected ungratefully that if he did walk in now, the momentary embarrassment would be well worth the result, and then Lee was kissing her and she thought no more for some time.
When they lay still beneath the inadequate cover of the sofa’s throw blanket and the candles on the table were beginning to gutter out, Lee asked Kate, “What was that glance that went between you and Roz the other night?”
“Ah. I should have known you’d see it. It’s kind of embarrassing. You know that quilt of yours I said the dry cleaner’s ruined? It wasn’t them, it was me. One day during the winter I was just sitting there and I… I just felt this tremendous… anger rise up. I just felt so pissed off at you, so I… destroyed it. Childish, I know, and stupid. I’m really sorry—it was such a beautiful thing, and I know how you loved it. But the point is that Roz happened to walk in on me.”
“I see,” Lee said, and from the way she said it, she truly did. “I’m sorry.”
“No apologies,” Kate said firmly. “It happened, it was both our faults, it’s over.”
The last candle flared wildly a handful of times and went out, leaving them in the dim light filtering in from the kitchen.
“And you,” Kate said. “What was that look that went between you and Maj?”
Lee shifted, would have sat up but Kate held her, and she subsided stiffly, then relaxed again.
“It was something Roz had just said about love and rage. Roz had a terrible childhood, I think. She never told me directly, but from things she said in passing over the years, I gather that she had one of those mothers who enjoys ill health while manipulating everyone with her weakness, coupled with an emotionally destructive and often absent father. Both of them alcoholics, and Roz an only child. So although she has built herself a gorgeous, strong, competent persona, when it slips, there’s a lot of pain and anger underneath. Maj and I are two of the few people who have seen it.”
Much as Kate would have enjoyed hearing the gritty details of the golden girl’s dark side, she had no right to ask, and Lee would very probably not tell her if she did. So Kate just pulled Lee to her feet, handed her the crutches, and gathered up their discarded items of clothing so as not to give Jon evidence of their activities when he came in.
Mind and body now restored to an equal state of tiredness and satisfaction, Kate followed her partner’s slow progress up to their bedroom, where she slept very well indeed.
ON THE SURFACE, the murders of James Larsen and Matthew Banderas were linked, by method and by the glaring fact that both men had been multiple offenders—Larsen against his wife, Banderas against a number of women. Still, surface links were often misleading. Which meant that nothing could be assumed, that painstaking detective work was the only option, both now in looking for someone to arrest as well as far down the line when court testimony loomed.
Every neighbor in the condo complex was interviewed, briefly or in depth. The members of the health club Banderas belonged to, his coworkers, his brother, the guys at the bar he frequented, all were noted, all were asked the necessary questions. On Monday morning, Kate tried to track down Banderas’s “real bitch” of a boss, but she was out of town, at a conference in Cincinnati until Wednesday. Kate left her number, and turned to the other interviews on her schedule.
Wednesday morning Janice Popper surfaced, back from Cincinnati but pleading a burden of accumulated work too deep to fit in an interview with the police. She suggested Friday, Kate countered with some very mild hints
