though to fight off cold.
'Rennell . . .'
From beneath the blindfold, a single tear trickled down his face.
Abruptly, Terri stood, removing the blindfold. Rennell hunched forward, head pressed against his drawn-up knees. A cry of anguish ripped from deep inside his chest.
Terri hugged him from behind, face pressed against the top of his head, watching Lane's narrow-eyed scrutiny of the sobbing man before him.
'It's okay,' Terri whispered, trying to breathe with him. She could feel his body trembling in her grasp.
* * *
Emerging from the prison, Terri felt diminished. Her only hope was that what she'd wrung from Rennell Price had some meaning larger than the fatigue and hunger of a man beaten down and then betrayed by a lawyer too intent on her goals to see him.
'I don't know what that was about,' Lane had told her. 'Maybe we never will. But it felt like more than a sugar deficit. The man was scared.'
'Maybe scared of looking stupid,' Terri answered. 'Or maybe of what he thought I was doing.'
For a moment, Terri thought of her childhood, her own nightmares and fear of darkness and then, unavoidably, their recurrence in Elena, and the terrible reasons for that. But all she could do was keep on going. So she drove downtown to Macy's, where Yancey James's ex-wife, Diana, worked behind a cosmetics counter.
* * *
Though quite striking, Diana James used too much of her own product for Terri's taste, and the spiky eyelashes made her enormous black eyes too prominent in a face so long and thin. But an edgy humor flashed through the makeup when Terri explained herself. 'Oh, Lord,' James said. 'Another one of poor Yancey's condemned. They find their way to his door like swallows coming back to Capistrano.'
'My swallow's got twenty-nine days,' Terri said. 'And his next stop won't be Capistrano. I was hoping we could talk.'
Diana rolled her eyes, her expression hovering between exasperation and hard-earned resignation. 'I'm a sucker for nostalgia. I mean, why would merely living with the man ever have been enough.' She glanced at her watch. 'Tell you what, counselor, my break's in twenty minutes. Chance to get us some fresh air.'
* * *
Terri sat with Diana James on a wooden bench in Union Square, watching the pigeons strut by with their chests stuck out while peering about for food.
James eyed them with amused disdain. 'Like Yancey before the fall,' she said. 'Posing like wild, all the time trying to figure out how to get through the next twenty-four hours. Excepting pigeons don't lie.'
Terri managed a smile. 'Nostalgia,' she remarked, 'isn't what it used to be.'
'Not for this girl.' James gave Terri a look of shrewd appraisal. 'I guess you want to talk with him, and you're needing my supposed expertise. Or intervention.'
'That was the idea,' Terri acknowledged. 'Especially the intervention part.'
A corner of James's mouth twisted up. 'You're Rennell Price's lawyer, right? So hard to keep them straight. As I recall things, Yancey didn't much like Rennell's last pack of lawyers when they came sniffing around.' Pausing, James stretched out her syllables in an orotund mimicry of her ex-husband. ' 'Acc-u-sa-tory,' he called them. 'Con- de-scending.' Poor bastard was scared to death of losing everything like he was losing me, so naturally he inflated himself with bluster like it was helium. Or,' she finished with sudden bitterness, 'white powder. By the time I left him, he wasn't anything but coke and pretense. Nobody home no more.'
Terri studied her with genuine curiosity. 'Did you have kids?'
'No, thank God.' The eyelids lowered. 'I say that, but now I've got no kids, too far south of forty. Yancey's the only child I'll ever have.'
'I guess you still see him.'
'If that's what you call propping somebody up.' Diana James sighed, her voice combining weariness with a certain measured sympathy. 'Yancey's got a long, hard road. One of the steps to recovery, they say, is apologizing to those you've wronged. He can't even remember all the people he owes apologies, and the ones he can remember make for a very long list. Sort of makes the road to Calvary look like the hundred-yard dash.' Her tone sharpened. 'One thing I do remember is your client made some poor Asian child choke to death on his own dick. Compared to that, lethal injection seems like a cakewalk. But maybe there's no exceptions on the path to true repentance.'
The abrupt mutation of James's attitude made Terri fearful she would not help. 'My client has a story,' Terri answered. 'No one ever told it. We're still discovering what it is.'
'We all got stories, counselor. And nobody ever tells them. There's no reality TV show wanting mine.'
Terri paused a moment. In a neutral tone, she asked, 'Do you think Yancey will talk to me about Rennell?'
James briefly closed her eyes. 'Only if you let him apologize enough.' Her voice softened, a muted apology of her own. 'I'll call him for you, all right? Don't want to stand in the way of my baby growing up.'
TWELVE
ENTERING THE PSYCHIATRIC INTERVIEW ROOM WITH ANTHONY Lane, Terri studied Rennell with apprehension, fearful that she had destroyed his trust. But when she gave him the sheaf of Hawkman comics she had brought as a present, the smile of gratitude spreading across his face caused her to reach for his manacled hands.
'I love your smile,' she told him and realized that she meant it.
