He dressed quickly, embarrassed, as she stood there watching him. She
followed him to the front door and as it opened and he stepped across
the portal, she abruptly pushed him through and then slammed it behind
him.
He looked back for a moment, wondering if she were laughing or crying
behind the door or maybe displaying any emotion at all. He hadn’t meant
to hurt her. He had clearly embarrassed her. He shouldn’t have done it
that way. She had certainly paid him back for that embarrassment,
bringing him to the threshold like that, manipulating him like some
laboratory experiment and then bringing the curtain crashing down on top
of him.
But as he walked to his car the memory of that look on her face made him
relieved their brief relationship had ended.
FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE JOINING THE COMMONWEALTH’S Attorney’s office,
Kate called in sick. Bedcovers pulled up to her chin, she sat propped up
on pillows staring out at a bleak morning. Every time she had tried to
get out of bed, the image of Bill Burton loomed up in front of her like
a mass of sharp-edged granite, threatening to crush or impale her.
She slid down lower in the bed, sinking into the soft mattress like
immersing herself in warm water, just below the surface where she could
neither hear nor see anything that transpired around her.
They would be coming soon. Just like with her mother.
All those years ago. People pushing their way in and firing off
questions Kate’s mother couldn’t possibly answer. Looking for Luther.
She thought of Jack’s outburst from the other night and tightly closed,
her eyes, trying to hurl those words away.
Goddamn him.
She was tired, more tired than any trial had ever made her.
And he had done it to her, just like he had to her mother.
Drawn her into the web even though she wanted no part of it, detested
it, would destroy it if she could.
She sat up again, unable to breathe. She held her throat with her
fingers, tightly, trying to prevent anothevattack.
When it subsided, she turned over on her side and stared at the photo of
her mother.
He was all she had left. She almost laughed. Luther Whitney was all the
family she had left. God help her.
She lay on her back and waited. Waited for the knock at the door. From
mother to daughter. It was her turn now.
AT THAT MOMENT, BARELY TEN MINUTES AWAY, LUTHER stared again at the old
newspaper article. A cup of coffee sat near his elbow, forgotten. The
small refrigerator hummed in the background. In the corner CNN droned
on. Otherwise the room was absolutely quiet.
Wanda Broome had been a friend. A good friend. Ever since their
accidental meeting in a Philadelphia halfway house after Luther’s last
prison term and Wanda’s first and only. And now she was dead too. Had
taken her own life, the newspaper article said, slumped over in the
front seat of her car with a bunch of pills stuffed down her throat.
Luther had never operated in the mainstream, and yet, even to him, this
was all a little much to take. It could have been some continuing
nightmare except that every time he awoke and stared in the mirror, cold
water dripping from features that grew more. and more grizzled, more and
more sunken with each passing day, he knew he was not going to wake up
from this one.
What was ironic, in the shadow of Wanda’s tragic death, was that the
Sullivan job had been her idea. A miserable, terrible idea looking back,
but one that had leapt from her surprisingly fertile mind. And an idea
to which she had held doggedly, despite warnings from both Luther and
her mother.
And they had planned it and he had done it. It was really that simple.
And in the cold face of retrospection he had wanted to do it. It was a
challenge, and a challenge combined with a huge payoff was too tough to
resist.
How Wanda must have felt when Christine Sullivan hadn’t gotten on that
plane. And no way for her to let Luther know that the coast was not