McTigue that eventually made him less than the man his wife had loved? Perhaps it was simply that Harper was egotistical and rude.
“He has a sister, I understand. Gary Harper lives with his sister?” I said.
Mrs. McTigue baffled me by pressing her lips together, her eyes tearing up. Setting my glass on an end table, I reached for my pocketbook. She followed me to the door. I persisted, carefully. “Did Beryl ever write to you or perhaps to your husband?”
She shook her head.
“Are you aware of any other friends she had? Did your husband ever mention anyone?”
Again, she shook her head.
“What about anyone she may have referred to as ‘M,’ the initial M?”
Mrs. McTigue stared sadly into the empty hallway, her hand on the door. When she looked at me, her eyes were weepy and unfocused. “There’s a ‘P’ and an ‘A’ in two of her novels. Union spies, I believe. Oh, my. I don’t think I turned the oven off.”
She blinked several times as if staring into sunlight. “You’ll come see me again, I hope?”
“That would be very nice.”
Kindly touching her arm, I thanked her and left.
I called my mother as soon as I got home and for once was relieved to receive the usual lectures and reminders, to hear that strong voice loving me in its no-nonsense way.
“It’s been in the eighties all week and I saw on the news it’s been dropping as low as forty in Richmond,” she said. “That’s almost freezing. It hasn’t snowed yet?”
“No, Mother. It hasn’t snowed. How’s your hip?”
“As well as can be expected. I’m crocheting a lap robe, thought you could cover your legs with it while you work in your office. Lucy’s been asking about you.”
I hadn’t talked to my niece in weeks.
“She’s working on some science project at school right now,” my mother went on. “A talking robot, of all things. Brought it over the other night and scared poor Sinbad under the bed—–”
Sinbad was a sinful, bad, mean, nasty cat, a gray- and black-striped stray who had tenaciously begun following Mother while she was shopping in Miami Beach one morning. Whenever I came to visit, Sinbad’s hospitality extended to his perching on top of the refrigerator like a vulture and giving me the fish-eye.
“You’ll never guess who I saw the other day,” I began a little too breezily. The need to tell someone was overwhelming. My mother knew my past, or at least most of it. “Do you remember Mark James?”
Silence.
“He was in Washington and stopped by.”
“Of course I remember him.”
“He stopped by to discuss a case. You remember, he’s a lawyer. Uh, in Chicago.”
I was rapidly retreating. “He was on business in D.C.”
The more I said, the more her disapproving silence closed in on me.
“Huh. What I remember is he nearly killed you, Katie.”
When she called me “Katie” I was ten years old again.
4
An obvious advantage of having the forensic science labs inside my building was I didn’t have to wait for paper reports. Like me, the scientists often knew a lot before they began writing anything down. I had submitted Beryl Madison’s trace evidence exactly one week ago. It would probably be several more weeks before the report was on my desk, but Joni Hamm would already have her opinions and private interpretations. Having finished the morning’s cases and in a mood to speculate, I keyed myself up to the fourth floor, a cup of coffee in hand.
Joni’s “office” was little more than an alcove sandwiched between the trace and drug analysis labs at the end of the hall. When I walked in she was sitting at a black countertop peering into the ocular lens of a stereoscopic microscope, a spiral notebook at her elbow filled with neatly written notes.
“A bad time?”
I inquired.
“No worse than any other time,” she said, glancing around distractedly.
I pulled up a chair.
Joni was a petite young woman with short black hair and wide, dark eyes. A Ph.D. candidate taking classes at night and the mother of two young children, she always looked tired and a bit harried.