Guilty as Sin (24 page)

"Me?" Paul thumped a fist against his chest. "Yeah, I'm to blame. Bullshit. You're the one who—"

"Stop right there!" Hannah demanded. "I will not listen to this again. Do you understand me, Paul? I'm tired of you blaming me. I blame myself enough for both of us. I'm doing the best I can. I can't speak for you; I don't know what you're doing. I don't even know who you are anymore. You're not the man I married. You're no one I want to be with."

"Well, that's fine," he sneered. "I'm out of here."

And so the vicious circle completed itself again, Hannah thought as the doors slammed. They had danced the dance so many times, just the thought of it made her dizzy. Exhausted, she sank down onto a wing chair and reached for the portable phone on the end table. She needed an anchor, a friend, someone she could feel safe loving even if he could never love her back.

The phone on the other end rang once, twice.

"God Squad. Free deliverance."

A smile trembled across Hannah's mouth.

"We've got a special on penance tonight—three rosaries for the price of two."

"What about shoulders to cry on?" she asked.

The silence was warm and full. "Buy one, get one free," Father Tom said softly.

"Can I put it on my tab?"

"Anytime, Hannah," he whispered. "Anytime."

Paul picked his way along the edge of the woods that bordered Quarry Hills Park. The moonlight was intermittent, blinking on and off as dark clouds scraped across its path like chunks of soot in the night sky. He knew the way well enough. The path meant for cross-country skiers had been trampled by countless boots in the last few days as the police had combed the hillside for evidence. Tattered ribbons of yellow plastic crime-scene tape clung to tree trunks like synthetic kudzu.

He tried to ignore it and not think about the reason it was there. He needed a break from the nightmare. He needed comfort. He needed love. He deserved something better than Hannah's running him down. She should have been able to see the strain he was under. If she had been a true wife to him, he would have been sleeping in his own bed tonight. Instead, he wanted to seek out another man's wife.

That the man was sitting in jail tonight, accused of stealing Josh, brought on a complex matrix of emotions. None of them made him turn back.

The kitchen light was on in the Wrights' house. From the woods his views of the interior were abstract—a rectangle of kitchen, a square of bathroom wall and ceiling, a triangle of bedroom through the inverted V created between the tied-back curtains.

Karen was home. He had called her from a pay phone and hung up when she'd answered, afraid that her telephone might be bugged. There were no cars in her driveway, no evidence of visitors.

Caution and cowardice and guilt held him there at the edge of the woods. Need finally drove him forward.

He tracked across the backyard to the door that led into the garage and let himself in as he had many times before. Garrett's Saab had been impounded by the police and taken away, leaving Karen's Honda to take up only a fraction of the floor space. This was where Mitch Holt had arrested Garrett Wright. For a second Paul could almost hear the sounds of the scuffle, the low pitch of Holt's voice as he recited the Miranda warning.

Paul barely knew Garrett Wright. They were neighbors, but not the sort who shared summer evenings and backyard barbecues. Wright held himself apart, superior. He gave his life to his work at the college and regarded the people around him as if they were specimens to be studied and picked apart. It brought a certain bitter pleasure to think of him sitting in jail. How superior was he now?

"Paul?"

Karen stood behind the storm door looking fragile and startled. Her fine ash-blond hair framed her face. A pink rose bloomed across the front of her oversize ivory sweater. Feminine. Delicate. Everything he wanted in a woman.

"Paul, what are you doing here?"

"I needed to see you," he said, pulling the door open. "Can I come in?"

"You shouldn't." But she stepped back into the laundry room anyway.

"I had to see how you're doing. I haven't seen you since Garrett—"

"That was a mistake." She shook her head, not quite looking at him. Garrett should never have been arrested. He's never been arrested."

"He took Josh, Karen."

"That's a mistake," she mumbled, twisting a finger into her hair. "He would never . . . hurt me like that."

"He doesn't love you, Karen. Garrett doesn't love you. I love you. Remember that."

"I don't like what's happening." The words came on a trembling whine. "I think you should leave, Paul."

"But I need to see you," he said urgently. "You can't imagine what I've been going through, wondering about you—wondering if you're all right, wondering if the police have been interrogating you. I've been worried sick."

He lifted a hand to touch her cheek. "I've missed you," he whispered. Soft. She was so soft. Need ached through him. He needed comfort. He deserved comfort. "Every night I lay awake, wishing you were with me. I think about us being together—really together. It can happen now. Hannah and I are finished. Garrett will go to jail."

"I don't think so," she murmured.

"Yes. You don't love him, anyway, Karen. He can't give you what you need. You love me. Say you love me, Karen."

She hitched a breath, tears spilling over her lashes. "I love you, Paul."

He lowered his mouth to kiss her, but she turned her face away. She pushed at him, her small hands spread across the front of his coat.

"Karen?" he whispered, confused, crushed. "I need you."

She shook her head, tears tumbling down her cheeks, her lower lip trembling. "I'm so sorry. It was all a mistake." She slowly sank down along the front of the dryer to sit on the floor. She wrapped her arms around her legs, rested her cheek on her knees and cried softly. "... a terrible mistake."

I made a mistake. The line blinked on and off in Denny Enberg's head like a neon sign. On and off, on and off, the relentless beat like Chinese water torture.

"You should be happy, Denny," he mumbled, pouring himself another shot of Cuervo. "You're out of it. You're off the hook."

He had never expected to be put on the hook in the first place. Deer Lake was not a place of intrigue. His clients were generally ordinary, their cases unremarkable. He lived a quiet, decent life, dull by many standards. There was his law practice, his hunting and fishing, his wife Vicki. She worked nights as an LPN at the rest home and was taking classes at Harris to become an elementary-school teacher. They talked about adopting a baby but had decided to wait until Vicki finished school.

The Cuervo went down like liquid smoke. Edges were beginning to blur and soften as he looked around his office. The Manly Man Cave, Vicki called it. The place where he was allowed to hang his hunting trophies and keep his guns and play poker with his buddies once a month. The walls were knotty pine, the floor covered in flat, hard carpet the color of dirt. His inner sanctum. He allowed no clients back here. His secretary left the vacuum cleaner at the door every Friday. He used it once a month.

The building that housed his modest practice sat on the edge of a strip-mall parking lot and had once been a laundromat and dry cleaner's. Now the other half was occupied by a dentist who gave him a deal for referring clients who had ruined their teeth in car accidents and barroom brawls. The kind of clients he handled best—uncomplicated.

I made a mistake.

"Let it go, Denny," he croaked, staring across the room at the ten-point buck that hung above his gun rack. "You can't win 'em all."

That was what he had told Ellen North when she had stopped by trolling for information. "I wasn't aggressive enough. I let my client down. He fired me. It happens."

The case could have made him some money, made him a name, but it was gone now, and good riddance. He didn't need the pressure, didn't want the secrets.

"You seem distracted, Denny," Ellen said.

"Yeah, well, it was a big case. I could have used the business it would have brought me. But what the hell. Who needs the headache?"

"Your heart didn't seem to be in it."

"No? Yeah, well . . . Vicki didn't like the idea of my defending Wright."

"She thinks he's guilty?"

"Trick question."

"Withdrawn," she said with a nod.

"Anyway, the crank calls were getting annoying."

"What calls?"

He shrugged. "The usual 'You scum lawyer' variety. Some people believe he's guilty. Now Costello can worry about it. I'm out."

She started to leave, turning back toward him at the door, her expression pensive. "You know I would never ask you to compromise your ethics, Denny. But I trust you to do what's right. If Garrett Wright is the monster we think "e is, he has to be stopped. His accomplice has to be stopped. If you could do something to stop them, I know you would. You would do the right thing. Wouldn't you, Denny?"

Do the right thing.

I made a mistake.

He tipped the Cuervo over his glass and drained the bottle.

Josh sat up in his bed and looked at the glowing dial of the clock on his nightstand. Twelve a.m. His mom had left a night-light on for him even though he was much too grown-up to have one. He was old now in ways Mom would never understand, in ways he could never explain.

He crawled out from under the covers and went to the window that looked out on the lake. In the moonlight it looked as if it could have been a white desert or the surface of a faraway planet. The ice-fishing huts clustered in an area down the shoreline could have been a village of alien life-forms.

He left his room and went down the hall to check on his mother. The door to her room stood open. She was asleep in bed, though he knew from experience the slightest sound might wake her. He wouldn't make a sound. He could be like a ghost, could move all around, be anywhere and no one would see him or hear. The quiet was in his mind, and he could make it as big as he was and put it all around him like a giant bubble.

He backed away from the door, went down the hall to the bathroom, where a window looked out on the backyard. He climbed up on the clothes hamper and parted the curtains. The snow was silver, the woods beyond like black lace with the here-and-gone moon shining between the bare branches of the winter-dead trees. There was a mystical, magical quality to the scene that called to him. The feeling frightened him a little, but pulled at him like a pair of big invisible hands. He wanted to be out there, alone, where no one would watch him as if they expected him to explode, and no one would ask him questions he wasn't supposed to answer.

In the mudroom he pulled on his snow boots and put on, over the new purple Vikings sweat suit Natalie Bryant had bought him, the new winter jacket his mom had bought him. People had bought him a lot of presents, like it was Christmas or something. Only when his mom gave them to him, she seemed sad and anxious instead of happy.

Josh knew he was the cause of those feelings. He wished he could fix her broken heart. He wished he could make the world right again, but he couldn't.

What's done is done, but it isn't over.

He didn't like to think about that, but it was in his head, put there by someone he didn't dare go against. The Taker. The Taker said he wasn't nposed to tell, or bad things would happen, and so he didn't talk, even though bad things seemed to be happening anyway. Josh stayed inside his mind, even though it was a lonely place. It was the safest place to be. As quiet as a mouse, he let himself outside.

The call came at 2:02 a.m., jolting Ellen from a restless sleep. She sat bolt upright in bed, scattering the files and documents she had fallen asleep reading. The fat three-ring binder that was her bible for the Wright case tumbled to the floor with a thud. She stared at the phone, her mind rationalizing as it had Monday night. The call was probably work related. A cop in need of a warrant. There were other cases ongoing in Park County besides the Holloman kidnapping. Or maybe it was about the Holloman case. Maybe it was Karen Wright, calling to confess her husband's sins.

Still, she couldn't bring herself to pick up the receiver. Harry raised his massive head from the mattress and made a disgruntled sound at having his sleep disturbed.