Guilty as Sin (30 page)

She replayed the scene in her mind as she went through the motions of preparing supper for her children, her hands shaking so badly she spilled tomato sauce on the counter. It splashed across the tile like blood, the color of violence and rage. For a long moment she just stood there staring at it. She thought of Megan O'Malley, beaten, the lifeblood of her career rushing out of her. She thought of that night Mitch had come, the night she'd told Paul it was over between them. The last lifeblood of their marriage had been drained from them. She thought of Josh and the blood that had been drawn from his arm.

Hannah didn't know if any of them could ever get back what they had lost. And yet Garrett Wright could make a down payment and buy back his freedom. If he wanted, he could come home to the house down the block. He could resume his residence in Lakeside with no regard for the lives he had wrecked at the end of the street. It seemed he could wipe the slate of his conscience clean as easily as she wiped away the spilled sauce on the counter. No consequences. Clean up the mess and forget about it.

He won't get away with it.

Ellen had assured her the county attorney's office was working diligently to bring the case to trial and to convict Garrett Wright. Mitch had told her all the law-enforcement agencies involved in the Dustin Holloman case were focused on capturing Wright's accomplice. She had to trust the system. She believed in it, believed it worked more often than not. She had to believe in justice.

He won't get away with it.

She slid the lasagna into the oven, wiped her hands on a dish towel, and walked down into the family room. The movie was still rolling, but no one seemed to be watching it. Lily was singing a tune of her own composition and her own language, and wiggling around the cherry trunk that served as coffee table. She had pulled a pair of huge pink play sunglasses out of the toy box and wore them at a jaunty angle. Hannah grabbed a discarded baseball cap and plunked it sideways on her daughter's head, finding a smile that had become too rare in the last weeks.

"Hey, Lily-bug, are you doing the diaper dance?" she asked, squatting down and wiggling her own behind, sending Lily into a giggling frenzy.

Hannah laughed, amazed at how good that felt. Then her gaze strayed to Josh and the laughter died. He hadn't moved from the window, his expression hadn't changed. He didn't seem to be with them. His emotional isolation took on magical physical properties—an invisible force field around him that didn't allow him to see or hear or reach out to the People who loved him.
              

The idea came with a swift needle stab of pain. A force field was something Josh would have created a story around . . . before. He was fascinated by science fiction, loved to make up his own tales after watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since fall he had carried a notebook with him everywhere—his "Think Pad" he called it—to draw pictures of rocket! ships and race cars. He had filled the pages with his thoughts and ideas.

The notebook was gone now, given over to the state crime lab. The kidnapper had used it as one of his taunts, placing it on the hood of Mitchf Holt's truck. Another piece of Josh's childhood gone.

Even as she thought it, Hannah's gaze caught on the sketch pad the county child advocate had given Josh. It lay on the floor, pushed aside, unused, blank. She shivered at the thought that Josh's mind might be that blank. There was no way of knowing as long as he chose not to share his feelings. He had spent another fifty minutes with the psychiatrist that afternoon staring at the woman's aquarium, watching the fish swim back and forth. His only comment had come at the end of the session. He had turned to Dr. Freeman and said, "They're trapped, aren't they? They can see out, but they can never get out."

As he sat staring out the window, Hannah couldn't help but wonder if he felt the same way.

On impulse, she turned away from him and went back through the kitchen to Paul's immaculate home office. He had yet to clean out the room, though she supposed that day would come when he would box up his half of their marriage and take it all away.

Hannah found what she was looking for on a shelf in the closet, where Paul kept supplies—a brand-new blue spiral notebook. From the organizer on the desk she chose the most exotic-looking pen she could find—a fat red one with a fancy blue clip and a removable cap. She left the office and went into the laundry room, where one cupboard drawer held gift wrap, tape and string and sheets of stickers. Digging through the mess, she found an assortment of stickers she knew would appeal to Josh and used them to decorate the cover of the notebook. With a laundry marker she carefully wrote Josh's New Think Pad across the center of the cover, then at the very bottom printed To Josh From Mom, and finished the line with a heart.

He was still sitting by the window when she returned to the living room. Lily had lost all interest in the movie and was busy dragging toys out of the toy box.

"Josh, honey," Hannah said, laying a hand on his shoulder, "I've got something for you. Will you come sit with me on the couch so I can give it to you?"

He looked up at her, away from the window and the dark view of the lake then gathered up his backpack and went to the couch. He sat back in corner, the pack on his lap, his arms around it as if it were a favorite old teddy bear. Hannah took the opportunity to close the drapes, though she left the stool he had been using. Sitting next to him, she resisted the urge to pull him close. Dr. Freeman had impressed upon her the need to give Josh a little breathing room, even though what she wanted most to do was hold him twenty-four hours a day.

"Remember your Think Pad and how it got lost?" she asked.

Josh nodded, though his attention seemed to be caught on the baseball cap Lily had discarded on the floor.

"I remember how you used to draw and write in it all the time. All the neat pictures you used to do with spaceships and everything. And I got to thinking you probably still miss it. I mean, that sketch pad you got is pretty cool, but it's sort of big, isn't it? You can't really carry it around. It won't fit in your backpack. And so ... ta-da!" She held out the new notebook in front of him. "Josh's New Think Pad."

Hannah held her breath as he looked at it. He made no move to take it at first, but his gaze traveled the cover from top to bottom, taking in the stickers of the starship Enterprise and football helmets and Batman. Slowly he uncurled one arm from around his backpack and reached out with his forefinger. He touched one sticker and then the next. He traced beneath the title, then dragged his fingertip down to the bottom of the page. To Josh From Mom. He opened his hand and stroked the line, his expression wistful and sad.

"Go ahead, honey," Hannah whispered around the lump in her throat. "It's yours. Just for you. You can write down whatever you want in it—stories or secrets or dreams. You don't ever have to share it with anyone if you don't want to. But if you want to share it with me, you know I'll listen. Anything you want to tell me, you can, and it'll be all right. We can work out anything because we love each other. Right?"

His eyes filled with tears as he looked at the notebook, and he nodded slowly, reluctantly. Hannah wished she could have known what part of her statement made him hesitate. Was it that he didn't believe he could tell her or that he didn't believe they could work it out? She had no way of knowing. All she could do was offer him support and reassurance, and hope to God the promises she made him weren't empty.

As he took the notebook from her, she pulled him close and kissed the toP of his head.

"We will work it out, Josh. However long it takes. It doesn't matter," she whispered. "I'm just so happy to have you home, to be able to tell you; how much I love you." She pulled back from him a little and made a goofy face at him. "And get mushy all over you."

A tiny smile of embarrassment hooked one corner of his mouth and he rolled his eyes. Like the old Josh. Like the boy who loved to kid with her and laugh. "It's okay, Mom," he said in a small voice.

"It better be," Hannah joked. " 'Cause, you know, even when you're a grown-up and the star quarterback in the Super Bowl, I'll still be your mom and I'll still get mushy."

Josh wrinkled his nose and turned his attention back to the notebook. He ran his finger over the stickers one by one, naming each one in his head. He recognized them all from Before, when he had been a regular kid, when life had been simple and his biggest secret had been kissing Molly Higgins on the cheek. He wished he could go back to Before. He didn't like secrets, didn't like the way they made him feel inside. But he had to keep them now. There could be no telling. He had been warned.

So he chose not to think about the secrets at all. He would think about other things, like his new pen and how it looked like something astronauts might use, and his new Think Pad. Blank pages just for him, not for sharing with strangers or anyone. Blank pages that were like part of his imagination—space for thinking and storing thoughts away. He liked that idea—taking thoughts out of his head and storing them away where he didn't have to think them anymore.

He slipped the notebook into his backpack and carried it to his room.

CHAPTER
 
17

Ellen pulled her glasses off and rubbed her hands over her face, unconcerned about her makeup. Her makeup was long gone. There was no one around the office to see her anyway. Even the cleaning people had come and gone. Ellen had done the reverse—she had gone to Campion and come back.

At Campion she had run the gauntlet of reporters and stood in the windswept parking lot of the Grain and Ag Services on the edge of town, where Dustin Holloman's boot had been found in the cab of an employee's pickup.

"Doesn't this confirm Dr. Wright's innocence?"

"Will you try to delay next week's hearing?"

"Is it true Garrett Wright was never a suspect before his arrest?"

"Is it true Wright plans to sue for malicious prosecution?"

"Is the owner of the pickup being questioned? Is he a suspect?"

The questions came at her like lances. The reporters swarmed around her, their eyes bright and feral.

The parking lot was a rough sea of ice, rutted and polished by truck tires. Under the sodium-vapor security lights it took on a pearly glow. The buildings and huge metal bins of the grain elevator made an austere backdrop, Shaker-plain and simply functional, unlit, unwelcoming. Clouds had taken the daylight early and snow had begun to fall. Small, sharp flakes hurled down from heaven on a frigid, unforgiving wind.

The BCA mobile crime lab was parked at a cockeyed angle twenty feet
 
from the lone pickup truck. Evidence technicians swarmed around truck, working in the brilliant light of portable halogen lamps.

"They're taking their time," Mitch said. "They don't want to miss so much as a hair—which is all well and good, but the guy who owns the truck raises cattle and his dog rides around with him in the cab. They'll be here all night getting hair off the goddamn seat cover."

Ellen squinted against the pelting snow and the glare of the lights. "Who owns the truck?"

"Kent Hofschulte. He works in the office here."

"Any connection to the Hollomans?"

"Casual acquaintance, I hear. You want details, you'll have to talk to Steiger."

She stepped a little closer to the truck just as an evidence tech moved aside from the open driver's door. Dustin Holloman's boot sat on the bench seat of the truck, center stage under the halogen spotlight. A single winter boot, the purple-and-yellow nylon of the upper portion too bright in this bleak setting.

She had returned to the office because she had more cases than Garrett Wright's on her schedule. There were loose ends that needed tying, and then there were Quentin Adler's endless questions about the two cases she had handed over to him. But she had appetite for neither the work she needed to accomplish nor the turkey sandwich she had picked up at Subway for her supper. All systems were crashing due to lack of fuel, but the thought of food turned her stomach.

Out of practice. When she had worked in Minneapolis, she had got to the point where she could go from a murder scene to dinner and not think twice about it. The mind was an amazing machine, able to develop what defenses it needed. But it had been a long time since she had needed defenses.

"Call it a night," she murmured, checking the clock. Nine-fifteen. Poor Harry wasn't seeing much of his mistress these days. At least he had Otto. Otto Norvold, her neighbor and fellow dog lover, who didn't mind seeing to Harry when Ellen had to put in a late night.

She sorted through the stack of files in front of her, taking those pertinent to Wright and two other cases she would have to deal with the next day—a burglary for which she expected the defendant to cop a plea, and a DUI she fully intended to put in jail for as long as she could. The files went into her briefcase; then she set about her daily ritual of arranging everything left on her desk in precise order. She had learned long ago that her office was the one place in her professional life where she could always be guaranteed order and control. She exercised the ritual with religious dedication and found it much more calming than the pointless raking of a