Текст книги "The Perfect Stranger"

Автор книги: Wendy Corsi Staub

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 22 страниц)

It’s kind of lonely when you’re the only one rattling around the house day after day—well, mostly, night after night, Meredith wrote, almost echoing what she’d written in her blog.

Exactly—don’t think I’m a big baby, she wrote back, but sometimes I still get scared at night when Rob’s away!

Now, remembering that exchange, she feels a twinge of guilt. It was only Meredith—but what if it had been someone else? Someone she trusted, but shouldn’t have?

Rob is looking a little guilty himself. “Sorry, I know you wouldn’t write something that personal on the blog. You’re pretty good about keeping things nonspecific.”

“I am. So please don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried. Not about myself.”

No. He worries about her.

Until she got sick, she was okay with that—with letting him protect her, take care of her.

But cancer changed that. Made her stronger, more determined to take care of herself, and . . .

More aware that Rob can’t protect her. He can want to, and he can try, but her big strong husband isn’t in charge after all. He—and she, for all those years—only wanted to believe that he was.

Stronger, more independent and self-aware . . .

Sometimes she still bristles when Rob assumes the old role of protector, and she knows it bothers him when she won’t let him.

She changes the subject, asking about his workday, his golf game, and who was at the club tonight. As he tells her, she manages to ask questions in all the right places, and to laugh at quips she knows are meant to make her laugh, though she doesn’t really comprehend a word he’s saying.

This is how it was back when she was sick, going through the motions of ordinary conversation.

Later—much later, long after the kids are home and the house is quiet, Landry lies awake in bed staring into the dark, still preoccupied with Meredith’s death and wondering why Elena never called. She must have gotten home too late.

Uneasily remembering what Rob said, Landry wants to ask her whether she thinks there’s any chance some online predator might have deliberately targeted Meredith.

Are the police also considering that angle?

Probably. They must be going through the blog word for word, looking for clues.

Meredith was really open, sharing information that Landry would never have put out there for just anyone to see.

But that doesn’t mean you haven’t let your guard down, too, from time to time.

Just today she handed out her phone number to a bunch of people she’s never met—and she told Jaycee her first and last name.

But I didn’t broadcast that stuff on the Web, she reminds herself. I just told a couple of friends, privately, over e-mail and the telephone. Nothing wrong with that.

No. But from now on she’ll be extra careful not to provide any identifying details on her own blog. And tomorrow she should go through it and delete anything she wouldn’t want to share with “opportunistic rapists and murderers,” as Rob put it.

Heck—maybe she should just stop blogging altogether.

Maybe it’s too dangerous.

Dangerous? Come on. You’re just being paranoid.

The inner voice, blustering bravado, is the one that popped up often back when she was sick, reminding her never to let fear get the best of her.

You’re going to keep blogging, because . . . because it’s what you do. And you’re going to stop worrying, because worry is a waste of energy. Get it? Got it? Good.

She rolls over, hoping to get some sleep at last.

The first-class cabin lights dimmed shortly after the flight took off from LAX.

Jaycee always gets a window seat on the red-eye so that she’ll have something to lean a pillow on, keeping her face turned away from the rest of the passengers. But this was a last minute trip, and an aisle was all they had left.

“Unless you want to fly coach?” Cory asked over the phone when he made her reservation.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“What do you think?”

“I haven’t flown coach in years, and you know it. Too risky.”

“Ah, but I so enjoy breaking your chops.”

So here she is, in first class, yes, but stuck in an aisle seat at midnight, numb with exhaustion after racing all over Los Angeles on just the few hours’ sleep she’d caught the night before. She would like nothing better than to close her eyes and wake up in New York, but knows from experience that she won’t be able to get comfortable enough to sleep.

Certainly not without the prescription sleeping pills Cory gets for her, which she mistakenly packed in the bag she checked.

Oh, well. She lands at five-something, and if she goes straight home to bed until noon, she’ll almost get a full night’s worth of beauty sleep.

Left with five hours to kill, she can either try to read a magazine, or she can use the in-flight WiFi to get online and see if there are any updates about Meredith. She’s had so little downtime today that she hasn’t had a chance to see what’s going on.

Jaycee takes her iPad out of her carry-on in the overhead bin and checks to see if anyone is paying any attention to her as she waits for it to power up.

The lucky businessman in the window seat beside her is huddled under a blanket, out cold, snoring softly, his head resting on a pillow wedged against the window. Across the aisle, a woman is similarly asleep against her own window, wearing a sleep mask—freebies here in first class on the red-eye. The woman’s seatmate appears completely absorbed in whatever he’s typing on his open laptop.

Good. The last thing she needs is some nosy fellow passenger snooping over her shoulder, trying to get a look at her screen.

She checks e-mail first.

She has several different accounts—a personal address, a business address, and one she uses for blogging. She usually doesn’t open that as often as the others, but today, because of Meredith, she’s been keeping an eye on it.

Since she last checked, Elena has responded to the e-mail BamaBelle sent this morning with her phone number and the link to the Cincinnati newspaper article about the murder. Elena sent a reply-all message expressing her sorrow over Meredith’s death and saying she’d be working late but would call Bama tonight.

To Jaycee, it sounds as if she’s trying to dodge having to make the phone call. She can certainly understand that—she herself had hesitated before making the call this morning. There were so many reasons not to cross that line from a strictly electronic relationship to more personal contact.

In the end, she concluded there were more reasons to call than to avoid it—primarily because the others might get suspicious if she didn’t, especially at a time like this. As long as she was careful not to give anything away, she decided, it would be fine.

And it was—for the most part. She managed to keep the conversation focused on Meredith and evade any sticky questions she sensed Bama was about to ask.

Like her real name. After Bama volunteered her own, Jaycee quickly changed the subject.

Not that anyone was likely to recognize her real real name, the one she’d been born with nearly forty years ago, in a tiny Minnesota town pretty much no one has ever heard of, not far from the border with Manitoba, Canada.

But still . . . you just never know. Which is why she hasn’t used it in ages.

Anyway—Landry Wells? With a name like that, no wonder she goes by a pseudonym. All anyone has to do is plug it into a search engine, along with Alabama . . .

Jaycee types it all in now, including her mother’s maiden name—Quackenbush—presses Enter, and finds herself looking at BamaBelle’s life story.

It’s basically all there, if you have time to sift through the results—and right now she has nothing but time. She peruses a wedding announcement, a real estate sale for an address in Point Clear, birth announcements for two children—Addison Landry Wells, who would be seventeen now, and Robert Tucker Wells IV, fifteen. There’s information about volunteer work and PTO posts, and there are pictures, too.

It’s not as though Jaycee doesn’t already know what BamaBelle looks like—she has a head shot on her blog. But it’s interesting to see her as a young bride, as a PTO mom, and, in a photo taken just last week, in the Mobile society pages at a charity ball with her husband and another couple identified as Robert Wells’s law partner John Sanderson and his wife Mercy.

She’s also been tagged here and there in candid shots on other people’s social networking pages. Landry Wells doesn’t have one of those herself; her Internet activity seems limited to her blog page—which, interestingly, does not come up on the search engine.

That means BamaBelle has done a good job of keeping her real self separate from her blogger identity. Not everyone is successful at that.

Meredith wasn’t.

But I certainly am.

The man beside Jaycee stirs in his sleep. Skittish, out of habit, she quickly closes the screen she was reading.

It’s just as well. Who cares who BamaBelle really is?

Who cares who I really am?

That’s the beauty of the Internet. There, you can be anyone you want to be. You can escape your real life.

That’s all Jaycee ever really wanted, from the time she was a little girl, abandoned by her unwed mother to be raised by grandparents who took her in out of duty, and nothing more.

She wanted to escape.

That’s why she used to hide in the shed behind the house, until she got so cold or hungry that she had to drag herself back inside to face reality—usually, with punishment for not answering when they called her name.

It’s why she looked forward to going to school every day, while her classmates complained and lived for the weekends.

And it’s why she discovered that she liked being on stage when her freshman drama teacher convinced her to audition for the high school musical. She could step into the spotlight, leave behind her real life with all its problems, and for a few hours, at least, become someone else—anyone else.

At seventeen she fell in love with Steven Petersen onstage—and off. That was the year everything happened: the year her grandmother died, the year she got pregnant, the year Steve broke her heart, and the year she gave up her newborn for adoption.

Not that you wanted to keep her anyway. You didn’t want anything tying you down, holding you back.

At eighteen she finally got to escape for real.

She left behind the name she’d been born with and the miserable house where she’d been raised, and the godforsaken northern town where few people ever really gave a damn about her. She changed everything she could: hair color, build, clothing style, the way she walked, the way she spoke . . .

She rests her chin in her hand, remembering. That was the first time she truly, officially, became someone else. But it wasn’t the last. Not by any stretch.

As she muses, she realizes that the flight attendant, leaning against the galley counter reading a magazine, is glancing in her direction.

She averts her own gaze out of habit—all those years of trying not to make eye contact, afraid someone is going to recognize her, engage her in conversation.

Usually if you do that, people get the hint that you want to be left alone.

“Doesn’t everyone?” Cory likes to ask her when she gets paranoid.

“I didn’t always,” she’s reminded him—and herself. There was a time when she craved attention—from anyone. Even strangers.

Maybe there’s a part of her that still does. That would explain it all, wouldn’t it? Even why she couldn’t leave well enough alone and simply lurk online; why she was compelled to engage by writing the blog, interacting with people online . . . people like BamaBelle, who have no idea who, or what, she really is . . . or isn’t.

Yes, she wants to—needs to—interact with them at a safe distance. But face-to-face?

No, thank you.

Sneaking a peek at the front galley just in time to see the flight attendant glance again in her direction, Jaycee casually reaches up to block her face under the pretext of finger-combing her bangs, careful not to knock her wig askew. Then she pulls a sleep mask out of her pocket, places it over a good portion of her face, and turns her head away.

Leave me alone. Please. Just leave me the hell alone.

Home at last, Detective Crystal Burns is greeted at the door of her West End Cincinnati town house by Ginger, her Chesapeake Bay retriever.

“What’s up, Gingy?” She tosses her keys and badge onto the counter and bends over to pat the dog. “Did you miss me? Huh?”

Panting and obviously thrilled to see her, the dog follows her into the living room, where Crystal’s husband, Jermaine, is snoring on the couch. Presumably, he’d also have been thrilled—if not panting—had she arrived home many hours earlier, in time for their planned candlelight anniversary dinner.

They were married two years ago today. Well, technically, two years ago yesterday, since midnight came and went a few hours ago.

Jermaine—fellow cop by trade, amazing chef in his spare time—finally had the day off on the heels of a grueling sting operation.

He went out and picked up a couple of steaks this morning, plus all the ingredients for Crystal’s favorite garlic truffle mashed potatoes, asparagus with hollandaise, and fresh strawberry shortcake in homemade pastry shells.

That was before she got bogged down in the case she’s working.

“It’s okay,” Jermaine said when she told him she wouldn’t be home in time for dinner. “I get it, baby.”

“I know you do.”

That he gets it is the beauty of this second marriage.

Crystal’s first husband worked in corporate insurance and not law enforcement, and thus failed to understand that when you’re working a homicide, the case—and the endless paperwork that goes with the territory—has to take precedence over just about everything, including anniversary dinners.

Despite her many differences with her ex, she hung in there for almost twenty years of that first marriage. Long enough for their only child to graduate high school and join the military. Sometimes she wonders if she hadn’t filed for divorce before her son was killed in Afghanistan two years later, would she ever have done it? Leaving that marriage had been hard enough as it was. The man wasn’t just clingy and possessive; he was all but helpless when it came to running a household without her.

Jermaine is quite the opposite—efficient and self-sufficient enough to let her breathe. He doesn’t work the homicide unit—he’s vice—but they’re both in law enforcement.

That’s not all they have in common. Crystal met him at a bereaved parents’ meeting. He, too, was divorced, but his marriage didn’t falter until after his teenage daughter died.

It was a drug overdose. Tragic. Jermaine and his wife had their share of problems before that—what couple doesn’t? But their marriage, like so many, couldn’t withstand the trauma of losing a child.

Every day, Crystal gives thanks to the Lord that as they emerged simultaneously from the wreckage of their lives, she and Jermaine found each other. And she would have given anything to have been here with him tonight, celebrating the one reason she found the strength to go on living in this grim world where she hasn’t just lost her only child, but spends each day confronting the rock bottom worst of humanity.

Leaning over the couch, she kisses the spot at the edge of her husband’s receding, graying hairline.

Jermaine lets out a final loud, waking snore and opens his eyes.

“You’re home.”

“Nah . . . you’re jus’ dreamin’.”

“Then how ’bout you make it a sweet dream, baby.” He grins, pulling her down. “I haven’t seen you in weeks.”

“Feels that way, doesn’t it?”

In the past couple of days, between his strip club sting and her homicide, they’ve only managed to connect on the phone.

But there are worse things. Far worse.

Crystal settles into his arms with a kiss and a deep yawn, resting her head against his barrel chest.

“Paperwork finished?”

“Finally.”

“How was Cleveland?”

“Oh, you know . . . it rocks,” she says dryly.

“Find what you needed?”

“No, we did not.”

She and her partner, Frank Schneider, had driven up there two days ago to check out Hank Heywood’s alibi for Saturday night, when his wife Meredith was murdered. He said he’d been home all night at his mother’s house, cleaning out her closets and cabinets now that he’d moved the old lady into a home.

Crystal and Frank talked to the people who lived on either side of the mother’s condo, hoping to find elderly busybody types who have nothing better to do than keep an eye on the neighbors.

Unfortunately, the single mom who lived on one side had gone away for the weekend with her kids. She’d seen Hank Friday afternoon as they were packing the car, but not since.

“For what it’s worth,” she told the detectives, “Mr. Heywood is such a nice guy. I can’t imagine that he had anything to do with a murder.”

It wasn’t worth anything at all, thank you very much.

Crystal has met more than her share of cold, hardened criminals lurking behind Mr. Nice Guy facades.

She and Frank had better luck with Professor Malcolm, who lived next door on the other side.

He said he’d run into Heywood carrying a bunch of heavy-looking garbage bags down to the parking lot Dumpster at around seven o’clock Saturday evening, when he himself was on his way out to dinner. He returned to the building before eleven but didn’t recall whether Heywood’s truck was still parked out front.

That could mean that it wasn’t there.

It could also mean that it was, and Professor Malcolm simply hadn’t noticed it.

He did notice it when he left for church on Sunday morning, headed to an eleven o’clock service.

“Well?” Frank asked on the way back to Cincinnati. “If you were a betting woman—”

“Oh, you know I’m a betting woman, Frank.”

He grinned, well aware that she and Jermaine like to sneak off to Vegas or Atlantic City every now and then.

“So if you were playing the odds,” he went on, “would your money be on the husband?”

“It’s not just about the odds. If you look at the victimology and possible motives—who stands to benefit most from the death?”

“Exactly.” Frank started ticking off Hank Heywood’s known stressors on his fingers. “The guy loses his job. His mother loses her marbles and her ability to live alone. He’s going to lose his wife sooner or later . . .

“Looking at it strictly from a financial standpoint, sooner would be preferable, because his health insurance runs out soon, and if he doesn’t find a new job with benefits, they’re screwed. He’s thinking it’s better to collect on her life insurance policy now instead of later, right?”

Crystal shrugs. “At that point, if they’ve lost their health care for any amount of time, the payout might not even cover the debt they’ll have racked up on her medical care.”

“So we have motive. And opportunity. Yeah, we know he was seen in Cleveland Saturday night and again on Sunday morning, but it’s a four hour drive, tops. He could’ve left after the neighbor saw him by the Dumpster, driven down to his house, killed the wife, and driven back before dawn.”

Yeah. He could’ve.

Or, Hank Heywood could’ve been right where he said he was, sadly cleaning out his failing mother’s condo in preparation to list it, completely unaware that his beloved wife of more than thirty years lay dying in the master bedroom they shared back home.

Still a tragic scenario, but that one would undoubtedly sit a hell of a lot easier with the three kids who lost their mother.

The rest of the family has fairly solid alibis for Saturday night. Both of the sons were home with their wives and kids. The daughter was at a party for a colleague. Her husband wasn’t with her—he was with someone else, Keith Drover finally admitted after hemming and hawing when they interviewed him today.

“Another woman?” Frank had asked—probably recognizing a kindred philanderer, Crystal thought at the time.

Turned out that wasn’t the case—exactly.

Drover begged them not to tell his wife the truth—especially after they said they’d need to talk to his lover to confirm his alibi.

Assured that they weren’t going to turn around and tell Rebecca, on the heels of losing her mother, that her husband was in love with another man, the poor sap looked relieved. But only until Frank reminded him that this was an active homicide investigation.

“When you’ve got a high profile case, the dirty laundry sometimes tends to come out before all is said and done,” he warned Keith. “You might want to think about coming clean to your wife before she hears it from someone else.”

Poor Rebecca. She’s managed to hold it together so far—in fact, she was doing much better today than she was when Crystal first met her at the scene on that rainy Sunday afternoon. She can still hear the young woman’s anguished screams; can still feel Rebecca clutching her sleeve, asking who had done this to her mother.

“We’re going to find out,” she promised her then, and again today, before she and Frank left the house after questioning the family members again. “Our job is to make sure justice is served.”

That’s what it’s all about. You can’t turn back the clock and bring the loved one back to the family, and Lord knows you can’t take away the agony of loss.

All you can do is try to give them closure.

“So how’s it going? What do you think?” Jermaine asks now, stroking Crystal’s hair.

“Same thing I thought this morning, and yesterday, and the day before.”

“Which is . . . ?”

“That Meredith Heywood wasn’t killed by some stranger she’d surprised when he was robbing her house.”

“You sure? There have been an awful lot of break-ins around here lately. That’s nothing new.”

She nods, well aware national statistics show that Ohio cities have a disproportionately high number of burglaries, with Cincinnati near the top of the list.

But—statistics again—stranger homicides are extremely rare. Victims—particularly female victims—usually know their killers.

She doesn’t have to remind Jermaine of that.

But he’s a cop; he’s trying to remind her that sometimes, in an investigation, what you see really is what you get.

Not in this case, though.

She updates her husband about the rest of the evidence they’ve been gathering. It indicates that Meredith Heywood had been killed almost instantly with a blow to the head.

“What was the weapon?”

“Probably a household object. Could have been a baseball bat, a hammer, an andiron—not sure.”

“From her household? Or did the perp bring it with him?”

“Again—not sure. We didn’t find the weapon.”

She goes on to tell him that the victim’s body was found on the floor, which was clearly meant to indicate that she’d been hit while she was standing or moving.

But Crystal is fairly certain she’d been killed in her bed—maybe even while she was sound asleep—and then moved to the floor postmortem.

The bedding was spotless—too spotless. The spatter pattern surrounding the body on the floor indicated that it should have extended up onto the bedspread, but it didn’t. The bedspread was pristine, and lab tests turned up no sign of blood.

Beneath the spotless sheets, the mattress gave off a faint bleach smell, and is still being tested for evidence of blood that may have been cleaned up by the perpetrator.

Nearby, the bedside table was overturned, a lamp broken, a water glass spilled.

“So it looked like there was a struggle,” Jermaine says.

“Right. But there wasn’t. It was staged, just like everything else.”

The house appeared to have been ransacked. The family was able to pinpoint a few things that were missing—an envelope of cash kept in a desk drawer in the den, a small bureau-top chest filled with the victim’s costume jewelry, the victim’s laptop and cell phone that had probably been sitting out in the open.

But a professional burglar wouldn’t have missed the coin collection on the shelf of a basement closet whose door was left ajar as if it had been ransacked. Nor would he have overlooked the relatively valuable jewelry stashed in several padded cases tucked into the back of a drawer that was found open, its contents rumpled to look like someone had gone through it.

It was all for show, to cover up the real motive for the break-in: murder.

Whoever did it was a novice.

A more seasoned killer—or a pro, a hit man—would have made the fake burglary more convincing, and wouldn’t have been so clumsy about moving and repositioning the body.

“So who did it? The husband?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What’s your gut telling you?”

She shrugs. “The guy is the picture-perfect image of a distraught, shell-shocked, bereaved widower.”

“Which means absolutely nothing to you.”

“Exactly.”

Last year, she interrogated a twenty-year-old mother who’d drowned her own baby in a toilet. The girl—her name was Diaphanous Jones—never stopped crying while they talked, heaving sobs, gasping for air—the picture of maternal devastation. Yet, chillingly—she’d confessed her crime immediately after she committed it, and never once tried to retract.

Grief, regret—normal reactions to any loss. Visible emotions don’t let you off the hook.

That Hank Heywood is, on some level, a bereaved husband is not in dispute. But there were a number of potent stressors in his life leading up to the murder. He was under a lot of pressure. Something might very well have happened between him and his wife that caused him to snap.

“Maybe he was seeing someone else,” Jermaine speculates.

“Or maybe she was.”

“You think?”

She shakes her head. “There’s not a shred of evidence pointing in that direction, but . . .”

She and Frank haven’t completely dismissed the idea that Meredith had a lover who might have been in the house with her in her husband’s absence. Maybe the lover had killed her. Or maybe her husband had found out about him—or her—and acted out of vengeance.

Meredith’s daughter had been adamant that her mother wasn’t living a secret life—which Crystal is now inclined to take with a grain of salt, given Rebecca’s husband’s illicit affair.

Keith Drover seems certain his wife is clueless about it—but then that, too, could be open for debate.

In any case, Rebecca had insisted that no one close to her mother—no one she knew, anyway—would have been capable of hurting her.

“Everyone loved her,” she said tearfully. Clutching a handful of sodden tissues, she answered all of Crystal and Frank’s questions about friends and individual family members . . .

Something flickered in her eyes, though, when she was first asked about her father.

A hint of . . . something, and then it was gone.

Her parents had a great, loving marriage, she said.

Right.

Diaphanous Jones’s family had told Crystal she’d been a great, loving mother.

She loved that baby more than anything . . .

“My mother and father worshiped each other,” Rebecca said.

Most kids are going to believe that about their parents, if there are no overt signs of marital trouble in the household. Especially adult children who have moved on. Crystal’s own son was stunned and bewildered when she called him at boot camp to tell him that she and his dad would be going their separate ways.

“But why?” he kept asking. “You guys never even fight.”

Not true, exactly—but damn, she and her ex were good at hiding the tension. Practice makes perfect.

Maybe Meredith and Hank Heywood really were happily married.

Maybe not.

Hell, some days she wonders if any marriage—outside of her own, of course—is entirely happy.

“The other thing we’re looking at,” she muses aloud to Jermaine, “is the Internet.”

“What about it?”

“The victim was a blogger. She put way too much of her personal life out there for anyone to read.”

“Yeah, well, we’ve seen more and more of that sort of thing. People go blabbing on social networking Web sites, not just about birthdays and their mother’s maiden names, but where they’re going, and for how long, and who they’re with. The next thing you know, they’re reporting that someone’s stalking them, or their identity’s been stolen, or their empty home was burglarized . . .”

“Or worse,” Crystal says with a nod.

She explains to her husband that Meredith Heywood was a breast cancer survivor who wrote a very public blog that had hundreds, maybe thousands, of followers.

“You think one of them killed her?”

“Could be. But if that was the case, it wasn’t necessarily a complete stranger. Not in the usual sense of the word.”

“What do you mean?”

She tells him about the last piece of evidence—the one that’s been nagging her from the moment she first saw the body.

Jermaine shakes his head. “So you really do think it was the husband, don’t you?”

She hesitates, remembering the raw pain in Hank Heywood’s face.

Remembering the flicker of doubt in his daughter’s eyes.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I honestly don’t know.”

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

How on earth did this happen—again?

It’s not like I’m someone who just goes around . . . killing people.

Meredith was the first, and she was supposed to be the last, the only.

But now look.

The crumpled figure lying on the ground moans, clenching and unclenching the hand that until moments ago held a puppy on a leash.

The puppy is running loose somewhere down the street, still dragging a length of leather and chain from its tagged collar.

The man’s hand is covered in blood, reaching for the knife sticking out of his stomach, reaching . . . reaching . . .

He’s too weak. He’s not going to make it.

It was different with Meredith. She was likely unconscious before she grasped what was happening, unlike this poor soul who must know he’s dying, an ugly, painful death at that.

With Meredith, it wasn’t ugly and painful.

It wasn’t impulsive, and it wasn’t about anger. No, it was about—

Well, it was far more complicated than anyone could possibly understand. But it was the right thing to do.

This . . .

This was probably the wrong thing.

It was probably the wrong thing? It was definitely the wrong thing!

Look at him! Look what you did to him!

The man on the ground moans again.

Oh, dear.

“I’m sorry. Really. I didn’t mean for this to happen, but . . . I only wanted to be left alone. Why did you have to stop me and ask for a light? Why couldn’t you just walk on past me?”

Another moan, the low, terrible sound of an animal being tortured.

This is bad. This is wrong.

But I couldn’t help myself.

He kept talking, and he said the wrong thing, and . . . and I’ve been under so much pressure these last few days with everything, that I just . . .