“For a walk. The trail down to the lake. I want to feel some clean snow on my face.”
“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” Sandy said. “You do know that?”
“All I know is that Bob can come home now,” Nina said.
She went to the morgue. She had to see Flint.
He was on a gurney, post-autopsy, covered with a sheet. She pulled it back and stared at his scarred face. He looked younger than she had thought. In the way of the dead, he gave nothing back except the empty calm of eternity.
Bastard! she told him. He didn’t answer. She had never seen him alive. She would never fully understand him. Unknowable, he had escaped her by dying before she could tell it to his face, tell him, Got you, got you.
Got you. Selfish and doomed, he rested in peace.
She had one more call to make. Four hours later, in the evening, after Cheney called to tell her that the arrest had gone down quietly, she went to see Dave Hanna at the Placerville jail. The drive down the hill went slowly because of the drifts and she welcomed the chance to think some things through.
“You took your time,” Dave Hanna told Nina through the glass in the visitors’ room at the Placerville jail. His ruddy face showed fright. “I only got to make my phone call an hour ago. The cops said I was under arrest for Sarah’s murder. That’s all they would tell me. It’s all a big-”
“Let me bring you up to date, Dave,” Nina said.
She told him about the gun, the fingerprint, the bruises on Flint ’s body.
Hanna began to cave in as she talked. He slumped and said, “Oh, shit,” several times. When she finished, he started to cry. Nina watched him do that.
After a few minutes, when the sobbing and hiccuping had died down, Nina said, “Why did you do it, Dave?”
“I don’t like the way you’re looking at me. This is-still confidential, right?”
“I’m still your attorney. It’s confidential.”
“Why’d you have to open up the whole thing?”
“Why’d you kill her?” Something in her voice must have shaken him.
“It just happened,” he said. “I snapped, I guess.”
“What does that mean?”
“We saw the robbery from the balcony, then the man in the mask ran one way and the kids took off toward their rooms. I told Sarah to stay put and I ran down the stairs.”
“Why?”
“I saw the gun lying on the concrete. I don’t know why, I just wanted it. I picked it up. It was hot, alive. I wanted to use it on something. I looked up and Sarah was standing on the balcony looking down at me. And she knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That I was thinking, I’d like to shoot her.”
“Oh?”
“She already knew. So I pulled the trigger and made it real. I was surprised myself. I heard a noise and I thought, Drop it and run back up and yell. So I did that and I had just made it a few steps up when the motel clerk came around the corner, and I stopped.” He grimaced. “Later, I felt really bad about it.”
“About what?”
“Leaving the gun. But I didn’t have enough time to think. You have to understand, Nina, it was like somebody else did it.”
Nina was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “But why? Why did you kill her?”
“Why? Why? How should I know? She was just putting up with me. She ragged on me about money, about me having a few beers at night, about brushing my fucking teeth before I went to bed. She was going to have a baby and there wasn’t going to be any room at all for me after that. The gun was in my hand. It happened.”
Nina leaned back and closed her eyes.
“I was tired of her. Everybody gets that way sometimes. I had a gun in my hand. It’s like an accident.”
“An accident,” Nina repeated.
“The whole thing. A series of random events that put the gun in my hand. I haven’t told a soul,” Hanna went on, “except my attorney. How strong is that evidence, Nina? What’s going to happen to me? If she hadn’t given me that look, like I was an asshole, when I looked up at her on that balcony, it wouldn’t have happened.”
“What about Flint?” Nina said. “Was he gagged and bound when you shot him?”
“Flint? Why are you talking about him? That was no crime, not really, he had come there to kill me. It was self-defense.”
“You shot him in cold blood!”
“So what? He deserved it, didn’t he? Fool. He didn’t dream I could take him.”
Nina said nothing. Dave went back to his wife.
“It’s not my fault. I never did anything wrong my whole life. I walked her to church, I folded the clothes, I went and got the paper for her in the morning. For years. Years. Something snapped. I wasn’t myself. I’d had a few. Whatever.”
“Did you kill Chelsi? Did you follow me to Germany?”
“No! It was Flint. I wouldn’t have done that to little Chelsi. Poor little girl. I was so scared while all that was going on, Nina. It was very hard to keep it together.”
“Flint only finished what you started,” Nina said.
“Not at all. You don’t understand. Flint had nothing to do with me.”
“I’m afraid the difference escapes me.”
Hanna’s face drooped. “I appreciate your coming down, Nina. I was afraid you might walk out. It’s good to know that at least you’re going to do your duty and help me in my hour of need. Lucky for me you’re a criminal lawyer, too. I’ll sell the house. You’ll be paid.”
“Don’t put up the For Sale sign on my account,” Nina said. She opened her briefcase and pulled out the legal pleading, never taking her eyes off Hanna. Then she plastered the paper against the glass. “Read it,” she said. He read it.
“You can’t do that!” he shouted. “You’re my lawyer and you have a duty!”
“This is a new matter.”
“I told you I’d pay you. Don’t leave me, please, Nina. You have to help me. I don’t want to go through this with a stranger.”
Nina said slowly, “You know, Dave, I never really knew what evil was until I met you. I could find some excuse for every one of my guilty clients. But you taught me. Now I know.”
“But-”
“Evil is a man who kills his wife and thinks he deserves pity. You make me sick. Listen. Remember this one thing from our conversation.”
“Wait-”
“Remember this through all the years to come, Dave. It was your fault. All of it.” She spat the words out.
“Don’t do this!” He was shouting again. He kept it up while the guard came in and dragged him back into the secure area. Nina sat, her head bowed, until the guard came to fetch her.
Epilogue
THE PRE-CHRISTMAS SNOWSTORM TURNED INTO A whopper. Three feet of snow plumped up the street with mounds of marshmallows. Four feet packed the higher ski resorts. When bright, dry conditions returned, Tahoe went wild. Tourist SUVs clogged the roads in and out, ski racks piled high on their roofs. The Heavenly Gondola sagged with the weight of the people going up and down from the lodge. The lake that never froze, rimmed by its white peaks, gleamed under a cloudless, deep sky. The casinos rocked into the night and Christmas carols jingled across the mountains.
Nina Reilly’s law offices closed, leaving behind a Happy Holidays sign to swing on the door, reminding unobservant clients that the world had shut down. For this short time, all the running hamsters in the town lumbered down from their wheels, ate too much, drank too much, and fell into luxurious stupors. Nobody worked. Even Sandy and Wish went home to Markleeville, Wish’s brown van stuffed full of presents and feed for the animals.
On Vashon Island in Washington State, at his scratched old desk, Elliott Wakefield set down his mechanical pencil and cocked his head at the result. He had checked the equations over and over, and the results never varied. He couldn’t find an error. Starting with any integer on Gauss’s li line, he could first determine precisely how many primes there were up to that point, and then generate the nearest prime by plugging that number into his function. Factoring any-size composite number followed as a necessary corollary of the function.