"But I wasn't! I thought I heard a noise and I got scared, so I came in to see you and you weren't here! I called and called but you wouldn't answer me, and I looked all over for you but you weren't here! I was so scared! I thought you'd left me!"
"I was right there in bed all the time. Tell me what you did after that."
"I went back to my bed and hid under the covers. I was crying. I… think I fell asleep again."
"And then you woke up and now I'm here. It was a nightmare, Jill. You only dreamt you were looking for me." She hugged her daughter tightly against her. "I'd never go anywhere without you. You know that don't you?"
Jill nodded. "But it seemed so real!"
"I know." She kissed her. "The worst ones always do. But it's over now, and I'm here, so why don't you get into your robe and we'll go make breakfast."
"Can we have scrambled eggs?"
"Sure."
"Good! I want to try my chopsticks on them!"
As Jill trotted off, Kara sat on the edge of the bed and fished around for her slippers. The mention of the chopsticks brought Rob to mind. He was another reason she was glad to be back at the farm. She'd spent most of the week holding her breath, praying he wouldn't see the resemblance between himself and Jill. How could he miss it? But he had, thank God.
Well there was no sense in worrying about what might have happened. Right now, she had breakfast to cook and a book to write.
She found her slippers and was about to slip them on when she caught a glimpse of the sole of her left foot.
It was filthy.
She checked the right and found the same. The bottoms of both of her feet were covered with dirt. Not house dirt, but outside dirt.
Yard dirt.
But she'd showered right before bed last night. Her feet had been clean, she was sure of it. This wasn't possible, unless…
A chill stole over her. Jill's dream. What if it hadn't been a dream? What if Jill had really come looking for her and she hadn't been here? But where had she gone? Outside? Barefoot? That was crazy!
Crazy. Dr. Gates had said to let him know if anything strange happened—blackouts and things like that. Did he mean sleepwalking, too? Kara had never done that before. At least that she knew.
What's happening to me?
Probably nothing. Probably just a reaction to the stresses of the past week. But if anything like this happened again, she was going to be on the phone to Dr. Gates immediately. As much as she disliked the man, he had a head start on any other shrink as far as this case was concerned.
As Kara put her slippers on and reached for her robe, she realized that the day had suddenly changed. The morning was no longer as bright. The buoyancy she'd felt on arising had vanished, replaced by a leaden weight of uncertainty. The Apple no longer called to her. She sensed it was going to be a very long day. And an even longer night.
▼
4:20 P.M.
"You're spending an awful lot of time on this jumper, Harris."
Rob had been expecting this. He was surprised he'd been allowed to carry it this far. But the time had come and now he was sitting across the desk from Detective Lieutenant James Mooney, chief of Midtown North's detective squad, readying an explanation. Mooney's office was a walled-off cubicle furnished with a standard issue green metal desk. He had a window, but like all the other windows in the precinct house, it was covered with steel mesh. Late afternoon sunlight strained through the mesh.
Mooney himself was a balding, jowly, overweight bulldog who usually had half a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth. He seemed tough until he began speaking—he had a tendency to whine. But he did manage to keep the precinct's detective squad under tight control and yet remain approachable.
Rob had pulled the weekend along with Mooney. The lieutenant liked to use his Saturdays on duty to close up all the open files that he could.
Rob said, "There's a possibility she didn't go out that window on her own. She may have had a push."
"Forensics doesn't think so."
"Forensics has been wrong before."
Mooney removed the cigar to sip from his coffee mug, the contents of which had come from the bottle in his bottom drawer. Specks of ash fell from the cigar's cold tip onto the manila folder that held the paperwork of Kelly's case.
"I read your report, Harris. You've got one very disturbed girl here, under psychiatric care, on schnozz, who jumps naked through a twelfth floor window from a room where Forensics says there's no sign of a struggle. The M.E. says her body shows no signs of a fight, except for one love bite on her shoulder. We've got people with their heads blown off waiting for their perps to be found. Don't waste your time with this one. Close it!"
That was precisely what Rob was trying to avoid.
"I think we're missing something here, lieu," he said. "I've got a gut feeling that this psychiatrist is involved somehow."
"Anything concrete?"
"No, but—"
"Then close it."
"One more week, lieu. That's all I want. I'll squeeze it in between the DiGilio and Stern cases."
Mooney's eyes narrowed as he looked at Rob.
"You got something personal in this?"
"Nah," Rob said, leaning back in his chair and hoping he was convincing. Mooney didn't like his cops getting into cases where they were personally involved. "It just interests me, you know? Ever have a case that got under your skin and made you itch?"
Mooney's eyes got even narrower. His whine became more pronounced.
"You ain't thinking of writing a book or any shit like that, are you?"
Rob laughed. "Hey, lieu, you've read my reports! What do you think?"
Mooney stuck the cigar back in his mouth and smiled.
"Yeah. You've got a point there. But Christ, every other guy in the department seems to be writing a book!"
Rob nodded. Ever since Bill Caunitz, a former detective with Mooney's rank and position, began hitting the best-seller lists and appearing on Good Morning America, a lot of guys were trying their hand at fiction, but not with much success.
"Give me another week, lieu. If I can't prove foul play by then I'll close it myself."
"You'd better. And don't come back next week with some sky blue theory. I want hard stuff or we close. Got it?"
"Got it."
Rob knew Mooney was hoping he'd find nothing. The lieutenant liked grounders—open and shut cases. If Kelly Wade's case remained a suicide it would be closed and forgotten. But if it became reclassified as a murder it stayed open until solved. Unsolved murders were never closed, and that could mean filing semiannual DD5 Supplementary Complaint Reports into eternity.
Rob took the file and returned to his own desk in the squad room. It was the same color and style as Mooney's, only older and more dented. A few phone message slips on his blotter. None from Connie. He wondered why he felt relieved. Another love affair down the tubes. It was getting to be a habit.
He picked up the sheet with the notes he'd made on that lawyer yesterday and tossed it out. Ed Bannion checked out okay: a tax attorney with no record. Still… one nervous guy. Rob uncrumpled the sheet and slipped it into the back of Kelly's file, then went over the new information he'd dug up on Dr. Gates—or rather, Lazlo Gati.
It hadn't been easy. Little Lazlo's immigration papers said he was seven years old when he arrived in the United States. He took the oath of citizenship at age 21 and had his name changed to Lawrence Gates that same year. Beyond that, Rob had come up blank. Then he'd remembered Doc Winters' passing remark about an older brother and sister who'd died in West Virginia a while back. A department contact at a Wheeling newspaper faxed him a couple of articles. The first to come through was three years old and concerned Marta Gati's death in a fire that gutted her house. The circumstances were deemed suspicious, especially since the young handyman and the maid had disappeared. Interesting, but it told Rob nothing about Dr. Gates. Then another article came through, a few years older than the first, concerning the death of the senior Gati sibling, Karl, an independent mine owner who suffered a fatal heart attack.