Selby jumped quickly over the gallery railing and put himself between Earl and his daughter. He swung his forearm against Earl’s chest, checking his momentum and holding Thomson until the marshals surrounded him and led him, struggling and cursing, from the courtroom.
For an instant Earl Thomson’s flushed face had been only inches from Selby’s, so close that he could see the sweat on Earl’s upper lip and smell his mint-scented after-shave lotion. He had felt the strength in Thomson’s hard shoulders, and the thought of that power violating Shana’s slender body made Selby devoutly wish that no officers were there to intervene...
Later, Selby helped his daughter through the crowded corridor, an arm tight around her shoulders as they passed the gauntlet of reporters and photographers and TV cameras.
A man unexpectedly joined them, a short, fat man falling into step beside Selby. His breath smelled of whiskey. “A terrible business, Harry, a terrible thing for the child, but your Shana’s a gutsy little lady, God bless her.”
It was Jay Mooney. He slipped a folded piece of paper into Selby’s hand, patted Shana’s shoulder and hurried off into the crowd lining the sidewalks.
That night Selby studied the information Jay Mooney had given him. Her name was Emma Green and she lived somewhere in or around Jefferson, New Jersey. She was black, twenty-six or twenty-seven, and once worked in a bar off-limits to the students of Rockland Military College. She had been sexually assaulted and grievously injured several years back by the then-Cadet Colonel Earl Thomson.
Captain Walter Slocum and Dom Lorso had personally prevailed upon the assault victim to drop charges against young Thomson.
Why Jay Mooney had changed his mind and decided to help him, Selby couldn’t guess... maybe because he couldn’t kill the fly sharing his pizza... futility might be as good a reason as any.
Selby called Burt Wilger at the sergeant’s apartment in East Chester and asked him if he could help him find the address of a woman named Emma Green who lived somewhere in Jefferson, New Jersey.
When he explained why he wanted it, Wilger was silent a moment, then said, “You know you can’t use it, Selby. Not in this trial.”
“I understand. Brett explained that.”
“Okay then, I’ll check out where your Emma Green is living. But it could take time. She could’ve moved anywhere by now, you know.”
The hall was dark but Shana’s door was open and her light was on. She was sleeping on her side, an arm trailing over the side of the bed. The radio was still playing.
Selby eased himself carefully into the wicker armchair at her worktable, but it creaked under his weight and she turned quickly to look at him.
“Is anything wrong, daddy?”
“No, I just wanted to look at you. I’m sorry I woke you up. Try to get back to sleep, honey.”
She turned off the radio and pushed her hair from her forehead. Then she smiled uncertainly and he knew she was puzzled, and maybe embarrassed.
“Do I look okay?” she asked him.
“You look fine, you look perfect,” he told her. “I like to look at you. It’s one of the things about being a father that’s fun. But after kids are about three or four, it’s all over. They’re always running up and down stairs, in and out of rooms, and they don’t sit still long enough anymore. If you look at them while they’re eating or watching TV, they get self-conscious and want to know if they’ve done something wrong or why you’re staring at them. I thought you were asleep so I came in to look at you, okay?”
“Sure, it’s fine. But I’m awake now. Does that spoil it?”
“No. I guess I was hoping you’d wake up. I wanted to talk to you. I wanted to tell you I’ve been sort of stupid about this whole business. I knew what happened, but I guess I never really absorbed it. I questioned you about it and asked for explanations, asked you to remember details and the times things happened, like it was... just an automobile accident, like which way you were going on your bike and what way the car was coming from. I want to tell you I felt proud of you in court today, what you were able to say, how you said it. I felt very glad we belonged to each other... But when this is over, and you go on with your life, I’d like you to try to understand that I loved you and cared about you and still didn’t understand what you’ve been through...”
“I’m going to cry,” she said, “unless you stop talking like that.”
“Okay,” he said quickly. “I won’t say another word about it, I’ll change the subject. What about this summer? What would you like to do? You tell me and we’ll try to set it up.”
“Well, I don’t want to sound like some dumb kid or a kind of nut, but I’d really like to stay home and go to summer school. Miss Calder, all the teachers, are making it easy for me now. But I know I’ve lost a lot of ground, regardless of grades.” She propped herself up on her elbow. Her face was animated. “I’d like to cram in French and take a science minor, and then...” She regarded him doubtfully. “Does it matter if it’s expensive?”
“Well, we’ll see. What is it?”
“I’ve been reading about skiing in Switzerland, daddy, a little town in the Alps where the snow’s so deep in the streets you can’t even hear the cars or anything. People have hot chocolate and wear bright sweaters and ski all day. They have bunny slopes that Davey and I could practice on. I was thinking that we get a long vacation at Christmastime and maybe we could do it then. You could teach us, couldn’t you?”
“We can sure check it out. We can start thinking about it.”
She fell asleep soon afterward, and Selby watched her for a while and then kissed her on the forehead, gently, so as not to wake her.
Chapter Twenty-Five
A Lebanese maid opened the door of the suite and told Thomson his wife was having her massage. Would he perhaps enjoy some tea or a drink while he was waiting for Mr. Santos to finish?
Thomson shook his head and sat down beside his wife’s circular bed. Her quarters included therapy pools and a gymnasium that opened off the main room with its carefully controlled temperature and artificial sunlight.
Miguel Santos, brown and trim in white T-shirt and trousers, supervised Adele Thomson’s water therapy and her sessions in the rhythmically pumping exercise machines. Their grueling regimen fulfilled Adele’s desperate hopes of walking again one day, and perhaps even dressing herself and doing her own hair. It was a hope no doctor had ever given her the slightest chance of realizing. But Adele refused to consider their verdicts as long as the machines could twist her body into simulated contortions, and Santos’s probing fingers could bring color and tone to her wasted flesh...
The accident that paralyzed Adele Thomson had occurred when Earl was twelve. She had been on a shooting trip with her husband in Iran, at a Pahlavi “shooting box,” a lodge on the Elburz mountains only a short flight from Tehran...
Everything in Adele’s bedroom, except for mirrors, was done in flat whites — draperies, furniture, carpets. But her wardrobe doors always stood open so that her clothes provided a colorful contrast to the relentlessly neutral walls, furs and dresses of purple and green and cool grays, tiny jewels gleaming on cashmere sweaters and edging the straps of evening sandals. Her golf and tennis footwear were also on display, the uppers plumped up tautly with slim wooden shoe trees.
Thomson couldn’t get the Selby girl’s testimony out of his mind, her quiet, deliberate voice, the awful words and images they created — he noticed a pair of headlights coming up the driveway. Davic...
The Iranian guides had driven them into the hills where lemon and rose sunlight spread over the tallest peaks. Chairs were placed at strategic sites, guns loaded and distributed, certain thickets pointed out — it was like a stage set, animals caught in spotlights, deer or large cats, to be admired before being shot to death with grace and precision. The fields of fire were marked by whitewashed poles. If a gun barrel strayed beyond these limits, a sure brown hand would be there to move it firmly back into the firing zone. Flowers glistened on the ground, tiny blue flowers that grew around the rocks and through the scaly brush like delicate veins...