“I heard her say that, but I never knew any of her specific plans to leave,” I said honestly.
“You knew she was going to run, you asshole. Well, we’d better find them.”
“You have her story,” I said. “That’s enough.”
“I’ll decide what’s enough, Perry. And, whether we find them or not, you’d better have your ass in my office tomorrow morning. I’ve got a long line of cops wanting to talk to you about an even longer list of crimes.”
“I’ll be there.”
I sat on the floor of my living room with the lights off. Julie was gone. It would have been easier for her to get away when she’d been with me, but she’d waited until the police had her. Probably she’d wanted to cut me a break and make things at least somewhat easier for me with the police. Thoughtful. Now it was their fault she’d disappeared, not mine. I could have stopped her if I’d called the cops soon enough. John Weston had told me not to, though. Didn’t mention he was going with them.
I called Joe and told him the news. He wasn’t surprised, not by Julie’s vanishing act, or John’s decision not to call the cops, or even that John had gone with them. He was a little more surprised that Julie had killed her husband, but it’s hard to throw a total shocker at a thirty-year police veteran.
“You all right?” he asked.
“Fine.”
“Sure.” He paused, then said, “Get some sleep, LP. You’ve earned it.”
“See you tomorrow, Joe.”
At one in the morning, Amy came over. She didn’t call, but that was fine. I wasn’t asleep, and she knew I wouldn’t be. I let her in, and we sat on the couch, and I told her what I knew. I told her all of it, from Thor and Krashakov to my conversation with Julie at the pond to John Weston’s request that I take the night off to think things over.
“Wow. She killed his son, and he let her go. Went with her, even.”
“He let Betsy keep her mother,” I said. “They might seem like the same decision to anyone else, but I don’t know if they were to John.”
“And it’s not like he’s got long to spend with them. Six months to a year, right?”
“What are you talking about?”
“John Weston’s dying, Lincoln. Didn’t you know that?” When my face told her that I didn’t, she shook her head. “Wow, I thought you knew. Julie told me in the interview. He’s in the late stages of terminal lung cancer.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t know what to say to a lot of things anymore.
“What’ll happen to Hubbard and Cody?” Amy asked.
“They’ll prosecute Hubbard. My guess is the FBI will handle Cody internally. It will be difficult to prove exactly how much he knew and how much he hurt the investigation, and they’ll break their backs to keep something like that out of the media spotlight. He’ll probably end up filing papers in the Des Moines office by June.”
She shook her head. “It’s been a hell ofa day for you, Lincoln.”
“Yes, it has. I was thanked for my cooperation by one of the city’s deadliest criminals and cursed by a prosecutor. Sounds like I handled everything pretty well, right?”
“You’re alive, and so are they,” she said. “You didn’t handle it that badly.”
“They are alive. Alive, and long gone. Good thing we made Weston give us the retainer check.”
“My story runs tomorrow,” she said. “There are quite a few quotes in it indicating that Julie was still scared and that she wanted to disappear to protect her daughter. There’s nothing in it indicating she killed her husband, though.”
“And there shouldn’t be. Let the police deal with it now, Ace.”
She looked at me. “It bothers you, doesn’t it? You could have taken her to the police instead of dropping her off at the hotel. You could have told someone what you knew. But you didn’t.”
“Yeah, it bothers me. It bothers me because I’m not sad about it. I know she killed her husband, and I know she’s gone now, and I’m not at all disappointed. I want her to be gone. I don’t want her to be in jail.”
“But she killed a man. She murdered her own husband.”
“Well, sure,” I said. “There’s that.”
Amy nodded. “And you can rationalize it a little, can’t you? You can look at the situation and justify her actions, or least justify her freedom.”
“Yes,” I said. “But I shouldn’t be able to. Killing is killing. It’s not my job to justify it. She took a life, Amy. And John’s okay with letting her go, because he wants the best for his granddaughter. But it probably would have been best for her to have both parents alive, don’t you think?”
Amy pulled her legs up on the couch and tucked them underneath her. “You almost died for her, you know.”
“Yes.”
“Twice.”
“Yes.”
“Any bitterness about that?”
“No.”
We sat on the couch and stared at the wall. All the lights were off, and that was how I wanted it to remain. I was content to stay in the dark again.
“You loved her, didn’t you?” Amy asked softly.
I shook my head. “No, I didn’t love her. I’d known her for three days, Amy.”
“Okay, so you didn’t love her. But maybe you wanted the chance.”
I shrugged. “Screw it.”
She smiled at me. “Too tough to care, eh, Lincoln?”
I shook my head again. “Not too tough. Too smart.”
She touched the back of my head lightly, her fingers caressing the swollen knots left by Krashakov’s gun. “People come and go in our lives. We don’t get to pick when and how they come, and we don’t get to pick when and how they go. We just learn from it, deal with it, and move on. That’s how it goes. And that’s what you have to do now.”
“Deep,” I said. “You should be a writer.”
She flicked her finger against one of the knots hard enough to cause a little pain. “And you should be an ass. Oh, wait-you’ve already got that covered.”
I laughed, then sighed and put my head back against the couch. “I do what I can.”
“Yes,” she said, “you do. And that’s all you can ask of yourself, Lincoln. Now I’m going to let you get some sleep. You’re going to need it for a day under the interrogation lamps.”
“It’ll be a blast,” I said. “The cops are probably selling tickets if you want to be there for the show.”
I walked her down to her car. She gave me a long, hard hug, then climbed into the Acura and drove away.
I went upstairs and dug Betsy Weston’s diary out of the drawer where I had stashed it. I read through a few of the entries again, smiling at her spelling mistakes, able now to put a voice and an attitude with the thoughts. Then I snapped it shut and threw it in the garbage can. The heart-shaped prism I had taken from her bedroom that same afternoon was in the drawer with the diary. I started to toss it in the trash, too, but I didn’t. I took it down to the gym and used the fishing line to hang it in the little window next to the desk. The sun would emerge from behind the clouds again one of these days, and when it did, the prism would sparkle, and maybe it would make Grace smile. You do what you can.
I locked the office and walked out to the parking lot. A jet roared overhead, flying quite low as it came in for a landing at the airport just a few miles away. The sound was tremendous, a blast that seemed to shake me until it was all I was aware of. I looked up at the sky and watched the trail of smoke and the lights as the plane roared in. I wondered where it had been and where it would go next. I wondered if it had carried Julie and Betsy Weston someplace. Eventually, the plane descended so low the buildings obscured it from sight. The cloud of vapor it had left behind faded slowly into the night sky, and then there was nothing left but the memory of the sound.
I went upstairs and went to bed.
Michael Koryta
