anger and resentment that she'd been put in this position once again.
She'd almost lost her bearings at the time of her rape, her brain twisting away from her bruised body, her mind going on journeys of its own, far from her friends and the events unfolding around her. She'd worked goddamned hard to get it all back and to rebuild a life loosely based on what had predated it.
As she spoke to Sam, she saw not only the man she'd just met—and the ghost he represented—but the circumstances that had led her to him: her niece, what she must have gone through before trying to rob that store, the fact that she'd had no one to turn to, as Gail had had in her time of need.
By the end of her recitation, after Sam had said, "I'll get this downstairs to the boys in blue. They'll probably know this jerk right off. We'll get him for you," Gail found she was barely listening.
She got to her feet. Despite Sam's reassurances, Gail now felt remote from this conversation. The news of Laurie being shot, Joe's fatalism about it, the man at the apartment, the very details she'd cataloged entering this office, had all intertwined to cut her loose from the logical, reasonable world she usually inhabited with ease and comfort. With Sam's words barely an echo in her ears, she moved toward the exit feeling alone and distracted, in dire need of a course of action.
And utterly responsible for doing something on Laurie's behalf.
Chapter 5
Joe Gunther sat on the windowsill and hitched a leg up, wedging his foot against one frame and his back against the other. The VBI office was on the second floor of Brattleboro's old Municipal Building, once a high school and built in the 1800s. It looked pretty ugly from the outside, had lousy heating and cooling, was poorly laid out and crammed with people, but its windows were huge, could be opened, as this one was now, aqnd had really comfortable sills for taking in the summer sun.
It was late in the afternoon. There was a unit meeting planned for half an hour from now, but for the moment, the office was empty. Joe knew that Sammie Martens was downstairs consulting with the PD and would be back momentarily, but that didn't diminish his pleasure at having the place to himself, even if briefly.
Joe was a loner by instinct. Married once as a young man, widowed not too many years afterward, and left without children, he'd gone through a long period getting used to a life alone before meeting Gail at a political function. At the time—and often to this day—people thought them an odd match. He an old-fashioned, lifelong cop, born on a farm some sixty miles farther north up the Connecticut River, and she a New York-born, hypereducated rich liberal. But they had their common ground. Both were independent, hardworking, committed to their jobs or causes, and armed with a strong sense of right and wrong.
And both seemed to need as much time apart as time together.
He'd wondered about this once, even fretted a little in the early days, thinking of the unlikeliness that two halves of a couple could actually share this particular trait for more than a few months. But he didn't worry about it anymore. They'd gone through so much by now, including living together briefly following her rape, that they'd found a comfortable niche they could share, despite it being both unconventional and perhaps inexplicable even to themselves. All that counted was that it worked.
As if the topic had been visibly hanging in the air, Sam walked into the office as Joe was musing along these lines, and announced, "Gail dropped by a while ago." She crossed to her desk, rummaged around its paper snowbank for a couple of seconds, and extracted a single sheet, which she then consulted. "Said she'd gone to her niece's apartment and bumped into a guy the Bratt PD's since identified as Roger Novelle—local bad boy specializing in crack and heroin, both the using and selling of same."
She tossed the piece of paper back onto the pile and sat
She'd almost lost her bearings at the time of her rape, her brain twisting away from her bruised body, her mind going on journeys of its own, far from her friends and the events unfolding around her. She'd worked goddamned hard to get it all back and to rebuild a life loosely based on what had predated it.
As she spoke to Sam, she saw not only the man she'd just met—and the ghost he represented—but the circumstances that had led her to him: her niece, what she must have gone through before trying to rob that store, the fact that she'd had no one to turn to, as Gail had had in her time of need.
By the end of her recitation, after Sam had said, "I'll get this downstairs to the boys in blue. They'll probably know this jerk right off. We'll get him for you," Gail found she was barely listening.
She got to her feet. Despite Sam's reassurances, Gail now felt remote from this conversation. The news of Laurie being shot, Joe's fatalism about it, the man at the apartment, the very details she'd cataloged entering this office, had all intertwined to cut her loose from the logical, reasonable world she usually inhabited with ease and comfort. With Sam's words barely an echo in her ears, she moved toward the exit feeling alone and distracted, in dire need of a course of action.
And utterly responsible for doing something on Laurie's behalf.
Chapter 5
Joe Gunther sat on the windowsill and hitched a leg up, wedging his foot against one frame and his back against the other. The VBI office was on the second floor of Brattleboro's old Municipal Building, once a high school and built in the 1800s. It looked pretty ugly from the outside, had lousy heating and cooling, was poorly laid out and crammed with people, but its windows were huge, could be opened, as this one was now, aqnd had really comfortable sills for taking in the summer sun.
It was late in the afternoon. There was a unit meeting planned for half an hour from now, but for the moment, the office was empty. Joe knew that Sammie Martens was downstairs consulting with the PD and would be back momentarily, but that didn't diminish his pleasure at having the place to himself, even if briefly.
Joe was a loner by instinct. Married once as a young man, widowed not too many years afterward, and left without children, he'd gone through a long period getting used to a life alone before meeting Gail at a political function. At the time—and often to this day—people thought them an odd match. He an old-fashioned, lifelong cop, born on a farm some sixty miles farther north up the Connecticut River, and she a New York-born, hypereducated rich liberal. But they had their common ground. Both were independent, hardworking, committed to their jobs or causes, and armed with a strong sense of right and wrong.
And both seemed to need as much time apart as time together.
He'd wondered about this once, even fretted a little in the early days, thinking of the unlikeliness that two halves of a couple could actually share this particular trait for more than a few months. But he didn't worry about it anymore. They'd gone through so much by now, including living together briefly following her rape, that they'd found a comfortable niche they could share, despite it being both unconventional and perhaps inexplicable even to themselves. All that counted was that it worked.
As if the topic had been visibly hanging in the air, Sam walked into the office as Joe was musing along these lines, and announced, "Gail dropped by a while ago." She crossed to her desk, rummaged around its paper snowbank for a couple of seconds, and extracted a single sheet, which she then consulted. "Said she'd gone to her niece's apartment and bumped into a guy the Bratt PD's since identified as Roger Novelle—local bad boy specializing in crack and heroin, both the using and selling of same."
She tossed the piece of paper back onto the pile and sat
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