True to the Law by Jo Goodman Page B

delivered the paper, pen, and ink to him mere minutes after he made his request, and Cobb had given him a gold piece for his trouble. It was an extravagant gesture, one that Cobb could not afford to regularly repeat, but he had been feeling generous. It was a mood that lingered.
    She
had something to do with it. Gertrude Morrow. He reached into the inside pocket of his vest and gingerly extracted the sketch he had made of her in Andrew Mackey’s study. The lawyer’s description had been correct on general points, but he had not been able to convey the finer ones.
    Miss Morrow did indeed have an oval face, but there had been no mention of the faint indentation at the base of her chin or that in spite of features that were perfectly proportioned, there was an intriguing asymmetry that was visible when she smiled. The shallow dimple on the left side of her mouth had no twin on the right. Cobb wondered if Mackey hadn’t noticed or didn’t think it was important enough to bring up. For Cobb it was precisely that kind of detail that raised a sketch to the level of a portrait. Cobb had spent a considerable portion of the evening committing certain aspects of Gertrude Morrow’s face to his memory and wondering if Andrew Mackey had ever noticed her except in passing.
    Her eyes were a shade of green that he did not believe existed in any other form in nature and therefore defied his ability to describe them. Warmer and a shade lighter than emerald, brighter than the green underside of an orchid leaf, they absorbed and reflected light in a way that softened the color in one moment and then brought it brilliantly into sharp relief in the next.
    Cobb reined in that thought, his mouth twisting with wry humor. He had been interviewing witnesses and suspects for years and never once gave this much consideration to identifying the color of a pair of eyes. Neither, he reflected, had he surrendered so much control of an interview, and when he had asked Miss Morrow if he might join her for dinner, interviewing her had been the purpose of his request.
    Or he had fooled himself into believing that was his motive. He could admit that he had not put up much of a fight. The only details on a personal note that she shared with him were her former connection to Charlotte Mackey and the fact that her father was a minister, both pieces of information that Cobb already knew. She, on the other hand, learned one fact—that he was not a dedicated gambler—and chased it with the single-mindedness of a greyhound after a rabbit.
    Cobb still wondered why he told her about Hempstead, Indiana. He had had sense enough to keep his answers close to the truth so he would not trip over himself, but his intention had been to offer only broad strokes. He
had
worked in banks, stockyards, and hospitals, also for the railroad and twice for city hall. In every instance he had been employed as an investigator, first with the powerful Pinkerton Detective Agency behind him, and later on his own. He had never been marshal for one day in Hempstead, let alone six weeks, but it had taken him that long to establish the connection between the molestation, rape, and on two occasions, murder, of seven young women in rural Indiana towns and run the itinerant preacher and his son responsible for the acts to ground.
    What happened after that turned out to be a lesson to him, not his finest hour.
    He studied his sketch again. Owing to his critical judgment, he decided that he had placed her eyes rather more closely together than they actually were. Neither was her nose as pinched as he’d been led to believe. Mackey had nothing at all to say about her neck, and Cobb’s sketch only suggested the line so that her head would not appear to float on the paper. He picked up the pen and extended that line so the long stem of her neck became the graceful curve of her shoulder. He made small changes to her eyes and nose, put in shading to hint at the luster of her hair, and added the faint