And this is the Andy Lewis that that preacher’s daughter saw just before being beaten to a pulp, thought Kate. His skin was dark with fury, his hand trembling with this evidence that he, Andy Lewis, might have been tricked, trapped, thwarted, outsmarted. He brought his eyes up to Kate, looked at her shirt, dismissed her, turned to Lee.
“You. Let me see.”
She looked to Kate for direction, but Kate could only nod. Slowly, slowly Lee’s hands went up to the back of her neck, and slowly she pulled her own black cord over her blonde curls, and then she held the button out to him.
He stared at the small device swinging from Lee’s fingers, his eyes narrowing in disbelief.
“You pushed it, didn’t you? When we were coming down the hallway, you were all bent over. You had your hands on it, didn’t you? Oh, Christ, you stupid bitch, you’re going to be very sorry you did that.”
“Mr. Lewis,” Kate began in the calm and reasonable voice demanded both by training and by good sense, “I’m afraid you’ll find there are police all around the house. However, I should point out that as of this moment we have nothing on you, in spite of what Vaun just said. With a good lawyer—”
“Shut up!” he snarled, and jammed his gun into Lee’s hair. Kate froze.
“I don’t care what evidence you have,” he said. “I’ve got hostages. I’ll get away, you won’t risk losing ‘Eva Vaughn,’ now will you? I’ll get away. But I don’t need you. Three hostages is too many, and a cop doesn’t count anyway.”
“Andy,” Vaun said quietly, “don’t hurt her. Tie her up if you like, but let her go. If you do, I’ll go with you. If you kill either of them, you’ll have to kill me too.”
His head turned to her, his face screwed up as if he were about to spit, or to cry, and indeed the answer he spat out climbed rapidly into a shriek.
“You? You think I care what I do to you? I should have killed you years ago. All of this happened because of you, you goddamned bitch. I should have wrung your neck that night. I should have poked your cold little eyes out.”
His rage poured out onto Vaun, and still Kate sat, knowing he was about to explode, knowing he would see her move, knowing that in a matter of seconds time would have run out and she would have to make her hopeless bid for their lives. Lee might reach him—she was out of his sight—but Lee sat, still clutching the button, stunned by his sheer animal fury.
Vaun, though. Vaun the passive, Vaun the mirror, Vaun the observer and chronicler of the world’s torments, Vaun was meeting him, shaking herself free almost visibly from the restraints of a lifetime, caught up in a rising bubble of exhilarating, intoxicating, liberating rage. Her face was alive, furious, unrecognizable, her pale cheeks flushed with passion, her pale eyes glittering like a pair of blue diamonds, every bit as hard and as cutting. She threw back her head and called her death to her in the vast relief of one final clash, all bars off, no quarter given, all her confusion and torment coming to a single focus on this, her lover, her enemy, her death. She rose up to meet him, took one step back, and stood braced to hurl her words at him.
“Yes, Andy, you should have. But you didn’t, did you? And everything I’ve done in the last fifteen years, everything I’ve painted, has been thanks to you. Thanks to you, Andy. These hands,” she held them up and shook them in his face, “these hands have changed the way people see the world, thanks to you—”
“You’ll never paint again!” he shrieked at her, and the heavy gun jerked slightly toward her, and then all three of them could see his mind reassert itself and take control of the hand’s movement. He looked at her in astonishment and began to laugh, the madness and hysteria all the way up to the surface now.
“You think I’m going to kill you, you stupid bitch? That’s what you want, isn’t it? But I’m not going to make it that easy for you. You’re going to wish you were dead—it’ll make being locked up for ten years seem like a fairy tale because you’re going to live knowing what your precious painting did, you’re going to have to live knowing that because of your precious fucking painting people died, that those hands you’re so proud of might as well have been around those skinny soft little throats and on this gun, and you’re going to have to live knowing that precious little Jemma and Tina and Amanda who tried to bite me, the little bitch, and what’s the other one’s name? Samantha and now your good friends Lee and Casey, all of them died because of your precious fucking painting hands, and even if your hands can hold a brush when I’m finished with you, all you’ll be able to paint is blood and death, and you did it all, you did it, Vaunie, it was you.”
And he turned then and many things happened simultaneously, as his gun lowered onto Lee and Vaun cried out and Kate finally made her move, diving low for his knees, and the high upper window blossomed in glittering fragments into the room and two guns went off. Then there was blood like paint spattered across the room and there was death and there was the sound of two women groaning in deep and eternal agony, and then came the sound of more smashing glass and the absurdly unnecessary flat buzz of the breached house alarm, and then running feet and shouts and the wail of distant sirens, and Hawkin pulling Kate off Lee and muffling his partner’s choking groans in the hollow of his shoulder, and the sirens louder now and the sudden silent chasm as both house alarm and siren shut off, and the calm rush of the ambulance men, and Hawkin holding Kate back—and then Lee was gone, and it was over, over, it was over.
Epilogue
The Road
Works of art are always products of having been in danger, of having gone to the very end.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, letter
There was also a nun, a Prioress…and thereon hung a brooch of gold full sheen, On which there was first writ a crowned ‘A,’ And after Amor vincit omnia.
—Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, Prologue
33
Tyler’s Road was a very different place in the June sunshine. Even the redwoods through which Kate had run that disgustingly wet night seemed more benevolent. The roses along the fence were a glory of color, the rusty shed roof had disappeared beneath an expanse of green, and brilliant flags flew from every fence post, each printed with a helm, a lute, or a quill and proclaiming the boundaries of the Medieval Midsummer’s Night Faire.
There were still a few press vans, Kate was amused to see, although they were vastly outnumbered by the buses, bugs, pickups, vans, station wagons, and just plain cars of the participants, which even at this early hour lined both sides of the narrow road for nearly a mile on either side of the Barn. She parked her own car at the suggestion of a long-haired boy in jester’s motley and began to walk toward the sounds and, soon, the smells of Tyler’s Barn. There was a steady flow of long-haired, bearded, long-skirted types whose costumes ranged from monastic robes to gowns that would have seemed modern in Marie Antoinette’s France, with a scattering of self-conscious families in shorts and cameras. She herself was dressed in proper period style, thanks to the bullying of one of Lee’s clients—but as a young man, in tunic and lightweight leggings. No ruffs or farthingales for her, thank you.
As she neared the entrance gate she fished out from the leather pouch at her belt the pass that had come in the mail and handed it to the gatekeeper, a vaguely familiar woman in rustic brown who stamped her hand with something that was either an octopus or a musical instrument. Behind the woman stood a mountainous figure in green tunic and leggings, leaning on a rough staff the size of a young tree, a walkie-talkie grumbling from his hip. She looked at him more carefully, and at last knew him by the earring.
“Mark Detweiler?”
He looked at her with uncertainty.
“Kate Martinelli. Casey?” she suggested.
“Casey Martinelli!” he boomed, and crushed her hand in his. “Good to see you. I wouldn’t have recognized you in a million years. How’ve you been?” And then his face changed as he remembered, and still booming he continued, “I was so sorry to hear about your friend, we all were. Is there—”
r /> She interrupted quickly, not wanting to hear it.
“Thanks, no, I’m fine, have you any idea where Tyler is, or Vaun Adams?”
He looked furtively to either side and bent down to whisper in her ear.
“Vaun was around. She’s helping Amy with the cart rides, or maybe doing faces, I’m not sure which. Tyler’s around.” He waved vaguely into the multicolored swirl of humanity. Kate thanked him and began to turn away, but was stopped by his booming voice. “Tell you who I did see, though,” and he waited.
“Who?” she obliged.
“Your partner.” Seeing her confused look, he repeated it. “Your partner. Al Hawkin.”
“Al’s here?” She was surprised. This didn’t seem his sort of show, but then, maybe he was here for reasons similar to hers.
“Got here about half an hour ago, with the most gorgeous wench—oh, sorry, we’re not supposed to call them wenches this year. What was it now?” He scratched his grizzled head in thought, pushing the feathered cap awry. “Oh, right. Buxom ladies, we’re supposed to say. Anyway, she’s a looker. They went towards the food tents—see the white ones?”
She thanked him again and set off, aiming well downhill from the blazing white canvas from which all the smells were drifting. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see him, not quite yet. Later in the day perhaps, after she had talked with Vaun.
Inevitably, perverse fate decreed that the first familiar face she saw was that of Al Hawkin, dressed in twentieth-century open-necked shirt and tan cotton trousers, standing by himself across a clearing and listening to a quartet of three recorders and a viola da gamba. She had not seen him for nearly two months, since the night he had come to the house with the intention, she had realized only recently, of apologizing for his failure to send the marksman up the neighbor’s tree in time to save Lee’s spine. Kate had been in no state to receive him or his guilt, being on the edge of exhaustion and frantic with worry over yet another infection that was trying to carry off what was left of Lee, and had thrown him out with scathing, bitter words.
Those words hung in front of her now and she hesitated, tempted to duck back behind the tent, but was stopped by the absurdity of it. He saw her then, half raised a hand in greeting, and waited until he saw her start toward him before moving from his post. They met halfway.
“Hello, Al,” she said with originality.
“Kate,” he answered. “How are you?”
“I am well,” she said, and was vaguely surprised to find that she meant it.
“And Lee?”
“You saw her a couple of weeks ago, I think?”
“Ten days ago. She was due to be discharged the following day. How is it going?”
“She’s much happier at home, sleeping well. And she seems to be doing better just generally.”
“Changes?” He was as sharply perceptive as ever and picked up the nuance of hope in her voice.
“The doctors say they aren’t sure, but you know doctors. She says there’s some feeling in her right foot, and the other day she moved it in reflex.”
“Oh, Kate. That is good news. I’m very glad to hear it.”
The sincerity behind the hackneyed phrases stung her eyes, and she looked away at the musicians. Some people were beginning a dance.
“Al, I’m sorry about how I acted when you came to see me. I didn’t mean it, I hope you know that.”
“I do. I chose a poor time to come. Forget it. I’ll come to see her sometime, shall I?”
“She’d like that.”
“Tell her I said hello, and that I’m glad to hear she’s doing better.”
“She’s sure she’ll be jogging by Christmas. Of course, she never jogged before—I don’t know what her hurry is.”
He smiled at her, hearing what lay behind her feeble joke.
“Buy you a beer?”
“A bit early for me.”
“You have to get into the medieval spirit. They drank it all day—no coffee, can you imagine? and no tea other than herbs that they drank as medicine—and got a large part of their vitamin and caloric intake from beer. Why, do you know, court records show that the lady’s servants—the women, mind you—were each issued something like three gallons a day?”
“Must have been a jolly castle.” She wondered at this arcane expertise.
“With busy toilets. Speaking of which, I wonder where Jani could be? Oh well, she’ll find us.”
And so saying he casually draped an arm across Kate’s shoulders, and she was so astonished she could only lean into him as they meandered downhill and joined the line for paper cups (printed with a wood-grain design) of surprisingly decent dark beer.
They found a quiet corner atop a pile of large wooden crates and sat looking at the pulsating, growing crowd of medieval merrymakers. The beer went down well as they sat in the shade on an already hot morning with the taste of dust on their tongues. Kate swallowed and gave herself over to relaxation, feeling small pockets of unrealized tension give way. It was the first alcohol she’d had since what she thought of in capitals as The Night. To drink would have been an act of cowardice, until now.
She didn’t realize she had sighed until Hawkin turned to her.
“I almost didn’t come,” she said, as if in explanation.
“I was a little surprised to see you,” he agreed.
“Some of Lee’s clients are with her today. Jon Samson, as a matter of fact—one of her most devoted. Silly to call them clients, I suppose. If anything, they’re the therapists, both physio- and psycho-.”
“Friends, maybe.”
“Friends. Yes. I don’t know what I would have done without them.”
“Are you coming back, Kate?” he asked abruptly.
“You know, until ten minutes ago I wasn’t sure.”
“And?”
“Yes. Yes, I do believe I’m coming back.”
“Good.” He nodded and drained his cup. “Good. How soon?”
“I’ll have to arrange care for Lee.” He waited. “Jon offered to move in for a while, to take over the front rooms. I’d have to get in a bed, arrange a relief schedule for him.” Hawkin waited. “A few days. Four. Maybe three. Why?”
“I could use you now,” he said. His fingers fiddled with the waxy rim of the cup, uncurling it, and his eyes scanned the crowd, and his face gave away nothing.
“Isn’t this where you start lighting a cigarette?” she said suspiciously.
“Gave them up.”
“Why do you need me now?”
“I’ve been given the Raven Morningstar case.”
“Oh, Christ, Al, give me a break!” Ms. Morningstar had been found, very much murdered, in her hotel room in the city the week before. Ms. Morningstar had a list of enemies that would fill a small telephone book. Ms. Morningstar was one of the country’s most outspoken, most eloquent, most militant, most worshipped, and most vilified radical feminist lesbians.
“You might be of considerable help.”
“Oh, I can imagine. You could nail me up on the doors of the Hall of Justice and let them throw things at me while you slip out the back.”
“None of them would throw things at you,” he said matter-of-factly. “There is, after all, a certain amount of renown attached to a female police officer who forces her superiors to give her an extended leave in order to nurse her wounded lover, lesbian variety, and who furthermore makes noises that the departmental insurance policy should be made to include what might be termed unofficial spouses.” He did look at her finally, with one eyebrow raised, to gauge her response. She stared at him, open-mouthed, for a long minute, until she felt a sensation she’d never thought to feel again. A great, round, growing balloon of laughter welled up inside her and finally burst gloriously, and she began to giggle, and laugh, more and more convulsively, until in the end she lay back on the crates and roared, tears rolling down into her hair. His growing look of alarm only made it worse, and it was some time before she could get out a coherent explanation.
/> “When I…that first day, in your office…you so obviously didn’t want to be burdened with me—no, I understood, I was being set up in a prominent place on the case because there were kiddies involved….” She realized where they were and lowered her voice. “And any case with kiddies has to have a little lady in it, and little old Casey Martinelli was that lady, there to look cute and pat the kiddies on the head. And now”—she started to laugh again—“now I’m the department’s representative to the chains-and-leather dyke brigade.” She wiped her eyes and blew her nose, and suddenly the laughter disintegrated and she heaved a sigh. “Ah, well, as they say: only in San Francisco.”
“So when can you be there?”
“Jesus Christ, Al, you don’t give up, do you? Today’s Saturday. I’ll be in Tuesday.”
“Make it Monday.”
“Nope. There’s people I can’t reach on the weekend—have to do it Monday morning.”
“Monday afternoon, then.”
“All right, damn it! Late Monday afternoon.”
“I’ll set a press conference for three o’clock.”
“A press—you utter bastard,” she swore angrily, and an instant later realized that she was cursing at the man who was still her superior officer.
He swung his face around, looked directly at her, his gray-blue eyes inches from her brown ones, and grinned roguishly.