John Lutz - Lightning

Randy Travis was singing now about something profound that had happened in the backseat of a Buick convertible in Kentucky. Tammy started toward their table, but Geary waved her away.

“I don’t know,” Carver said. “Norton seems like the ideal suspect.”

“Ideal patsy, too. Guy’s a true believer.”

“You think the real bomber might have set him up?”

“Anything’s possible,” Geary said. “People like him are suggestible.”

“Does Norton claim somebody set him up?”

“No, just that he’s not guilty.”

Carver looked at Geary. The man was a war-weary cop, and an honest one. Not the smartest, maybe, but a plodder who never gave up. One who took great pride in his work. But no superior officer could inspire disloyalty in his men more effectively than McGregor. Sometimes that disloyalty was conscious and flagrant, sometimes unconscious and subtle. But it was there nonetheless, like an infection that waxed and waned.

“Maybe it’s not all that complicated,” Carver suggested. “Maybe you’re not so sure about Norton’s guilt simply because McGregor is.”

Geary didn’t argue. He nodded. “And because he’s McGregor.”

Both men understood the odious lieutenant whose very thoughts were corrupt enough to draw flies, and who had the minds of his own officers muddled out of sheer hatred for him.

Carver sat back and worked on his beer. The woman who might be a policewoman named Frances glanced at him and smiled. But he wasn’t thinking about her, he was thinking about McGregor.

McGregor, who was completely cynical about humanity, and who was often in the way of justice because he didn’t believe it existed.

Carver sometimes hated himself for weakening and thinking McGregor might be right.

Geary left Vinny’s after finishing his beer, and Carver asked Tammy to bring him a hamburger and a morning Gazette-Dispatch, if there happened to be one lying about.

Five minutes later Tammy returned with a delicious-looking hamburger heaped with tomato, lettuce, and onion on a sesame seed bun, and a badly wrinkled but readable newspaper that had been left by a previous customer. Most of the sports section was missing, but the front section was intact even if the pages had been shuffled. Someone had torn out a ten-minute oil change coupon, but there had been nothing printed on the back of it about the clinic bombing. Instead the interrupted news item had to do with a hostage situation in the Middle East. Trouble all over the map, Carver thought. He smoothed out the front page and read as he ate.

The dead in the clinic bombing were Dr. Harold Grimm-ostensibly the target, if there was one besides the clinic itself-and a patient named Wanda Creighton, the woman who’d walked into the clinic ahead of Beth. She had come to the clinic, which concerned itself not only with abortion but with many phases of women’s health, to talk to Dr. Grimm about amniocentesis to determine the sex of the child she had decided to bear. The injured were Beth and volunteer nurse and receptionist Delores Bravo. Only slightly injured, and not requiring hospitalization, was a nurse named Janet Havens who had been preparing an operating room for an abortion scheduled for later that morning.

The paper was an early edition and made no mention of Adam Norton. It did mention Operation Alive, describing it as an extremist anti-abortion organization based in Orlando and headed by a Reverend Martin Freel. The Reverend Mr. Freel was quoted as denying that Operation Alive had any connection to the bombing, and that any such allegation was absurd and part of a plot instigated by pro-choice fanatics to undermine the operation’s effectiveness. The Bible was quoted by Mr. Freel, the commandment about bearing false witness. Then he refused to say anything more about the bombing and referred any further questions to his attorney, Jefferson Brama.

Carver set the paper aside and finished his hamburger, thinking the law and the Bible sure made life confusing.

The news item had mentioned Dr. Grimm’s widow, Adelle. Carver paid Tammy, then went to the phone booth against the back wall and tried to look up the Grimms’ number and address in the directory.

But there was no Dr. Grimm listed in Del Moray or environs. Obviously the Grimms had an unlisted phone number, which made sense, considering they were the target of people who were violent.

Figuring Geary was either back at his desk by now or in the field where he could be reached by phone, Carver dropped his change in the slot and pecked out the number of police headquarters. Geary would probably tell him the Grimms’ address and phone number. When Geary had walked out of Vinny’s, he was in the mood to help Carver do anything that might cause McGregor trouble. And if it happened to cause Carver trouble too, that was acceptable. Life in law enforcement was rife with politics and political victims.

The Grimm home was on Phosphorus Lane in west Del Moray, in a palm-lined section of modest stucco houses with tile roofs and attached garages at the end of long gravel driveways. Most of the garages were made of brick and looked more substantial than the houses. Practicing in an abortion clinic was apparently less profitable than other places where a physician might ply his trade. Harold Grimm probably hadn’t been the sort of doctor who spent much of his time on a golf course.

The new widow Adelle Grimm’s house was yellow stucco with a green tile roof, green awnings, and a small front porch with a wooden glider at one end. The front door was painted dark green and had a small, triangular window in it.

Carver thought there was something mournful in the drooping canvas awnings, the sagging gutter over the porch, the shaded windows like the eyes of the dead, as if the house somehow knew and shared the grief of its inhabitant.

He climbed out of the parked Olds and walked toward the house. The small front lawn was green and closely cut so that parallel stripes of varicolored grass from recent mowings showed in it, and the flower bed around the porch was tended and colorful. Birds chirped, bees hummed. The yard wasn’t mourning along with the house. There was no sign out here that one of its owners had died unexpectedly and violently.

Carver took the two low steps up onto the porch and stood in the shade. There was no sound from inside the house. He pressed the brass doorbell button with the tip of his cane.

Still no sound.

A jet airliner roared overhead, rolling constant thunder through a cloudless blue sky, and he didn’t hear anyone approaching on the other side of the door, inside the house.

But suddenly the door was open and the dark-haired woman he’d seen in the emergency waiting room yesterday morning was staring out at him.

She wasn’t a tall woman, but she seemed tall because she stood very erect and her features had a narrow, rectangular line about them. Her hair was mussed and brushed back off a high forehead. The swelling around her red-rimmed eyes narrowed them and added to the straight-lined symmetry of her face. Too old to bounce back after the death of a spouse, too young to bear the burden of sudden widowhood with philosophical acceptance, she gazed out at Carver from her new situation and did not smile or say hello.

Carver tried a smile. A fierce-looking man in repose, he knew that his smile was surprisingly beatific and reassuring, transforming his face and putting people at ease in his presence. One false impression replaced by another. Was that how it was with Beth’s nurse? The somber one with the mirthful smile?

Carver suspected she might be somber all the time, considering what she saw almost every day.

“I saw you yesterday at the hospital,” Adelle Grimm said, not returning his smile. There was a delicacy about her, not of physique but of attitude, that suggested she wasn’t strong enough to survive emotional storms. And right now she was in a hurricane.