Steven Womack - By Blood Written

Once outside, Hank Powell walked down Fifty-third Street toward Third Avenue. He couldn’t make any sense of this.

He was stunned, confused. Here was this obviously well-educated, intelligent, sophisticated, high-powered woman who turned on him like a cornered badger. It was almost as if Taylor Robinson hated cops.

What Hank Powell did not know, and could not possibly have known, was that Taylor Robinson did hate police.

Hated them to the core of her soul …

Thursday morning, Manhattan

Taylor Robinson stood in the silence of her office, staring at the closed door. From the outside, she appeared calm, almost serenely so. But in her chest, she felt a pounding that, for a moment, genuinely frightened her. She fought to control her breathing, to loosen her neck and jaw muscles.

To stay in control.

She turned and walked to the window. Through the film of dust and grime, she watched as, to her right, the FBI agent exited the building and walked down the stoop onto the sidewalk. He paused, standing still, then shook his head and walked off in the direction of Third Avenue.

She stayed like that for what felt like a long time. Her mind went blank, as if the encounter with the FBI agent-

what was his name?-had caused something inside her to empty.

How long had he been here? She had, for the moment, lost perception of time. She gazed out the window to the traffic below on East Fifty-third. Behind her, she heard a door open.

“Taylor?”

Taylor turned. Her assistant, Anne, was in the doorway, a concerned look on her face.

“Yes?” she answered blankly.

“Are you okay?”

Taylor turned and looked back out the window. The sun was breaking through a layer of gray overcast, throwing random beams of bright yellow light on the street below. She turned back and faced the young woman.

“I’m going out for a while,” she said.

She had spent her entire life since that day trying to forget.

It had been her fault, her fault, and she had carried that weight around inside her over half her life.

Over half her life. Twenty years. Twenty years that Jack never got. And many more in front of her that he would never have.

It was supposed to have been the best summer ever.

Her brother, three years her senior, was home from VMI.

John Prentice Robinson was his full name, but no one ever seemed able to call him that with a straight face. He was too playful, too spontaneous, too reckless, to be a John Prentice Robinson. He was the family prankster, the practical joke master, the puncturer of pretense, the outrageous smart ass that everyone loved. He would always, in everyone’s perception, be a Jack. And she adored him.

Handsome, rugged, a born athlete … He had captained the soccer team and track team in private school, then gone onto the Virginia Military Institute, where he was soon captain of the varsity shooting team. He came home that summer as a prime candidate for the Olympics.

Her brother, Jack, on the U.S. Olympic Shooting Team.

He was home for just a week, only a week, before heading out to Colorado Springs to spend the rest of the summer training. The days had been buoyant, happy. Her father-

one of Greenwich, Connecticut’s most prominent cardiolo-gists-had even taken time off from his rounds. They played tennis at the country club, hosted a grand summer party, danced and swam and sang and drank.

Taylor felt as if it would go on forever. That they would always be young and energetic and happy, that life would always be a banquet.

That day, that day it all ended, her father woke early, left in his Mercedes to make his hospital rounds. Her mother slept late, as did Taylor and Jack, and then went out for a tennis date at the club.

Jack climbed into his Jeep and drove off to meet friends for lunch.

Taylor relaxed, hanging around the house, debating what to do with the rest of the day. She had chores to do, had promised her mother to do some laundry and clean up her room. Her senior year would begin in a few weeks as well.

So maybe it was time she started going through the stack of college catalogs that had been coming in the mail for months.

Then the phone rang. Her best friend, Dori, invited her over to spend the afternoon swimming, sunbathing, listening to music, talking about boys. The usual …

Just guilty enough at neglecting her chores to feel it, but not guilty enough to say no to Dori, Taylor rushed into her bedroom and changed into her bikini, then threw on a T-shirt and a pair of cutoffs just as Dori pulled up in her convert-ible Mustang. Taylor grabbed her purse and bag, then ran for the back door. Dori honked the horn and yelled to her.

As Taylor went out the back door, she slapped her hand across the burglar alarm panel.

And hit the wrong button. The burglar alarm system her father had installed a few years earlier had a silent mode.

No one ever used it.

She didn’t mean to do it.

God, she didn’t mean to do it.

They would later stitch together from bits and pieces how it all happened.

At two-twelve that afternoon, an automated call came into the Greenwich Police Department reporting a breakin at the Robinson home. Dispatch sent a prowl car to investigate. Riding alone that shift was a young, rookie patrolman barely older than Jack. In fact, he had just a week earlier finished his probationary period, which required him to ride along with an older, more experienced officer.

When the officer arrives, a Jeep is in the driveway behind the house.

The officer exits the squad car carefully. There’s no sign of a breakin. The officer stands there a moment.

Suddenly, the sliding glass door to the patio courtyard opens up and a young blond man in a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and running shoes steps out.

With his hands in his pockets …

The officer unsnaps his weapon.

Jack, smiling, gregarious as always, never met a fellow he didn’t like, walks toward the officer.

With his hands in his pockets …

“Stop right there,” the officer commands, holding his left palm out, his right hand on the butt of his pistol.

Jack grins, keeps walking: “What’s up, Barney Fife?”

“Stop,” the officer yells.

Jack suddenly pulls his hand out, cocked, his index finger pointing like the barrel of a gun, his thumb like the hammer, like a seven-year-old boy playing cowboys and Indians. He points it at the officer.

Who draws his weapon and fires.

John Prentice Robinson, star athlete, captain of the varsity shooting team, prankster and naively stupid young man, came home that afternoon and didn’t realize he’d set off the burglar alarm when he came in. And as a result, he died that afternoon on the warm clay tiles of the courtyard patio of his parents’ two-million-dollar home, of a single gunshot wound to the chest.

They buried him three days later next to his grandparents.

Devastation is too tepid a word, too mild a description, for what happened to Taylor, her parents, her family.

The city settles for one-point-five million. Taylor refuses any part of it.

Her father shuts down, buries himself in his work.