Thomas Perry - Dead Aim

“Why did she pick New York?”

“I don’t know. She lasted there a few months, working in a restaurant. Then she moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, because it was a change from New York. Then she moved back to L.A. After Mark died, she was never the same. She was nervous, restless. She went places, but it wasn’t because she was hoping that anything was going to happen when she got there. It was more like a person pacing the floor, just moving because staying in one place was intolerable. She came here two months ago. She stayed here with me. She rented a car, the way she always had, but all the time while she was here she probably never went farther than the yard. I would come home from work and find her lying flat on her back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. She had no desire to see anybody from the old days, or to pick up the phone to talk to anybody in any of the places she’d lived. Not even L.A. She had always been the one who was athletic, but this time she seemed physically weak. She was unwilling to move, but she wasn’t ever at rest. Finally one day, she packed up again to go home. That’s what she said. That it was time to go home.”

Sarah barely got the words out before she dissolved into tears again. Mallon and Lydia let their eyes meet while hers were closed. There seemed to Mallon to be nothing for them to do but wait. Lydia gave her only ten seconds before she said, “What was Mark’s last name?”

“Romano.”

Lydia said, “Do you know whether they caught the person who killed him?”

“No,” said Sarah. “I don’t think so.”

“Did that seem to bother Cathy?”

She stared at the window for a moment, and her answer seemed to come as a mild surprise to her. “I don’t think so. She talked about him, about good things they had done together. She didn’t talk about the killer at all. I suppose that if the only man you ever loved that much is killed, then what matters is that he’s gone. She never talked about the rest of it, the way some people seem to. Like they could never rest until the person gets punished. I think Cathy knew she could never rest no matter what.”

Mallon said, “Maybe if I had somehow known all of this at the time, I could have said or done the right things.”

“No. I knew everything, and I talked to her over and over for a year or more. It made no difference. The only thing that would have was bringing Mark back.”

Lydia said, “I hope you don’t mind if I give the Santa Barbara police your phone number and address. They’ll need to talk to you, and there will have to be arrangements made.”

Sarah looked at the floor. “I know. I’ll call them right away. I’ll have her brought back here so she can be buried near my parents.” She seemed almost to be talking to herself. Mallon knew she was going to be talking to herself often in the next few days, reminding herself of things that needed to be done, people who needed to be called. Death wasn’t just an event that happened by itself. It was a lot of work.

Lydia stood and said, “We’ll be back in California tomorrow. If there’s anything we can do to help, here’s my business card. It has my number on it.” Sarah accepted it, but placed it on a bookshelf without looking at it.

She said, “Thank you. And, Mr. Mallon, I thank you for trying so hard to help my sister. I don’t think acts of kindness are wasted or lost. You made my sister’s last memory of people warmer and brighter.”

All the time she was speaking, they were advancing on the door, and then they were outside. Mallon looked for a last time at the yellow house. It was outdated now, the cheerful paint job and the neat interior all part of a phase of Sarah Carlson’s life that had stopped existing at the moment when he and Lydia had stepped onto her porch.

He stood on her front walk, gripped by the impulse to go back up the steps and tell her the rest of the story. He asked himself what he was longing for. Could he possibly want sympathy from her for the sense of loss that he felt? No, it was something else. He had momentarily imagined that telling Sarah something so private-so damning, now that Catherine had proved that her consent could not have been the free choice of a person in control of her will-would make Sarah reciprocate and tell him things that were equally private: intimate details and secrets that would make him finally understand what Catherine had been thinking. He recognized that the urge was insane. If he told Sarah that he’d had sex with her sister a couple of hours before she’d killed herself, she could only loathe him. He had already heard everything she would ever tell him.

“Bobby?” Lydia’s voice startled him. “Forget something?”

“No,” he said, turning toward the car, and took a step. “Just for a minute, I thought I had.”

“You’re right,” Lydia said softly. “We told her enough.”

As Mallon drove the Town Car around the corner and pulled over on the next block, Lydia took out her cell phone and dialed a long-distance number. “Detective Fowler, please.” She turned to Mallon. “You know we’ve got to do it.”

Mallon nodded, then listened with undisguised curiosity.

“This is Lydia Marks. Robert Mallon and I are in Pittsburgh.” She repeated, “Pittsburgh. We’ve managed to locate the sister of Catherine Broward. Yeah, the one who killed herself. The sister’s name is Sarah Carlson and she’ll be calling you shortly. Want her number and address anyway?” She recited them, spelling the street name. “You’re welcome. Nothing you haven’t heard before. There was a boyfriend, he died, and she never got over it. The only odd thing was that he got murdered.” She rolled her eyes at Mallon. “Mark Romano. It was in L.A., about a year ago.” She paused for only a second. “I doubt it, but I’m going to look more closely when I get back. Of course I’ll let you know anything I find.” There was another pause. “Oh? That’s quick. I’d better let you take her call.”

She avoided Mallon’s eyes as she put the telephone away. “There,” she said. “Now he’s got nothing to bitch about, and if he finds out something we don’t know, he might very well save us from wasting our time trying to get it too. In any case, he hasn’t got the unpleasant suspicion that I’m a problem.”

Mallon gave a single nod and a perfunctory half smile of acknowledgment, but he seemed not to have necessarily agreed. He remained silent as he pulled back onto the residential street and turned in the direction of the highway back to their hotel.

“Well, what do you think?” Lydia asked. “This might be a good place to quit.”

Mallon looked surprised. “Why do you say that?”

“You tried to save a girl. You wanted to know why she wasn’t willing to be saved. Now you know: her boyfriend was killed, she felt depressed, and she never got over it.”

Mallon seemed to be comparing the assertion with some interior standard. “I’m not ready to quit. I don’t think I know enough yet.”

Lydia considered. “You don’t think the sister told us the truth?”

“Well,” said Mallon, “I think what she told us was true. I don’t imagine for a second that she told us everything she knew to be true, and I think she suspects still more that she isn’t sure is true, but may be. All of it together doesn’t seem to be enough.”

“Has it occurred to you that some things can’t be known so completely and in such detail that there are no mysteries left?”

“Sure,” Mallon said. “But I don’t think we’ve reached the end. We’ve just got one person’s reaction, with one point of view.”

Lydia said, “Let’s look at it from another point of view, then: yours. We’ve just listened to her only relative. What did you hear that makes you curious? You tell me what to look at next.”