Mariah Stewart - Acts of Mercy

She gestured for them to take seats on the sofa as she sat on a dark blue wing chair that looked as if it had survived several of those fights she’d mentioned.

“How many children do you have?” Sam asked, even though he knew there were four Walker offspring.

“Three boys and a girl. The youngest is eight. Ryan.” She turned to the detective and added, “He was the one who answered the door the day you came to…”

“I remember.”

“May I offer you anything…” she said. “Coffee?”

“Nothing, no thank you,” Sam replied. “I just wanted to stop in to meet you while I’m here in Lincoln.”

“Will you be going to Pilgrim’s Place?”

“We just came from there,” he told her.

“Ross and I used to look forward to our Tuesday nights there. Now I can’t even drive into that part of town without getting an anxiety attack.” Lynne Walker shook her head from side to side. “I don’t understand it. I will never understand it. My husband was a good man. A great father, a wonderful husband. How someone could hate him enough to do this terrible thing…”

“I am very sorry for your loss, Mrs. Walker.” Sam felt like a hypocrite uttering those clichéd words. After Carly’s death, he’d heard that same phrase repeated over and over until he thought he’d punch the next person who uttered it, and now here he was, uttering those same words to someone else.

“Do you know what it’s like to have someone you love murdered?” Lynne Walker’s question took him completely offguard, and for a moment, he wasn’t sure he’d heard her correctly, until she repeated it. That she was looking directly at Sam made it clear she was addressing him.

“Ahhh, actually, yes. Yes, I do, Mrs. Walker.” He felt his skin flush red, and his throat began to close. He cleared it, then nodded slowly.

“May I ask…?” She appeared as flustered at his response as he’d felt at the question. It was obvious she’d anticipated a “No.”

“My wife.” Sam could feel Chris Coutinho’s eyes on him but couldn’t bring himself to turn to look at the detective. Talking about himself had always made Sam feel vulnerable. Talking about Carly made him want to walk away.

“I’m so sorry.” Lynne Walker reached out to him and squeezed his arm. “Do you have children?”

“No.”

“How long has it been?”

Days. Hours. A lifetime. How do you measure the time between the last time you said good-bye and now?

“Three years.” Three years, two months and four days .

“Ross has been gone almost half as long,” she murmured. “Did they ever find your wife’s killer?”

“Yes.” He sat more stiffly than he’d like, but didn’t seem able to relax. In the past, Sam had been spared direct dealings with the grieving families. He had rarely had to deal with the heartache, and was finding he wasn’t very comfortable with this aspect of his new job. He had yet to become comfortable with his own heartache. “He’s in prison appealing his death sentence.”

“Then you understand completely,” she said softly. “What it’s like…”

“I do, yes.” Sam tried to cut her off, afraid she’d keep talking about it. He didn’t want to talk about his own loss. Right now, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to talk about hers, but he had a job to do.

“I think it’s even harder on the children. They really have no conception of good and evil, of life and death.” She paused, as if reflecting. “I suppose that’s no longer true. They understand now how quickly things can change.”

“It’s a tough lesson for anyone to learn,” Sam told her.

“Indeed it is.” Lynne Walker cleared her throat. “If I could think of anything that could help you, believe me, I’d do it. I lay awake at night, trying to think back on anyone who Ross might have had words with, or anyone who might have a reason to dislike him, but I swear, I can’t think of a soul. He wasn’t confrontational and he disliked conflict. Went out of his way to compromise and to avoid hurting anyone else’s feelings. So I can’t think of anyone.”

Her eyes began to fill. “I’ve thought back to every single person I remember seeing at the mission, going as far back as the first week we were there. I can’t think of one single instance where there was any kind of adversarial conversation that involved my husband, or one time when he had something negative to say about anyone.” She looked at Sam and shrugged. “People liked Ross. They gravitated to him. I can’t think of one single reason why someone would want to kill him.”

“Sometimes there is no reason,” Sam said softly.

Ross Walker’s widow excused herself and left the room, returning with a tissue she used to blot under her eyes.

“I’m so sorry that you made the trip all the way out here and I haven’t been able to tell you anything at all.”

“Mrs. Walker, I didn’t come here to question you,” Sam told her. “I came to meet you. As a Mercy Street client, I just wanted you to know that we’re going to do whatever we can. There are no guarantees…”

“Oh, I know that.” She waved a hand impatiently. “I don’t expect a miracle. But I saw Robert Magellan on TV and he was talking about how he was putting together this crack team of investigators and how it wouldn’t cost anything if they picked your case, and I figured, what do I have to lose? I appreciate that someone there thought our case was worth looking into.” She turned to Coutinho. “Chris, I know how hard you worked on this case. You’ve become almost like a member of the family. I need to know that you understand that my submitting Ross’s case to Mercy Street didn’t mean that I thought you didn’t do your job.”

“I understand completely, Mrs. Walker,” the detective replied. “I’m really fine with your decision. I’d love to see the case solved, you know that. If Sam can do that, I’ll be the first on the phone to congratulate him.”

“Actually, Detective Coutinho hasn’t completely abandoned the case,” Sam interjected. “He is working with us to track down a few potential witnesses.”

Lynne Walker smiled broadly. “Thank you, both of you. For the first time since this nightmare began, I feel hopeful that his killer might be found.”

When Sam opened his mouth to remind her not to get her hopes up, she turned to him and said, “I know. I know it may never happen. But I feel that with all the attention being paid to his case, our odds are just that much better now.”

On the way back to Coutinho’s office where Sam would pick up his car, the detective asked, “Was that true? What you said back there about your wife?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn, I’m sorry, man.”

“Thanks.” Sam stared out the window. After several miles had passed in silence, he said, “The guy who murdered Carly did it to prove to me that he could. No other reason. Just to prove that he could take her from me.”

“Some old boyfriend or something?”

Sam shook his head. “A serial killer I was helping to track. He’d killed seven women, all the same way. I was in West Virginia at the funeral for number six when he came into my home in the middle of the night. By the time I got home, she’d been dead for over twenty-four hours.”

“Jesus, that’s rough.” The detective shook his head as if shaking off a curse. “You said they caught the guy.”

“Don Holland. He swears he didn’t do it.” Sam snorted. “He kills seven other women in exactly the same manner-admits to those, by the way-but swears he did not touch my wife. His fingerprints were all over my house, and he actually admitted he was there. But he swears that Carly wasn’t there and that he never touched her.”