John Lescroart - Guilt

They faced each other in the calm Ojai morning. Blue jays were fighting for territory in the air above them. One of the canyons off to their left echoed with the howl of a coyote.

They went on the assumption that you always made mistakes, which was how they thought they'd catch you.

Dooher had to admit that even he had made a few.

Well, to be honest, he'd made none with Nguyen.

But there had been a couple of small errors with Trang – the cellphone business, how could anybody be expected to know about that? But with Trang they'd only gotten as far as an investigation.

With Sheila, they got him all the way to trial, so by objective standards, he supposed he was slipping. He'd been forced to hurry his plans after Avery had gone down to LA. If he didn't move fast, he ran a risk with Christina. Someone else might have come along and distracted her and he would have been back to where he started. So he'd had to strike when he did.

But the lack of planning had showed.

The knives were one of the problems, though he favored a knife because you had control. You put it where it needed to go and held it there, feeling the life slip away, until you knew you'd done it.

But a knife was too much trouble. Too dirty. He'd had to throw the bayonet off the Golden Gate.

He'd thought he'd solved the problem with the kitchen knife, the gyrations with the blood and the glove and the botched burglary. But that had been close – his cleverness had nearly done him in.

He'd really learned a lot – the trial had been instructive that way. There were phone trails, paper trails, evidence trails, eyewitnesses, and trackers among the police for each of them.

So this time, from the moment he began to move, he wouldn't leave any hint.

Glitsky would know. How could he not know? But there would be nothing he could do.

He wasn't going to leave any messages on answering machines. All Saturday morning, no one answered at Wes and Sam's, and he hung up as soon as he heard the message begin.

After he'd made his decision last night, sleep came more easily. Indecision was the ruin of lesser men. He'd set his body clock for around 9:00 and called the Carreras down in Ojai. If he was going to locate his wife, he would need Irene.

Sam didn't pick up, and Diane Price called Christina back at her motel and asked if there was anything she could do. 'How far apart are the contractions?' she asked.

'Not close. Seven minutes. They warned us about this in Lamaze. They won't admit me until it's two or three minutes. It's going to be a while.'

'Why are you in a motel?' Diane asked.

'That's a long story.'

'Is there anybody with you?'

'No.'

'I could come.'

'Why would you do that?'

'You used to volunteer at the Center here, too, didn't you? Us guys ought to stick together, don't you think?' Diane thought saying anything about the further connection between them at this moment would be counter-productive. She heard the breathing again. When it returned to normal, Diane spoke again. 'I've been through this with two kids of my own, Christina. I could keep you company. We could talk. You need somebody with you. How are you getting to the hospital?'

'I don't know.'

Diane made up her mind. 'I'll be there in ten minutes.'

Christina opened the door to her motel room. The woman was bundled for the chill – heavy woolen coat, enormous leather carry-all, designer ski cap pulled down over dense graying hair. But she smiled warmly, projecting a calm confidence that Christina found comforting. She had beautiful gray-green eyes.

There was also something familiar about her. 'Do I know you? How did you know I was Mark Dooher's wife?'

The smile remained. The eyes seemed to know everything. She didn't move forward, but seemed content to wait out in the cold until this was cleared up, until Christina had accepted it. She might not, after all, want her around after she knew. And that would certainly be understandable. 'Sam said you were smart.' A proffered hand. 'I'm Diane Price. It's nice to meet you at last.'

At 12:45, Wes picked up on the second ring, heard Mark Dooher's voice. 'I'm going to start by apologizing.'

He didn't reply. Dooher continued. 'I was out of line. I shouldn't have come by your house, made cracks about your girlfriend.' He paused. 'Look, Wes, Christina ran out on me. I freaked out. I'm sorry.'

'Okay, you're sorry. Nice talking to you.'

He hung up.

'That was our friend Mark Dooher again,' he told Sam. 'He said he was sorry. I told him I was glad for him.'

The subject made her nervous, but she played along. 'That wasn't what you said. You said it was nice talking to him.'

'It was,' Farrell agreed. 'We had a full and frank discussion of the issues.'

The phone rang again.

'Don't pick it up,' Sam said.

But he already had.

'Wes! Don't hang up. Please. You still there?'

'I'm here. What do you want?'

Sam was telling him to hang up again.

'I need to talk to you.'

'It must be your lucky day. You are talking to me.'

'No. You and me. Privately.'

Farrell's voice had no inflection. 'I'll drive the hordes away from the extensions. We're talking privately right now. We can talk like this or you can hang up. Your call.'

Dooher measured his silence. Finally, he produced a sigh. 'I don't…' Starting again. 'I need your help. Your legal help. I may want to talk to the police.' Another silence to let the ramifications sink in. 'I don't want to say anything specific on the telephone. You can understand that.'

'You want to turn yourself in? Is that what you're saying?'

'I don't believe in telephones much anymore, Wes. You could work something out. I don't want to say anything else over these lines. I need to see you, is why I called. I need your help. I can't live with it anymore.'

The Little Shamrock, the bar where Wes and Sam had met.

The fog obscured nearly everything outside the picture windows; across Lincoln, the cypresses were spectral shadows in the netherworld.

Sam sat across the table from Wes, holding both of his hands in both of hers. Neither had touched their Irish coffees.

That morning they'd bundled up and gone out early for an aerobic workout – a 'power walk' from their duplex to the beach and back. The Bay to Breakers race – 7.2 miles from the Ferry Building to Ocean Beach – was in two weeks, and Sam ran it every year. Wes had no desire to try to die crammed shoulder to shoulder with 98,000 assorted crazed runners, walkers, naked folks, cross-dressers and caterpillar floats, but he didn't mind the exercise leading up to it.

They weren't talking about the race, though.

'Wes, I am begging you, please don't do this.'

'He's going to give himself up, Sam. He wants me to negotiate how it's done.'

'Give himself up for what?'

'I don't know. Trang, maybe.'

'I don't trust him.'

But some part of Wes, evidently, still did. 'I'm surprised it's taken him this long. Christina left and that made him see it.'

'See what? That it's wrong to kill your wife? A lot of people get that concept right away. You'd be surprised.'

'He said he needs to talk, Sam.'

'So do you really believe he's going to admit killing anybody? That he'll go to jail?'

'Maybe living with the guilt is a kind of jail.'

'A motto for the ages, Wes, but then again, maybe it isn't. Maybe that's not him.'

'It's everybody. It catches up with everybody.'

'Wes, listen to me. People do live with guilt. You know this. You've defended criminals your whole life… people don't care about guilt. They care about getting caught.'

'Mark isn't most people. He's got a conscience.'

'No, he doesn't.'

Farrell shook his head, sticking to his guns. 'You don't know him.'