John Lescroart - Guilt

Midnight.

Sam Duncan sat up abruptly, terrifying Quayle, who'd been asleep in bed with her. The dog yipped twice, then whimpered, and she reached out a hand to calm him, bringing him over the blankets on to her lap.

Petting the dog absently, she swung her legs over the side of the bed. She hated it when she couldn't sleep, and she' d made a resolution that she wasn't going to drink even a drop of anything to make her nod off. The last time she'd had a drink was St Patrick's Day, and look where that had gotten her.

To right here.

The couple who lived in the unit above her – Janet and Wayne – were silent now, though from the sound of it, they'd had a hell of a good night. Actually, it had been like one of those scenes in the movies where the couple next door let out all the stops and just completely went for it. Perhaps Janet and Wayne didn't realize that Sam had come home. Maybe they didn't think sound carried that well through the old building. Regardless, they put on some show – pretty much the complete range of the audio spectrum – vocals, screams, thuds, creaking springs, sighs and moans, you name it. In the movies, it was often pretty funny.

For Sam, tonight, it wasn't. It was damn near tragic, she thought.

But she wasn't going to panic. She was a mature woman and if fate had not supplied her with a mate after all this time, she had dealt with it, made a successful life for herself. The men had come and gone, a few steadies, a fiance once for a couple of weeks, but for the past four or five years, she'd simply decided to stop pursuing it, stop worrying about it, concentrate on her career and let whatever was going to happen in her love-life simply happen. The problem was that nothing significant had happened.

Not until Wes Farrell.

She hadn't been with him more than two hours, but in that time – stupidly, without any reason or explanation – she'd felt more alive, simply better, than she could remember. There was just a whole different quality to the way they'd related – complete ease, immediate rapport, sexual attraction, attitude, humor. Of course, she'd been half in the bag. But the half that hadn't been thought it remembered pretty well.

And then he'd turned out to be…

Well, what, really? A guy who did a job she didn't approve of. Didn't it come down to just that? What was so bad about him? It wasn't like he was a mass murderer, a professional wrestler, a car salesman. And the violence of her reaction to what he did – though she hated with all her heart to admit it – might have had just a tad of a tiny bit to do with alcohol.

So she did the wise thing first – went completely on the wagon. Thought about the whole issue soberly and while sober. She was thirty-five. She hadn't been lonely before, but now, damn it, she was. Well, no, not exactly that. What she wanted was another fix of him.

Christina had said to look him up in the book, and after two days of struggling with herself, she had. There was a work number, on Columbus, no home number listed. And the number was there right now on the notepad on her bed-table under the lamp.

'Shit,' she said, flicking on the light.

What the hell, she was thinking. It's midnight. He's at home and I can just talk to the machine at his office, apologize for being such – no, not apologize, don't start on that note. I'd just like to talk with him. And she'd leave her number.

But wait. He knew where she lived, and if it had been important to him, he could have come by, rung the bell…

Except that, no, she'd thrown him out. He'd probably think, with some justification, that she was a nutcase. Even if he was tempted to come back, he'd think twice, maybe ten times – and decide he'd better not. She couldn't blame him. Also, if she was really, as he'd said, the first woman since his marriage, he'd be skittish. And again, she couldn't blame him.

It was going to have to be her.

I've got to find out if his marriage is over, she thought. That's got to come first. I'm not getting involved with a married man. I don't know him at all. This is dumb.

But she was punching the numbers and the phone had started ringing.

'Hello.'

'Oh, I'm sorry. I must have the wrong number.'

She was about to hang up. She wasn't prepared to really talk with anybody, certainly not with him. She was only going to leave a message. 'Sam? Sam, is that you?' It stunned her. He recognized her voice?

She clenched the phone. She should just slam it down. Wrong number. Wrong time. Wrong.

'Sam?' he repeated. 'Is that you?'

She sighed with frustration. 'I wanted to apologize. No! Not apologize, explain. I thought I'd get your machine.'

'You want, I'll turn it on, promise not to listen till tomorrow morning.'

'That'd help. Are you still working, I mean at work?'

'If you ask questions, my machine won't be able to answer. It'll get all confusing.'

'You're right.'

'Also, I think you should know that I got my client – Levon Copes? – I got him off today. If that's what you were calling about.'

'You got him off?'

'They dropped the charges. The DA decided the evidence wasn't going to stick. He's out of jail.'

She took a breath. 'Well, that's not exactly what I called about. Maybe a little, but not mostly.' Another pause. 'Listen, if I promise not to get psycho on you, would you like to meet me sometime for some coffee or something?'

'Sure. I mean okay. I guess. Why don't you tell me when?'

'Would, like, about now be all right?'

Sergeant Paul Thieu, an investigator in Missing Persons who doubled from time to time as a translator, rode in the passenger seat of Glitsky's unmarked green Plymouth, chattering away as though he was on his way to a wedding or a party, instead of a murder scene. Next to him, Glitsky kept his eyes on the road – it was dusk and the fog clung around the car like wool.

Actually, Glitsky was thinking that it wasn't so bad hearing a voice with some animation in it. There wasn't much cheeriness in the rest of his life, especially around his house, where now they had a nurse coming in every day.

Flo wasn't going to spend her last days in any hospital – they'd discussed it and the family was going to be around her. Not that she was there yet, to her last days, but they were coming. Also, Nat – Glitsky's father – was spending a lot of nights on the couch in the front room, taking up the slack with the boys, trying to keep things in some perspective, as if there could be any.

But Glitsky had hjs job. Going to it was a kind of a relief. And Thieu, chatter or not, represented the beginning of what might turn out to be a more than normally interesting case.

By far the majority of homicides in the city were what law-enforcement personnel referred to as NHI – 'no humans involved' – cases. One person from the lowest stratum of intelligent life would kill another, or several others, for no apparent reason, or one so lame that it beggared belief.

Last week, Glitsky had arrested a twenty-three year-old woman whose IQ soared into the double digits and who'd killed her boyfriend in a dispute over what television show they were going to watch. After she'd shot him, she sat herself down and watched all of Roseanne before thinking, 'Well, hey, maybe I'd better see if I can wake old Billy up now.' Which, with a bullet in his heart, proved an elusive undertaking.

But occasionally someone with a more or less normal life got killed for a real reason; the deadly sins did continue to reap their grim rewards. These were the cases Homicide cops lived for. Glitsky and Thieu were driving to what looked like one of them now – an attorney named Victor Trang, who'd been stabbed in the chest.