John Lescroart - Guilt

Sam nodded. There was nothing to say. Sometimes, she knew, closing that circle could be the toughest pull of a person's life, and it seemed to her that Diane Price was well on her way to doing it.

Diane was going on. 'And by now it seems behind me. I married Don, went back to school and at least got my degree. I've got two great teenagers, and I'm actually working in a lab where my brains count. And I got there – I got all of that – by finally not being a victim anymore, just pulling myself up by the bootstraps and deciding, that was it, deciding I wasn't going to have this cancer in my life. I wasn't going to talk about it, think about it, refer to it. It was the past, over, done.'

'But you're here?'

'I'm here.'

Sam hesitated. 'Did something else happen?'

Diane shook her head. 'Not to me, thank God. But then, suddenly, last week, I was reading the paper and I started shaking at the breakfast table. I couldn' t stop shaking.'

'What was it?'

'The story about this woman who'd been murdered, Sheila Dooher her name was.'

Sam felt the hair begin to stand up on her arms.

'So the name caught my attention, and I looked down the article, and then opened to the inside page and there was the picture of her and her husband at some charity thing last year. Her husband Mark.'

Sam knew what was coming.

'The man who raped me.'

Father Gorman knew why he'd been summoned to the Archbishop's office. Not only had he been absent at the rosary when Sheila's body had been laid out, he'd not attended the wake afterward, then begged off officiating even peripherally at the funeral Mass. He hadn't gone to the gathering at Dooher's home afterwards.

Now they'd kept him waiting nearly twenty-five minutes at the end of the day. Not a good sign. He was more exhausted than he'd ever been in his life. For weeks, he'd slept no more than four hours a night, plagued by nightmares about his own long-gone parents, of all things. And then, finally, he was inside the austere office. James Flaherty stood up behind his desk, but didn't come around it, didn't offer the kiss of peace as he sometimes did. Instead, his lips moved into a perfunctory smile, but his eyes did not change in any way at all, and he sat back down immediately.

'Gene, I'll get right to it,' he said. 'Mark Dooher is one of my most trusted advisers. He is also, not incidentally, a substantial contributor to the Church and to your parish. He's been President of your Holy Name Society, President of your Parish Council, President…'

Gorman didn't need the glowing litany. 'Yes, Your Excellency. I know who he is.'

Not used to being interrupted, the Archbishop's eyes flared briefly. After a long silence, Flaherty continued. 'He has also lost his wife to murder, as you well know. The police have been hounding him on another matter because of some kind of political vendetta. This is not a time to abandon those people who need us most. The man is going through some kind of hell right now, and I found it incredibly un-Christian, not to say callous as a human response, that you didn't see fit to assist at his wife's funeral or visit with us afterward.' He changed the tone of his voice, making it more personal. 'Mark was incredibly hurt by it, Gene. Incredibly.'

'I'm sorry,' Gorman said. 'I…' He didn't know what else he could say, and left the sentence unfinished, hanging in the room.

Flaherty waited for more, but it didn't come. 'You're sorry?'

'Yes.'

'Sorry doesn't seem like quite enough, Gene.'

'I'm sorry about that, too, Your Excellency.'

Flaherty cocked his head. 'What's going on here? You two have a disagreement, a fight?'

'No.'

'Do you want to talk to me about anything else? I checked your most recent reports, and things at the parish seem to be going along smoothly. Am I wrong about that?'

'No, Your Excellency.'

Flaherty tapped the table. 'Let's drop the Excellency. I'm Jim Flaherty. We've known each other a long time. Is there something going on in your parish?'

Gorman knew what he was asking – was he having an affair, was there a scandal brewing? He shifted his burning eyes to the ceiling, to the sides of the room. 'I do feel like I'm under a lot of stress lately. I'm not getting much sleep. I…'

Again, the rogue syllable, and again it hung there.

'What would you like me to do, Gene? Would you like some time off? A short retreat?'

'Maybe so, Jim. Maybe that would help.'

The Archbishop sat still a minute, lips pursed, eyes unwavering. 'All right,' he said at last. 'Let's give that a try.'

Farrell knew he was fouling the air. The Upmann Special tasted delicious, and normally he made it a point not to smoke cigars in small offices, but he didn't much like Craig Ising, and it gave him some pleasure to realize that Ising was going to have to get his suit cleaned to get the smell out. Farrell thought it was a fair trade – he felt dirty near him, but he was a client and your clients were not always people you admired.

'But I didn't do anything wrong. This isn't even a crime in Nevada!'

Farrell coughed, then blew a vapor trail into the air above them. 'We've been through that, Craig. You should've been in Nevada when you committed it.'

Thirty-six years old, physically fit, nicely tanned, Ising had told Farrell all about the suit that he would soon have to clean. It had set him back $450 in Hong Kong. A silk blend that supposedly felt even better than it looked. If you could get it in America, it would go for more than a grand.

Farrell had spent most of the day in this tiny conference room in Ising's plush Embardacero office, the two men discussing a plea so Ising wouldn't have to go to jail. That was the hope, anyway. And Farrell was ready to go home.

Ising's position, early on in the day, was that he was a businessman and all he'd done was take advantage of an investment opportunity. He'd been making some pretty serious money at this particular endeavor for the past couple of years. The investment was straightforward enough – Ising had been buying the insurance policies of people infected with AIDS, in effect becoming their beneficiary when they died.

In Ising's views, everyone benefited by this arrangement. The AIDS patients sold their discounted policies for cash which they needed for their medical bills – normally sixty percent of the value of the policy – and their policies were then sold by middlemen to investors like Ising, who paid between $6,000 and $200,000 for the policies, based on the patient's life expectancy.

Ising had gotten lucky with the first couple – the patients had died almost immediately and he'd cleared nearly half a million dollars in less than a year. Unfortunately for him, the State of California regulated this particular investment (by outlawing it) and Ising was looking at two to five years in state prison and a six-figure fine.

'This doesn't bother you at all, does it, Craig?'

'What bothers me is they're trying to take me down for it. That's what bothers me. Other guys have done a lot worse.'

This was inarguable, so Farrell didn't push it. Instead, he got down to tacks. 'You're lucky, you know. The DA's taking heat for the court's dragging along on violent crimes, so he gets the idea he wants to clear some massive backlog on these white-collar cases, get 'em processed out without taking up court time. You fall in the crack. Otherwise, you'd be looking at hard time. This is actually a sweet offer.'

Ising rolled his eyes. 'It's so sweet, why don't you put up the money?' The deal was a fine of half a million dollars earmarked for AIDS research and two hundred hours of community service for Ising. 'And the time. Where am I supposed to get two hundred hours?'

Farrell shook his head. Two hundred hours is five weeks full-time, Craig. You get the minimum prison time and it's two years. Five weeks. Two years. Think about it.' He sucked on his cigar, keeping it lit. The air in the room was getting as opaque as fog. 'But hey, it's your decision.'