Jeffery Deaver - A Maiden's Grave

And so it was Melanie Charrol who stepped forward and drove the long knife deep between Handy's ribs, all the way to the bloody handle. The thin man choked, coughed blood, and fell backwards, shivering. Slowly she drew the knife out.

Potter took the weapon from her, wiped the handle on his sports coat, dropped it on the ground. He stood back, watching Melanie crouch beside Handy, who was trembling as the last of life fled his wiry body. She crouched over him, her head down, her eyes on him. In the dimness of the night Potter couldn't see her expression clearly though he detected what he believed was a faint smile on her face, one of curiosity.

And he sensed something else. In her posture, in the tilt of her head near his, it seemed as if she were inhaling the man's pain like spiced incense wafting through her house.

Lou Handy's mouth moved. A wet sound rose, a rattle, but so soft that Arthur Potter was nearly as deaf to it as Melanie would be. When the man quivered violently once, then again, and was finally still, Potter helped her to her feet.

His arm around her shoulders, they walked through the night while around them saplings and sedge and buffalo grass whipped from side to side in the sinewy wind. Fifty yards up the road they came to the government car Melanie had commandeered for the drive here from Hebron.

She turned to him, zipping up her battered brown leather jacket.

He gripped her shoulders, felt the wind slap her hair against his hand. A dozen things he might have said to her came to mind. He wanted to ask if she was all right, ask what she was feeling, tell her what he intended to explain to the troopers, tell her how many times he thought about her during the barricade.

But he said nothing. The moon had slipped behind a lesion of black cloud and the field was very dark; she couldn't, he told himself, see his lips anyway. Potter suddenly pulled her to him and kissed her on the mouth, quickly, ready to step away at the least hesitation. But he felt none and held her tightly to him, dropping his face to the cool, fragrant skin of her neck. They remained in this embrace for a long moment. When he stepped back the moon was out once again and there was pale white light on both their faces. But still he remained silent and merely guided her into the driver's seat of the car.

Melanie started the engine and, glancing back, she lifted her hands off the wheel and gestured to him in sign language.

Why would she do that? he wondered. What could she be saying?

Before he could tell her to wait, to write out the words, she put the car in gear and drove to the dirt road, rocking slowly over the uneven field. The car made an abrupt turn and disappeared behind a row of trees. The brake lights flashed once and then she was gone.

He trudged back to the bloody Nissan. Here, he smudged all the fingerprints but his own and then rearranged the bloody knife, the guns, and the two bodies until the crime scene told a credible, if dishonest, story.

"But what exactly is a lie, Charlie? The truth's a pretty slippery thing. Are any words ever one hundred percent honest?"

He was surveying his handiwork when, suddenly, it occurred to him what Melanie had said a few moments before. The words were among the few in his own paltry vocabulary of sign language, words he in fact had signed to her earlier in the evening. "I want to see you again." Was this right? He lifted his hands and repeated the sentence to himself. Awkwardly at first, then smooth as a pro. Yes, he believed that was it.

Arthur Potter saw a car approaching in the distance. Turning his collar against the relentless stream of wind, he sat down on the rocky ground to wait.