Danielle Steel: Malice

“My God …” the first officer into the room said softly, and then he saw her and took the gun from her as the others walked into the room behind him. The youngest of them thought to wrap her in a blanket, but he had seen the marks on her, the blood smeared everywhere, and the look in her eyes. She seemed crazy. She had been to hell and only halfway back.

Her father was still alive when the ambulance and the paramedics came, but barely. She had severed his spinal cord and the paramedics suspected that the bullet had gone into his lung after that. He was completely paralyzed, and couldn't speak to them. But he didn't even see Grace as he left. His eyes were closed, and they were giving him oxygen. He was barely breathing.

“Is he gonna make it?” the senior policeman asked the paramedics as they put him into the ambulance and turned the siren on in a hurry.

“Hard to say,” they answered, and then in an undertone, “Not likely.” They left the scene then, and the older officer shook his head. He had known John Adams since he was in high school. John had handled his divorce for him. Hell of a guy, and why in God's name had the kid shot him? He'd seen the scene when they'd arrived, and he'd noticed that neither of them was dressed, but that could mean anything. Obviously, it had happened after they went to bed in their own rooms, and John probably didn't sleep in pajamas. Why the girl was naked was another thing. She was obviously unbalanced, and maybe her mom's death had been too much for her. Maybe she blamed her father for the mother's death. Whatever it was, they'd find it out in the investigation.

“How is she?” he asked one of his junior officers. There were a dozen officers on the scene by then. It was the biggest thing that had happened in Watseka since the minister's son had taken LSD and committed suicide ten years before. That had been a tragedy, but this was going to be a scandal. For a man like John Adams to be shot by his own kid, that was a real crime, and a loss for the whole town. No one was going to believe it. “Is she on drugs?” he asked as a photographer took pictures of the bedroom. The gun was already in a plastic bag in the squad car.

“She doesn't look like it,” the young cop said. “Not obviously, at least. She looks kind of out of it, and very scared. She has asthma, and she's having a hard time breathing.”

“I'm sorry to hear it,” the senior officer said sarcastically as he glanced around the neat living room. He had been there only hours before, after the funeral. It was hard to believe why he was back now. Maybe the kid was just plain crazy. “Her father's got a lot worse than asthma.”

“What did they say?” The junior officer looked concerned. “Is he gonna make it?”

“It doesn't look great. Seems like our little shooter here did quite a job on her old man. Spinal cord, maybe a lung, God only knows what else, or why.”

“Think he was doing her?” the younger man asked, intrigued by the situation, but the older man looked outraged.

“John Adams? Are you nuts? Do you know who he is? He's the best lawyer in town. And the most decent guy you'd ever want to meet. You think a guy like him would do his own kid? You're as crazy as she is and not much of a cop if you can come to a conclusion like that.”

“I don't know … it kind of looked like it, they were both naked … and she looks so scared … there's a bruise coming up on her arm … and …” He hesitated, given the senior man's reaction, but he couldn't conceal evidence, no matter who the guy was. Evidence was evidence. “There was come on the sheets, it looked like …” There had been a lot of blood, but there were other spots too. And the young cop had seen them.

“I don't give a damn what it looked like, O'Byrne. There's more than one way for come to get on a man's sheets. The guy's wife just died, maybe he was lonely, maybe he was playing with himself when she came in with the gun, maybe she didn't know what he was doing and it scared her. But there's no way in hell you're gonna come in here and tell me that John Adams was doing it to his kid. Forget it.”

“Sorry, sir.” The other officers were already rolling up the sheets as evidence anyway and putting them in plastic bags too, and another officer was talking to Grace in her bedroom. She was sitting on the bed, still wearing the blanket they had given her when they got there. She had found her inhaler and she was breathing more easily now, but she looked deathly pale, and the officer questioning her wondered how clear she was on what had happened. She seemed so dazed that he almost wondered if she understood him. She said she didn't remember finding the gun, it was suddenly just in her hand, and it went off. She remembered the noise, and then her father bleeding all over her. And that was all she remembered.

“How was he bleeding on you? Where were you?” He had the same impression of the scene as O'Byrne, though it seemed hard to believe of John Adams.

“I don't remember,” she said blankly. She sounded like an automaton, her breath was still coming in little short gasps, and she seemed a little shaky from the medication.

“You don't remember where you were when you shot your father?”

“I don't know.” She looked at him as though she didn't see him sitting there on her bed with her. “In the doorway,” she lied. She knew what she had to do. She owed it to her mother to protect him.

“You shot him from the doorway?” It was impossible, and they were getting nowhere. “Do you think someone else shot your father?” He wondered if that was where she was going with her story. An intruder. But that was even less believable than the story about the doorway.

“No. I shot him. From the doorway.”

The officer knew without a doubt that her father had been shot at close range, maybe no more than an inch or two, by a person right in front of him, obviously his daughter. But where were they?

“Were you in bed with him?” he asked her pointedly, and she didn't answer. She stared straight ahead, as though he weren't even there, and gave a little sigh. “Were you in bed with him?” he asked again, and she hesitated for a long time before she answered.

“I'm not sure. I don't think so.”

“How's it going in here?” the senior officer inquired, as he poked his head in the door. It was three o'clock in the morning by then, and they had done everything they needed to do at the crime scene.

The officer questioning Grace gave a hopeless shrug. It was not going well. She was not making a lot of sense, she was shaking violently, and she was so dazed that at times he really wondered if she even knew what had happened. “We're going to take you in, Grace. You're going to be in custody for a few days. We need to talk to you some more about what happened.” She nodded, and said nothing to him. She just sat there, with bloodstains all over her, in the blanket. “Maybe you'd like to clean up a little bit, and put your clothes on.” He nodded at the officer who'd been talking to her, but Grace didn't move, she just sat there. “We're taking you in, Grace. For questioning,” he explained again, wondering if she really was crazy. John had never mentioned it, but it wasn't the kind of thing one said to clients.

“We're going to hold you for seventy-two hours,pending an investigation of the shooting.” Had it been premeditated? Had she meant to shoot him? Had it been an accident? What was the deal here? He wondered too if she was on drugs, and he wanted her tested.

She didn't ask if they were arresting her. She didn't ask anything. And she didn't get dressed either. She seemed completely disoriented, which was what suggested to the officer in charge more and more clearly that she was crazy. In the end, they called for a female officer to come out and help them, and she dressed Grace like a small child, but not without noticing assorted marks and bruises on her body. She told her to wash the bloodstains off, and Grace was surprisingly obliging. She did whatever she was told, but she 6ffered no information.