“You’re probably right. Will your wife be in later?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure it’s fair to ask of her what she can’t give.” A tear traced its way down his handsome face, but he made no move to brush it away, seemed unembarrassed. “Whoever did this to him…”
“I’m going to find out,” Jeremiah said, meaning it.
“Yes. I believe you will. Thank you for being his friend.”
Jeremiah stared at the battered, broken body in the hospital bed and had to fight back a tear or two of his own. No matter how many times he saw young men shot, knifed, beaten, drugged, and drunk, he had this same twisting pain in his stomach, this same overwhelming sense of loss and waste. When he didn’t, he promised himself he’d quit. Control and objectivity were one thing. A loss of compassion was something else entirely.
“That’s a two-way street, Mr. Tiernay. Your son’s been a friend to me as well.”
15
They picked up sandwiches in a little shop that had Griffen’s stamp of approval and ate them on the deck above Leonardo’s lush backyard. Roasted vegetables on flatbread for Mollie, plain old roast beef for Jeremiah. She’d filched a bottle of pinot noir from her godfather’s wine closet, knowing he would not only have approved but insisted, and poured two glasses. Jeremiah held his in one hand, his fingers so rigid she thought he might shatter the glass. She understood. He wasn’t irritated or unnerved or anything that she might have been in a similar position.
It wasn’t his mood, she realized, fascinated, but his mind at work.
Jeremiah Tabak was doing what Jeremiah Tabak did, which was sort his way through facts, bits and pieces of information, scenes, comments, vignettes, anything and everything that came his way, then sit back and process them into a coherent whole.
Mollie suspected that the coherent whole wasn’t materializing. He could speculate, perhaps, and come up with a variety of possible wholes, but he would avoid getting too far ahead of his precious facts.
She also suspected—no, she thought, she knew—that he wasn’t really quite out on the deck with her. He couldn’t smell the greenery and flowers in the warm evening air, couldn’t hear the cry of the seagulls, the hum of traffic, the not-too-distant wash of the tide. He was in his story that he would never write. An occasional sip of wine was all that told her he hadn’t gone catatonic.
But this altered state, of course, was familiar to her. She’d grown up with people who would stare off into space—not over crime and corruption, perhaps, but over music. A difficult phrase, an elusive cadenza, a new interpretation of a favorite sonata. These were the things that would occupy her parents and sister, her godfather, and take them mentally out of the room. She’d had these experiences herself, particularly when she was playing flute, but also, although less often, when she was brainstorming on behalf of a client. Definitely, however, her mind didn’t have the same tendency to wander as her parents’ did.
And Jeremiah would disagree that his mind was wandering at all. He would say he was concentrating. Deliberately focusing. And maybe he was, but she didn’t believe it was strictly a matter of control or choice on his part. He was a reporter, she realized now, because of the way his mind worked, the way he took in the world around him, not the other way around.
She pictured Croc’s battered face, his skinny, beaten body, his father in tears at his bedside. Gut-wrenching. Appalling. Who would do that to a defenseless human being? And especially miss a diamond-and-ruby necklace in his back pocket in the process? She didn’t buy the theory that the attacker had been interrupted before he could find it, or before he could get Croc’s body to wash out to sea. He’d wanted Croc found with the necklace on him, if not necessarily found alive.
Which, she acknowledged and accepted, was getting herself way ahead of the facts.
Jeremiah shifted, his jaw set hard, and with an abruptness that made her jump, he polished off the rest of his wine in a gulp. Then the tension went out of his body, and he rolled up out of his chair and stalked into the kitchen. She heard him rinse his glass in the sink and set it on the drainboard.
He was back here in Leonardo’s guest quarters with her, tuned in to his surroundings.
Mollie followed him inside, her own wine half drunk. She slid onto a stool at the breakfast bar, the counter between them as he stood staring out the window. The crickets had started. She knew he would stay tonight. He’d arranged for the elderly men in his building to take care of his animals, and he’d need to stay close to Croc. He’d left her number with the police. But he’d said nothing about staying, and given his preoccupation, she hadn’t brought it up.
He pulled his gaze from the window and turned to her, his eyes a swirl of color, none of the grays and golds and blues distinct. “Your deep, dark secret’s out, sweet pea.”