Chapter 8
They’d been in the air almost two hours, and if the uncomfortable silence between Anne Jeffers and him was going to go on for another three, Mark Blakemoor decided, he’d have a couple of drinks and then try to get some sleep.
He’d done far too much drinking lately, though, especially in the ten months since Patsy had left. Eighteen years and then the marriage had simply been over. All she’d said was that she couldn’t take it anymore, that she couldn’t deal with being a cop’s wife any longer. But what else could he do? He couldn’t change careers—didn’t even want to. On the other hand, Patsy had complained about his drinking, too, and if he wanted to be really honest about it, she was right—he had been drinking too much. Besides, even one drink on an airplane always left him with a hangover. Better to spend the time finding out what, if anything, Richard Kraven had told Anne Jeffers before he’d died.
“Anything you want to talk about?” he asked, shifting his muscular six-foot-two, 210-pound frame a fraction of an inch in a futile effort to make himself more comfortable in the cramped seat.
Anne had been staring out the window at the endless expanse of clouds that lay in an unbroken blanket a few thousand feet below the plane, and at first the detective’s words didn’t register. Then she sighed, rubbed at her stiffening neck and glanced over at him. “About Glen?” she asked, deliberately pretending she couldn’t read Blakemoor like a book. From what she’d gathered about his recent divorce, the man had barely paid any attention to his own wife when he’d been married to her; so why on earth would he now be interested in her husband, whom he didn’t even know? Then she relented: after all, Blakemoor had been willing to give up his seat on this flight, even though it hadn’t come to that. “Or is it Richard Kraven you want to talk about?”
“Either way,” Blakemoor replied. “But I guess I’m not real good with the sympathy thing. Patsy always used to say—” He cut his own words short, reddening slightly. “Oh, the hell with what Patsy used to say, right? So come on, give. What did Kraven say? I’ve got a lot of open cases back home. If you can close even one of them for me, it’d sure help.”
Anne shook her head. “Believe me, Mark, if he’d said anything relevant, I’d tell you. Even if I didn’t use it in a story, I’d still tell you. You’ve put too much effort into this for too many years. But it was the same old thing: he didn’t have anything to do with anything, he was framed, there’s a conspiracy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”
The detective’s eyes narrowed darkly. “You’d think a man’d want to go to his grave with a clean conscience, wouldn’t you? But not Kraven. Coldest son of a bitch I ever saw.” Silence fell between them again as each retreated to his own thoughts. With Blakemoor’s next question, though, Anne knew at once that his mullings hadn’t been terribly different from her own. “What do you think? Any chance at all that we were wrong?”
“Who are you asking?” Anne countered, a thin smile curling the corners of her mouth. “Anne Jeffers, ace journalist, or Anne Jeffers, private citizen?”
“How about we start with the private citizen?”
“He’s guilty,” Anne stated with no hesitation at all. “Guilty, guilty, guilty, as charged. And guilty of all the others he was never charged with, too.”
“Okay,” Blakemoor said. “Now, what about Anne Jeffers, ace reporter? What does she think?”
Anne spread her fingers wide and wiggled them as if she were typing at an invisible keyboard. “Show me a reporter who wouldn’t like to rip the cover off a conspiracy that sent an innocent man to the electric chair. I mean, we’re talking Pulitzer Prize here, Mark.”
The detective eyed her speculatively, trying to gauge how much of what she’d just said was meant seriously and how much was merely intended to rile him. “Does that mean you’re planning to keep chasing this one?” he asked.
Anne opened her mouth to answer, then realized she didn’t know what she was going to do. Three hours earlier, before she’d heard from Rita Alvarez, it would have been an easy call: given what Kraven had said in their last conversation, she’d at least have to give it one more shot. Because if Kraven hadn’t been lying, and she could prove it, there undoubtedly would be a Pulitzer in it for her. Not to mention a huge book contract, probably a movie, and a new job with a salary that would make her current paycheck look like a kid’s allowance. Now, though, everything was different. In just those few minutes she’d talked to Rita, all her priorities had changed. “I don’t know if I’ll chase the story or not,” she finally replied to the detective’s question. “It’s all going to depend on Glen’s situation. It may be that I’ll take a leave of absence.”
An incredulous grin spread over the detective’s face. “You? Give me a break, Anne—when it comes to working a story, you’re no different from me when I have a tough case. The hell with hours, the hell with food, the hell with sleep, and the hell with the family, too.”
Anne’s first reaction to Blakemoor’s words was to mount an immediate and aggressive counterattack: “Maybe that’s why Patsy left you. At least my marriage is still very much intact, thank you.” Blakemoor winced, and Anne immediately regretted her words. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That really wasn’t fair.” As she thought about it, she realized just how unfair it truly was. After all, it wasn’t she who had to hold dinner for Glen every night. Often it was exactly the opposite, or even worse—sometimes during the last few months it was Heather and Kevin waiting for both their parents, or eating alone while both adult Jefferses grabbed a bite in their offices. If she wanted to be completely honest about it, Blakemoor hadn’t been far off the mark at all—she did tend to shut everything else out when she was working on a story. The one that had ended today had occupied nearly all her attention for most of the last five years.
Suddenly she had a chilling thought: If she hadn’t been so consumed with the Kraven case, would she have seen Glen’s heart attack coming? But how could she have? It had simply come out of the blue!
Or had it?
She cast her mind back over the last few days, then the last few weeks and months. How long had it been since she and Glen had simply taken an evening off together, let alone a whole weekend? Usually one or the other—if not both of them—were working. His birthday had gone uncelebrated, as had their anniversary three months ago. If she’d become too engrossed in her work even to celebrate some of the most important landmarks in her life, how could she expect to be aware of her husband’s health?
Should she have seen the heart attack coming? Should she have found signs of it in Glen’s face? Were there stress lines she hadn’t even noticed, or a tiredness she’d ignored? A leaden weight of guilt began to settle over her as more and more questions formed in her mind, questions to which she had no easy answers.
“Hey, Jeffers, come on,” Mark Blakemoor said as if reading her thoughts. “What happened to Glen wasn’t your fault. You haven’t treated him the way I treated Patsy. Jesus, there were times when she didn’t see me for days at a time.”
“And have I been in Seattle the last few days?” Anne asked, her voice edged with self-accusatory sarcasm. “Oh God, Mark, I keep thinking I should have seen it coming, that I should have realized he was working too hard and made him slow down.”
“That would have been the pot calling the kettle black,” Blakemoor remarked. But his face wore a smile.
For the rest of the flight, Mark Blakemoor managed to keep the subject of conversation off both Richard Kraven and Glen Jeffers’s heart attack. The only subject left that came readily to mind was his own divorce, and to his surprise, he found himself telling Anne everything about it. What surprised him most was that by the time the plane landed in Seattle, he’d discovered two things: the divorce had been just as much Patsy’s fault as his own, despite his ex-wife’s insistence that she’d been a wronged woman; and that he could talk to Anne Jeffers about anything that came into his mind. He’d never felt that way about a woman before, and as he followed Anne off the plane at Sea-Tac airport, he wondered what it meant.
He also found himself wondering exactly how strong Anne’s own marriage was. If she should ever be single—
Jerking his own reins up short, Mark Blakemoor tried to banish the thought from his mind. It was already planted, though, and he knew it wasn’t going to go away. So what was he going to do now? Fall in love with another man’s wife?
Swell! Just f*cking swell!