“You didn’t have to get up,” Tracy whispered to Sherlock, the more chivalrous of the two dogs. Sherlock gave her an inquisitive look. “Yeah, I know what you want.” She opened a cabinet and fetched him a dog biscuit. He didn’t immediately take it, looking up at her with mournful eyes, as if he could sense her pain. “It’s okay,” she said. “Go ahead.” Gently, he mouthed the biscuit. She kissed his head. “Don’t tell your brother.”
She stepped lightly into the bedroom and undressed in the dark, slipping on a nightshirt and sliding beneath the comforter. She nuzzled into the pocket of warmth created by Dan’s smoldering body.
“Hey,” Dan said, his voice groggy with sleep. He wrapped his arms around her. “You’re late. I tried to wait up.”
She could still smell mint toothpaste on his breath. In the dark, Rex gave a high-pitched yawn, as if to tell them both to keep quiet. Roger jumped onto the bed, purring.
“Sorry to wake you,” she said. He’d been busy at his law office in downtown Redmond, his reputation and caseload having followed him from Cedar Grove. With Tracy working the night shift, they didn’t see each other much in daylight. “We got another homicide.”
“I figured as much. Bad?”
She thought again of the body beneath the white sheet. Just a boy. A child. “Hit and run,” she said. “Twelve-year-old boy.”
He kissed the top of her head and gently caressed her hair. “You okay?”
In all the years that she’d gone home to an empty apartment, she’d always told herself she was okay, even when she hadn’t been. She didn’t have much choice. There wasn’t anyone to comfort her, and so she’d never learned how to be comforted. She was trying.
“Not great,” she said.
“I’m sorry.” He squeezed her tight. She felt his breath on her hair and the gentle rise and fall of his chest. “You want to talk about it?”
She smiled. She’d be talking about it for many days. She’d be thinking about it for years. But tonight, Dan was tired. She was too. “Go to sleep.”
“What time is your doctor’s appointment tomorrow?”
She’d forgotten about Dr. Kramer at the fertility clinic. “Two.”
“I can rearrange things and meet you there.”
“It’s just to get the test results,” she said. “We can make a decision about what to do after we know.”
Dan adopted a staccato, military cadence. “Well, for my part, I continue to remain fully available for the task at hand. And let me assure you that neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night shall keep me from my appointed task.”
“We’re making a baby,” she whispered. “Not delivering the mail.”
Dan had no worries. He’d already been tested, after having his vasectomy from his first marriage reversed. He’d walked into their Redmond home loudly proclaiming that he was “locked and loaded and shooting live ammo!”
In other words, whatever their problem, it wasn’t him. So while a part of Tracy would have liked having Dan go to the doctor with her, another part didn’t want him present, didn’t want him to hear what she already suspected to be the test results. The problem, whatever it might be, was her.
Dan released her and rolled onto his side. Within less than a minute, she could hear his peaceful breathing. She thought again of Shaniqua Miller, about the way she had crumbled in the street, her son’s death consuming her. She thought too of Del’s sister, Maggie, and how she must have felt when she’d walked into her daughter’s bedroom and found her child dead. She thought of her own mother’s complete and inconsolable agony, like a deep cut that would never heal.
It made her think again of her desire to have a child, and she wondered if, maybe, not getting pregnant was a blessing, instead of a curse.
CHAPTER 4
Early Tuesday morning, before the wheels of justice had started to spit out civil decisions and criminal punishments, Delmo Castigliano walked the hallways of the King County Courthouse. The well-lit marble floors still emitted the faint odor of lemon from the janitor’s mop, but they did not yet teem with lawyers, courthouse personnel, or the citizens who had business within the courtrooms.
Del found courthouses fascinating representations of a city and its population. Within its rooms people recited wedding vows, wills were probated after lives lived, and titles changed hands on land and on buildings. Fortunes were made and lost in civil suits. Lives were condemned in capital murder cases. Families were irrevocably altered. The building held so much joy and so much sorrow.
And now Del had business in it.
He’d lost his niece. His sister had lost her child. No arguments could be made or appeals filed to alter that fact. Man could not change what had occurred. Allie was not coming back.
But he could bring those responsible to justice. Yes, he would.
He’d called in a favor, unbeknownst to his captain, Johnny Nolasco, who had reluctantly given Faz the green light to find the dealer who’d sold Del’s niece the drugs. Del had agreed to take a backseat in that investigation, but he would not take a backseat when it came to finding closure for his sister. That was family business. That was Del’s business.
He stepped from the hallway into the King County prosecutor’s office and advised the receptionist he had an appointment to see Rick Cerrabone.
“He’s in trial,” the receptionist said.
“He’s expecting me.”
Moments after a phone call, Cerrabone appeared in an interior doorway and motioned for Del to follow him. Faz had once pointed out that the senior King County prosecutor, with dark bags beneath his eyes and a hound dog’s jowls, was a dead ringer for Joe Torre, the former Yankees manager. The description had become fixed in Del’s head.
Del followed Cerrabone down a narrow hall into his cramped office. Every inch of space on his desk and floor was occupied by binders and stacks of paper. Cerrabone was Prosecuting Attorney Kevin Dunleavy’s right-hand man and handled most of the first-degree murder cases, including the death penalty cases, and he was in the grips of another one.
“Sorry about the mess. We’re in the middle of the Westerberg trial.” Cerrabone closed the door, making the office feel even smaller. Del detected coffee and saw a mug on Cerrabone’s desk.
“I heard. I hope this isn’t an inconvenience,” Del said.
Cerrabone waved away the comment. “The judge gave us the morning off; one of the jurors called in to say her nanny was running late.” He sat in an ergonomic chair behind his desk—his back gimpy. Del sat in one of two cushioned chairs. The only indication Cerrabone had a personal life was a five-by-eight framed picture of his wife, also a prosecutor, though she used her maiden name. When you sent murderers to prison, you guarded your privacy. The prints on the wall were standard black-and-gray photographs of Seattle throughout the decades.
“I’m sorry about your niece, Del.”
“Thanks,” Del said, for what seemed the thousandth time. “Thanks for coming to the service.”
“You look tired. You getting any sleep?”
“We had a hit-and-run fatality last night. A twelve-year-old boy.”
“I heard,” Cerrabone said. “It may end up on my desk.”
The comment caught Del by surprise. Cerrabone usually only handled the MDOP cases, an acronym for the Most Dangerous Offender Program. “Why?”