by Gayle Wilson
“I just wish you’d told me,” she said again, regret tightening her throat, regret for things she’d said and done that she certainly couldn’t share with Kahler.
“I only told you now because you seemed convinced he’d sent the package, that the way he lives makes him more suspect. I wanted you to understand that there are some valid reasons for Barrington’s seclusion. Maybe the headaches aren’t reason enough for everything, but they help to explain the way he lives.”
She nodded.
“What’s the fascination, August?” he asked. His voice had changed. No longer a clinical assessment, but deeper, more intimate. Personal.
“I don’t even understand it myself. It’s just there. It’s been there from the beginning.”
“I guess all that money would be appealing. I can’t speak for Barrington’s supposed sex appeal,” he said. “I never saw any of that.” His lips had moved into a slight smile, but there was no matching amusement in his voice. “You know he may no longer even look the way he once did.”
She almost denied that Barrington had changed—physically changed. She almost revealed that she’d seen him much more clearly since that first night when she’d acted on impulse and entered his darkened house.
“I know,” she said. “For some reason, he just…interests me. Maybe it’s seeing the effect Jack had on the one man who survived, and it’s not the money, Kahler, no matter what you think. I can’t explain what I feel. I know it’s unprofessional. More than that, it’s a little…weird,” she admitted. “I know all that. I almost asked Lew to take me off the story because of it, but…I just can’t seem to leave it alone.”
“I think you ought to back off. For a lot of reasons. Let the series die a natural death. Maybe that’s what the package this morning was intended to do—to tell you to back off.”
“Is that what you really think, Kahler? Is that a professional assessment?”
Again the hazel gaze held hers. “Personal,” he said. “I don’t want you hurt, Kate.”
She smiled at him. “Trust me, I don’t want to be hurt. That crap this morning made me very aware of how easy it is to get someone if you really want to. All you need is an address. I found out I’m not nearly as brave as I thought I was.”
“Good,” Kahler said, his tone ordinary again. “A little less brave is a lot safer. Get a dead bolt, August, and think about the other—about dropping the series.”
“I will,” she promised.
He stepped through the door, pulling it closed behind him. The apartment seemed suddenly very empty. She walked back into the living room where they’d been sitting. She stopped before the table beside the couch. She hesitated, trying to resist, but finally she opened the drawer and looked down at the folder containing the pictures of Thorne Barrington.
She put her hand down on top of the file, but she didn’t take it out. Instead she stood, touching it, the tips of her fingers whitened against the manila surface, remembering the cruelly exposing slashes of sunlight and the stillness of the man who had never turned to face the windows she’d uncovered.
“YOU OKAY?” Lew asked the next day. He pitched his question low enough that their conversation would remain private.
She glanced up from the words on her screen. “Better than yesterday. Thanks for sending Kahler. Talking to him helped.”
“I don’t think I can accept responsibility for that,” Lew said, smiling at her. “He seemed worried about you. I think he just wanted to see for himself you were all right. He didn’t seem to think your package had anything to do with Jack.”
“I know. He promised to let me know what the lab finds.”
“Kahler also thought it might be a good idea if you back off the series. You want me to get someone else to do the feature on the guy in Tucson, or you want to just let it stand with the articles you’ve done? It’s your story, Kate. It has been from the beginning, so it’s your decision.”
“You think Kahler’s right? About the package not being from Jack?”
“He gathered up the remains, and he’s seen all the others.”
“He told me everything was different. The mechanics. Everything. But the return address was the same on this one and the Tucson bomb, and that information hadn’t been released. How could someone know about that?”
Lew shrugged. “There are always leaks. Any information gets out, if enough people know about it. Maybe not to the general public, but out just the same. The fact that Barrington’s address was on the Tucson bomb would be interesting to anyone with Atlanta connections.”
“I thought he’d sent it,” Kate said.
“I guess that’s natural, considering that you’ve been working on the bombings, but Kahler said—”
“Not Jack,” she corrected. “Barrington. I thought Barrington had sent it.”
“Judge Barrington?” Lew said, the disbelief in his voice reminding Kate of Barrington’s reputation.
“I know. Kahler thought it was ridiculous, too. It’s just that we have some…background.” She glanced up in time to catch the surprise in Lew’s brown eyes.
“I didn’t know you knew Barrington,” he said.
“We’ve met,” she hedged. It was the truth, but it didn’t explain why those meetings would make her suspect him. She wished that she hadn’t started this. “I just keep coming back to Thorne Barrington as the sender, despite what everyone else seems to believe about him.”
“Why do you think Barrington would do something like that?”
“We had a run-in. I tried to talk to him about the bombings. I’ve always thought he was the key to understanding Jack’s motives. There’s got to be some significance to the fact that he was the first victim. But the judge made it pretty clear he didn’t want to talk.”
“Knowing you, I’d bet you didn’t accept his refusal.”
“Eventually. I didn’t have a choice. But now I wonder if trying to talk to him made him angry enough that—”
“It wasn’t Barrington,” Lew interrupted with conviction. “There’s no way someone like Thorne Barrington is going to pull a stunt like that. It’s no secret he hates the press, and with reason, but still, I can’t see him putting together the package you got yesterday. It’s totally out of character.”
“Maybe your character changes when someone tries to blow you up,” Kate suggested. She realized suddenly that Lew would be the perfect person to verify what Kahler had told her. “Lew, you’ve lived here all your life. You move in some of the same circles as the judge, know the same people. What did you hear about Barrington’s injuries?”
“Information for the series?” Lew asked.
“Not really. I just need to know. Kahler told me there was some trauma to his head. Brain damage can—change people. Personality changes. One of Kahler’s sources mentioned the judge suffers from migraines, possibly psychogenic in nature.”
“Psychogenic?” Lew questioned.
“I looked it up. It means having an emotional cause.”
“Like having a bomb go off in your hands, maybe?” Lew asked, smiling. “That kind of emotional cause?”
Kate knew he was right. Even if the migraines were emotional in origin, that didn’t mean Barrington had turned into the kind of crazy Kahler had talked about.
“I’ll ask around,” Lew surprised her by saying. “I know a few people who were close to Barrington at the time. They may not talk to me, but I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Thanks,” Kate said.
“What about the series?”
“I’m not ready to give it up. Not yet. If it’s possible, I’d really like to go to Tucson. I want to talk to Draper’s widow. Personally, one-on-one. There’s a connection between all these people, Lew. I know it in my gut. We just haven’t found it yet. Somehow Draper and the others, Thornedyke Barrington included, are all connected. I don’t care what the cops think, Jack’s not working at random. And I think it’s significant that the interval between victims has shortened. For some reason,
suddenly Jack’s in a hurry. Maybe we’re closer than we think. Maybe the Feds have something. Or maybe he just wants it to be over. Maybe he wants to finish it.”
“And nobody knows how many more people are on his list.”
“We know there’s at least one more name on that list,” Kate said. Lew shook his head, puzzled by her comment. “One more name,” she repeated. “The name at the top. The name he started with three years ago. Thornedyke Barrington.”
HE OPENED HIS EYES slowly in the dimness of the massive bedroom. Even the slight movement of his lids hurt. Not the ice-pick-in-the-brain agony of the headaches, but the dull soreness in every muscle that they always left behind. He knew from experience that the effort of turning his head on the pillow would be a vivid reminder of the residual effects. He swallowed carefully, his mouth dry from the drug Elliot had administered.
He closed his eyes again. The dim, curtain-shrouded light that seeped in from the windows should not be enough to set off another attack, but it was sometimes hard to judge what was enough. Of course, with the sudden flood of summer sunlight yesterday, there had been no doubt. Because he had refused to stand there with his eyes closed while she shouted at him, he had known exactly what he faced from the moment Kate August had released that first shade. He had been too stubborn—or too stupid—to leave.
He opened his eyes again, raising the damaged right hand in an unthinking gesture, automatically protecting himself from even the faint light the draperies allowed into this sanctuary.
Vampire, he thought again, repeating the word that haunted him. A damn vampire. He usually had more success keeping the bitterness at bay, but remembering the troubling dreams he’d had about Kate August, he knew why that was now so hard.
KATE SPENT most of Thursday’s flight to Tucson worrying about the letter she’d mailed before she left Atlanta. It had taken her most of the previous evening to write, despite the fact that she’d spent all day thinking about what she wanted to say.
Not exactly wanted to say, she admitted. She had written a couple of letters of apology at the beginning of her career when she had overstepped her own ethical boundaries. Because doing that had been extremely painful, she had let nothing like those incidents happen in the years since.
At least not until she’d rushed into Judge Barrington’s home and thrown up the shades with the same kind of hysterical indignation that had propelled the temperance ladies to chop up bars with axes. Despite the fact that she was genuinely sorry if she had triggered one of the migraines Kahler had described and despite the fact that she was a writer by profession, it had been a very difficult letter to compose. And it had been harder to drop it into a mail slot and let it go.
That’s what she had to do, she thought. Let it all go—the guilt, the remorse and her fascination with Barrington. That was really what had gotten her into the situation in the first place. As soon as she got back to Atlanta, she intended to throw the folder and the pictures she’d collected into the trash. No more obsession with Thorne Barrington.
Chapter Five
Using Kahler’s name and copies of the articles that had appeared in the series as her foot in the door, Kate had wrangled Jackie Draper’s address and an introduction by phone from the Tucson Police Department. Although Hall Draper’s widow had sounded a little confused about why she was being asked to talk to a reporter from an Atlanta paper, she agreed to the interview.
Mrs. Draper’s eyes looked as if she hadn’t slept since her husband’s death, and Kate felt guilty about putting her through this. The comments the judge had made about her job crept into her head as she opened her notebook.
“I don’t really understand what you want me to tell you, Ms. August. You said you were trying to help the authorities find a connection between the victims?”
“I don’t believe Jack sends his packages at random. I think there’s some link between the people the bomber targets, and if we can discover what that link is…”
“Then the police can catch him,” Jackie Draper finished.
“Hopefully,” Kate agreed, smiling at her.
“What kinds of things do you need to know?”
“Anything you’re willing to tell me, really. The kind of man your husband was. His family. His background. Where he grew up. College. Career. Why don’t you just talk, and I’ll listen. Then I can ask you anything I’ve thought of that you might not have covered. How does that sound?”
“Okay,” Jackie Draper said.
Her eyes had already lost their focus, moving back into memories that might even provide some kind of comfort. Permission to go back to happier times. Kate found herself hoping that if what she was doing didn’t help, at least it wouldn’t make the grieving harder.
The soft voice went on a long time. The shadows lengthened, and the narrow strips of light that filtered between the closed slats of the blinds slowly inched across the carpet. She had begun with Hall Draper’s childhood, spent in a tiny coal-mining community in Pennsylvania. It had apparently been a life of almost endless deprivation, never enough money, food or warmth.
“I think that’s why he ended up here,” Jackie said, a brief smile touching her lips. “He finally felt warm. You don’t forget the things you do without in childhood. Or the way that doing without made you feel. You may not ever tell anybody, but you’re always careful to see that your own children—”
Her voice broke, the emotion that comment had evoked seeming to catch her unaware. “I just can’t imagine what Trent’s going to do without him. They were so close,” she whispered. “Hall’s own father wasn’t much. Not like we think of daddies nowadays. Maybe he was just a different generation, but remembering his own childhood, Hall always bent over backwards to make sure Trent knew how much he loved him. He was a good man, Ms. August. I don’t understand why someone would do this. It doesn’t make any sense. Why Hall? That’s what I can’t understand.”
“Nobody can, Mrs. Draper. None of them really seemed to deserve what happened.”
“But you think the killer chose them?”
“I do. I’m sorry if that…” Kate paused.
“It’s all right,” Jackie Draper said. “If he did do that, I want him caught. Especially if he thought Hall deserved what happened to him. If he did it out of hatred or revenge.”
“Can you think of anyone who disliked your husband, Mrs. Draper?”
“Enough to kill him?” Jackie asked, shaking her head. “Hall didn’t have an enemy in the world. I know that’s hard to believe, but he really was a good man. He did a lot of pro bono work. I used to tell him we were going to starve to death while he was defending somebody who didn’t have a cent. He’d tell me that people who had money would always go to someone else, and that I should be grateful poor people needed lawyers, too. I think they reminded him of the people he grew up with.”
Mrs. Draper smiled slightly. Remembering. It had probably really been an issue, her chiding him for his willingness to help those who needed legal advice, but couldn’t afford to pay for it.
“I wish I could take back all those things I said. All the times I fussed on him for doing what he thought was right. I just wish I could tell him—” Her soft voice stopped again, and the tears that she had mastered until now flooded the shadowed eyes. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, wiping the moisture away with the tips of her fingers. Embarrassed to cry before a stranger.
“It’s all right,” Kate said. “I understand.”
“If that’s all you want to know…” Hall Draper’s widow said, letting the suggestion trail.
“One more question, and then I’ll leave you alone, I promise. I’m so grateful you were willing to talk to me.”
Jackie Draper nodded, still trying to remove the traces of forbidden tears.
“Was there anything in your husband’s life he felt he…shouldn’t have done, maybe?” Kate asked. All these people, all Jack’s victims seemed so ordinary, but Kate had thought for a long time there must have been something that made
them targets for a madman. Jackie Draper’s eyes expressed her puzzlement, and Kate tried to clarify. “Something he shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in? Or something he regretted later. I don’t really know—”
“Hall wasn’t ever mixed up in anything that wasn’t good and decent, Ms. August.”
Kate nodded, knowing she couldn’t probe any deeper. For some reason she felt exactly like the kind of vampire Barrington had accused her of being. Feeding off other people’s pain.
“Thank you so much for seeing me, Mrs. Draper,” she said, standing up. “I hope some good comes out of the information you’ve given me.”
Hall Draper’s widow nodded, standing also. Kate stuck her notebook and pen back into the leather handbag. She held out her hand, and Jackie Draper put hers into it. Kate was surprised at how fragile it felt. She looked stronger than the frail delicacy of that hand. Unless you looked into her eyes, she thought. Kate had already turned toward the door when the woman spoke.
“There was…one thing,” Jackie Draper said, her voice so quiet Kate had to strain to catch the words. “These days…” She hesitated again, her shoulders hunching slightly. “It doesn’t seem like much today, but Hall was always sorry. There wasn’t anything he could have done about it. He was just a kid, but he was sorry. Especially after we had Trent, after he found out how much…it means to have a child.”
Kate held her breath, unwilling to slow the whispered words.
“The girl was just…trash. I know that sounds harsh, but she was. Hall never even knew for sure if it was his baby. She said it was, but she was…” Again, the slender shoulders moved upward. “Even Hall knew it could have been anybody’s baby. He was sixteen. She was maybe a couple of years younger. But the thing was…it could have been his baby, you know. It was possible. Hall admitted that. He told me about it. Years later. After Trent was born.”
