Perfect Victim
Page 25
The man looked up. “Okay….”
“Let’s take this nice and easy, all right? One step at a time?”
“Sure.”
Kopsinsky turned and signaled to somebody hovering outside the door. “You’ve already met Edith Drinkwater, I believe…”
The black woman entered tentatively. Decked out in a conservative navy pantsuit, also sporting a laminate tag around her neck, she had her hair in tight braids. She looked nervous. “Got somebody here wants to see you, Ulysses.”
The man nodded. “Okay.”
A moment later, a thin ash-blond woman in a sweater and jeans came in the room with a plump, caramel-skinned three-year-old on her hip. The woman paused, her face a topography of pain, her child instantly recognizing Grove, transfixed by the shorn head and markings. “Daddeee?”
Grove stood up so abruptly he knocked his chair over.
Momentarily stricken, his breath catching in his throat, he saw this small-hipped woman and curly-haired child casting off a ghostly aura of light. It radiated off them in faint luminous filaments that reached across the room and penetrated Grove with a surge of heat, the stabbing pain in his hips, in his spine, in his temples, all of it suddenly burning away on a wave of cleansing truth.
The lead shield around his memory dissolved, revealing his identity in a sudden and unexpected nickelodeon-flash of raw experience—climbing down a bottomless well, ocean waves obliterating a message in the sand, trembling hands holding a heart-wrenching note from a forlorn wife, a father reading a fairy tale to a child, an upside-down monster—all of the memories so vivid and bright that he nearly collapsed.
“Oh Jesus, there you are, there you are, there you are, there you are,” he mumbled under his breath as he limped around the side of the table and went to them, reaching out first for the child, then for the mother, embracing both, one in each arm, the tears blurring his vision. “There you are, there you are, there you are, there you are—”
The room became a tableau of almost reverent stillness and silence.
The section chief stood near the window, his head down respectfully, his expression one of weary acceptance, acceptance of genius, acceptance of the inexplicable.
And the woman named Drinkwater hovered stone-still near the door, looking down at her hands as though praying, a certain kind of acceptance passing over her face as well—
—the realization that this strange and terrifying assignment, as well as her role in this man’s life, which would forever remain a secret, had come to an end.
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