Urge to Kill

Though she might blame other people, the real cause of her depression of the last several weeks had been herself. Her reactions to their actions.

I did it to myself.

It wasn’t them; it was me. I did it to myself.

They made me do it to myself.

Quinn and his detectives reinterviewed everyone connected to the Becker and Rhodes murders. They could find no connections between the two men, no connection between any two people who knew both men. Had the Becker and Rhodes murders both been hunts? Duels?

“Now we’ve got something,” Fedderman finally said at the end of a dreary, unproductive day.

“What would that be?” Quinn asked.

“Whole bunch of questions,” Fedderman said.

“Ballistics wasn’t certain,” Pearl said. “Maybe the gun found on Rhodes didn’t kill Becker.”

“The maid at the Antonian Hotel,” Fedderman said. “Rosa Pajaro. She might know more than she’s telling. She’s scared. Maybe of something worse than losing her job or being deported.”

“Think she’s still working there?” Pearl asked.

“It’s questionable,” Fedderman said.

A phone call answered the question. Rosa Pajaro had collected her paycheck and disappeared from the Antonian without giving notice two days ago. A follow-up phone call revealed that she’d also left her basement apartment without bothering to notify the landlord.

“Scared, all right,” Pearl said. “Probably all the way back to Puerto Rico.”

“Mexico,” Fedderman said.

“Probably happened when she saw Thomas Rhodes’s photo on TV news or in the paper,” Quinn said, “and she realized she was a key witness in a murder case.”

“Can’t blame her,” Fedderman said.

“We don’t know enough to blame anyone for anything,” Pearl said.

Chain lightning danced in the darkening sky.

Lavern stood in the heat outside the Broken Wing Women’s Shelter and felt a few droplets of moisture on her face, one on her eyelash, another on the bridge of her nose. Maybe it was going to rain and bring relief from the heat. Maybe not. The city might be once again toying with its people. The way Hobbs sometimes toyed with her.

She unconsciously raised a hand and felt the new bruises on her left cheekbone, another farther down on the side of her jaw. Hobbs hadn’t broken her skin. He was good at what he did and didn’t want to draw suspicion. Her makeup did a fair enough job of covering these latest of Lavern’s facial bruises, from a distance.

Her left side hurt badly enough that she favored it and walked with a slight limp. When she’d left the apartment, she hadn’t known where that limp would take her. Now, standing and staring at the shelter, she realized Broken Wing had been her destination from the beginning.

The sturdy brick building with its line of dormers seemed to call to her more strongly every time she passed it. It was like a fortress with a pale concrete stoop and solid wood double doors. Each door had a large brass knocker beneath a small leaded glass window. There was black iron grillwork over the ground-floor windows. The building didn’t look as if it could be easily broken into. A person might feel safe there.

Lavern leaned against a NO PARKING sign and sighed. She knew that a person couldn’t stay inside Broken Wing forever. That was the problem. She’d heard about women who’d found refuge there and stayed for months, and then left only to be reclaimed by their patiently waiting abusers.

Lavern knew Hobbs was patient.

He would wait.

She took a final glance at the thick wooden doors that would provide protection for only so long; then she limped away along the sidewalk. Lightning still flickered and charged patches of purple sky between the tall buildings, but whatever breath of air there’d been had now ceased. No more tentative raindrops found their way to earth. It wasn’t going to rain this evening. It had been a trick. Life was a damned trick, a painful practical joke.

As she walked, Lavern tried to think of lots of things, but found her mind focusing on the shotgun at home in the hall closet. The sharp pain in her left side whenever she took a step kept bringing her back to the gun. It was a twelve gauge, like the one her father had let her fire once in some woods behind a rented cabin. She remembered the deafening bark of the gun, the heavy recoil against her right shoulder. She’d fired at a paper target he’d nailed to a tree, and she’d hit it.

She’d hit it.

A pretty damned good shot.

I could do it again.

She couldn’t stop thinking about the shotgun. It was unhealthy, a fixation like this, but she couldn’t seem to control it. She guessed that was why they called them fixations. It was all Hobbs’s fault.

Hobbs’s damned fault.

He’d blocked every avenue of escape, made her into something that would have no choice other than to do to him what he might secretly want but not have the courage to do himself.

Suicide by wife.

I could do it again.