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“Hold up, you’remytrusty sidekick.”
“You just carry on believing that.”
She enjoyed the to-and-fro.That and the scenery kept her mind off things.But not for long.A patch of fresh red paint on a fence went by, and she had a sudden thought.
“Can I see your tablet?”
“Ga’head.”
The crime scene techs had sent over an image of the page, torn from a hymn book.
“I’m trying to see what color the ink is.”
Marcus glanced at it.“Blue.Black.Ink color.Why?”
“Just an idea.Back when people still wrote letters, there were all kinds of ways of communicating different messages, above and beyond the words on the page.The kind of paper you used, the color of the ink.Red was a warning.Green was… I can’t remember, I think it was to do with lying.Anyway, it doesn’t matter, does it? What did you notice about the circles?Around the letters spelling my name.”
“I’m driving, Vee.They’re circles.”
She tutted.“Neatly done, or sloppy?Complete circles, or with gaps?”
Marcus gripped the steering wheel.It looked like a toy in his hands.The size of Marcus, the sheer bulk of the guy, often made Kate smile.She didn’t understand why.
“Each one’s a perfect circle,” she said.
“So he wets the bed?Dresses up as a pony?”
“If you apply to art school, like SAIC in Chicago, it’s one of the tests they give you.Draw a perfect circle, free-hand.”
“So we’re looking for an artist?”
“Someone meticulous, at least.”
Despite the sunshine glinting on the water, the warmth of the car, and the pleasing, leathery scent of Marcus’s cologne, Kate shuddered a little then.She knew why.It was the contrast.The same contrast she’d seen in Denton, who was dead, but might as well not be for all the nights he spent inside her head.The precision and the preparedness.The neat creativity versus the ugly, savage, frenzied way he destroyed lives.
Two kids roared by on a motorbike, the pillion passenger flipping them the finger for no reason at all.Marcus tutted.
“They’ll end up in wheelchairs going that speed.”
Kate smiled.“Wasn’t that the sort of thing you got up to?”
“Yeah.And Dominic ended up in a wheelchair.”
“I thought Dominic joined the Coast Guard.”
“That was Dom Shoes.”
“Shoes?”
“His dad owned a shoe store.”
Marcus barely discussed his time with the Navy SEALS.Again, Kate felt it was something that might never change.The things she knew about her partner’s military career she could count on one hand.Afghanistan.Yemen.An injury and a long recovery.Three comrades lost in a single afternoon.But this secrecy, or privacy, or whatever it was, didn’t extend to other parts of his life.If Kate had to sit for an exam entitled Marcus Reid: The Bensonhurst Years, she felt sure she’d ace it.The school friends and the nicknames – Dom Shoes, Fat Timmy, Spud and Poke and More Fingers – along with apocryphal stories of how they came to be bestowed.The fights and the run-ins, the scrapes and the girlfriends.
As a campus kid, and only daughter of a surgeon and an academic, Kate had nothing to compare.Her friends had all been like her: good girls,seriousgirls, marching in formation on a path from choir recitals to eating disorders to scholarships at prestigious schools and then… what? She’d lost touch with all but one of them.And she was aware that the others were all still in touch with each other.She supposed she’d never really fit in.But she wasn’t a typical FBI agent, either.She supposed she just didn’t fit in anywhere.
The spotted calf.
That was what Denton called her.A cruel reference to the small, port-wine birthmark under her chin.But more than that, part of the man’s twisted, private theology, his justification for killing.She wished she could erase him from her memory, wished her mind was like those tv ads for detergent, the brain emerging sparkling white and blossom-scented from the washer-dryer, each painful scene broken down by miracle molecules.Instead, however dead Denton was, he lived on.He lived on, and in his wake, fresh cohorts of sickos clamored for her attention.
