The Silent Hour (33 page)

    Amy
and I stayed for a week. We hung out with Joe and sometimes Gena, ate seafood,
had drinks of fruit juice and rum, bitched about the heat. All the things
you're supposed to do in Florida.

    I
checked the office voice mail daily. There was no word about Ken. Many days, I
played his last message again. I listened to words I already knew by heart, and
I tried to imagine what had provoked them. I had no luck. You rarely do with
that approach to detective work. The way it gets done is out on the street. I
stayed on the beach.

    On the
day before we left, I ended up sitting on a chair outside Joe's hotel, alone,
while he and Amy made a run to the store. Gena was coming by for an afternoon
cocktail before dinner, and she showed up before they got back and came down to
join me. We made small talk for a bit. I found out that while she had lived in
other states and, for one year, in Europe, she always came back to Idaho in the
end. Both parents were still alive, and she had two sisters; all of them lived
within a fifteen-minute drive.

    "So
are you going to move to Cleveland or make him move to Idaho—" It was
supposed to be a joke, but her pause told me it was a discussion they'd
actually had.

    "Maybe
either, maybe neither, maybe something completely different," she said.

    "Egypt—"
I was still trying to keep it light, because I was caught off guard by the idea
that they were this serious.

    "One
person moving to join the other is the obvious option," she said,
stretching out on the chair beside me and kicking off her sandals, "but
there's an element of it that could feel selfish either way, you know— We both
have our own lives at home, so to have one person make the sacrifice seems
unfair. So we've talked about a compromise. Moving somewhere new to both of
us."

    "Oh,"
I said. Can always count on me for insight.

    She
looked over at me, sunglasses shading her eyes. The wind was fanning her brown
hair out. "Would I like Cleveland—"

    "Probably
not."

    "Really—"

    "You
live in a college town in the mountains, right— Well, the city's a change. Most
people head the other way. Leave the city for mountains." I waved out at
the water. "Or a beach."

    "I
lived in New York for seven years. Never minded being in a city. Of course, I
was twenty-five then, too."

    I
didn't say anything.

    "Either
way, it won't be happening overnight," she said. "Joe's not the sort
of person who rushes into things."

    That
made me laugh. "No, he's not."

    She
smiled but looked away from me. "He's worried about you."

    "Doesn't
need to be."

    "I
couldn't speak to that. I don't know you well enough to say. I do know that
he's worried. He's afraid that the way he left was unfair to you. That you're
carrying guilt about it when you shouldn't be."

    "I
got him shot, Gena. Seems to warrant a small dose of guilt. But that's really
not the issue, not anymore. He's happy again, and I'm glad of that.
Thrilled."

    "You're
not. Happy, I mean."

    "Happy,"
I said, "seems like a hell of a subjective thing. I'm working on it.

    So is
Joe. So is everybody. And I can tell you this—you're good for him. I can see
that so clearly, and you have no idea how nice it is. He's been alone for a
long time."

    "Had
you, though."

    "Yeah,
but he never liked my hairstyle as much as yours." She smiled.
"There's one thing I'd like you to know." "Yeah—"

    "When
we've talked about moving," she said, "and the things that we'd miss
the most, just hate the idea of being away from, I talk about my family. Joe
talks about you."

    A call
from Graham came later that night, and the message he left offered no sense of
progress but some news—Joshua Cantrell's family had won a preliminary legal
motion to claim the house on Whisper Ridge.

    Life,
or the lack thereof, always seemed to me like something that had to be
established medically, not legally, through beating hearts and functioning
brains rather than notarized paperwork. That's not always the case. The judge
had ruled that the Cantrells were entitled to post legal notice of Alexandra's
presumed death, which would run in a variety of newspapers, and there would be
a ninety-day period to contest the claim. Either Alexandra herself could
appear, proving it wrong while welcoming the approaches of police, or someone
else could bring forward proof of life. If those ninety days passed without
either occurrence, the Cantrells could begin maneuvering to claim their share
of the estate. Graham's understanding was that they'd have to split the estate
with Dominic Sanabria.

    "He
probably killed their son," I said when I called him back the next
morning, "and now they're going to have to share the money with him—"

    "That's
what the law seems to say."

    When
we got back to Cleveland, I bought a paper in the airport and flipped through
it to the public notice section while we stood beside the luggage carousel.
There was the first notice of Alexandra Cantrell, buried amid pages of
fine-print legalese. It seemed too quiet a way to announce the end of a life.

    "You
should do an article," I told Amy. "If anything's going to produce Alexandra
or proof she's alive, it won't be this notice. It'll take more publicity than
that."

    She
agreed with me, and a day later so did her editor. The story appeared on the
following Sunday, front page and above the fold. The TV news picked it up by that
evening, and several Associated Press papers around the country ran shortened
versions of the "missing, presumed dead" story in the days to come.
The story never gathered the national steam I'd hoped for—CNN, talk show
features, that sort of thing—but for several weeks, Graham, the newspaper, and
the Cantrell legal team were flooded with tips. I called Graham to see if
anything was coming of it. Just the tips, he said, most crazy, none credible.
If Alexandra was still alive, there was no sign.

    I
wrapped up what case work I had left when I got back to the city, then put out
a memo to our core clients explaining that Joe and I were stepping aside from
field investigations. I referred them to other people in town, brushed aside
inquiries, and waited for the outcry of disappointment and anger. It never
came. Perry and Pritchard Investigations wasn't the community institution I'd
believed it to be, evidently.

    I
listened to Ken's message daily for a while. Then, a month after he'd been
killed, the voice mail informed me the message would be deleted from the
system. It had been there too long, evidently. You couldn't keep it forever.
Eventually the computer decided that the time elapsed required the message to
go away even if I didn't want it to. By the next morning, it was gone.

    I
invested thirty thousand dollars into new equipment for the gym. I paid for a
larger phone-book ad and hired a friend of Amy's to create a Web site. I did
most of the work on the gym by myself, largely because it kept me busy. When I
wasn't working on it, I was working out in it. That summer I took thirty
seconds off my time in the mile and added forty pounds to my bench press, got
it back up to a max of three hundred and ten pounds, my all-time high and a
mark I'd set when I was a rookie. My attention to diet changed, and I started
taking amino acids and fish oils and any number of other things that were
rumored to have some sort of health benefit. By August, if I wasn't in the best
shape of my life, I was damn close to it. My workouts had become feverish,
almost obsessive. Do one more rep, Lincoln, run one more mile, take one more
pill. You'll be stronger, leaner, faster. You'll have no vulnerability. None.

    I'd
been spending more and more nights at Amy's apartment, and one evening I felt
her eyes on me and turned to see her watching me with a frown from across the
room.

    "What
have I done—"

    "Quit
your job," she said.

    "This
is an unemployment lecture—"

    "That
gym won't be enough for you."

    "You
don't know that. I could make plenty of money—"

    "Not
money, Lincoln. It won't be
enough
for you. Don't you get that—"

    "You're
enough for me," I said.

    "Romantically
speaking— I sure as shit better be. If I'm not, then you're a cheating bastard.
If you mean I'm
enough,
period, all you need… that's not true."

    "Actually,
it is."

    "Well,
it shouldn't be. You're not enough for me."

    I
raised my eyebrows. "Gee, thanks. You're a sweetheart tonight."

    "I'm
serious. I love you, but you don't define my entire existence, either. You
wouldn't want to be around me if you did. So to sit there and tell me that I'm
enough
for you, that's a lot of pressure, and when you finally realize it's
not the truth, I don't want to be the one who gets hurt."

    "I'm
not sure I follow your logic there, but I don't intend to hurt you, Amy."

    She
came over and kissed me, then leaned back and stood with her hands on my
shoulders and looked into my eyes.

    "You
just removed a large piece of yourself, and now you're pretending that it was
never there. It's been a hell of a thing to watch, trust me. Impressive at
times. You're a master of denial, Lincoln, an absolute master—but I'm scared of
where it's going to take you."

    She kissed
me again then and walked out of the room. I sat and watched her go and thought
that I should follow and say more. I didn't know what I would say, though. I
really didn't.

    At
the end of August, Graham called again, this time to tell me that he finally
had his lab results on Joshua Cantrell's grave. The backlog had loosened up,
and he'd used Ken's murder as a means to bump his request higher in priority.

    "We
got nothing," he said. "No DNA results. Nothing that connects to
Harrison, or anybody else. The only DNA they could find was Cantrell's."

    I
felt defeat sweep through me, realized just how much hope I'd been holding out.

    "What
next—" I said.

    Graham
was quiet.

    "You're
done—"

    "I'm
not done, Linc, but it's a cold case, and without new—"

    "Ken
Merriman was murdered in May, Graham. That's not a cold case."

    "That's
also not my case. Talk to your boys in Cleveland on that one. I'm sitting here
in Pennsylvania with a full caseload and a bunch of supervisors who don't want
me spending time in Cleveland. Look, nobody's more disappointed about this than
me. I come to a case with one goal—to close it. I haven't done that on this
one. I won't deny that, but I also won't bullshit you. My focus has to be out
here, where I'm paid to work. I'd love to take Sanabria down, love to take
Harrison down, but I can't."

    "Somebody
will," I said. "In time."

    "Right,"
he said, and then neither of us was comfortable with the other's silence, so we
said a hurried goodbye and hung up.

    The
same day Graham gave me the news about the lack of lab results from the grave,
he gave it to John Dunbar, who, evidently, had continued his regular calls
asking for updates and offering his help. I hadn't heard from Dunbar since I'd
asked him to leave my apartment, but at noon on the day after Graham's call he
showed up again.

    I was
on a ladder in the gym, applying paint to a band around the ceiling I'd decided
to make a different color than the rest of the wall. It was an aesthetic
effect, completely unnecessary, but I'd decided to do it anyhow, because it was
good to stay busy. I was finding all sorts of ways to stay busy.