then they were out in the corridor and he was leading the way back toward the schooling part of things. “We’re going down here.”
As they walked along, he wanted to put his arm around her. “Are you okay with how that went?”
“I really like Doc Jane.”
“Me, too.”
“It’s just a waiting game now.”
They fell quiet again, but he was sure they were both thinking the same thing: Holy crap, what if they had created a new life? And she had to carry it safely to term?
The implications seemed as vast as the galaxy, and it was a relief to stop in front of the door to one of the interrogation rooms.
“I think this is the right one.” He knocked. “Butch?”
When someone answered on the other side, Boone opened the way in. One look to the right at the photographs that had been put on the wall and he recoiled. Behind him, Helania likewise gasped.
Over at the table, Butch looked up from a pad of notes. “Oh. Sorry. Should have given you a heads-up.”
Boone went over and stood in front of the photographs from the morgue, his size guaranteeing that nothing of the images showed.
“We don’t have to talk here,” Butch said.
“No.” Helania shook her head. “I will not ignore this or pretend any of it didn’t happen.”
As she approached the wall, Boone didn’t budge, but she wasn’t looking at what he was blocking. She was focused on the center portion that was marked with a roman numeral II. Reaching up, she touched a piece of paper with her sister’s name on it.
“How you doing with Isobel’s death?” Butch asked quietly. “And I’m sorry to be blunt about it.”
Boone opened his mouth to stop the line of questioning, but Helania got there first. Looking over her shoulder at the Brother, she said, “I’m glad you’re up front. And as for handling it? Not much better than I did when I first found out.”
“I know where you’re at.”
“Yes, you’ve seen a lot of homicides, I imagine.”
“I lost my sister, too.”
Boone looked at the Brother sharply. “I didn’t know that.” Butch leaned back in his chair, balancing on its two hind legs. Tapping a blue Bic pen on his thigh, he focused on the layout he’d made. “My sister was abducted, raped, and murdered, and I was the last one who saw her as she drove off with the boys who did it to her. I was twelve years old. She was fifteen.”
Helania walked over to the table. When she tried to pull a chair out, she frowned.
“They’re screwed down,” Butch said as he righted himself. “I have a screwdriver—”
“No, it’s okay.” Helania slipped into the space between the table and the seat, her back to the photographs and notes. “Can you tell me . . . can you tell me about how you dealt with her loss?”
Butch now tapped the pen on the pad he’d been scribbling on, its 8½ by 11 inches filled with blue crosses, arrows that jumped from sentence to sentence, and doodles of . . . golf carts?
“I’ll be honest, I’m still not over it. When I think about Janie, it’s just what you said. Fresh as it was the instant I found out. It takes a lot of time before you don’t wallow in grief every second of the day and night. More time than you want it to. I promise you, though, one evening you’re going to wake up, and you’ll be in front of the mirror brushing your teeth . . . and you’ll realize that you actually slept through the day and you don’t feel like you’re in someone else’s skin.”
Boone went over and joined them. The experience of wedging his body into that landlocked chair wasn’t half as smooth as it had been for Helania, but he made himself fit.
“All death is hard,” Butch murmured to the pair of them, “but it’s so much worse when you feel like you could have done something to stop it.”
Boone nodded. “Amen to that.”
“You truly feel responsible for your father’s death?” Helania asked. “I tried to get him to stay home that night.” Boone pictured his sire clear as day in his mind, Altamere sitting at that desk in his study and glaring as Boone tried to reason with him. “But he insisted, and the thing that I worry about . . . the thing that haunts me? It’s what if I . . .” Boone cleared his throat. “What if I wanted this to happen? What