neck was cutting her badly. She tried to grab hold of it and release the pressure but she couldn’t. It was a wire! She made a last-ditch effort to scratch his face but it was too late. She felt herself slipping into unconsciousness.
Sam came home a half hour later. He headed for the kitchen and made himself a ham sandwich. Then he turned on the TV in the living room and watched it for an hour or so before heading up to bed. As he flipped on the light switch in the bathroom to take his last piss of the evening, he almost fell over Alice’s corpse.
“Jesus!” he exclaimed, recoiling from the body on the floor. He could feel himself starting to hyperventilate as Alice’s cold dead eyes seemed to stare right at him. Then the cop took over. He knelt down and checked her pulse. There was no doubt she was dead. He called 911 and made his report. After that, he checked the entire house for clues.
When he was finished, the twenty-year veteran who had recently presided over so many ghastly crime scenes of young women went back up to the bathroom, sat down next to his wife, held her cold, rigid hand in his, and wept.
Chapter Eleven
After she checked out the crime scene with the other members of the task force, Danni went looking for Sam. She found him downstairs in his den with the door closed, sitting at his desk smoking a cigarette. Sam was not a smoker.
When she walked in, Sam stood up and gave her a hug and started weeping again with his head on her shoulder.
“I don’t want anybody to see me like this.”
“They’re your friends, Sam. They understand.”
Sam let her go at that point and sat back down in his chair. “It’s funny—up until a few minutes ago I believed wholeheartedly what you just said. We’re in the business of murder. We understand. The reality is I never understood all those people who were crying over their loved ones. I never got it until now. Now it’s my Alice.” He fought back the tears again. “Twenty-five years we were together. Twenty-five years. What am I going to tell my kids?”
Danni didn’t know what to say so she said nothing, just stood next to him with her hand on his shoulder. They stayed there like that for several minutes.
“We’ve gotta get that bastard,” Sam finally said.
“We will, Sam. We will.”
“If he finds out where your daughter is, he’s going to kill her. You know that, don’t you?”
It was the first thing Danni had thought about when she heard about Alice. “Yes, I know.”
“I should have gotten that search warrant for you. I don’t know if that kid is innocent or guilty, but we can’t leave any stone unturned. I know how you feel now.”
“It’s too late for that, Sam, but we’ll catch this guy.”
Sam wasn’t listening though. He was in his own nightmare.
“I put you off,” he said, standing up and walking around the room. He was such a big man that he immediately made the room look smaller. “I sent you to Jane and then I sent her a memo basically telling her to give you lip service. She told you she was going to go to the judge but she did the same thing with him that I did with her. People are dying out there and she’s sitting with the judge telling him about a hysterical police officer. What the hell were we thinking?”
Danni had already figured out how the search warrant deal had gone down so she was not all that upset by Sam’s confession. She was worried about him though. He was losing it. She stopped him and put her hands on his shoulders as she looked him in the eye.
“Look, you were right about the search warrant. Besides, it’s not important now. You’ve got to pull yourself together, Sam. Your kids are going to need your strength. They’re going to look for it.”
Sam loved his kids. Danni expected him to straighten up when she mentioned them but he didn’t. The head lowered again.
“I don’t know what to say to them.”
“You’ll find the words.”
“I can’t.”
“I’ll help you. Now, I know this is not going to sound that reassuring, but I want you to give me your gun.”
Sam lifted his head and gave her a quizzical look. “My gun? What do you think I’m going to do?”
“Nothing, but I don’t know for sure. Neither do you. Nobody knows how