much while we ate our room service dinner. Instead, we maintained a kind of comfortable silence that couples of many years achieve. Afterward, I took a long bath and listened over the bathroom speaker to the CNN report on the shootout at Digital Imaging. There was nothing new. More questions than answers. A good portion of the news conference was focused on Thorson and the ultimate sacrifice he had made. For the first time I thought about Rachel and how she was dealing with this. She had lost her ex-husband. A man she had grown to despise but someone she had shared an intimate relationship with just the same.
When I came out of the bathroom I wore the terrycloth bathrobe the hotel provided. She was lying on the bed, propped against the pillows, and still watching the television.
“The local news is about to start,” she said.
I crawled across the bed and kissed her.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“I don’t know. Uh, whatever the relationship was that you had with Thorson, I’m sorry. Okay?”
“So am I.”
“I was thinking . . . you want to make love?”
“Yes.”
I turned off the television and the lights. At one point in the dark I tasted tears on her cheeks and she held me tighter than she had ever done before. There was a bittersweet feel to our lovemaking. It was as if two sad and lonely people had crossed paths and had agreed to help heal each other. Afterward, she huddled against my back and I tried to sleep but I couldn’t. The demons of the day were still wide awake inside.
“Jack?” she whispered. “Why did you cry?”
I was silent for a few moments, trying to find the words that would explain an answer.
“I don’t know,” I finally said. “It’s hard. All along, I think, I was hoping in a daydreaming sort of way that I would get the chance to . . . Just be glad you’ve never done what I did today. Just be glad.”
Still later sleep would not come, even after I had taken one of the pills from the hospital. She asked me what my thoughts were.
“I’m thinking about what he said to me at the end. I don’t understand what he meant.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said he killed Sean to save him.”
“From what?”
“From becoming like him. That’s what I don’t understand.”
“We probably never will. You should just let it go now. It’s over.”
“He said something else. At the end. When everyone was there. Did you hear it?”
“I think so.”
“What was it?”
“He said something like, ‘This is what it’s like.’ That’s all.”
“What does it mean?”
“I think he was solving the mystery.”
“Death.”
“He saw it coming. He saw the answers. He said, ‘This is what it’s like.’ Then he died.”
45
In the morning we found Backus already waiting in the conference room on the seventeenth floor of the federal building. It was another clear day and I could see the top of Catalina rising behind the marine layer of morning fog out on the Santa Monica Bay. It was eight-thirty but Backus had his jacket off and looked as though he had already been at it for several hours. His spot at the meeting table was cluttered with a spread of paperwork, two open laptops and a stack of pink phone message slips. His face was drawn and sad. It looked as though the loss of Thorson would leave a permanent mark on him.
“Rachel, Jack,” he said by means of salutation. It wasn’t a good morning and he didn’t say that. “How’s the hand?”
“It’s okay.”
We had brought containers of coffee with us but I saw he had none. I offered him mine but he said he’d already had too much.
“What have we got?” Rachel asked.
“Did you two check out? I tried to call you this morning, Rachel.”
“Yes,” she said. “Jack wanted something a little more comfortable. We moved over to the Chateau Marmont.”
“Pretty comfortable.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t submit it for reimbursement.”
He nodded and I got the idea from the way he looked at her that he knew she hadn’t gotten her own room and had nothing to submit anyway. It was the least of his worries, though.
“It’s coming together,” he said. “Another one for the studies, I suppose. These people—if you can call them that—never cease to amaze me. Every one of them, their stories . . . each one of them’s a black hole. And there’s never enough blood to fill it.”
Rachel pulled out a chair and sat across from him. I sat next to