the ocean seems rougher than it did when I drove in. Collins says that this is common and has something to do with the rock formation.
He points out where Darryl Anderson died on a September day six years ago. “There was a hurricane warning, or a watch,” he says. “I can never remember which is which.”
“I think the warning is worse,” I say.
He nods. “Whatever. A bunch of local teenagers weren’t too worried about it, and they decided it would be really cool to ride the waves in the middle of the storm.”
“Anderson was one of the teenagers?” I ask.
“Nope. I think he was twenty or twenty-one. His brother was one of the kids out in the water. Anderson heard about it from his mother, who was upset and asked him to make sure the kid was okay.”
Collins shakes his head at the memory and continues. “The undertow was unbelievable, and Anderson started yelling at the kids to get out of the water. He was a big, scary guy, a football player, so they did. Except one kid, a fourteen-year-old, couldn’t make it. The current was pulling him out.”
“So Anderson went in after him?”
He nods. “Yeah. Got to him and grabbed him but couldn’t make it back. Their bodies were never found.”
“Is there any way,” I ask, “any way at all, that he could have been murdered?”
His head shake is firm. “No way. There were twenty witnesses to what happened, including me, although I got here for the very end of it. Everybody who saw it said the same thing. It was preventable… those kids should never have been in the water… but there is absolutely no way it was murder.”
It’s a sad story, but one that has the secondary effect of cheering me up. Kenny obviously had nothing to do with this death, and if I can find that to be true of most of the others as well, then coincidence will actually have reared its improbable head.
When I get back home, an obviously distressed Laurie comes out to meet me at the car. I hadn’t told her where I was going, and she was panicked at the possibility that Quintana had gotten to me and dumped my body in the Passaic River.
“I’m sorry I upset you,” I lie, since I’m thrilled that she’s upset. “I had to leave in a hurry.”
“You had a cell phone, Andy. You could have called me.”
She’s right, I could have called her, and I’m not sure why I didn’t. It’s not like me. I didn’t consciously think about it, but was my subconscious trying to worry her? Or am I subtly separating from her, so as to prepare myself and lessen the devastation when and if she leaves?
“I should have.”
She lets it drop, and I update her on what I learned. She is relieved, as I am, but points out that it’s not proof that Kenny wasn’t involved with any of the other deaths. She suggests that it’s time that I speak to Kenny about it, and I make plans to do so before court tomorrow.
Laurie and I had planned to go to Charlie’s for dinner tonight, but she doesn’t want to leave the house. She wants to make a quick dinner and get into bed. With that as the ultimate goal, there is no such thing as a dinner quick enough. But I inhale some kind of a sandwich, and Laurie and I are in bed by nine o’clock.
Our lovemaking tonight is more intense than usual, and Laurie is one hundred percent responsible for that. I think that she was really shaken and worried about me today, and this is how it is manifesting itself. Of course, the next time I successfully read a woman’s mind will be the first, so I stop trying to figure it out and simply go with the flow.
It turns out to be one of the best flows I’ve ever gone with.
I WAKE UP WITH that awful feeling of remembrance about Adam. I know these feelings will be with me for a long time, because I still have them about Sam’s assistant, Barry Leiter, and he died almost two years ago. I’m going to have to start allocating scheduled time for my various guilt issues so I don’t get them confused.
I arrive at court an hour early for my scheduled meeting with Kenny about the information Adam was developing. I bring Kevin with me, not for him to participate, but to have an independent opinion on Kenny’s