The Sugar House

Dr. Blount looked at them beseechingly. Criminals were always so sure of their right to empathy. Tull turned to Tess, disgust sharp in his face, even as his expression warned her to control herself. He need not have worried. She was still standing by the wall, her palms pressing against it hard enough to leave grimy marks, or so she hoped.

Her only fear was that if she lost contact with the wall, her hands would wrap themselves around the doctor’s throat and never let go.

chapter 17

“I NEED YOU.”

The voice was Crow’s, coming to Tess through the fog of sleep. For once they were in his apartment, because they had drunk too much at di

Half-awake, Tess rolled into him. Dream and reality merged, enriching the other. They often came together this way and she liked the illicit, phantom quality of these meetings. Not even Crow’s fumbling in his nightstand drawer disturbed the mood.

“I need you,” he repeated.

“I need you, too,” she assured him. At other times of the day or night, they were more apt to say “I love you,” possibly “I want you.” Or, in imitation of a song that Crow particularly liked: “Baby, take it all off.” But in the middle of the night, it was always: I need you.

The only problem was that Crow’s midnight raids tended to wake Tess up, while he slept more soundly than ever. She lay in his arms, feeling last night’s alcohol buzz shift into this morning’s hangover. Martinis, followed by many glasses of red wine, and a memorable di

The events of the past two days ran through her mind like a slide show. There was Tull, presiding over a press conference at the state police headquarters, explaining how she had identified Gwen Schiller, and how the clinic how deceived Gwen’s parents. He held back the information about the sexual assault-even in death, Gwen deserved her privacy. It would get out, eventually, as state agencies moved to close down Persephone’s and strip the clinic of its license. But Tull was determined the information wouldn’t come from him.

Next slide. Tess saw Herman Peters, the boy-wonder police reporter who looked so deceptively i

A booth in Frigo’s Bar. Ruthie Dembrow’s mouth was a grim, straight line, no lipstick to brighten it. Tess had done what she had asked her to do, yet she had not found what Ruthie wanted. There was no co

“But this hospital, this clinic,” Ruthie had said, her overarched brows drawn down in a frown, her eyes locked on Tess’s. “If they knew it was her, wouldn’t they want it to be secret, so they didn’t end up in all this trouble?”

“You mean, did the people at the clinic have Henry killed, in case it turned out he did know who his victim was? I honestly don’t think so, Ruthie.”

“It doesn’t feel right to me,” Ruthie insisted. “He was talking about a new trial, an appeal. Did I tell you that? He said there were mitigating circumstances.”

Didn’t they all, Tess thought. She thought again about the rubber tube, how Henry had stopped to play a joke on Gwen’s corpse. Ruthie didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did. Even with the cops, he had played the stoned huffer for all it was worth. “I know he didn’t mean to kill her, Ruthie. But he did.”

She thought her voice was gentle. Ruthie was beyond being comforted.

“You think you’re better than me, don’t you? You can’t imagine anyone in your family getting into trouble like this.”

In fact, she couldn’t, but she wanted to be conciliatory. “You forget my Uncle Donald worked for a senator who was convicted of mail fraud, and we make it a point not to inquire too closely about Uncle Spike’s business dealings. My family’s not so clean.”

“You can say that again.” Ruthie looked at the check on the table. Tess had refunded part of the retainer, which she thought generous-in truth, she had earned every last cent. But she felt guilty that the case, which had brought her glory, had done nothing for Ruthie’s grief, provided her no closure. “So you’re done now.”

The implication being that Ruthie would never be done, that for her, this would never be over.

“Look, you did a good thing, Ruthie. I know you don’t have any feelings for Gwen Schiller, but there’s a father who knows where his daughter is, who can begin to grieve for her, and it’s because of you. It’s a good thing, even if it’s not the answer you wanted. Even if it’s not an answer at all. Sometimes, there is no ‘why’ to things.”

“Henry was so scared of going to prison,” Ruthie said. “He thought if things dragged on long enough, he might be able to serve his whole time in city jail. Just his luck, he had to be the one guy in Baltimore to get a speedy trial.”

The city courts were famously clogged and had gone through an embarrassing period in which case after case was thrown out because of unconstitutional delays or lost evidence. Tess had heard of other men awaiting trial who preferred the city jail to the state prison system. But the finer points of incarceration escaped her.

“He confessed,” she reminded Ruthie.

“Who doesn’t when they get a hold of you? In the end, when he saw he was going to go to Hagerstown, he tried to take it back, but the judge wouldn’t hear of it. He had a crappy lawyer, the guy shoulda done something. You get what you pay for, or so I thought.”

“I gotta go,” Tess told Ruthie. It was past eight, Crow was waiting for her at the Brewer’s Art.

“Yeah, I guess you do,” Ruthie said. “It’s fu

Tess stopped. “What do you mean by that?”

Ruthie tapped a cigarette out of her pack, whacking the pack with great force.

“Nothing, nothing at all. Thank your father for me. He owed me a favor, and you were it. You did your job. I guess if I don’t like the way it turned out, I got no one to blame but myself. And my stupid brother.”

Eight hours ago, Tess had been inclined to agree. Now, awake in the dark, she found herself thinking about Henry’s death. Life was built on coincidences, but this one did have a stink to it. Sure, people died in prison, given the nature of their roomies, but it happened far less often than it did in the world at large. In Henry’s case, a fight had broken out in a different part of the cell block, yet he was the one who had been killed. It had the earmarks of a hit, a pla

Ruthie had come to Tess thinking there was an Old Testament logic to her brother’s death, an eye for an eye. Someone who knew Gwen, but didn’t want to own up to her identity for whatever reason, had sought to avenge her death.