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Alexa and Sava
“Hello, Alexa,” he said quietly, as though afraid to approach her. She looked on the edge of panic and as though she were about to run from the room, and from him. And when he spoke, he had the same deep, husky voice, and the same southern drawl. What was different was that she wasn’t his wife anymore, and hadn’t been in years.
“Hello, Tom,” she said politely, looking stiff. She was still wearing her work clothes, a quiet navy suit, and she had kicked off her shoes, and had on navy stockings and a lawyerly white blouse, and her hair in a bun. Unlike him, she looked like a different person than the carefree, happy woman she had been ten years before. Now she looked serious, professional, and extremely uncomfortable to be facing him. But Sava
“I can pick something up on the road,” he said gently. What he had seen and startled him most was the look of sorrow in her eyes. It was all still there, everything he had done. It made his stomach hurt and made him want to cry. But it was way, way too late for that. “We’ll get going now,” he told Alexa, as though to assure her that he would be out of her sight and her space soon. She nodded, somber faced, and left the room. She walked into her bedroom and closed the door. He looked at Sava
They were ready to leave a few minutes later. Sava
“I love you,” Alexa said as she hugged her. “Have a good time.”
“I love you too, Mom. Don’t work too hard.” And then she hesitated for a minute in the doorway. “Do you want to come and say goodbye?” She meant to her father. Her mother shook her head without a sound, and Sava
Alexa heard them leave a moment later, and she lay down on her bed. She hadn’t expected to see him, or to be so shaken when she did. What had shocked her was that he looked no different, not one jot. He looked exactly as he had when he was her husband, and for an instant she had to remind herself that he no longer was. It was as though her heart and body had hung on to all the memories she had tried to kill. Her soul remembered, her skin remembered, her heart remembered, and now she remembered how much she had loved him then, and how painful it all was. As she lay there, she wondered if there were some people you always felt the same way about, who awoke the same feelings and the same memories. No matter how much you had come to hate them, or how much things had changed, there was always some tiny part of you that remembered how sweet it had been. The worst part was that she knew that if she had met him for the first time that night, she would have been just as attracted to him, just as dazzled by him and how incredibly good-looking he was. He was hard to resist. And then slowly as she lay there, she remembered just how awful it had been, how badly he had hurt her, and how weak and despicable he was. But for just a fraction of a second, she had remembered the good times and felt the same things for him. She was sorry she had seen him, and then decided she wasn’t. All it did in the end was remind her of how much she hated him, and why.
Chapter 6
Halfway into the week Alexa was relieved that Sava
On Thursday Alexa met with Judy Du
“Where have you been?” Jack asked her when he ran into her in the hallway.
“On a UFO, eating Twinkies,” she said, with a grin at him. “Doing drugs again, counselor?”
“No, but the public defender is. She just spent a half hour trying to convince me of Luke Quentin’s i
“Good. She can visit him in prison. That happens, you know. Women fall for them, no matter how heinous their crimes, and visit them in the slammer for years. We just got our seventeenth victim.” The numbers grew almost every day.
“I feel like I’m following a presidential election,” she said as they stopped at the coffee machine. She had already had too many cups that day. “How many states do we have now?”
“Nine,” he said with a grim look. “The guy is amazing, and I don’t think we’re through yet.”
“We’re not overestimating him, are we?” She didn’t want to get sloppy, and start pi
“I think we may be underestimating him. So far it all matches up. We’ve got his DNA now with every victim.” She nodded and went back to her office. She was there until nine o’clock that night, and had been all week. She was at her desk on Friday until ten-thirty, going over all the forensic reports from every state. It all looked solid. Nothing surprised her anymore, except that he wouldn’t plead. He was still claiming he was i