Day of the Dead - J. A. Jance [5]
Gayle dozed off almost immediately, while Larry lay beside her, sleepless and spent. As the hours dragged by, his initial sense of euphoria disappeared as his mind tried to grapple with the consequences of what she had done. If she had actually murdered the girl—and Larry didn’t doubt it—how much of her terrible crime was his fault, his responsibility?
Larry was more than willing to acknowledge that he had violated the physician’s sacred creed to do no harm. He had taken sexual advantage of a patient—a helpless minor—who had been under his care. That was bad enough—bad enough to have him tossed out of the world of medicine and bad enough to make him liable for criminal proceedings as well, but what he had done wrong was a long way short of murder.
But Gayle? Not only had she slaughtered someone in cold blood using a knife from their own kitchen, she had come home afterward and exhibited not a trace of remorse. She hadn’t been ashamed of what she’d done; hadn’t been sorry. Instead, she had come home to her husband reveling in it—wearing the gory evidence of her crime as though it were a badge of courage or even honor. And then, by having Larry clean that evidence away and by welcoming him into her body, she had somehow made her crime his and had turned him into an accessory—a willing accessory—to murder. In the process, she had extracted something else from him as well—his tacit agreement to secrecy and silence.
Larry had always known Gayle was headstrong and ambitious, but until that night he would never have thought her capable of murder. She had been provoked—pushed beyond the limits of her endurance. And what had caused that to happen? Larry’s actions. Larry’s stupidity. And that made all of this Larry’s fault. He was the one who had pushed Gayle to this appalling extremity. No matter what the law said, in Larry’s mind and heart he really was an accessory to murder—both before and after the fact. If Gayle went down for the crime, so would he.
He could hear himself now lamely trying to explain to some stupid cop exactly how it had all come about. Well, yes, his wife had come home covered in blood. “And what did you do then, Dr. Stryker?” the cop would ask, and Larry would have to explain how first he had cleaned Gayle up by getting into the shower with her and then screwing her brains out before finally getting around to calling the authorities. Try telling that to a jury—or a judge.
It was almost dawn before Larry finally began to come to grips with the reality of his predicament. The unspoken complicity Gayle had exacted from him in the bathtub and in the bedroom was far more all-encompassing and compelling than any paltry marriage vows. Those Larry had broken time and again without so much as a second thought.
But this was something else. Ten years ago, in a church, he had promised to love and cherish Gayle Madison Stryker until “death do us part.” As dawn began to color the sky outside their bedroom window, he finally saw how those very same words now meant something else entirely. Gayle had Larry by the throat and by the balls, and she wasn’t letting him get away. Ever. And maybe that wasn’t half bad.
Larry had always been his mother’s “good boy,” not because he had never been in trouble but because he had never been caught. Growing up in a time that predated video surveillance, he had shop-lifted with impunity all through grade school and high school, and he had loved it. Had loved doing it and getting away with it; had loved living on the edge where he might be caught but wasn’t. He had loved being accepted as an “exemplary” student—as someone his teachers pointed out as a “perfect role model” for others—when Larry, in fact, knew better.
He had married Gayle because she was beautiful and rich, but it had never occurred to him that they