The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [75]
“Is there any reason Nada would go back to Chicago?”
Amoyo thought about it. “Her mom is still there, as far as I know. At least part of the year. But they never even spoke as long as we were together. Why?”
Wayne hesitated, but if he wanted information, he’d also have to give it. “She was talking to a guy at the casino. His name was Gary Jameson. I think he was offering her a job in Chicago.”
Laughing, Amoyo said, “Well, there you go. Mystery solved, right?”
“You think she’d just pack up and move to the Midwest?”
“They got blackjack there?”
“Kind of. Riverboats.”
“Then hell yeah. Places don’t mean anything to her. The world in her head is so much bigger than the world outside. Las Vegas, Montana, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Istanbul—they’re all the same place. It’s all just outside to her. And she doesn’t really say good-bye like other people you know.” Wayne thought he almost looked nostalgic for a second. “Maybe the other night was her way of saying good-bye to me.”
Wayne wanted to punch him.
23
BEA BEAUJON had prosecuted maybe a dozen cases of home invasion, and twice that many rapes (including a satisfying guilty plea from Phillip Truman just that afternoon). She’d put away abusive husbands and identity thieves. She’d been the lead prosecutor in three murder trials and the second chair in seven more, all convictions. Frequently, one of the obstacles to conviction was what she called “the stupid effect.” She couldn’t count the number of times, when debriefing a jury, she’d heard one of them say about the victim, “I know it wasn’t her fault, but how could she be that stupid?”
Bea didn’t always have a good answer.
In her own case, when she came home in the early-morning dark and saw a broken window in the side of the garage and debris scattered across the painted concrete as if someone had cleared Donald’s workbench with a dramatic sweep of his arm, she didn’t run back down the driveway to a neighbor’s house, as a meditative juror might expect her to have done, or even dial 911 on her cell phone. She kept walking farther and farther into her home, examining the damage, trying to make sense of it, calling out to her husband, “Donald? Don? Don? Donald?”
She extracted Nada’s twenty-five-dollar Colossus chip from her purse, her new good-luck charm, and rubbed the scratch on it for comfort. She’d last spoken to Canada on the phone three days ago. She’d taken the job in Chicago and Bea begged her to get a cell phone, even one of those drugstore throwaways so popular with the drug dealers Bea put away. “The police are looking for you,” Bea had said. Nada joked that was exactly why she didn’t have a cell phone. There were too many people she didn’t want to talk to. The chip now reminded Bea, fleetingly, that she hadn’t returned the call to that detective in Chicago.
Bea followed the light bleeding down the stairs, calling out “Donald” again and again, as if repeating the name of the person she loved most in the world would somehow ward off the thing she most feared. As a hypothetical juror might have pointed out, a prudent person (especially one who had just lectured her friend on the subject) might have taken the cell phone from her purse and dialed 911, but Bea did not.
The stairs led straight up to a small square landing and a wall with a light switch and a photo of their daughter, Lori. Bea froze, then recalled that Lori was at a friend’s house for the night. She pushed aside her fear and pressed her feet slowly against each of the last four steps to the second floor.
“Don?”
He was in their bedroom, kneeling on the floor, head bowed, hands tied behind his back. His shirt was torn, a bruise painted a third of his face purple, and one eye was swollen shut. Blood and dirt formed a gory paste in his thin blond-gray hair. His lips moved.
Bea screamed, loud and long, a horror movie scream that was full of fright and surprise and despair and loss. Fear controlled her now. Fear of the inescapable. The fear a passenger must feel on a crashing airplane’s rapid