“It’s a fake meeting that’s about to start again, if you don’t get to the point,” she says.
“I want to talk to the agent heading up the task force on Walter Timmerman.”
“You mean the task force you don’t even know about because I never told you?”
“That’s the very one.”
“Forget it, Andy.”
“I know who killed the Timmermans, and I thought I should share it with the government, my government, as a way to demonstrate my patriotism.”
“I’m getting all misty.”
“I would think that a task force investigating Walter Timmerman might want to find out who killed him. That might even be one of their primary tasks.” I’m overstating things a bit here, but I’m comfortable with the assumption that if Childs admitted killing Diana Timmerman, then he must have killed Walter as well.
“Was it your client?”
“No.”
“Is your client still in jail?” she asks.
“That’s another story,” I say. “Can you set up a meeting?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she says.
“Your country will be forever grateful to you.”
I ASSIGN SAM WILLIS THE JOB of giving Thomas Sykes a cyber strip search.
Maybe it will turn out that all Sykes was doing was getting into his partner’s wife’s pants, but I want to know what else he was getting into before the Timmermans died.
Laurie has cooked dinner tonight, the first time she’s done so since she was shot. She’s doing remarkably well; though her walk is unsteady, her facial features and speech are both almost back to normal. She still tires easily, which drives her crazy. I know that, because she tells me so.
I have my own, admittedly unscientific, way of measuring how Laurie is progressing. Basically, my theory is that the more I think about sex, the healthier she must be.
For a few weeks after the shooting, sex was the farthest thing from my mind. All I cared about, all I obsessed over, was Laurie surviving and then someday regaining her health and strength.
Then, as it became clear she was out of the woods and on the way to a full recovery, the idea of sex as an eventual possibility appeared on the horizon. But it was certainly nothing imminent, and I just as certainly didn’t consider doing anything about it.
But now I detect some faint rumblings out there. It’s still not anything I would act on; my fears of rejection and humiliation would simultaneously rule that out. But I am definitely at the point where if Laurie suggested it, it would not provoke a raging argument. It might even be good for her psychologically, and I’m certainly a guy who would do anything to help.
After dinner Laurie makes coffee in two devices she uses, which involve pushing down on the tops and sort of squeezing the coffee out. I think they’re called French presses and she considers this the only way to drink coffee. Unfortunately, my taste buds aren’t quite sensitive enough to know the difference. I can happily drink any kind of coffee, even instant, while Laurie would rather drink instant cyanide.
“Andy, was there ever a time when you thought I was going to die?”
My knee-jerk instinct is to say no, but for some reason I decide to try the truth, just to see how it goes. “I thought you had died,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
I tell her about receiving the phone call in Hatchet’s office from Pete, and my desperate fear that he wasn’t telling me the full truth, that he was just getting me down to the hospital so he could convey the devastating news in person.
“That must have been awful for you,” she says.
“I can’t ever remember a worse time in my life. But once I got there, and you came out of surgery, then I knew you were going to make it.”
“What made you so sure?”
“It was like, once I could put my mind to it, then I could control it. I thought you had died before I had a chance to focus on your recovery, but once I had that chance, I knew we’d make it.”
“We’d make it?”
“I only wanted to live if you did.”
“Please don’t say that,” she says.
I nod. “Okay. I won’t say it.”
Laurie is quiet for a few moments, then says, “We’ve never talked about dying, about one of us being left behind.”
“We don’t talk about a lot of things,” I say. “It’s natural; we’re both busy, and we’re usually in different time zones.”
She smiles. “We talk about our days; I tell you how my day went, and you tell me about yours.”
“I have to come up with more interesting stories. Or more interesting days,” I say.
“I love my job, Andy. And I love Findlay. And I love you.”
“You’ve got your cake and you’re eating it.” It comes off as a little petulant, probably because it is.
“I know you’re not satisfied, Andy. And I’m not, either. I just don’t know how to make it better.”
“For now you should just worry about getting better.”
“I am,” she says. Then, “I’d like to go with you tomorrow night.”
“To the dog show?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I need to get out of the house; it will help me feel alive again.”
“You think you’re up to it?”
“Why? What are you going to do there?”