Katherine nodded. 'He was shot in the leg. But the bullet just missed an artery, Nancy said. He could have died. In Parkton, of all places. The suburbs are supposed to be safe, for God's sake.
It's not as if it happened in East Baltimore.'
Freeman stroked her hair. 'I know, I know,' was all he could think of saying.
'You're not even safe in your own home these days. Carjackings, robberies, shootings, even in the suburbs.' She pulled away from him. There were damp patches on her shirt from his wet chest and he could see the outline of her breasts through the material. 'I'm going to lie down,' she said. 'Maybe I'll take a pill.'
Katherine often had trouble sleeping and she had a bottle of Sominex in her bedside cabinet. He watched her walk down the hallway to the bedroom, a little surprised at her reaction because it wasn't like her to show so much emotion, not since her father had died, anyway. An aunt, admittedly one with whom she'd had little contact in recent years, had died after a short illness a few months earlier and she hadn't shown a tenth of the grief she was showing over a bullet in Art Brown's leg. Freeman scratched his wet hair. Maybe it was because Dr Brown was closer to home.
Katherine took Mersiha to all her sessions with the psychiatrist and they'd met socially at various charity functions, but even so her reaction seemed a little extreme. He wondered if there was something else worrying her.
He towelled himself dry, put on a bathrobe and went into their bedroom. She was already under the covers, a red satin sleep-mask over her eyes. The bottle of sleeping tablets was by the bed and she was snoring softly, but Freeman had the feeling that she was only pretending. He stood for a while, watching the slow rise and fall of the quilt, then he dressed in jeans and an old sweatshirt and went downstairs. Mersiha was still in the kitchen, sitting at the table and reading the Baltimore Sun.
She looked up and tapped an inside page of the newspaper.
'It's here,' she said. 'It happened yesterday morning. Isn't it amazing?'
Freeman sat down next to her and she slid the paper across to him. There were only half a dozen paragraphs on the page. The shooting in the leg of a Parkton psychiatrist wasn't considered a major news story on a day when two young girls had been killed in a drive-by shooting and a police officer had been shot in the chest during a city drugs bust. According to the article, an intruder had entered through an unlocked door and had surprised Dr Brown in his bedroom. The psychiatrist had told police that a young black male had threatened to shoot him unless he'd told him where he kept his money. When Dr Brown had insisted that there was no money in the house, the intruder had shot him once and fled. The description Dr Brown gave to the police fitted about half of the city's young black males. The gun had been a.22-calibre, the weapon of choice among inner-city drug dealers.
'Amazing, isn't it?' Mersiha said. 'I was supposed to see him tomorrow evening. That's why Nancy called. I guess that means no more sessions for a while.'
Freeman folded the paper and gently rapped his daughter on the head. 'I'm sure it'll take more than a bullet in the leg to stop Dr Brown from seeing you. Katherine said he'll be out of hospital in a day or two.'
Mersiha shook her head. 'She said Nancy gave her the names of some other shrinks. She said Dr Brown wouldn't be working for a while.'
'We'll see,' Freeman said. 'And don't call them shrinks.
At sixty dollars an hour they're highly trained professional psychiatrists, okay?'
Mersiha laughed. 'Sure, Dad. Whatever you say. Where's Katherine?'
Freeman nodded upstairs. 'In bed. She isn't feeling very well.'
'Shall I take her up something?'
'No, let her sleep. She's tired.' Freeman looked at his watch.
'Do you want to catch a movie?'
Mersiha's eyes widened. 'Yeah, sure!' she said. 'That'd be great.'
Katherine took the blue and white striped laundry bag out of the wicker basket and carried it over her shoulder to the bathroom opposite Mersiha's bedroom. She pulled out the laundry bag full of Mersiha's dirty clothes and dragged both bags down the stairs to the laundry room. After she'd emptied both bags on to the table, she quickly sorted through the pile, putting the whites on one side and everything else into the washing machine. She reached for a pair of Mersiha's black Levis and turned them inside out. There was something hard inside one of the back pockets. Katherine slid her fingers into the pocket and pulled out the object. It was a brass shell case, and it glittered under the fluorescent lights.
She frowned, tossed the cartridge into the air and caught it.
She made a fist and put it to her lips, blowing into her clenched hand like a magician preparing to make it disappear, but when she opened her fingers it was still there. She put it into the pocket of her dress and carried on throwing the dirty laundry into the washing machine.
Later, with the machine started on its washing cycle, she poured coffee into two mugs and carried them through into the sitting room where her husband was sitting with his feet on the coffee table, a stack of papers on his lap.
'Thanks, honey,' he said.
Katherine put the mugs on the table and tossed him the brass cartridge. Freeman caught it one-handed. 'What's this?' he said, frowning.
'What does it look like?' she asked.
'I know what it is, honey. Why are you giving it to me?'
'I found it in Mersiha's jeans?'
'You what?'
'I found it in the back pocket of her jeans. I just want to know what we're going to do about it. Or to be more accurate, what you're going to do about it.'
The?'
Katherine raised one eyebrow archly. 'Tony, I don't want to keep repeating myself. That's a cartridge case, isn't it?'
Freeman nodded. 'Yeah, a.22 by the look of it. What on earth would she be doing with it?' He looked up. 'Do you think she got it at school?' . 'I've no idea,' Katherine said.
'Have you found anything else?'
'I haven't searched her room, if that's what you mean. You know how closely she guards her privacy. I think you're going to have to talk to her. She's being funny with me at the moment.'
'Funny?'
'She doesn't seem to want even to be in the same room with me.'
'What sparked that off?'
'God knows. But I don't think she's in the mood for a heart-to-heart, not with me anyway. Besides, she's always been a daddy's girl.'
Freeman couldn't help but smile. 'We're both her parents.
Maybe we should tackle her together.'
Katherine shook her head. 'She's sure to feel threatened if we both confront her.'
'Toss you for it?' Freeman joked.
Katherine pointed her finger at her husband. 'It's your turn.'
'What do you mean, my turn? I tell you what, you take this one, and I'll give her the sex talk. Deal?'
Katherine smiled. 'You know full well that I gave her the sex talk two years ago. And the menstruation talk. And the drugs talk.'
'I did the drugs talk,' Freeman reminded her.