Act of Deceit

Chapter 36

“Y ou mean it was true?” Janie said, as she moved a stack of books from a shelf to a box in her bedroom.

It was 8 A.M., an hour after Donnally had left Sonny’s house.

“Don’t change the subject,” Donnally said, standing in the doorway. “I’m sorry about what I said. You don’t need to move out.”

“You don’t have to be sorry. You did me a favor by knocking me out of orbit. It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.”

Donnally shrugged. “Have it your way.”

“You may want to try it, too.”

“So this is for my benefit?”

She stared at him for a moment. “Your orbit was never around me.”

But it was once.

He knew it and she knew it, from the moment he’d entered her office, sent by SFPD under the assumption that he needed to get his head straight after being shot and killing the two gangsters. He had taken a look at her, underwent what felt like the Big Bang, then asked, “Can a patient date his shrink?” She smiled and told him no. He then turned around and walked back out the door. Thirty seconds later, her phone rang, she said yes to a new question, and he hadn’t asked another woman out since.

Standing there looking at her now, he realized the problem was not that there wasn’t an orbit, but that there was.

For too many years, they had been like bodies in motion, pulled together by attraction and pulled apart by inertia, and it was momentary acceleration in one direction or another that had replaced the exhilaration that had swept them along for the first few years. In the end, there hadn’t even been enough passion to carry them through with their plan for her to join him in Mount Shasta and work in the nearby VA clinic.

Donnally walked out of her room, already imagining the house empty. Then he noticed a worn spot on the hallway carpet and scuff marks on the wall and a chip out of the paint on the corner near the top of the stairs.

All of that had been invisible just two minutes earlier.

He couldn’t decide whether he was already starting to think like a landlord or it was just guilt about how he had let the house deteriorate.

By the time he arrived at the bottom of the stairs he’d almost worked himself around to the sort of place he always did: It didn’t make any difference which it was or how he felt about it.

Things just are the way they are.

He’d fix the place up, rent it out, and head back up to Mount Shasta.

Except there was a new void in his life. An emptiness. And not just because Janie was leaving, but because the trail from Mauricio’s deathbed to Anna’s killers had ended almost a generation earlier, in a history he wasn’t part of and that didn’t feel real to him.

Donnally walked into Janie’s office and used her computer to run a news archive search for articles about Artie and Robert Trueblood, but he couldn’t find any murder victims with those names. He discovered that the true names of the suspects in the New Jersey armored car case were Willie Carley and Julius Moran, but those didn’t show up in local homicide reports either. Finally he searched for double murders during the weeks after Anna was killed, and there it was.