Chasing The Dead

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Bonnie was waiting for Alex when she got home, dressed, pressed, and ready to go in a pair of dark-wash skinny jeans, a coral open-front blazer over a white silk blouse buttoned at the neck, the tail hanging over her jeans, and three-inch heels showing off her legs, as if they needed any help. Hands on her hips, she took one look at Alex and shook her head.

“I’m not going anywhere with you looking like that. Where have you been? Never mind,” Bonnie said, raising a palm. “I don’t want to know. Take a shower and put on something clean. We’ll pay our respects to Robin’s family and then we’ll get something to eat. I’m famished, so get moving. Chop, chop,” she added, clapping her hands.

Alex grinned, enjoying Bonnie’s dismay at her appearance. It was one of their rituals, Bonnie pretending to be annoyed, Alex pretending to be sorry, both of them keeping their tongues firmly in their cheeks.

“On my way. I’ll be ready sooner if you lotion my back when I get out of the shower.”

“Oh, no. If I do, the only thing we’ll be having for dinner is each other. Now, get moving, sister.”

Standing in the shower, hot water pulsating on the back of her neck, she thought about the little game they’d played when she walked in the house. Their relationship was made of such moments. They were familiar and easy, like muscle memory, only for lovers. But this one was so out of sync with the day she’d had that she didn’t know what to make of it or Bonnie or them. She was absent the day they taught how to integrate murder and death threats into a quiet home life.

She and Bonnie had always shared whatever was going on at work, dancing around client and patient confidentiality like most couples who swore their mates to secrecy, picking one up when things went wrong, patting the other on the back for a job well done. Intimacy wasn’t just about sex or just about their private life. It was about intertwining everything, blurring the line between where one of them ended and the other began.

Alex worried that her life was becoming compartmentalized, Bonnie in one box, Dwayne Reed and Judge West in another, their box getting crowded with the additions of Hank Rossi, Jared Bell, Mathew Woodrell, Robin Norris, and her killer. She had tried convincing herself that Judge West was building this wall between her and Bonnie, but she knew that she was the one laying the bricks, each made of the secrets she was keeping from the woman she loved.

And now Bonnie wanted to bring a baby into their lives at the very moment that Robin’s killer might have set his sights on her. Overcome at the image of Bonnie standing at her grave, holding their baby in her arms, she began to cry, pounding the shower walls with both fists, turning her back to the wall and sliding to the floor, letting the water beat down on her.

“Are you drowning in there?” Bonnie said, knocking on the bathroom door a few minutes later.

Alex pulled herself up. “Not yet. Be out in a second.”

She put on faded denims, a untucked pale blue checked shirt beneath a gray and blue wide-striped sweater, and a pair of black Kick Hi boots, ran her fingers through her damp hair, applied ChapStick to her lips, and pronounced herself ready.

Minutes later they were in Bonnie’s Audi, the satellite radio playing Billy Joel’s “Just The Way You Are,” a song they claimed as theirs, repeating the promise not to change they’d made to each other when they fell in love. Settling back in her plush leather seat, inhaling Bonnie’s perfume and surrounded by tons of high-performance German engineering, Alex felt cocooned and safe. For the first time all day, she thought they would survive all of this, though she had no rational reason to think so, only that she would find a way. When they stopped for a traffic light, she leaned over and pulled Bonnie toward her for a long, deep kiss.

“Boy!” Bonnie said when Alex let go. “I guess I’m buying dinner.”

Robin had lived in Overland Park, which was on the Kansas side of the Kansas City metropolitan area. The state line was a convenient geographic demarcation that allowed Kansas residents to claim the attractions on the Missouri side-professional sports teams, high-end stores and restaurants, art galleries and museums-as their own while disavowing Kansas City’s failing public schools, persistent crime rate, and gangs as someone else’s problem. Except for Robin, who’d taken the good with the bad, dedicating herself to representing the dropouts, drug addicts, and gangbangers who’d found their way to her public defender’s office.

She’d lived on a quiet, tree-lined street in a modest stone and stucco house with a two-car garage, a semiparched lawn, and a basketball net mounted on a steel post on the side of the driveway. Four cars were parked in front of the house, two others in the driveway.

Bonnie slowed as they approached the house. Two men got out of one of the cars in the driveway, one of them limping.

“Don’t stop. Keep going,” Alex said.

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“That’s Rossi,” she said, pointing at the men, “and the one with the limp is a detective named Wheeler.”

“So? I’m no fan of Rossi, but why should we let him keep us from offering our condolences to the family? If they can, we can too.”

“Just keep going. I’ve had enough Rossi for one day, and they aren’t there to offer their condolences.”

Bonnie drove past the house, glancing at Alex. “How could you know that?”

Alex took a deep breath, her stomach churning. “Because Robin was murdered. It’s Rossi and Wheeler’s case. They’re probably there to tell the family, which makes it the wrong time for visiting.”

Bonnie stopped the car at the end of the block, turning to Alex, her eyes narrowed, her mouth tight.

“And you were going to tell me this when?”

“Soon,” Alex said, her face reddening. “Tonight, okay? I just found out this afternoon, and when I got home, you were ready to go and you told me to jump in the shower and then next thing I know, here we are.”

“No. There’s no ‘next thing I know here we are.’ Not after we’ve been in the car for twenty minutes. You couldn’t have mentioned it?”

“I know. I know and I’m sorry. It’s just that. .” She stopped, blinking, shaking her head and then staring out the window. “This has been. .” She hesitated again, turning back to Bonnie, swallowing hard, and letting out a deep breath. “Some kind of day.”

Bonnie eased up, putting her hand on Alex’s shoulder. “There’s more, isn’t there?”

Alex nodded.

“About Robin or something else?”

“Both.”

“Are you in trouble?”

“Maybe.”

“Are you going to tell me, or do I have to worry without knowing what I’m worrying about?”

Alex looked at her, torn between adding another brick and knocking down the wall. Her eyes filled; a tremor rattled outward from her belly. She’d been holding so much back, and all she wanted was to let it go.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice thick. “I’ll tell you everything. Let’s go home.”