Part 1 (2/2)

”What are you doing here?” I asked.

”I've been transferred,” she said. ”Just this week. I can't believe I ran into you like this. Tell me you're not still married.”

I smiled. As much as I hated to admit it, there had been something between us in law school. It was an attraction that was deep and physical, and it took every bit of control I could muster to resist her. Not that she made it easy. She hit on me openly and shamelessly. She even hit on me in front of my wife, Caroline, a couple of times; I remember it was all I could do to keep Caroline from punching her in the nose.

”Still married,” I said. ”It's been good.”

”How many kids did you end up with?”

”Just the two. They're both out of the house now. What about you? Are you married?”

”I'm Leah McCoy now,” she said. ”I got married five years after we graduated. His name is Carmack McCoy, everybody calls him Mack. Great guy.”

”Kids?”

”One. Robert. He's fifteen years old, and he's not happy about moving here. He's not happy about much of anything, really. If you want to know the truth, he's a pain in the b.u.t.t.”

”Teenager,” I said. ”It'll get better.”

She squeezed both of my hands.

”You look good, Joe,” she said.

”Thanks, so do you.”

She was tall, just under six feet, lean and leggy. She was wearing running gear skimpy shorts and a light blue, sleeveless top and still had a sheen of sweat on her tanned face.

”Would you be interested in having an affair?” she asked. ”I'm so bored.”

”Who. . . ah, who transferred you here? Who are you working for?”

”I was kidding, Joe. My husband is a super-human. There isn't a boring bone in his body. And I work for Uncle Sam himself. I'm an FBI agent, believe it or not. So is Mack.”

”No kidding? How long have you been with the FBI?”

”Fifteen years. I worked for an insurance defense firm in Nashville after law school, but I hated it. I met Mack at a bar on Printer's Alley. We started dating and got married a year later. He was already an agent, and one day when I was complaining about work he suggested that I apply to the bureau, so I did. They hired me, and Mack and I have been with them ever since. It's been an interesting life. We've lived in a bunch of places, most recently Miami. I loved the work there, but I hated the climate. We both put in for transfers to Tennessee about a year ago, and a couple of jobs came open. They gave us twenty-four hours to make up our minds. It didn't take me twenty-four seconds.”

”So you're working in the Johnson City office?”

”No, I'm in Greeneville. Mack's in Johnson City.”

”Only thirty miles apart. That's not so bad. What kind of cases are you going to be working?”

”I'm going to be doing crimes against children: kidnappings, p.o.r.nography, stuff like that. Mack worked drugs in Miami, but he's going to work public corruption here.”

”I'm sure there's plenty of work for both of you.”

”Yeah, it's a shame, but it's true.”

The handle on the gas pump popped, indicating the tank was full and breaking the momentum of the conversation.

”We should get together,” Leah said, ”the four of us.”

”Definitely. Where are you living?”

”Just down the road. Big brick house. The corner of Highway 36 and Boring Chapel Road.”

”I know exactly the house you're talking about. Been for sale for about a year.”

”Not anymore.” She kissed me lightly on the cheek. ”I'll see you around, big boy.”

She turned and I watched her walk away toward her car. She knew I was watching, because halfway across the lot she blew a kiss over her shoulder and started swaying her hips back and forth like a fas.h.i.+on model on a runway. She climbed into a charcoal gray Infiniti and pulled away.

I got back into the truck thinking about what she'd said: ”We should get together, the four of us.”

Caroline would be thrilled.

Chapter Three.

Seeing Leah tripped another emotional trigger, and as I drove toward home, I found myself wondering about the choices I'd made and the stark contrast between my professional life and my personal life. When I walked out the door each morning, it was as though I stepped into a different plane of existence. Everywhere I turned, there were battles to be fought: battles with defense lawyers, battles with trial judges and appellate judges, battles with defendants and victims and victims' families, battles with employees, and worst of all, battles with my own conscience. There were days I'd return home feeling like I'd been abandoned by my own soul, like it had been ripped from my very being and had crawled off to hide, wounded and bleeding, until it had healed enough to rejoin the fight.

But at home, things were different. Caroline and I had been together since high school and were still deeply in love. She'd been battling breast cancer for more than two years and had been deeply scarred, both physically and emotionally. There was now a long, pink ridge across Caroline's lower abdomen and two more that ran from her scapulas to the small of her back, each a result and a painful reminder of the three failed attempts to reconstruct her amputated breast. Her surgeon had decided that replacing the breast with a ”flap,” or slab of transplanted tissue, was the best course of action. He took the first flap from her abdomen and it seemed to do well until she underwent radiation therapy. The radiation caused the blood vessels in both the flap and the surrounding tissue to shrink to less than half their normal size, and most of the flap died, liquefied, and exited her body through wounds that opened like large blisters and took months to heal.

Six months after the first failure, the surgeon decided to try again. This time the flap came from muscle and tissue in Caroline's back, but because the radiated blood vessels couldn't handle the amount of blood being carried to the site by the healthy vessels, most of that flap died, too, leaving her with another b.l.o.o.d.y mess that seemed as though it would never heal. A year later, over my strenuous objection, Caroline consented to a third attempt at reconstruction. The surgeon, a.s.suring us all the while that the third time would be the charm, ”harvested” yet another flap from the other side of her back and transplanted it to the same site. Less than a week later, the transplanted flap began to turn black. The surgery failed so miserably that the surgeon had to remove it. So after more than two years and nearly a dozen surgeries, Caroline now had what looked like a large shark bite where her breast used to be. I dressed the wound every day, and Caroline went about her life as though it wasn't there. I could no longer accompany her on visits to the surgeon, however. His arrogance had caused Caroline untold amounts of pain, heartache and worry, and I wanted to snap his neck like a dry twig.

But I'd grown accustomed to the wounds and the scars that marked Caroline's body like bomb craters on a battlefield. To me, she was still the same beautiful creature I'd fallen in love with so many years ago. I think I loved her even more, if that was possible. Through it all: the chemotherapy, the radiation, the sickness, the fatigue, the surgeries, she'd remained unfailingly upbeat and positive. On the extremely rare occasions that her resolve would begin to flag, she would pull herself out of it immediately and would even go so far as to apologize to me for being weak. She'd shown such courage and such strength during her illness that it left me in awe, and whenever I began to feel sorry for myself because of what I did for a living, all I had to do was think about Caroline and what she'd been through. My problems paled in comparison.

Our eldest child, Jack, had been drafted by the Detroit Tigers after his junior year of college and was finis.h.i.+ng up his first season in the minors down in Florida. Our daughter, Lilly, was just beginning her junior year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and was enjoying her life away from home. Caroline and I shared the house with a couple of dogs, a German shepherd named Rio and a teacup poodle named Chico. We'd saved plenty of money and Caroline had invested it judiciously, primarily by staying away from the wolves on Wall Street. I should have enjoyed life more, but just beneath the surface of my psyche, a bubbling pool of turmoil churned like magma inside a volcano. I struggled constantly to contain this nagging sense of doom and inner rage that seemed to intensify as I grew older. I thought I knew its origins, believed I had a fundamental understanding of the events that had nurtured it over the course of my life, and I'd attempted to take steps many steps in a sustained and determined effort to diffuse it, but still it remained. Most often, the rage manifested itself in the form of nightmares vivid, violent scenes that would cause me to wake up screaming and sweating. Worst of all, they caused me to fear sleep, to avoid it at both a conscious and subconscious level, and the resulting deprivation would inevitably result in exhaustion, followed by restless, involuntary sleep, and even more nightmares. Occasionally, if enough pressure was brought to bear, the psychic magma would spill over the sides of my inner volcano into molten lava and I would lash out, sometimes verbally, sometimes physically. It was as if I would suddenly become some type of feral being, undomesticated and violent, and I would focus my rage upon whatever, or whomever, had caused the internal pressure to rise to the boiling point.

Whenever it happened, whenever I allowed the demons from the past to gain the upper hand, I wound turn, inevitably, to Caroline. She was my Athena, my Great Ameliorator. She knew how to soothe me, how to convince me that the world was not as dangerous as I might believe it to be. She reminded me always that love is most important in this world, that I was loved, and that despite my psychological torments I retained a far greater capacity for love than for violence. She would patiently rea.s.sure me that the path I'd chosen was the right path, that I wasn't wasting my life, that not only was I relevant, I was necessary. I suspected at some level that she was placating me, but she always managed to do it in a manner that convinced me, at least for awhile, that what she was saying was true, and that, as the cliche goes, everything would be alright.

The sun was well above the horizon as I pulled into the driveway. A red Mustang that belonged to my sister, Sarah, was parked to the right of the garage. Sarah was a year older than me, a dark-haired, green-eyed, hard-bodied woman who was living proof of the power of genetics. She's spent most of her adult life abusing herself with drugs and alcohol and had spent a fair amount of time in jail, but you'd never have guessed it by looking at her. With the exception of tiny crows' feet at the corners of her eyes, she appeared the picture of health and clean living.

I hadn't seen Sarah in over a month, which was always a bad sign. So was the fact that she'd apparently come over unannounced on a Sunday morning.

I knew something was wrong as soon as I walked in the door. Sarah and Caroline were standing next to the kitchen table. Caroline's arms were around Sarah's neck and Sarah, who wasn't given to displays of emotion other than anger, was sobbing. Rio, our German shepherd, was lying next to the wall to their left. He must have sensed the sadness in the room, because he always greeted me enthusiastically. His ears perked up and he looked at me, but he didn't move. I walked across the kitchen and caught Caroline's eye. She was stroking the back of Sarah's head, and I could see that she, too, was crying.

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