Read Online Life Penalty by Joy Fielding - Free Book Online

for his attention, for his willingness to listen. So many of her friends, those who called to voice their concern or who dropped over to the house, grew quickly uncomfortable as soon as Gail tried to talk about Cindy. They kept telling her it was better for her not to think about such things, and so Gail had stopped talking about Cindy, for their sakes, not for hers.
    “It’s not uncommon for murderers to show up at a victim’s funeral,” Lieutenant Cole was explaining. “It gives their sick minds a sense of power, I guess, kind of like the author of a play sticking around to catch the audience’s reaction after the last act. Part of him is daring everyone to catch him; the other part is relishing in the misery he’s caused. When has he been that powerful before?”
    Gail felt sick to her stomach. “You think he’ll be there?”
    “It’s just a possibility. We’ll have men all over, of course. If you spot anyone you don’t recognize, or think you see someone that looks uncomfortable, a little off in some vague way, someone who smiles maybe or who does something equally out of place, point him out as soon as you can. I’ll be right at your elbow.”
    Gail nodded, forcing herself to concentrate on what the lieutenant was saying. The man who murdered her little girl might also come to her funeral! The thought was too grotesque, too appalling. Her mind quickly sifted through the many crank phone calls she had received this past week: the angry voice which condemned her as a parent, the religious quacks who told her it was God’s punishment for her sins, the simply vicious who taunted her in little girl voices with cries of “Mommy!”
    A week ago she would not have thought such monsters existed, that people could be so willfully cruel to another human being already suffering so much pain. And yet the week had shown her that there was nothing human beings were incapable of doing, no level to whichthey could not descend. How had she failed to live in this world for almost forty years and not realize this before?
    Exactly seven days had passed since the thirtieth of April.
    Gail looked toward the coffee table in the living room. The morning paper lay stretched open across it. “The paper said there might be some connection between what happened to Cindy and that little girl who was killed a year ago …”
    “There’s no connection,” Lieutenant Cole stated immediately. “I don’t know where these reporters get their information sometimes. Karen Freed was run over by a hit-and-run driver. There was no sexual assault, nothing at all to connect the two cases.” Gail winced to hear her daughter referred to as a case, and looked back toward the newspaper.
    All the papers were making a great theatrical show of anger, screaming at the police in large black headlines to find the child killer before he struck again. But the effect of all that anger was only an increase in sales for the people who put out the papers. Perhaps the killer had purchased a copy.
    Perhaps the killer would be at the funeral.
    The television cameras followed them from the car to the church and later to the cemetery. Gail watched them with the detached curiosity of a spectator, which, she realized, in the last week, was the way in which she had come to view her life. Only when her thoughts turned to finding the man responsible for her daughter’s death did she feel any stirrings of life within her. Outwardly, she was there for those who needed her, to put her arms around Jennifer, her hand into Jack’s, her cheek against her mother’s. Inwardly, she watched her every move as if she were watching someone else, observing herself as if she were the central figure in aforeign film with subtitles she was unable to follow or to understand. She moved from room to room on cue, ate when she was directed to do so, even managed a smile when supplied with the proper motivation; but inside, she felt nothing.
    She listened to the words of the minister with