Read Online The 37th Hour by Jodi Compton - Free Book Online Page B

carpet runner and my steps were audible only to me. I stopped just short of the kitchen doorway.
    Genevieve sat at the broad table where Deborah had corrected papers, her back to me. A bottle of scotch and a glass with about two fingers in it sat in front of her.
    How do you counsel your own mentor, be an authority to your authority figure? I had a sudden desire to go back to bed.
    You’re her partner, Shiloh had said.
    I stepped into the kitchen instead, pulled up a chair, sat down with her. Genevieve looked at me with no great surprise, but there was a dark light in her eyes that I didn’t think I’d seen before. Then she said, “He’s back in Blue Earth.”
    She meant Shorty. Royce Stewart.
    “I know,” I said.
    “I have a friend in the Dispatch office down there. She says he can be counted on to be at the bar every night. With his friends. How does a guy like that even have any friends?” Her speech wasn’t slurred, but there was a certain impreciseness in it, as though her gaze, her speech, and her thoughts weren’t entirely in line with each other.
    “What do you think it is?” she demanded. “You think they don’t know he killed a teenage girl? Or that they just don’t care?”
    I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
    Genevieve lifted her glass and drank, a deeper draft than people usually take with hard liquor. “He walks home late at night, even though he lives outside of town, on the highway.”
    “You told me this before. Remember?” I said.
    And she had. It was understandable, her obsession with Stewart, but it made me uncomfortable.
    “Let her talk about it,” Shiloh had counseled, shortly before I left. “She’ll probably work it out of her system and move on in her own time. Kamareia’s dead, he’s alive and free . . . she’s not going to come to grips with that overnight.”
    But I had a more immediate concern.
    “Gen,” I said, “it’s starting to worry me, the way you talk about him.”
    She drank again, lowered the glass, and gave me a questioning look over the rim.
    “You wouldn’t be thinking of paying him a visit, would you?”
    “To do what?” Her face was open, as if she really didn’t know what I meant.
    “To kill him.” God, let me not be planting a seed in her mind that wasn’t there before.
    “I turned in my service weapon up in the Cities.”
    “And nothing is stopping you from buying one. Or getting one from a friend. There’re lots of guns in these parts.”
    “He didn’t kill Kamareia with a gun,” Genevieve said softly. She refilled her glass.
    “This is important, damn it. Don’t go flaky on me,” I said. “I need to know you wouldn’t go down there.”
    She waited a moment before speaking. “I’ve had to counsel the survivors of murder victims. They don’t get retribution, even when we catch the guy who did it. There’s no death penalty in Minnesota.” She thought. “I probably wouldn’t get away with killing him, either.”
    These were stock answers, and not entirely comforting.
    “There’s such a thing as revenge,” I pointed out. “Call it closure, even.”
    “Closure?” Genevieve said. “The hell with closure. I want my daughter back.”
    “Okay,” I said. “I understand.” There was so much bitterness in her voice that I believed she was telling the truth: she didn’t want to kill Royce Stewart.
    Genevieve looked at the empty space in front of me, as if just now realizing I hadn’t been drinking with her. “You want me to get you a glass?” she asked.
    “No,” I said. “We should probably go back to bed.”
    Genevieve ignored me and put her head down to rest her chin on her arms, which were folded on the table. “Are you and Shiloh going to have kids?”
    “That’s, uh . . .” I was surprised into stammering, “. . . that’s a long time in the future.” The question reminded me of something, and in a moment my mind retrieved it: Ainsley Carter asking, Do you have children, Detective Pribek? “I’m sure