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“Is he dead?” Katy whispered. “I hope he’s dead. I don’t care if I go to jail so long as he’s dead.”
Hobbs emerged from the house. He saw Luke and Katy and came toward them.
Katy wrapped her arms around her midsection and rocked. “Martin wouldn’t have stopped. I know him. He would not have stopped. Ever.”
Hobbs reached the vehicle. He gave Luke an unreadable look and then he turned to Katy.
“Your husband is dead, Ms.Pilcher,” he said.
Katy closed her eyes. “Good. Will I go to jail?”
“No,” Hobbs said. “It was a clear case of self-defense as far as I’m concerned, and I’m the one who makes that call in this town. But I need you to tell me exactly what happened in there.”
“I’m not sure,” Katy admitted. “I think he had a stroke or a seizure. Maybe a heart attack. He just seemed to forget that I was there. He dropped the gun and sank to his knees, clutching at his chest. I grabbed the gun and pulled the trigger.”
“Did your husband have any underlying health conditions?” Hobbs asked.
Katy shook her head. “No. He never went to doctors. He didn’t trust them.”
“We’ll know more after the coroner examines him,” Hobbs said. “But no question about it—he’s dead, and you won’t face charges.”
Katy closed her eyes. “It’s finally over.”
“I’ll need a statement,” Hobbs said. “But it can wait.”
“I don’t want to go back into the cabin,” Katy said.
“Is there anyone you can stay with?” Hobbs said.
Katy shook her head. “I don’t know anyone in town. My daughtermoved to Phoenix. Pilcher isn’t her father. She hated him. She’ll be very glad he’s gone. So am I. Now I can go stay with Jenny. I couldn’t before, you see. I knew he would follow me and maybe kill her, too.”
“We’ll move you to a local motel tonight,” Hobbs said. He looked at the officer who had brought Katy to the vehicle. “Call the Clearwater Inn and tell Valerie we need a room for a couple of days for Ms.Pilcher.”
“Yes, sir,” the officer said.
Luke took his hand off the roof of the patrol car and looked at the shadowed doorway of the house. The embers of a thought he had been trying to suppress ignited.
Did I flatline him?
He had not been trying to stop Pilcher’s heart today. His goal had been to render the man unconscious. But Pilcher was dead, and while that was certainly the most convenient outcome for his wife and the world in general, it left one huge unanswered question. Had he been dead before his wife pulled the trigger?
Luke nodded to Hobbs and walked to the SUV he had left on the side of the road. He could feel the cop’s speculative eyes on him every step of the way. There would be no more friendly nights of poker and whiskey at Hobbs’s house.
He got behind the wheel of the SUV.
What had he become?
The familiar scene from his nightmares, the one in which he gripped a scalpel and walked through the blood of two dead men lying on the floor of a lab, flashed in front of his eyes.
He forced himself to focus on starting the vehicle. In the process he managed to suppress the vision. But he could not silence the voices of the two men from last night’s edition of the recurring nightmare.
“Subject A is not responding. We will have to terminate.”
“Wait. He may pull out of it. We can’t afford another failure. He’s worth a fucking fortune.”
“Only if he’s a success. If he does survive there will be a high probability of insanity. The client is paying for a psychically enhanced assassin, not a monster with a lethal talent.”
“We can’t be sure the subject will be insane if he survives. If he is we can terminate later.”
