Fruits of the Poisonous Tree Read Free Page A

touched my shoulder. “I’ll put her up at my house for a while—lots of room. Lots of people, too, when she wants the company.”
    I conceded the point and felt slightly foolish about my suggestion. “Thanks, Susan.”
    I paused a moment, trying to find the right words, knowing I’d done poorly enough already. Gail was looking at her hands in her lap—an obvious sign I’d overstayed a welcome I’d never received in the first place. Fighting the desire to at least touch her hair, I rose and stepped back.
    “Well, I’ll get out of here. Let me know if I can do anything to help.” I looked around. “Any of you—day or night.”
    Raffner nodded her thanks. Gail didn’t move.
    I took another step toward the door. “They’ll have to come back and ask you more questions—probably later today.”
    Gail’s head shot up. Her cheeks were wet with tears. “You’re not going to be on this case?” Her voice was incredulous, rich with betrayal.
    I opened my empty hands to her, burning with anger that I couldn’t immediately grant her one request. “I can’t say. They may not let me.”
    Her eyes blazed at me. “I want you on it, Joe.”
    I pursed my lips and nodded. “Okay. I’ll make it work somehow.”
    She looked at me a moment longer, her expression softening, becoming distant again—mourning the loss of something precious and irreplaceable. She went back to studying her hands.
    I moved to the door, at once eager and reluctant to leave. I paused there and glanced back at her, at her friends beginning to close around her once more.
    “I love you, Gail.”
    There was no response.

2
    THE LOBBY, AS IN SOME  Alice-in-Wonderland dream, was totally empty again, aside from Elizabeth Pace, alone and behind her curvilinear counter, who was talking on the phone. She waved at me and smiled as I passed through the electronically triggered double doors that led to the ambulance loading dock outside.
    The brittle air came as a relief, slightly stinging my cheeks and lungs as I drew in a deep breath. I stood there a moment, overlooking the parking lot, whose features were softly emerging as the harsh, unnatural sodium lights faded against the far gentler but more pervasive gray glow of the looming dawn.
    I was so overwhelmed by the feelings inside me, I was having a difficult time making sense of them. Moreover, I felt an urgent need to do so—and get on with the job at hand.
    Because that was the primary issue here—to do the job. I didn’t have the opportunity of escaping to the daylong demands of an accountant, or a backhoe operator, or a logger—of burying myself in something totally apart from what had happened to Gail and, through her, to me. My job was to eat, breathe, and live what she’d just been put through, not only because I was paid to do it, but because Gail had specifically requested it of me. That meant, despite Elizabeth Pace’s well-intentioned advice, that I was going to have to batten down some of the psychological hatches she’d urged me to throw open, and hope that the pressures behind them wouldn’t blow out at the wrong time or place.
    There was, however, one nugget of solace in my awkward position. Of all the gremlins that conspire to torture the mind of a rape victim, the conviction that her attacker is still out there, waiting to attack her again, is one of the most terrifying. And my job was to bring that guy in.
    Assuming they’d let me try.
    “How’s she doing?” The voice was Tony Brandt’s, coming from the dark far corner of the loading dock.
    I turned to see him leaning against the hospital wall, his hands buried in his trouser pockets, smoking his omnipresent pipe. “You still here? I thought you’d be at the scene by now, or updating the board.”
    Gail had recently been made chair of the town’s board of selectmen, currently a group of notoriously fickle people—and not to be left outside the informational loop for long.
    He smiled and pushed himself away from the wall