Nik Kane Alaska Mystery - 02 - Capitol Offense Read Free Page B

Move on with your life, and let me move on with mine.”
    Kane bit back a smart-ass remark and waited. He still didn’t understand what had happened between them. For twenty-five years Laurie had been, in addition to everything else, his best friend. She’d stood behind him during his trial and his years in prison, raising their kids, visiting him every week, toughing it out. Then, less than a month after he’d gotten out, she’d announced that she wanted a divorce.
    She’d gone out and gotten one, too. Kane couldn’t bring himself to fight it, couldn’t see rewarding her for all she’d done by being a jerk about it. But he’d dragged his feet, not signing the final papers until she’d gone off on him like a nuclear explosion. And, for some reason, he was unable to clear out of the house and finish the job.
    The house, their house, where they’d fought and sat companionably and made love and raised children, was just hers now, and she wanted him to remove his camping gear and guns and tools and everything else that reminded her of him, of them. She’d already removed everything inside the house, the gifts he’d given her and the photographs he was in, even the dishes they’d eaten off of. She’d covered the floors with new carpet and the walls with new paint. Laurie had erased him from her life, except for those few belongings still in the garage.
    He didn’t think she was being unreasonable, really, to want him out, to remove the last of his clutter from her life, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. And he didn’t understand why.
    “My analyst says you’re trying to hold on to me,” Laurie said. After all their years together, she had a spooky ability to tell what he was thinking. “She says leaving things here is an attempt to exercise control over me and our relationship.”
    Kane laughed.
    “Well, that’s really working, isn’t it?” he said. He could hear the self-pity in his voice and it made him disgusted with himself.
    “Nik, please,” Laurie said. “You’re just making this harder for me. And for yourself.”
    Kane sighed. She was right, of course. And she was entitled to the life she wanted, even if it was without him. He knew that he couldn’t keep them together on his own. He knew that the right thing, the honorable thing, was to wish her luck and let her go. He thought of himself as a pragmatist, was proud of his ability to face facts without wincing, and yet…and yet he just wasn’t able to do the pragmatic thing here.
    Maybe I am a control freak, he thought, just like Laurie and her goddamn analyst say.
    “Okay,” he said. “I may be going out of town on a case, but if I do I’ll come and get that stuff first thing when I get back.”
    “Do you think it will be long?” Laurie asked.
    “I don’t know,” Kane said. “I’m going to Juneau. It’s that case of murder in the legislature, the young woman who was killed there a few days ago. It could be a while.”
    “Oh,” Laurie said. “I read about that in the newspaper. The White Rose Murder, they’re calling it.” She paused. “Are you sure you want to get mixed up in all that?”
    Kane heard trouble in her voice.
    “What is it, Laurie?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”
    “Nothing, Nik,” she said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
    Kane waited. She’d tell him. She was too honest not to.
    “Dylan’s down there,” she said.
    It took Kane a moment to make sense of what she’d said.
    “Dylan?” he said. “Our son, Dylan? He’s in Juneau?”
    Dylan was the youngest of their three children, the only boy. He’d been twelve when Kane went off to prison, and he’d taken his father’s departure hard. He was at college when Kane got out, and when the boy returned for the summer he’d refused to even speak to Kane. As a child Dylan had been mercurial, happy one minute and weeping the next, full of enthusiasms that died out as quickly as they were born. In his father’s case, though, he seemed to have settled on