Verdict in Blood - By Gail Bowen Page 0,1

“I’m afraid I do,” she said. “I think it must be Justine Blackwell.”

“The judge,” I said. “But you were just at her party tonight.”

“I was,” Hilda said, stroking the dragon’s head thoughtfully. “That book you’re holding belongs to her. There’d been some disturbing developments in her life, and she wanted my opinion on them. I left your number with her because she was going to call me later today.”

“Come downstairs, and we’ll have that tea,” I said.

“I’d like to dress first,” Hilda said. “I wouldn’t be comfortable receiving a member of the police force in my robe.”

I’d just plugged in the kettle when the phone rang again. It was Alex Kequahtooway. “Jo, I know it’s late, but you said to call as soon as I heard from Eli.”

“He called you?”

“He’s back. He was here when I got home.”

“Oh, Alex, I’m so glad. Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. When I walked in, he’d just got out of the shower. He went into his room and started taking fresh clothes out of his drawers. Jo, he didn’t say a word to me. It was as if I wasn’t there. At first, I thought he was on something, but I’ve seen kids wasted on just about every substance there is, and this is different.”

“Have you called Dr. Rayner?”

“I tried her earlier in the evening. I thought Eli might have got in touch with her, but there was no answer. Of course, it’s a holiday weekend. I’m going to call again, but if I don’t connect, I’m going to take Eli down to emergency. I hate to bring in another shrink, but I just don’t know what to do for him, and I don’t want to blow it.”

“You won’t,” I said. “Eli’s going to be fine. He’s come a long way this summer. Most importantly, he has you.”

“And you think that’s enough?” Alex asked, and I could hear the ache.

“I know that’s enough.”

For a beat there was silence, then Alex, who was suspicious of words, said what he didn’t often say. “I love you, Jo.”

“I love you, too.” I took a breath. “Alex, there’s something else. About ten minutes ago, Hilda got a phone call from a colleague of yours. There was a murder in the park tonight. It looks like the victim was Hilda’s friend Justine Blackwell. I’m afraid Detective Hallam – that’s the officer who’s coming over – is going to ask Hilda to identify the body. I don’t want her to have to go through that.”

“She shouldn’t have to,” Alex said. “There are a hundred people in this city who know Justice Blackwell. Someone else can make the ID – I’ll take care of it. And, Jo, pass along a message to Hilda for me, would you? Tell her not to let Bob Hallam get under her skin. He can be a real jerk.”

“I’ll warn her,” I said. “Alex, I’m so thankful that Eli’s back.”

“Me too,” he said. “God, this has been a lousy night.”

As I poured boiling water into the Brown Betty, Alex’s words stayed with me. It had been a lousy night, which had come hard on the heels of a lousy day. The problem was, as it had been so often in the past few months, Eli.

He was a boy whose young life had been shadowed by trouble: a father who disappeared before he was born and a temperament composed of equal parts intelligence, anger, and raw sensitivity. Driven by furies he could neither understand nor control, Eli became a runaway who spattered his trail with spray-painted line drawings of horses, graffiti that identified him as definitively as a fingerprint. His capacity for self-destruction seemed limitless. He was also the most vulnerable human being I had ever met. Alex told me once that when he’d heard a biographer of Tchaikovsky say that the composer had been “a child of glass,” he had thought of his nephew.

From the day he was born, the centre of Eli’s life had been his mother. The previous May, Karen Kequahtooway was killed in a car accident. Eli had been sitting in the seat beside her. His physical injuries healed quickly, but the lacerations to his psyche had been devastating. The child of glass had shattered. For weeks, Eli’s anguish translated itself into a kind of free-floating rage that exploded in graffiti and hurled itself against whoever was luckless enough to cross his path. On more than one occasion, that person was me. But as the summer days grew shorter, the grief and fury