Joan Rochester began to hand him the phone. Myron reached out and snatched it from her, afraid of losing this tenuous connection. He strapped on his calmest voice and said, “Hello, Katie. My name is Myron.”

He sounded like a night host on NPR.

Katie, however, was a tad more hysterical. “What do you want with me?”

“I just have a few questions.”

“I don’t know anything about Aimee Biel.”

“If you could just tell me—”

“You’re tracing this, aren’t you?” Her voice was cracking with hysteria. “For my dad. You’re keeping me on the line so you can trace the call!”

Myron was about to launch into a Berruti-type explanation of how traces didn’t really work that way, but Katie never gave him the chance.

“Just leave us alone!”

And then she hung up.

Like another dopey TV cliché, Myron said, “Hello? Hello?” when he knew that Katie Rochester had hung up and was gone.

They sat in silence for a minute or two. Then Myron slowly handed her back the phone.

“I’m sorry,” Joan Rochester said.

Myron nodded.

“I tried.”

“I know.”

She stood. “Are you going to tell Dom?”

“No,” Myron said.

“Thank you.”

He nodded again. She walked away. Myron stood and headed in the opposite direction. He took out his cell phone and hit the speed-dial number one slot. Win answered it.

“Articulate.”

“Was it Katie Rochester?”

He had expected something like this—Katie not cooperating. So Myron had prepared. Win was on the scene in Manhattan, ready to follow. It was, in fact, better. She would head back to wherever she was hiding. Win would tag along and learn all.

“Looked like her,” Win said. “She was with a dark-haired paramour.”

“And now?”

“After hanging up, she and said paramour began heading downtown by foot. By the way, the paramour is carrying a firearm in a shoulder holster.”

That wasn’t good. “You’re on them?”

“I’ll pretend you didn’t ask me that.”

“I’m on my way.”

CHAPTER 40

Joan Rochester took a pull from the flask she kept under the car seat.

She was in her driveway now. She could have waited until she got inside. But she didn’t. She was in a daze, had been in a daze for so long that she no longer remembered a time when she really felt truly clear-headed. Didn’t matter. You get used to it. You get so used to it that it becomes normal, this daze, and it would be the clear head that would throw her out of whack.

She stayed in her car and stared at her house. She looked at it as though for the first time. This was where she lived. It sounded so simple, but there it was. This is where she was spending her life. It was unremarkable. It felt impersonal. She lived here. She had helped choose it. And now, as she looked at it, she wondered why.

Joan closed her eyes and tried to imagine something different. How had she gotten here? You don’t just slip, she realized. Change was never dramatic. It was small shifts, so gradual that it becomes imperceptible to the human eye. That was how it had happened to Joan Delnuto Rochester, the prettiest girl at Bloomfield High.

You fall in love with a man because he is everything your father isn’t. He is strong and tough and you like that. He sweeps you off your feet. You don’t even realize how much he takes over your life, how you start to become merely an extension of him, rather than a separate entity or, as you dream, one grander entity, two becoming one in love, like out of a romance novel. You acquiesce on small things, then large things, then everything. Your laugh starts to quiet before disappearing altogether. Your smile dims until it is only a facsimile of joy, something you apply like mascara.

But when had it turned the dark corner?

She couldn’t find a spot on the time line. She thought back, but she couldn’t locate a moment when she could have changed things. It was inevitable, she supposed, from the day they met. There wasn’t a time when she could have stood up to him. There wasn’t a battle she could have waged and won that would have altered anything.

If she could go back in time, would she walk away the first time he asked her out? Would she have said no then? Taken up with another boyfriend, like that nice Mike Braun, who lived in Parsippany now? The answer would probably be no. Her children wouldn’t have been born. Children, of course, change everything. You can’t wish it all never happened, because that would be the ultimate betrayal: How could you live with yourself if you wished your children never existed?

She took another swig.

The truth was, Joan Rochester wished her husband dead. She dreamed about it. Because it was her only escape. Forget that nonsense about abused women standing up to their man. It would be suicide. She could never leave him. He would find her and beat her and lock her up. He would do lord-knows-what to their children. He would make her pay.

Joan sometimes fantasized about packing up the children and finding one of those battered-women shelters in the city. But then what? She dreamed about turning state’s evidence against Dom—she certainly had the knowledge—but even Witness Protection wouldn’t do the trick. He’d find them. Somehow.

He was that kind of man.

She slipped out of her car. There was a wobble in her step, but again that had become almost the norm. Joan Rochester headed to her front door. She slipped the key in and stepped inside. She turned around to close it behind her. When she turned back around, Dominick stood in front of her.

Joan Rochester put her hand to her heart. “You startled me.”

He stepped toward her. For a moment she thought that he wanted to embrace her. But that wasn’t it. He bent low at the knees. His right hand turned into a fist. He swiveled into the roundhouse blow, using his hips for power. The knuckles slammed into her kidney.

Joan’s mouth opened in a silent scream. Her knees gave way. She fell to the floor. Dominick grabbed her by the hair. He lifted her back up and readied the fist. He smashed it into her back again, harder this time.

She slid to the ground like a slit bag of sand.

“You’re going to tell me where Katie is,” Dominick said.

And then he hit her again.

Myron was in his car, talking on the phone to Wheat Manson, his former Duke teammate who now worked in the admissions office as assistant dean, when he realized yet again that he was being followed.

Wheat Manson had been a speedy point guard from the nasty streets of Atlanta. He had loved his years in Durham, North Carolina, and had never gone back. The two old friends started off exchanging quick pleasantries before Myron got to the point.