Five Days in Summer

purse. He wondered what was in there; it always took her a full twenty seconds to find that phone. And here she was, driving.
    She answered, and listened. Her eyes stayed on the road but Geary didn’t like it. He didn’t like being the passenger in a car when the driver was doing more than driving, and he didn’t like the look of surprise on her face.
    “When?” she said, then listened again. “Is that a confirmation?”
    She tossed the phone back into her purse without looking.
    “Emily Parker’s hair,” Amy said. “Forensics matched a sample found in the car to a sample from her hairbrush.”
    Geary didn’t get it; how did they find hair in Robertson’s car if he hadn’t been picked up? “I thought we were going to wait, see if he led us to her.”
    Amy sped up as they approached their exit from Route 28 onto 151.
    “You’re over the speed limit.” Geary chuckled, but she didn’t slow down.
    “It wasn’t his car,” she said. “It was the ’fortyseven Ford.”
    The one they’d had impounded from Ragnatelli’s Vintage Automobiles, after Ragnatelli turned up dead.
    “So it wasn’t Robertson—”
    “There’s more.”
    Amy veered onto their exit. Geary held on to the dash so he wouldn’t spill into her lap.
    “CLIS turned up something in its database.”
    The Criminalistics Laboratory Information System, the FBI’s scientific reference. Geary had used it often.
    “Traces of pancuronium were found in Marjorie Lipnor’s blood.”
    “It had to be a fresh sample,” Geary said. “It doesn’t last long in the bloodstream. It would have been gone by the time she killed herself.”
    “There were traces noted from the initial samples, from right after they found her. CLIS crossed it with everything else found in the other cases, what little there was. Terry McDaniel’s blood showed traces of pancuronium too.”
    “But she was found dead, and pancuronium doesn’t kill you.” Then Geary understood something. “It’s a muscle inhibitor. It freezes the body temporarily, but not the mind.”
    Amy squeezed her eyes nearly shut, as if trying to block the image but not the road.

Chapter 18
    Emily felt nothing but the subtle rocking of liquid suspension, bent past hunger, engulfed by thirst, floating in water but not of it. Naked, with no body, just a head that was an echo chamber of distorted sounds. A grinding motor. The halting of a motor, its puttering out. The scream of gulls congregating. The swish of ocean air and a reedy scrape against the boat’s hull like a blade etching its way into her brain.
    The sounds and the smells.
    She stank. The boat stank. But she could not smell the corn man, he was so clean. He observed her and she could feel him with her hearing and her smell. She was his baby in a jar, something to be considered, then turned from in disgust. She was a thing on his floor. He considered her.
    “Ignore him,” Sarah said of the boy at school who hit Emily when she tried to kiss him. “He’ll come around.”
    She was six years old, unable to ignore anyone.
    She had three smooth-edged nickels in her pocket to remind herself she was better than him. She was fifteen cents richer than he was and would keep her kiss for someone who wanted it.
    Three coins in the palm of her mind:
    David was her work of art.
    She guided Sam.
    Maxi would walk any day now.
    “Don’t hover,” Sarah said. “Let him learn for himself.”
    At seven Sam let her tie his sneakers, wanted her to. David tied his own at five.
    “Don’t hold her so much. She’ll never learn to walk.”
    Maxi pulled herself up a chair leg, found her wobbly balance, stretched her arms and said, “Up, up, up.” Emily lifted Maxi until their eyes were level. They kissed.
    Footsteps, metal twisting on metal, he was hooking up his hose again.
    “Never forget that I love you,” Sarah said.
    Footsteps and the drag of hose on the floor and the assault of ice-cold water. Emily’s muscles chilled and hardened. Her blindfold soaked through. He hosed her head to toe like a dirty sidewalk.
    He never spoke.
    Footsteps away from her and the water stopped. He did something at what must have been a sink. Then he did something with the hose. She could see the corn man in his white jacket coiling the hose. The open and shut of a cabinet door. He had put the hose away.
    Footsteps.
    He dropped something soft onto the floor next to her and she could feel him lowering down, the darkness and weight of his body reducing itself to her