Violets Are Blue

turned
on
.
    “I called my home phone before we started to talk. The phone has been turned on speaker. Everything you just told me is on my voice mail. I have your confession, Kyle. Everything, every word. You lose, you sick, pitiful son of a bitch. You lose,
Mastermind
.”
    Kyle suddenly sprang up from the floor at me — and then I got to knock him out again. I hit him with the best punch of my life, at least it felt that way. His body lifted up off the floor and he lost a couple of front teeth.
    That was how he looked in the news photograph after his capture: the great Mastermind, missing two front teeth.

Chapter 116

    I FINALLY got to rest up, to stop being a cop for a while. Kyle Craig was in a maximum-security cell at Lorton prison. The district attorney was confident there was more than enough evidence to convict. Kyle’s expensive New York lawyer was screaming that he had committed no crimes, that he’d been framed. Isn’t that amazing? The murder trial would be one of the biggest that Washington and the rest of the country had ever seen.
    The thing was, I didn’t want to think about Kyle, or his trial, or some other psychopathic killer anymore. I hadn’t been to work in weeks, and it felt good. I felt real good. My ice pick wound was healing pretty well. The scar would be a souvenir. I was spending as much time as I could at home. I’d painted most of the house. I had been to two of Damon’s concerts in a row. I was on a roll.
    I was working on a jump shot with Jannie, reading
Goodnight Moon
and
Fox in Socks
to little Alex, taking cooking lessons from the best chef in all of Washington, or so Nana bragged. I was also making some time for myself. I’d even had a couple of nice talks with Christine Johnson. I told her I was sending the cutest pictures of Alex. Jamilla Hughes was coming east for a seminar and would visit next week. Everything was going well with her life, and I didn’t want to spoil it.
    It was around eleven o’clock, and I was playing the piano on the sunporch. The house on Fifth Street was quiet, everybody sleeping except for me.
    The phone didn’t ring, and what a sweet, simple pleasure that was.
    No one came to the door with bad news that I didn’t want to hear right now or maybe ever again.
    No one was watching me from outside, in the shadows, or if they were, at least they weren’t being a nuisance about it.
    I concentrated on getting into some songs by D’Angelo, and I was doing a pretty good job of it: “The Line,” “Send It On,” “Devil’s Pie.”
    Tomorrow? Well, tomorrow was a big day too.
    I was going to resign from the D.C. police force in the morning.
    And something else, something good for a change: I thought that maybe I was falling in love.
    But that’s another story, for another time.

Also by James Patterson:
    The Thomas Berryman Number
    Season of the Machete
    See How They Run
    The Midnight Club
    Along Came a Spider
    Kiss the Girls
    Hide & Seek
    Jack & Jill
    Miracle on the 17th Green

(with Peter de Jonge)
    Cat & Mouse
    When the Wind Blows
    Pop Goes the Weasel
    Black Friday
    Cradle and All
    Roses Are Red
    1st to Die
    Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas