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no doubt whatsoever where she stood. Even the most radical of gay rights
advocates admitted her to their fold, and she had been instrumental over the
last few years in engineering seemingly impossible agreements between opposing
sides. Enormous of heart, possessed of a cutting intelligence, charismatic,
articulate, and tireless, Roz was, in a word, compelling, and Kate was no more
immune to her charm than anyone else. Including the mayor, who had once called
Roz the nicest woman he'd ever been stabbed by.
Kate had only met Roz a year before, in the course of an investigation that
took her to Berkeley's so-called "holy hill," the site of a number of
theological seminaries. Roz had been wearing her clerical collar and her guise
as a late-blooming grad student, and only some months later did Kate discover
that Roz and Lee had, as they say, history.
Lee had known Rosalyn Hall for years, since grad school at UC Berkeley, in
fact, where Roz was doing a master's degree and Lee a Ph.D., both in
psychology. The two had worked together, discovered a shared passion for
Eastern religion, and had taken off to India and Nepal for six weeks, during
which trip they had been, briefly, lovers. Two such dominant personalities
were not a comfortable match, however, and they had parted as friends,
although from what Lee did not say about that parting, and her manner when she
did not say it, Kate had the impression that some dark happening lay at the
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parting's roots. Roz was not all cleverness and light.
Long years later, when Kate came across the cleric and Lee was still
struggling against the bullet's shattering effects, Kate, thinking only that a
minor resumption of Lee's counseling work might be therapeutic, had all
unknowing encouraged Roz to reach out to the injured woman. By the time Lee
told her of the old relationship with Roz, Kate (who was not a detective for
nothing) was not too surprised. Nor was she too worried, since she could also
read the signs that the affair was long over.
Besides, everyone she knew was in love with Roz, even those who were not in
lust with her. Even straight people hell, even those who hated Roz loved her.
She was not only charismatic, she was even good to look at; although she was
hardly fashionably slim, her tall, voluptuous shape and wide shoulders gave
the impression of a serious swimmer gone slightly to seed (actually, she had
never been much of a swimmer). Her shiny brown hair had just enough wave in it
to overcome Maj's amateur haircuts, her dark eyes were large and long-lashed
enough to compensate for her habitual avoidance of makeup. Increasingly in
recent months, when television broadcasts needed a spokesperson for a gay
perspective, they had begun to call on Roz; when the papers printed a shot of
the opening of a center for gay, lesbian, and bisexual teenagers or the ground
breaking of a crisis center, Roz's face looked out at the reader; when the
governor put together a task force on lesbian and gay parenting, Roz was on
it. That the mayor of San Francisco had appeared at Mina's school play was no
mere happenstance.
So no, Kate was not jealous or rather, she was honest. Jealous, yes, a
little. But hell, if Roz Hall had asked her to bed, she'd probably have gone
too.
Roz had not asked. Instead, when Kate had been injured during a case the
previous winter, while Lee and Jon were both away, it was Roz's concerned face
Kate saw from her hospital bed, Roz's red Jeep that drove her home at her
release, and Roz's longtime partner, Maj, who brought Kate food and comfort
and just the right amount of companionship to keep her going. The two women
were now family, closer to Kate than any of her blood relatives, and if Kate
sometimes felt like a poor relation bobbing in the wake of a glamorous star,
well, Roz had a way of making one feel that even poor relations were good
things to be. After all, even presidents had blue-collar cousins.
Kate relaxed back against the soft sofa pillows, looking with affection at
their guests. The talk had circled back to Mina and her seven-weeks-to-go
sister-to-be, and half of her attention was on that. The other half drifted
back to the Larsen murder, which seemed to be progressing on as
straightforward a path as investigations ever did, but which nonetheless
niggled at the back of her mind.
One of the things she had to find out, she decided, was what Larsen was doing
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in the Presidio parklands at that hour. Emily had not been able to think of
anything that would have taken her husband there, and neither could Kate. A
trap, maybe. Perhaps Crime Scene'll come up with something in the Larsen
house, she thought, and then woke to the fact that Roz was talking to her.
"Sorry," she said, sitting upright to demonstrate her attentiveness. "I was
miles away."
"Difficult case?"
"Puzzling," she conceded. Good manners required that she answer, but she
could hardly go into the details of an active case. This was a problem she'd
faced countless times over the years, however, and she had become skilled at
the diversionary side-step in conversation. "I was thinking about this
interview I had today with an abused woman. I just ... it continually amazes
me, what women will put up with for the sake of security."
"Oh, that's not fair," Lee protested. "It's not even true, to call it
security. They often live in a constant state of fear."
"So why do it? Because the known, however awful, is better than the great
unknown?"
"Sometimes it is," Roz broke in. "Especially when there are children, and no
other family or friend to lean on. We're a terribly solitary culture, you
know. It's not easy to find a support network in modern society, especially if
you're a woman who already feels humiliated by being someone's punching bag.
Self-respect is a luxury, and sometimes all these women can afford is pride,
that they won't admit failure."
There was nothing in Roz's face or voice to show that her words were anything
but general; nonetheless, Kate eyed her with the uneasy sensation that there
was some underlying message there for her alone. Roz's next words confirmed
it, and the evenness of her gaze.
"We all do this, to some degree, even if we're not in an actively abusive
relationship. We let ourselves be shoved into a corner, humiliated, used, and
abandoned, and then when our partner turns back to us, in the joy of reunion
we forgive."
A memory swept into the room, so vivid in the space between Roz and Kate that
it seemed to quiver visibly in the air.
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It was a scene from the previous December, a few days after Kate's release
from the hospital to her cold and empty house. The morning had been taken up
by one of her blinding headaches, legacy of a suspect's eighteen-inch length
of galvanized pipe. In the afternoon Kate had wakened from a drugged sleep, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]