Dead Aim by Thomas Perry

in after-hours clubs and was ‘associated’ with people in the designer-drug scene, and all that. If the reporter knew what he was talking about, the article didn’t manage to convey it to me. People in their twenties go to clubs, and when they do, there are people who might be using just about anything. Of course, I asked Cathy.”
    “Did your sister explain it?”
    “She admitted that she had been getting nervous about some of the people Mark seemed to know. And now and then he would be out all night, and when he came in it was pretty clear he had been partying.”
    “Other women?”
    Sarah shrugged. “She didn’t know, and she said she didn’t want to know, but after all, he wasn’t out all night alone. He must have been with somebody and it wasn’t her, right?”
    Lydia said, “Did he take a lot of drugs, or just know people who did?”
    “She said she never saw him take
anything
. But she admitted that if he had wanted to, he could easily have fooled her. She didn’t care. She was absolutely in love with him. When she came and told me all this, she hadn’t slept in two days, and she talked just about all night, until she fell asleep. She woke up about fifteen hours later, and she had changed.”
    “How?” asked Mallon.
    “She never talked about him much after that, but she was always thinking about him. I waited for a month, but she was still that way—mourning him as though he had just died. One morning when I woke up she was packing. She thanked me and said she was going to New York.”
    “Why did she pick New York?”
    “I don’t know. She lasted there a few months, working in a restaurant. Then she moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, because it was a change from New York. Then she moved back to L.A. After Mark died, she was never the same. She was nervous, restless. She went places, but it wasn’t because she was hoping that anything was going to happen when she got there. It was more like a person pacing the floor, just moving because staying in one place was intolerable. She came here two months ago. She stayed here with me. She rented a car, the way she always had, but all the time while she was here she probably never went farther than the yard. I would come home from work and find her lying flat on her back on the floor, staring at the ceiling. She had no desire to see anybody from the old days, or to pick up the phone totalk to anybody in any of the places she’d lived. Not even L.A. She had always been the one who was athletic, but this time she seemed physically weak. She was unwilling to move, but she wasn’t ever at rest. Finally one day, she packed up again to go home. That’s what she said. That it was time to go home.”
    Sarah barely got the words out before she dissolved into tears again. Mallon and Lydia let their eyes meet while hers were closed. There seemed to Mallon to be nothing for them to do but wait. Lydia gave her only ten seconds before she said, “What was Mark’s last name?”
    “Romano.”
    Lydia said, “Do you know whether they caught the person who killed him?”
    “No,” said Sarah. “I don’t think so.”
    “Did that seem to bother Cathy?”
    She stared at the window for a moment, and her answer seemed to come as a mild surprise to her. “I don’t think so. She talked about him, about good things they had done together. She didn’t talk about the killer at all. I suppose that if the only man you ever loved that much is killed, then what matters is that he’s gone. She never talked about the rest of it, the way some people seem to. Like they could never rest until the person gets punished. I think Cathy knew she could never rest no matter what.”
    Mallon said, “Maybe if I had somehow known all of this at the time, I could have said or done the right things.”
    “No. I knew everything, and I talked to her over and over for a year or more. It made no difference. The only thing that would have was bringing Mark back.”
    Lydia said, “I hope you