The Further Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn by Gail Bowen Page A

Ian’s death and the trial and see if there was anything I’d missed.
    When I pulled into the parking lot behind the station, Janis Joplin was singing “Me and Bobby McGee.” I was still humming the tune as I crossed the lobby and took the elevator upstairs. The young woman working in the video library was wearing Doc Martens, and she had a small diamond in her nose. When I asked for the Ian Kilbourn file she said, “You mean the whole thing?”
    “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” I said.
    She chewed her gum thoughtfully. “Is that a yes?”
    I nodded. “That’s a yes.”
    As I headed out of the library with my armload of tapes, she called me back.
    “This one goes with the file, too,” she said, and she balanced another tape carefully on the pile I was holding.
    I looked at the name on the spine: “Heinbecker Funeral.” It was the tape Jill had mentioned the afternoon Angus and I had come to Nationtv. She had said then that the eulogy Ian had given for Charlie Heinbecker had been terrific.
    As soon as I got into the editing suite, I put the Heinbecker tape in the VCR . I was in the mood for something terrific.
    I fast-forwarded past scenes of the mourners arriving, the choir processing, and the minister praying. Before I had a chance to prepare myself for it, Ian’s image was on the screen. As I watched my husband deliver Charlie Heinbecker’s eulogy, I think I stopped breathing.
    It was apparent that the video had been shot by an amateur. Periodically, the camera would jerk away from Ianto focus on the members of Charlie’s family in the front pews. The transitions were too abrupt, and often the images the camera captured were out of focus. None of that mattered to me. Jill had been right. Ian was terrific that day. He quoted Tennyson (“I am a part of all that I have met …/How dull it is to pause, to make an end/To rust unburnished, not to shine in use”), and he talked about stewardship and our obligation to others.
    Good words, but it was Ian’s face, not his words, that drew me closer to the screen. He had less than three hours to live, and he didn’t know it. He didn’t know that today was the day the dragon waited at the side of the road. In a gesture I had seen ten thousand times, Ian brushed back his hair with his hand, and I felt something inside me break. Tired of holding the pieces together, I closed the door to the editing suite and gave in.
    Crying helped. By the time the monitor showed the mourners leaving the church, I had distanced myself from what was happening on the screen. As I watched for Ian, I was in control again. Finally, he came out, and the camera zoomed in for a closeup. For a moment, he stood blinking as the December light bounced off the snow. Then he started down the church steps, and the camera arced away from him and began to follow another cluster of mourners as they moved from the church to the street. I was leaning forward to punch the stop button when Ian stepped into camera range again. Blurred but recognizable, he began walking down the street. He didn’t get far before a slight figure in a dark jacket came up behind him, reached out, and touched his shoulder. Ian turned. Then the camera made another of its convulsive transitions, and I was looking at the pallbearers carrying Charlie’s casket out of the church.
    I hit the rewind button. The first time, I rewound too far. Then I fast-forwarded past the sequence I needed to see. It took awhile, but finally my husband and his murderer were on screen. I pressed stop.
    Maureen’s back was to the camera, but her white-blond bouffant was unmistakable, and the baseball jacket she was wearing was the one she would be arrested in a few hours later. Ian was looking straight into her face. What did he see there?
    I touched the rewind button. Ian turned from Maureen and, in the robotic walk of an actor in a silent movie, my husband and the woman who was about to kill him moved away from one