After Caroline by Kay Hooper

Author:Kay Hooper [Hooper, Kay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56709-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 1996-03-26T16:00:00+00:00

“Are you sure?” Griffin asked, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand and holding the phone to his ear with the other. “That isn’t what you told me yesterday, dammit.”

Doctor Becket sighed. “Griff, you know as well as I do that the longer a body is out in the elements—especially during a wet and chilly night—the harder it is to pinpoint the time of death. You say the girl planned to sneak out of the hotel around eleven-thirty, and you ask if she could have been killed closer to midnight than we originally estimated. Yes, she could have. Anytime between ten P.M. and four A.M. would probably be a reasonable guess. I really can’t call it closer than that, not for the record.”

“Guesses,” Griffin muttered. “Isn’t science wonderful.”

“It has its limitations just like anything else,” Becket said. “Hey, call on the Portland M.E. if you want another opinion.”

“No, don’t be an ass. Thanks, Doc.” Griffin cradled the receiver and sat staring down at the elegant, leather-bound diary lying open on his blotter. “Son of a bitch,” he said quietly to himself.

“Having a bad day?”

He looked up at the open doorway of his office, then leaned back in his chair and shrugged. “You might say that.”

“I can come back later,” Joanna offered.

Griffin shook his head. “No, it’s all right.”

She came in rather cautiously and sat down in his visitor’s chair. “Um … about what I said yesterday—”

“If you thought I was still pissed about that,” he said, “I’m not.”

“Oh? Then how come it feels a few degrees cooler in here than it ought to be?”

“Okay, I’m still pissed. I hate being wrong.”

Joanna blinked, then smiled slightly. “Tough on the ego, huh?”

Griffin thought about it, then shook his head. “Not so much that as my knowledge of myself. You showed me something I hadn’t seen in myself, and I didn’t like it much. You were right—it was easier for me to believe Caroline’s death was no more than a random accident. I didn’t feel quite so guilty when I thought my being there wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“We can’t know that it would have,” Joanna reminded him quietly.

“No, but once we accept—once I accept—that something might have happened while she was waiting for me in the old barn, then it becomes a lot more likely that if I’d been there, the outcome might have been different.”

“Maybe. But you can’t go back and relive that day, not now. So what’s the use of feeling guilty? It won’t change what happened to Caroline, and it sure won’t help you. Let it go, Griffin.”

He wondered if he could, but smiled at her anyway. “Okay, I’ll work on that. But in the meantime, no matter how I feel about what happened that day, it hardly alters the evidence. She was alone, she was driving, and the car wasn’t tampered with or forced off the road. No crime was committed.”

Joanna nodded. “Not a legal crime, I accept that. But what about a moral one? What

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