Degree of Guilt Read Online Free PDF

found each other and a half cry rose from her throat and met his.
    Afterward, no one spoke.
    It was as if, Paget thought, their bodies had learned something their heads did not yet know. Neither of them wanted to spoil that. Neither wanted to ask for anything.
    ‘You wanted to ask me something?’ she said now.
    He turned from the stove.
    She stood in the doorway, without Carlo. Paget sensed that she had been there for some moments and that, unusual for him, he had been too abstracted to sense her presence. He looked past her, toward the living room.
    She followed his thoughts. ‘Carlo’s waiting outside,’ she said in a quiet voice. ‘I told him I wanted to say goodbye.’
    ‘I might have wished,’ Paget answered with equal quiet, ‘that you’d bothered saying hello.’
    ‘He’s my son –’
    ‘A cat’s a better mother,’ Paget cut in. ‘You performed a storage function, that’s all. And we both know whom you did that for.’
    ‘Do we, Chris?’ Her smile was bitter. ‘Do we , really? Because I doubt you’ll ever know or understand.’
    Paget’s gaze was cold. ‘I’ve come to understand a great many things. About you, and about myself.’
    ‘Including why you did things? Or are your motives as pure as ever?’
    Paget stared at her, silent.
    ‘It seems,’ Mary said with muted irony, ‘that we’re beyond the help of a family counselor.’
    Paget kept watching her. ‘What I was going to ask,’ he said more evenly, ‘is why you’re here.’
    ‘As I told you, I’m here to do background for an interview.’
    ‘You could have come and gone. As you have a dozen times.’
    ‘I wanted to see him.’ She gave a small, almost helpless shrug; it was sufficiently unlike her to give Paget pause. ‘Needed to. For reasons of my own.’
    ‘What about him? ’
    ‘Is it really bad,’ she retorted quietly, ‘for Carlo to think I care a little?’
    ‘Why now?’ Paget shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘You could have called. I could have prepared him. I wouldn’t have stopped you.’
    ‘Then call it a moment of weakness, Chris, and trust the good outweighs the bad.’ She smiled faintly. ‘We’ve had those moments before.’
    Paget looked past her ‘He’s a nice boy,’ he said finally. ‘Normal. I think quite happy, for the most part.’
    ‘I can see that.’ She paused, then spoke with more feeling. ‘It was what I wanted to see.’
    Paget nodded. ‘Now you have.’
    She turned to leave. Turning again, she paused in the doorway. ‘You look well, Chris.’
    ‘And you.’
    She smiled again, as if some private thought amused her, and was gone. Paget stood there, suddenly quite certain that she intended never to see him again.
    Now a day later, she had called.
    ‘If you need me,’ Terri Peralta was saying, ‘I can call a neighbor, see if someone can pick up Elena.’
    They were standing in the elevator on the way down to the parking garage. He had been lost in memory; it took him a moment to respond.
    ‘Thanks,’ he answered. ‘Just go home, be a mom.’ He saw her puzzlement, realized how dismissive he might sound. ‘She’ll want a referral, that’s all.’
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘Positive. It’s never good to represent someone you know, and she’s far too smart to want that. Plus I haven’t done homicide in years.’
    Terri was studying him intently. She doesn’t miss much, he thought, but this is more than she will ever understand.
    The elevator opened. Paget said good night and walked quickly to his car.

Chapter 3
    Mary waited in a witness room on the sixth floor of the Hall of Justice.
    The room was sparse: a bare table, white cinder-block walls, gray linoleum floors. A squat female cop watched through a glass window to ensure that Mary did not harm herself.
    She turned her back to the guard.
    The monastic simplicity helped her concentrate. He would want to know what happened; unless the years had changed the way he thought, no detail would be too minute.
    He would not, she