I could tell at once by Detective Jackson's voice that something was incredibly wrong.
"I drove over to Greenbriar Road 'cause I figured I'd take a peek before I informed the Washington crowd of suits I had access to the place. I found the key, just where you said but when I went in, I knew something was wrong. They say in all the manuals I never should do this on the phone but you deserve to be the first to know. I hate like shit to be the one to tell you, but there are two bodies upstairs, one in the bedroom and one in the hall."
Jackson must have thought I didn't hear him because he repeated what he'd said. I was too dumbfounded to speak.
"She's in a night gown, in bed. It looks like he'd just come out of the shower and got it from behind, with something heavy. She never got out of bed." I could hear sirens in the background. "I've got to go. We'll talk later. I'm sorry as shit; I really am. I know they were your friends."
A thousand thought and memories shuffled through my brain like black jack deck. Quinn and Martha. Dead. Both dead; murdered! I was devastated. A wave of guilt passed over me like fog on a beach party; guilt like a pants-down lover when the husband comes home. They'd never left! I'd been so wrong! Betsy and I had both jumped to too obvious a conclusion.
John Luke Grasso, his name was so much bile on my tongue I gagged to keep it down. He had killed them in cold blood! He had slayed my friends in their own town, their own home, in their own bed. Martha. My lifelong friend Martha, gone forever; Martha whom I loved in so many different ways for so many years. Martha, who I failed to forgive when she stumbled in one drunken moment of need, was gone forever. I staggered back to my room, away from the contented people playing around the pool, not wanting them to see me in tears.
I ran flush into Howie Abbott as I turned the corner and somehow managed to blurt out that Quinn and Martha were dead. He was as speechless as I had been as we hugged each other and somehow made it into my room.
I managed to calm myself enough to relate what little I knew of what happened to the people with whom we'd both worked so closely.
It was a different Howie Abbot who took the news. If a man could be more consoling, I've not met him. Perhaps it was a resurgence of his forgotten priestly training but for the first time, Howie was more lucid than I.