Gone by Lisa Gardner Read Free Book Online Page A

kitchen of a woman totally lost to despondency. Then again, Quincy had once worked a case of a forty-year-old mom who’d cleaned the house from top to bottom before hanging herself in the bathroom. In her suicide note, she’d included instructions to her husband on how to reheat all the meals she’d left for him and their three kids. The woman—who’d gone off her antidepressants—didn’t want to inconvenience anyone. She just hadn’t wanted to live.
    Kincaid traveled down the back hallway to the study. This was one of the few rooms with carpeting, a thick wool pile that Quincy liked to pace when trying to come up with the right turn of phrase. This was his domain, and walking into it a week later, he caught the faint smell of his own aftershave. He wondered if Rainie had entered this room in the past week. If she had caught that fragrance and thought of him.
    The desk was cleared off, the black leather chair neatly pushed in. The room already had a slightly abandoned feel about it. Maybe not a room for remembrance at all, but an omen of things to come.
    Kincaid wandered back out and hit the last room of the downstairs: the master bedroom.
    This room was more chaotic. The down comforter, covered in a duvet of greens, gold, and burgundy, had been kicked to the foot of the bed. The cream-colored sheets were twisted into a pile, the corner of the room lost to a mound of clothes. The room carried the musty odors of stale linens and recent sweat.
    And because Quincy knew Rainie better than he knew his own heart, he could look at each item in the room and see clearly what must have transpired in the middle of the night. The tossed covers from another bad dream. The skewed lampshade from when she’d fumbled for the light.
    Her trek to the bathroom, kicking aside socks and jeans along the way. The mess around the sink as she tried to clear the dream from her mind with water on her face.
    The water hadn’t worked, though. At least it hadn’t when Quincy had still been around. She’d scrub her face while he watched her from the open doorway.
    “Would you like to talk?”
    “No.”
    “It must have been a bad one.”
    “All nightmares are bad, Quincy. At least they are for us mere mortals.”
    “I used to have bad dreams after Mandy died.”
    “And now?”
    “Now it’s not so bad. Now I wake up and reach for you.”
    He wondered if that’s when she grew to hate him. Because her love gave him comfort, and his love, apparently, gave her nothing at all.
    Kincaid was finished in the bathroom. He moved around the dresser, opening each drawer, then checking the nightstands.
    “When Rainie was at home, where did she keep her weapon?”
    “We have a gun safe.”
    “Where?”
    “The study.”
    Quincy led Kincaid back to the wood-paneled room. He gestured to a print on the wall, a black-and-white portrait of a little girl peering out from behind a white shower curtain. Most people thought the picture was mere art, purchased, perhaps, for the whimsical quality of the girl’s gap-toothed smile. In fact, it was a photo of Mandy taken when she was six years old. He used to carry it in his wallet. Years ago, Rainie had had it enlarged and framed for him.
    And sometimes, when a case was particularly bad, say the Astoria case, Quincy would sit in here and simply stare at the photo of his daughter. He would think of the wedding she never got to have, the children she never got to bear. He would think of all the life she never got to lead and he would feel the sorrow press down upon him.
    Some people believed there was a special home for children in heaven. A place where they never felt sickness, or pain, or hunger. Quincy didn’t know; his relentlessly analytical mind didn’t do well with matters of faith. Did the children who had loving parents or grandparents get to be reunited with them? What about the newborn who starved to death while her mother went on a weeklong drinking binge? What about the five-year-old thrown down the