He shook his head, but he still told her, “I’m going to hope it does, Robin. That’s what’s going to keep me going. I’m going to think about seeing a movie with you, buying you some popcorn, maybe holding your hand during the scary parts.”
“It’d be cheaper if you just gave me the money to hold your scary parts.”
He took her hand in his. She stood dumbstruck as he brought his lips to the back of her hand and gently kissed it. “Think about a movie you want to see,” he told her. “Something really scary.”
Then he was gone.
Angie leaned against the wall. She let out a stream of breath. Here was another perfectly sweet man she was ruining. Okay, he was a perfectly sweet pedophile and murderer, but glass houses and all that.
Gina Ormewood passed through the sliding doors. She did a double take when she saw Angie, but kept walking toward the ER.
“Hey,” Angie said. “Wait up.”
Gina stopped but didn’t turn around. She said, “I just want to be left alone.”
Angie walked around the woman to get a good look at her. Gina’s lip was split. Her left eye had a bruise that was painful to look at. No wonder the guy at the desk hated Michael.
Angie asked, “What the hell happened to you?”
“I fell down,” Gina told her. She tried to walk away, but Angie blocked her path.
“Did he hit you?”
“What do you think?”
“Christ.”
Gina narrowed her eyes, finally recognizing Angie. “You fucked my husband.”
“Yeah, well.” Angie knew better than to lie. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve had much better.”
Gina laughed, then winced as her lip split open again. She put her hand to her mouth and looked at the blood on her fingers. “God,” she groaned. “Let’s go in here.”
She pushed open the door to the women’s restroom and Angie followed. Gina was petite, maybe five-three in her sneakers and around a hundred pounds. Michael had at least eighty pounds on her. This was like kicking a puppy.
“I met him when I was fifteen,” Gina said. She was leaning over the sink basin, looking at her split lip in the mirror. “He was interested in my cousin. She was a year younger than me. I thought I was protecting her.”
Angie knew to let her talk.
“He was so sweet,” Gina said. “I’d get these letters from him when he was in the Gulf, talking about how much he loved me, that he wanted to take care of me.” Her eyes met Angie’s in the mirror. “This is how he takes care of me now.”
Angie rummaged in her purse. “They’re all sweet at first.”
“You know that for a fact?”
“Even got the blood-stained T-shirt.”
Gina took a tissue from the dispenser and wet it under the faucet. “After Tim was born,” she began, “things changed. He started getting angry about everything. He didn’t want to touch me anymore. He’d leave the house at night, stay out for hours at a time.” She dabbed the tissue at her bloody lip. “Sometimes, he’d go away for the whole weekend. I’d check the odometer and he’d put five, sometimes six hundred miles on the car.”
Angie found what she was looking for in her purse. “Where was he going?”
“You get punched in the face enough times, you stop asking questions.”
Angie told her, “Turn around.” She dabbed some foundation onto the sponge and patted it around Gina’s black eye. “This is Clinique,” she said. “If you go a little lighter than your usual shade, do a little blending with your finger, it helps soften the bruise.”
“Did he hit you, too?”
“No,” Angie answered, concentrating on hiding the bruise. The truth was, Angie had been too drunk to remember exactly what Michael had done. All she knew was that she had woken up the next morning in the backseat of her car with a deep bite mark on her breast and a pain between her legs that took a couple of weeks to go away.
It wasn’t like this was the first time something bad like that had happened, but it was the first time it had happened with a guy from work.
Gina said, “He told me he was with Ken.”
“Wozniak?” Angie asked. Michael’s partner in Homicide. “What was he doing with Ken?”
“He said they went fishing up in the mountains together.”
Angie pressed her lips together, holding back comment. She couldn’t picture Ken with a fishing pole, and even if she could, Ken wasn’t exactly Michael’s kind of guy.
Gina’s voice dropped to almost a whisper. “Was he rough with you?”
Angie nodded. She used her fingers to tilt up Gina’s chin so she could check her handiwork in the light.
“He’s a bastard,” Gina said, still whispering. “I just want to get away.”
Angie added some more foundation. “You left him?”
“Two days ago.”
“Where are you staying now?”
“With my mother,” she answered. “He told me he’d come get me.”
Angie checked her again. Perfect. “Did you file a report?”
She laughed. “You’re a cop. You know how useless that would be.”
“That’s bullshit,” Angie told her. “You go to DeKalb County and file a report. They don’t give a shit if he’s a cop. They’ll take one look at you and run him in.”
“And then what?” Gina asked. “What happens when he gets out?”
“File a restraining order.”
“Look at my face,” the woman said. “Do you think a restraining order is going to stop him?”
She had a point. Angie remembered her days in uniform, recalled vividly how she had once peeled a bloody restraining order from the hand of a woman who had been beaten to death by her husband. He had used a hammer. Their kids were watching.
Gina washed her hands at the sink. “Why are you here?”
“I wanted you to send Michael a message.”
She turned off the faucet and grabbed a towel to wipe her hands. “You think he’ll listen to me?”
“No,” Angie admitted. She took one of her cards out of her purse. “I want to give you my phone number. Call me if he does anything to you.”
Gina didn’t take the card. “He’s going to do whatever he wants. A phone call isn’t going to save me.” She checked herself in the mirror, smoothed her hair. “Thanks for the makeup. Clinique?” Angie nodded. “I’ll get some at lunch today. If Michael finds out I talked to you, I’m probably going to need it.”
“I won’t tell him.”
Gina leaned against the door, propping it open. “He’ll find out,” she said. “He always finds out about everything.”
Angie stayed in the bathroom a few minutes, trying to regain her composure. She wanted to talk to Will, but what could she say? I went to the hospital to threaten Michael’s wife? He beats the crap out of her and, oh, by the way, he was so rough with me that one night we spent together that I couldn’t pee straight for a month? Like every other emotion in his life, Will had learned to control his sharp temper. Angie knew it was still there, though, right at the surface waiting for something to set it off. If Angie ever told him what had really happened with Michael Ormewood, Will would kill him.