Strike said "Huh" again, thinking about betrayal, about how everything and everybody were just so much smoke.
Rocco was gripped with the panic he often experienced around her, around himself. He seemed to be both here now and simultaneously five years in the future looking back at this moment, at the loss of this moment. He was always sliding past the nownes...
His voice was languidly dense, as if he was a little slow on the uptake, but Strike knew that tone came from the man's feeling of complete control.
On the nights they went to bed at the same time, Rocco would lie there and watch her go to the closet, watch her choose either silky slips or mannish shirts, like running up sex flags from across the room.
In the beginning - not now, thank God - Patty was always sharing the important books of her life with him, like Black Elk Speaks, The Golden Bough, and Hero with a Thousand Faces.
The County Jail looked like a tall, forbidding elementary school. Seven stories of dirty brown brick, one hundred years old and now operating at 330 percent of capacity.
