Chaos Quotes
"Every time I escape the glare it finds me again, the walled-in center of the Harvard campus a maze with its greens and lawns, its quadrangles and courtyards connected by paths and walkways."
"The memory is interrupted when I’m startled by a vibration, what feels and sounds like a large insect buzzing."
"The reason I’m meeting my husband is to eat dinner," I reply with a trace of irony."
"What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger."
"I don’t think so. Are you waiting for someone?"
"We couldn’t relax if we didn’t, and it’s the little habits that are sobering."
"He’s probably living alone, probably has a psychiatric history."
"I have a feeling I’m going to discover soon enough that Benton and I are about to have the same problem but won’t be able to discuss it much if at all."
"It’s difficult to hear such awful things about me. My anger spikes. I take off the headset, returning it to Benton."
"We’re still here, and we’ll figure it out. We always do."
"It’s business as usual in other words, and will be fine."
"If only there was a breeze. It’s hard to breathe. Damn suffocating."
"No matter how well intended your opinions may be, be very careful before you speak. I don’t care what you’re told or what you see. I don’t care what you’re absolutely certain you believe. Think twice. Think three or four times."
"An ID found on the fitness path in a public park isn’t a confirmation. Not even close."
"I’ve earned my share of purple hearts from grease and various condiment stains on pants and skirts."
"Everyone will be champing at the bit to collect whatever forensic treasures might be out here."
"We treasure conversations and activities that are unencumbered by broken laws and tragedies."
"I seriously doubt I would have fallen for the same ruse the same way Marino did or at all."
"That doesn’t mean I remind him of his mother or aunt or anyone else for that matter."
"I’m just telling you he thinks he’s a gift to women but unlike yours truly here he doesn’t like them. Not really."
"Let’s go," he says, and we move on to the second stage, the inner perimeter, not bothering with other protective clothing, not yet.
"Stop," I say to him as the silhouette of an unlit lamppost materializes in the dark up ahead, close to the overturned bicycle at the outer rim of the clearing, just before the woods begin again.
"I wouldn’t expect the park to leave a broken light out here for very long," I reply.
"Dammit!" I mutter, and regardless of what Barclay claimed, I had a feeling this was what I’d find. "She’s been moved."
"She’d like to ask you a few things," Marino says to them about me. "Then we’ll get you someplace where you can get cool, have a nice drink, a snack. How would you like to see what a real police department looks like?"
"I’m wondering exactly where you were when you noticed the body," I say to them as if I’m perplexed and need their help.
"If only you could speak, I always think. She will in her own way and in her own time. The language of the dead is silent and difficult, and the message I keep getting is Elisa Vandersteel looks remarkably clean and uninjured."
"But one day Janet reappeared, and next I knew Natalie was in hospice care and Desi was living here."
"What was called a snakebite or Indian sunburn back then was her specialty."
"There are better ways to deal with bullies, and in some respects I’m actually grateful to my sister. Thanks to her I learned the art of silence, the power of listening and the added potency that comes with waiting."
"Sometimes revenge really is better served cold."
"We’ve got to figure out who might know what went on in your house when the two of you were growing up in Miami."
"It wouldn’t show up on a CT scan. It wouldn’t be visible in an autopsy. But evidence of the massacre is beneath the surface like the footprint of a fort rotted away centuries ago and buried by layers of sediment and soil."
"My sister doesn’t get it. In my opinion she doesn’t want to get it because it’s easier for her to define Lucy as a bohemian or a tomboy, which is Dorothy’s euphemism for being gay."
"The irony is that Dorothy doesn’t know about the worst mistake I made. She doesn’t know about Carrie Grethen."
"I wouldn’t want to be Janet. I wouldn’t want to be the one who comforted Lucy after Carrie came close to destroying all of us. It’s not a level playing field. It never has been, and Janet’s smart enough to realize there are but a few degrees of separation between murderous hate and erotic love."
"I have no idea—assuming that’s what we’re dealing with."
"Bingo. Maybe it’s the key to where she lives."
"I try to come up with what could have been long and linear like fine wires."
"It must have felt as if she were being attacked by an invisible swarm of hornets."
"A powerful electrical current striking a gold pendant and passing through her body."
"Even though she would have been sweaty and electricity loves sweat."
"It’s what Marino calls a whack and sack."
"Well you got my number if there are any other questions?"
"That’s where we get the expression a bolt out of the blue."
"I need you to stop coming in here and asking us that!"
"I can imagine at least some of what they’re talking about."
"Lucy was able to hack into Elisa Vandersteel’s phone."
"No one is chasing me off, and I wait by the pedestrian door."
"Probably but we’ll confirm. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Ash Street, west of here."
"As usual he’s smarter than everybody else."
"I’m not sure what it is to feel safe anymore."
"We don’t live normal lives or have a normal relationship."
"You just let me know what you want me to do."
"I always feel as if I’m passing into the unknown like Alice through the looking glass."
"If you want my opinion? Carrie wouldn’t be."
"I’m thinking we should put her in the decomp room. She’s getting into rough shape really fast."
"No matter how hard our air-handling system has to work in this weather."
"Well I sure knew something was going on."
"The illuminated parking lot fills the opening as the massive rolling door lifts."