Blind Spot (19 page)

The missing witness. Suki felt like a complete idiot. How had she forgotten? She had been so focused on the alibi and figuring out how to cut McKinna’s strings, she had forgotten other avenues remained open. The witness might have seen the car full of kids, seen Alexa driving, seen Devin fire the gun. The witness’s testimony could pulverize the circumstantial evidence into meaninglessness. Except that the witness had run from the scene of the crime, and anyone who was fearful enough to leave a boy on the road to die was not going to be easy to find.

Lindsey had said she could find missing people. Suki stood and paced the room. Except, if her guess about Lindsey’s MMPI scores was correct, Lindsey was a fraud—she could not see into the future, she could not find a lost person, and her skills were in shrewdness and manipulation rather than in the paranormal. But reckoning final test scores based on responses to individual items was risky business.… Suki walked to the picture window that filled the west wall of the living room and stared into the greening trees. Maybe it was time to give Lindsey the chance to prove what she could do.

The
Boston Globe
was laying on the kitchen table, and had been since morning, unread and still held closed by an elastic band. Suki had been avoiding news, but now she pulled the band from the paper and opened it. As she feared, there was an article about the case on the front page. She sat down and read it through, even though she knew far more than it told, even though she saw all the mistakes: Jonah wasn’t eighteen; Ellery hadn’t worked at the rec center for only five years; Charlie Gasperini spelled his name with a
p
. They had all the details on Finlay right, though, accurately describing how he had come to the police station to change his story.

Finlay Thompson, a custodian at the Witton Recreational Center, retracted his previous statement that he had seen Devin McKinna, Brendan Ricker and Sam Cooperstein at the recreation center on the night of Jonah Ward’s murder. Mr. Thompson, accompanied from his daughter’s fishing lodge in Sunderland, MA, by Suzanne Jacobs, Alexa Jacobs’s mother, arrived at the Witton police station late Saturday afternoon.…

She read the paragraph again, then checked the date on the top of the page. “
Even in here we get the paper
,” Lindsey had once told her. Suki started to laugh. Everything Lindsey had said about Finlay was printed in the newspaper, and the newspaper had been delivered to the prison hours before Suki had arrived.

Mike called two hours later and confirmed all Kenneth had told her about Teddy Sutterlund. “I’m not going to kid you,” he said. “It doesn’t look good for Alexa.”

A vision of Lindsey’s black eye rose before Suki. “When?”

“Hard to tell. It could come as early as next week. Could not happen at all.”

Suki felt as if all the nerves in her body had been wired with neon. “But what if it does?” she cried. “What do we do?”

“Well, there’s nothing we can do to stop the arrest, but there are a number of things that can soften it,” Mike said slowly, thoughtfully, using full sentences. “If an arrest warrant is going to be issued, I can try to arrange for Alexa to go to the station voluntarily, first thing in the morning.”

“First thing in the morning?” Suki couldn’t believe he was actually telling her Alexa was going to be arrested. For murder. For killing Jonah Ward.

“That way we can get her arraigned the same day. Keep her from having to spend a night in a jail cell. If we play our cards right,” Mike continued, “she’ll stay in Witton. Low profile. I’ll drive her in myself. Keep the media off balance. She’ll be arraigned in Concord. We’ll post bail and you can take her home right from the courthouse.”

The Concord courthouse, a cold, hard, low-slung building, was not a place for Alexa. “Then what?” Suki asked, although she was probably almost as familiar with the procedure as Mike. But at the moment she wasn’t Dr. Suzanne Jacobs; she was just Suki, a woman with a daughter in trouble.

Mike seemed to understand this. “Generally, a probable cause hearing,” he said without a touch of impatience. “That’s where we’re going to prove that there isn’t even close to enough evidence for this masquerade to go to trial.”

“Do you think you can do that?”

“Good chance,” he said. “Yeah, I think a really good chance. The witnesses are known liars, there’s no murder weapon, no motive, no real opportunity if Alexa was driving the car—despite the logistical possibility argument they’ll probably make.” He hesitated. “But I’ll need your okay to get going on the probable cause prep.”

Suki could only imagine how much it was going to cost. “Of course,” she said quickly. “Sure. Do what you need to do.”

“Took a quick look at your evaluation. Looks good. Very thorough.”

For a moment Suki didn’t know what he was talking about. “Oh, good. Great,” she said. “I was there today. I gave Lindsey the MMPI.”

“How’d she do?”

Now it was Suki’s turn to hesitate. “We won’t know until the test’s scored. I put it in the mail this afternoon, so hopefully we’ll have the answer soon.”

“Interesting case, huh?”

“More than you know,” Suki muttered.

“How do you mean?”

But Suki didn’t want to talk about Lindsey. “Isn’t there some way we can stop the arrest?” she asked. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

Mike sighed. “Teddy’s turning the screws hard on Charlie Gasperini.”

“What if we found new evidence? Something, someone, who would bolster Alexa’s account?”

“The mysterious nine-one-one-dialing, fast-disappearing witness?”

A smile flitted across Suki’s face for the first time in the conversation. “The very same.”

“The police couldn’t find him.”

“The police didn’t look very hard.”

“And who’s going to look harder?”

“Me.”

“Not a job for you,” Mike said. “If you want, I’ve got a private investigator I could put on it.”

“I can’t afford it.”

“This stuff isn’t for amateurs—despite what you might see on TV,” Mike warned her. “I don’t want you doing this. Let me check around and see if I can come up with someone who’ll do it on the cheap.”

“That’d be great,” Suki said. “I appreciate it. But I’ve got to at least make a stab while there’s still time.”

“I’m telling you, it’s not a good idea.”

“Neither is letting Alexa get arrested.”

Mike was silent for a long moment. “I’ll drop your check in the mail on my way home.”

Suki had no idea how to find a person she knew nothing about. So she started with the only piece of information she did know: this person had been driving a car. That narrowed it down quite a bit.

When Alexa came home, Suki brought her into the family room and made her do what the police should have, but didn’t. She had Alexa describe the car she had seen on River Road on the night Jonah was shot. At first, Alexa resisted. She didn’t want to remember. She didn’t want to go there again. The tears flowed, but Suki stood tough and finally Alexa acquiesced.

Suki had years of training and experience in memory retrieval, and she used every trick she had. Imagery. Relaxation. Evocation. Pulling the string. Zeroing in. Specifying. Soon, the dark, big American car was transformed into a black or navy midsize Chevrolet with Massachusetts plates that was about five years old. “I can see eyes,” Alexa said, her face bright with excitement. “There were eyes. They were shining for a second, and then they were gone.” The witness. Suki was very much encouraged.

River Road was a small, windy thoroughfare connecting Witton Center with Massbury, a town ten miles west with a population so small that by comparison, Witton was a major metropolis. Therefore, it made sense to assume that a person driving down the road on a Friday evening was a local. Or at least that was what Suki assumed. It was a start. As was the fact that Phyllis was a deputy commissioner for the Department of Motor Vehicles. Suki’s sprits soared. This was something she could do. Something that just might work.

When she called Phyllis first thing the next morning, Phyllis was thrilled to be able to do something for Alexa and immediately offered to run a computer search. All midsize dark Chevrolets that had been registered to residents of the fifteen towns closest to Witton in the last eight years. They decided that was a wide enough, but not too wide, net. Suki was touched by Phyllis’s kindness. Neither one mentioned the fact that this was clearly an illegal act.

After seeing two clients, meeting with a lawyer on a case she was finishing up and working for a couple of hours on the Kern evaluation, Suki was finally able to go to Watertown and pick up the printout. Her heart was pounding with anticipation as she drove into the parking lot behind Watertown Center. Maybe this would be her big break. Maybe her luck was about to change.

When she got to the DMV, Phyllis had left for the day, but a manila envelope was on her desk with Suki’s name and a big smiley face printed on it. Phyllis knew Suki hated smiley faces; it was her attempt to bring a smile to Suki’s face. But Suki didn’t smile when she picked up the envelope. It was thick. Too thick. Her heart sank when she pulled out the printout. There were 357 late-model midsize dark Chevrolets registered in the fifteen towns. Three hundred and fifty-seven. Suki dropped into Phyllis’s chair. She had 357 names, addresses and phone numbers. Now what the hell was she supposed to do?

She flipped through the pages of wide green bar; she hadn’t seen a computer printout like this since graduate school. Leave it to the DMV to still be using twenty-year-old technology. The data had been sorted alphabetically, rather than by city—she hadn’t thought to specify—making it difficult to separate out only Witton residents, or just those living in abutting towns. Suki stared at the picture of Phyllis and her family on a western ski trip: so colorful, so happy, so normal. She looked back down at the printout. It would take a year to screen all these people. And Mike had said Alexa could be arrested in less than a week.

When Suki got home, Alexa was in the kitchen making dinner. This was something she’d used to do all the time—she was a far better cook than Suki—and Suki’s spirits lifted as she watched her daughter deftly season what she recognized from the smell to be Alexa’s wonderful vegetable stew. Alexa had always been their star; she was just easily and simply good at everything. “OPK,” Jen said whenever Suki told her of Alexa’s latest accomplishment. OPK stood for “other people’s kids,” and was Jen’s way of acknowledging Alexa’s specialness while bemoaning this lack in her own children—a lack that existed only in Jen’s mind.

Suki had to admit that Alexa was a tough act to be compared with: her schoolwork was superior, her social life full, she could fix a broken clock or get a stalled boat running, she could whip up a great dinner from whatever was in the refrigerator. Although, granted, she wasn’t all that good at sports. Suki dropped the envelope on the kitchen table and sat down. “Hi, honey.”

“There were a bunch of veggies going bad in the fridge,” Alexa said without turning. She tapped her foot on the floor as she stirred.

“Great. Thanks. It’s good to see you cooking again.”

Alexa tasted the stew then reached for the coriander. She threw in a couple of bay leaves and lowered the heat.

“Kyle home yet?” Suki asked.

Alexa took a gulp of water from the glass next to the stove. “Soccer practice. He told me in school he’d be home about six-thirty.” Alexa swept the stew debris from the counter into the sink. She still hadn’t turned around, but Suki could see her set expression reflected in the large plate glass window over the sink. Alexa drained her water glass and refilled it.

Suki ran her fingers through her hair. “It’s time we faced this.”

Alexa shrugged and opened the dishwasher. She rinsed the dishes and placed them in their slots. She ran the garbage disposal and wiped the countertop. Then she stirred the stew.

“We need to talk about Jonah and the pregnancy and the abortion,” Suki said to Alexa’s reflection in the window. “These aren’t things you should have to deal with yourself. And we need to think about what’s happening now. About what might happen.”

Alexa pulled the dish towel hanging over the handle of the oven, but when it came free, instead of wiping her hands, she twisted the towel between them. “Did Phyllis get you the car registrations?”

“All three hundred fifty-seven of them.”

Alexa whirled around, still worrying the dish towel. “That many?”

Suki stood and took the towel. “Come,” she said. “Sit.”

Alexa sat.

“I got pregnant when I was seventeen.” Suki hadn’t known that this was what she was going to say, but now that it was said, she recognized the lightness of it.

Alexa’s eye widened. “You never told me that.”

“Didn’t seem appropriate—until now.”

“What happened?”

Suki smiled. “The usual.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It was just bad luck.” Suki sighed. “Kind of like you. It was my boyfriend senior year. Only guy I had ever had sex with.” She took Alexa’s hand and kissed it. “Surprise.”

Alexa allowed Suki to hold her hand. “What did you do?”

“Grandpa took me to Puerto Rico. It was 1969. Abortions weren’t legal in this country.”

“You had an illegal abortion?”

“It was terrible. Dirty. Slimy. We had to ask a cab driver where to go when we got off the plane. They gave me anesthesia without checking whether I had eaten anything.” Suki could remember it all. Clearly. The blinding Puerto Rican sun. Herself, a terrified seventeen-year-old in a miniskirt. She could still feel the deep sorrow that gouged at her for what she was putting her father through, her guilt for letting him down. Suki suddenly understood that this must be just what Alexa was feeling.

“Oh, Mom.” Alexa squeezed Suki’s hand. “How horrible. How horrible for you.”

“Horrible things happen,” Suki said. “But Grandpa was great. He was there when I needed him. He was always there. Still is. And I want to be there for you the same way.”

“You are, Mom,” Alexa assured her. “You’ve been great. Are great.”

“I love you, baby,” Suki said softly. “No matter what.”

“I’m so sorry—” Alexa was cut off by the sharp whack of glass against glass. A beer bottle exploded through the kitchen window.