Cold Case (21 page)

“W
e've done what we can,” Frank said. “We'll both go mad if we keep going over it. Let's box it up and send the thing back. Make a copy first. We'll never remember all the corrections we've made.” They both glared at the offending manuscript.

Patsy nodded. “I'll bring it in as soon as that's done.”

“Fine. Good work, Patsy. Thanks.”

At his desk, waiting for Patsy to type the letter to go with the manuscript, he thought about Lucy McCrutchen. Too soon to ask her to dinner? Deciding the answer was no, he dialed her number.

“Good afternoon,” he said when she answered the phone. “I thought, since Amy is out on Fridays, perhaps it would be a good time to have dinner with me. Tonight?”

“Oh, Frank, I'm sorry. I'm all tied up. But thanks for asking,” Lucy replied.

“I'm sorry, too. We'll make it another time.”

They chatted for only a moment, and when he hung up, he regarded the phone thoughtfully. She sounded different. Strained? Upset? Second thoughts about seeing him? It sounded like it.

Lucy replaced her phone and walked out to the deck. The past week had been hellish, and now this. She didn't feel as if she could face Frank. It had come as a wrenching shock to learn that Amy had seen that incident on the deck so many years ago. And a worse shock to realize that Amy knew she had been out there. During the week, the tension in the air had been nearly palpable, with a deadly silence between them. The ease she had always felt with Amy was gone, and its absence left a hollow yearning for its return, and for the comfort she had found in her beautiful daughter. She had an almost desperate fear that she had lost her, just as surely as she had lost her husband and her son.

Amy couldn't be in love with David. She didn't even really know him. It was a romantic fixation of some sort in which she saw herself saving him, his gratitude…Lucy made herself stop going over that yet again. All week the same arguments had played themselves out in her mind over and over. If Jill had been a lesbian, that should be easy enough to establish without her help. She believed just as Amy did that that had been Jill's meaning on the deck years before. Something in her tone had made her meaning clear. Men simply don't lust after childhood friends who are also lesbians, she told herself once more, and that meant that David had had no motive for killing her, or for killing Robert. Lucy bit her lip, fighting against the recurring arguments. David was a stranger to everyone here. No one owed him a thing. The authorities couldn't hold his book against him, let prejudice overcome reason. The system was fairer than that. It had to be fairer than that.

Abruptly, she rose and went inside again. The last thing she wanted these days was to have to make meaningless small talk with Henry, and he had an uncanny knack for knowing when she was out on the deck. When she entered the house, she pushed down the lock button on the screen door. At least it prevented Henry's coming in and making himself at home, which seemed to be too much of a habit with him. No more, she told herself. No more.

In Portland, Amy sat at her small kitchen table with a Coke. A new project at work would keep her busy, and that was good. She wanted to stay too busy to think, to feel anything except fatigue at the end of the day. Was it time to move back to Portland? She kept asking herself and so far had not answered.

Her mother was not likely to change her mind, she told herself. At times, if she worked at it, she could almost see Lucy's refusal as reasonable. Then it slipped away. What harm could come to Robert now? Beyond redemption, beyond reproof. What difference could it make if the police suspected him of anything at all? Dig him up and hang him? She shuddered and took another drink from the can.

Decide what to do about the damn pictures! she told herself sharply. That was what she had to do this trip. Decide. Would they be enough to get David out of trouble? Why would they? If only she could see a clear way they could be used, there wouldn't be a question what to do with them. Hand them over. But they had nothing to do with Jill's death so many years ago.

She was still trying to untangle a swirl of conflicting and confusing thoughts when her cell phone chimed. To her surprise Chloe was calling.

“Amy, can we meet somewhere and talk? I have to talk to you.”

“I'm in Portland,” Amy said.

“I know. So am I. There's a coffee shop a few blocks from your apartment. Will you meet me there? Please.”

Doubly surprised, since Chloe was not in the habit of saying please to anyone, Amy said, “Where?”

She knew the small coffee shop/bakery combination, and fifteen minutes later she walked inside. Chloe was already in a booth with a cup of coffee.

“Thanks for coming,” Chloe said huskily when Amy slid into the seat opposite her.

The waitress came, Amy ordered coffee, and both she and Chloe remained silent until her coffee was served and the waitress gone again.

“This is hard,” Chloe said, her eyes downcast as she toyed with a spoon. “I realized an hour or so ago that what I had come up for was simply to get you alone and tell you something. At the house, you never know when Lucy or Henry will be around, or someone else, or the phone, or something will interrupt.” She glanced at Amy, then went back to examining her spoon.

“When we were in the town house, and Robert was a prosecutor, oh, ten or twelve years ago, I really wanted a divorce. But of course, I had to think of Travis and what it would do to him, and I held my peace. But the marriage, such as it was, had been over for years. Then Robert was elected and began to spend more and more time in Salem, traveling around the state. It was a relief, but it meant a lonesome life. I mean, in spite of whatever problems there are in a marriage, there's still a home, things you do together and all that. About four years ago, I was up here in Portland, and decided to drop in on Robert's apartment on the way back down, have dinner, whatever. I thought that maybe a new place, his apartment, would rekindle something, make it exciting for both of us.”

Amy felt transfixed as Chloe talked, apparently to her spoon. Now and again her attention flashed to Amy, then away so quickly it was little more than a blink. Her voice was low, nearly inaudible.

“So I went to his apartment, and I discovered a woman was either living with him or was a very frequent visitor. I know this is hard for you. I'm talking about your brother. Anyway, that day I waited, and when Robert got there, I told him I wanted a divorce. He begged me not to do it. He actually begged me and he talked about the career he saw looming for him, and for me he said. Big things in store for us, but not if there was a divorce. I was outraged and humiliated and I left. But that weekend, when he came home, he started again. There was a party that we had to attend, and he encouraged me to talk to Nick Aaronson. Threw me at him, is more like what he did, and Nick was everything that Robert wasn't. Warm, attentive, sympathetic, and he made it clear that he was attracted to me, had been since our college days.”

Another quick glance at Amy, a sip of coffee, playing with her spoon again. It seemed she needed a pause, a small time-out, a moment to moisten her lips.

“We had an affair,” she said then, in a near whisper. “Several months. Then I broke it off, ashamed, mortified at my own behavior.”

When she stopped again the silence extended until Amy broke it. “Why are you telling me this?” Her voice was as low as Chloe's had been.

“I have to,” Chloe said. “I decided I didn't care if it hurt Robert's career, I wanted a divorce.” Her words were coming so fast they were hard to follow, hard to separate out as individual words. “I told him so, and he showed me a picture of Nick and me in bed. He'd had us followed, had pictures. He said I'd ruin his career and he'd ruin me by publishing the pictures. I'd lose Travis, lose everything. He wanted to keep up the pretense of a good marriage. It was good for his image, he said.”

Chloe looked directly at Amy then for the first time. “I don't know where the pictures are,” she said. “And I don't want Lucy to find them. If she decides to sell the house, she'll clean out and pack up everything, and she'll come across them eventually. I can't bear to think what it would do to her to find out that Robert was blackmailing me into remaining in the marriage for his public image, nothing else.”

Amy drew back from her unwavering regard.

“If you find them,” Chloe said, “please give them to me so I can burn them. That's all I'm asking. I just want to burn them.”

Swiftly she picked up both their checks and slid from the booth, went to the cashier, paid and walked out.

Amy sat in her corner of the booth for several minutes without moving or touching her coffee. She had not even tasted it. She pushed it back and slid out of the booth.

How much of it was true? she asked herself, walking back to her apartment. And why had Chloe told her? Had she simply wanted an admission that Amy had them? An effort to gain Amy's sympathy? She remembered her own decision earlier, that if she had found no use for the pictures, eventually she would give them to Chloe and be done with them and with Chloe. The truth was, she thought with surprise, she really did have some sympathy for Chloe, who had spent half her life in a loveless marriage. Meanwhile, she still had to decide what to do with the damn pictures. Nothing for now, she finally told herself. Leave them in the safe-deposit box for now, and think about it.

Chloe was rigid with fury as she drove away. Amy had the pictures, she knew. The way Amy avoided looking at her, her general attitude since before Chloe had left the house. She had them. She would hand them over, Chloe told herself, as she had been doing all week. Amy wasn't like Robert, a blackmailer. She was like Lucy, soft and forgiving, understanding. She would hand them over.

And then, Chloe thought grimly, watch out, Nick. He had stopped calling, didn't return her calls, didn't answer his doorbell the times she had gone to the condo. He was cutting her out. She had steeled herself to one more act of debasement, but it would be worth it when Amy gave her the pictures. Her years of sacrifice, of living a lie, today, it would all be worth it, once she had the pictures. She would make Nick get it that she had nothing to lose by using the pictures. Nothing at all.

Barbara leaned back in her chair and rubbed her eyes. She had been reading one report after another for several hours and had made scant notes. Her phone buzzed and Maria said Bailey was on the line.

“I have something,” he said without preliminaries.

“Tell me.”

“I'll show you. Forty-five minutes? An hour? Office, home, your dad's place. Where?”

She glanced at her watch. It was four-fifteen. “Dad's place. We'll wait for you there.”

He hung up with as little ceremony as his greeting. Cell phone, she guessed. He hated and feared them for the danger, he claimed, of brain cancer that they posed. He spent as little time as possible using his. That he had used it probably meant he was on the road. She called Frank to make sure he'd be there.

“That's all he said,” she told him half an hour later. “He'll show us. David went to the clinic at two today. Out a little after three and Bailey called an hour and a few minutes later. If he let someone follow them to Shelley's house, I'll strangle him.”

Frank waved that away. “You know better. Anything in discovery yet?”

“No. Nothing to take to the bank. Nothing new.”

Bailey arrived half an hour later. “Traffic,” he said with a grumpy expression. “Friday get-out-and-drive traffic.” He was hot and more rumpled looking than usual. He had been driving his old Dodge that was without air-conditioning. Barbara waited impatiently as Frank played host and offered Bailey a cold beer. He accepted with a sigh and they went out to the back porch to sit at a table in the shade. Bailey pulled a gadget from his pocket and placed it in the center of the table. It was the size of a half-dollar coin, shiny and metallic, without any visible moving parts. Just a shiny case of some sort.

“That's it. Show-and-tell,” he said.

“What is it?” Barbara demanded. “Stop playing games. What's up?”

“Okay. Okay,” he said after taking a long drink. “You know how David and I work it. I drive up to the back gate, someone unlocks it to let him in and I leave. Pick him up the same way. They call, I go to the gate, he gets in and off we go. Today, a block or two away, he's fussing with that seat belt. You know, the belts in the Dodge, a little hard to get right sometimes. So he's having trouble with it, moving around some, and he feels something in his pocket. I stop to let him fish it out, and it's that.” He pointed to the object on the table.

“So what is it?” Barbara snapped. “Get to the point.”

“A GPS signaling device.” He looked at it admiringly. “A beauty, isn't it? Two hundred bucks.”

“You brought it here? For God's sake!”

“It's disabled,” Bailey said. “I called Hal Jarvis to meet us at a bar I know on 99, and drove around a little and ended up there and pretty soon Hal and another guy showed up.”

Hal Jarvis was his electronics expert, one he turned to often. Barbara believed Hal could wire the wind and make it tell tales.