Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (6 page)

custody of the boys.
 
He described his ex-wife to Sara as "bitchy."

Sara remembered his words.
 
"He said she would fly off the handle and

yell at the kids.
 
He told me she was sexually promiscuous but that he

really thought she hated men."

Sara's heart went out to Brad.
 
He was so worried about his kids that

it seemed to color his whole life, and she saw the shadows of pain wash

across his face when he thought she wasn't looking.
 
Even so, she found

Brad-"fun, bright, and attractive."
 
She had met very few men in her

life who were not intimidated by her intelligence and her income.
 
Not

this man.
 
Brad had a remarkably keen mind and Sara found him more and

more fascinating.
 
His lifestyle and his interests were different from

anything she had ever known.
 
But there was an almost electric energY

about him.
 
He was enthusiastic and charismatic and he had risen so

high so rapidly in the business world.

Incredibly, just when Sara had pretty much reconciled herself to being

alone, Portland's spring of 1986 surprised her.
 
It brought not only

its usual profusion of rhododendrons, azaleas, and dogwood blossoms,

but also this remarkable man who seemed to be ideal for her.
 
She

stopped seeing Jack Kincaid, and Jack dated Sandi exclusively.
 
Sara

and Jack were still friendly, it was just that they rarely met any

longer.

Brad Cunningham was everything that Sara had ever imagined she would

want in a husband, and he had come along just at the time when she

believed she would never find anyone.
 
It was funny how life turned out

sometimes, that the two of them should ever have met and fallen in love

defied the laws of probability.
 
Their backgrounds were so very

different.
 
Sara was Dutch, Brad was half Indian, half Celtic.
 
She was

small and blond, he was large and dark.
 
They were both, however,

determined and ambitious people who could focus on a goal and channel

all their energies until they achieved it.

Before April blossomed into May, Brad and Sara were extremely close.

"He waited a long time before he would make love to me," she

recalled.

"And that was thoughtful.
 
He told me that he didn't want to be

intimate until he was sure that we were going to stay together .
 
.

."

Brad proved to be both a tender and an exciting lover, a caring,

passionate man.
 
"He told me over and over again how much he loved

meþhow beautiful I was," Sara said.
 
"He was always telling me what a

lucky man he was to be with me, how lucky his boys were."

Sara had every reason to believe that Brad loved her.
 
"A nurse friend

of mine told me after a party that it was obvious Brad was in love with

me," she remembered.
 
"She said he never took his eyes off me the whole

evening."

Sara felt just as lucky to have found Brad.
 
It was a transcendently

perfect spring for both of them.
 
Brad gave her a friendship ring,

which they both knew meant a commitment that far exceeded friendship.

He urged her to rent an apartment in the Madison Tower so that they

could be closer together.

The three round towersþMadison, Grant, and Lincolnþwere the place to

live in Portland in 1986.
 
Their windows looked out on a renewed

riverfront, on all the arching bridges that cross the Willamette River

to connect the bisected city, and on the long park blocks that are not

unlike Manhattan's Central Park.
 
Brad had moved to a threebedroom unit

on the eighteenth floor where the rent was a thousand dollars a

month.

In June, Sara found a unit she liked on the fourteenth floor.
 
It was

eight hundred a month.
 
In New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, their

apartments would have rented for at least three times as much.
 
The

rooms were large and tasteful and there was an outside walkway running

around each floor of the soaring towers.
 
Basement parking facilities

were available to all tenants.
 
It was, of course.
 
a security building

where no one gained entrance to the tower elevators without permission

of the guards on duty.

Coincidentally, Brad's former girlfriend Lily Saarnenþwho had been

responsible for bringing Brad and Sara togetherþlived in an apartment

on the ground floor of the Madison Tower.
 
That didn't concern Sara.

Lily was a very sexy woman, it was apparent that whatever she and

Brad had shared was over, and Lily was in love with her surgeon

boyfriend, Dr. Clay Watson.
 
He was two decades older than Lily, hut

that didn't bother her at all.
 
She was a pragmatic woman, and Watson

took wonderful care of her.
 
Like Brad, Lily had a career in banking,

hut her health was unpredictable.
 
She needed someone like Watson.

Sara and Lily were very different types.
 
While Sara was sweetly

feminine, Lily's style was subdued.
 
She chose loose clothing in earth

tones, pulled her long hair hack in a bun, and wore horn-rimmed

glasses.

Even so, men seemed to find her almost bland but perfect features

spectacularly sensuous.
 
She had a manner about her that suggested a

sexuality barely under wraps.
 
She spoke softly, as Sara did, but Lily

had hidden promises in her voice.

Sara was not surprised that Brad had been attracted to Lily, hut now

he was completely devoted to her.
 
He had turned her life upside down,

and she was gloriously happy that summer.
 
She was so much in love that

she never felt fatigued, even though she was working such brutal hours

in the trauma unit.
 
It seemed as though everything she had longed for

in life was suddenly within her grasp.

Sara adored children although she had never been lucky enough to have

any of her own.
 
She had found Brad's three young sons delightful from

the moment he introduced them to her.
 
Jess, Michael, and Phillip were

as smart as their father, and well behaved.
 
Sara and Brad took the

boys sailing on a week s vacation and it was as if they were already a

family.
 
Sara hated to say goodbye to them when they went back to their

mother.
 
And she worried about them.
 
Brad had come to trust Sara so

much that he gradually revealed more and more about what their mother

was really like.
 
He confided that she called the children four letter

words and screamed at them continually.
 
The custody of his little boys

was desperately
 
important to Brad.
 
All of his husincss success meant

nothingþnot if his children were being mistreated.

That summer Brad and his estranged wife wrangled constantly about the

boys.
 
It was the one shadow over Sara's happiness.
 
She heard Brad

argue with his wife on the phone, though she never really saw the

acrimony between them.
 
She accompanied him sometimes when he went to

pick up his sons, but she never spoke to his wife.
 
"I saw her working

in her yard," Sara recalled.
 
i"Once, we took the boys back and she

came running up, holding her arms out for Phillip.
 
But we never

talked."

Sara worried about what effect all this was having on the boys, but she

tried to stay out of the arguments.
 
It wasn't her place to interfere,

and she was confident that Brad could handle things in the best way for

his sons.

Sara continued to pay the rent on her fourteenth-floor apartment in the

Madison Tower that summer, but she spent so little time there that it

seemed like an empty space with no human energy.
 
"I kept my clothes in

my apartment, but I was basically living in Brad's apartment," she

said.

His apartment reflected both his taste and his ability to buy the

best.

He even had a baby grand pianoþalthough he couldn't play.
 
It was only

natural that Sara wanted to spend her few off-duty hours with Brad.

"I was very much in love with him, and I thought he was very much in

love with me."

She had no reason to think otherwise.
 
Brad assured her many times a

day of his love.
 
He was always on time to meet her or pick her up, he

was always where he said he would be, and their time together was

wonderful.

In a sense, it was as if they were both recouping the years they had

lost in bad relationships.
 
Sara knew that Brad had been married four

times and that he had been disappointed in love just as she had.

But now, finally, almost serendipitously, they had found each other.

They were both under forty and they could plan for so many good years

together.

Except for all the hassle that Brad was having with his wife over the

custody of Jess, Michael, and Phillip, Sara's and Brad's lives were

idyllic.
 
Her practice was well established, his business interests

seemed to be booming, they loved each other, and they planned to get

married as soon as Brad was divorced.
 
Their days had fallen into a

happy pattern.
 
When Sara wasn't working at Providence, she was with

Brad.

Every other weekend, they planned their time around Jess, Michael, and

Phillip.
 
And on the weekends that Sara was on callþas she often

wasþBrad took the boys to the park blocks or entertained them in his

apartment.

He had the boys in the middle of the week for a few days too.
 
It

seemed that he and his wife had calibrated their joint custody almost

down to the minute.

Sara sensed that Brad was often sad, and he finally confessed to her

that his wife was continuing to make his life miserable.
 
Sara wondered