Echoes in the Darkness (26 page)

Since rigidity from rigor mortis lasts about twenty-four hours, the secondary flacidity found in the body of Susan Reinert, plus the lividity and other objective signs, allowed the pathologist to make a ballpark guess that she'd died late Saturday evening or early Sunday morning.

The abrasions on the back looked to the doctor like marks from the links of a chain. He checked her entire body for any sign of an intravenous injection, but could find no needle mark, though a single needle mark could easily be lost in the many contusions on that body.

When Jack Holtz asked the pathologist if he could take a guess as to cause of death, the doctor said, "Asphyxiation." Which wasn't super-helpful in that he could see that she'd stopped breathing. And that she hadn't been shot, stabbed, slugged, and probably hadn't been strangled. But that's all Holtz got until the lab reports came back to tell them whether something other than smothering had caused the shutdown in respiratory functions.

By Monday evening the state police investigators had contacted neighbors and friends of Susan Reinert and were reasonably sure by their description of her that the body in the morgue was Susan G. Reinert of Ardmore. Through information from her friends they'd called Ken Reinert and asked him to come to Harrisburg to make a positive identification.

To joe VanNort, any husband, even an ex-husband, is always a prime suspect. Ken Reinert reacted pretty much as one would expect after receiving the shocking news. He was saddened, confused, disbelieving, apprehensive. After he identified the body of his ex-wife, Jack Holtz took him out for some coffee. He was in the company of the state police for two hours answering questions and trying to adjust to the shock of violent death.

Suddenly, he looked at the investigators and had a thought. He wondered if the kids were with the neighbors or Pat Schnure or . . .

"Who's taking care of the kids?" Ken Reinert asked.

And an investigator said, "What kids?"

Ken Reinert called his parents to learn if his children were with them. He found they were not. When he informed his parents that Susan was dead, he was astonished to discover that he couldn't tell the truth. He told his parents that she'd been killed in a car accident.

Joe VanNort later heard about it and moved Ken Reinert up a notch on his suspect list. Why would he lie about it? the old cop wondered. But Joe VanNort had been a bachelor nearly all his life, and was childless. He didn't understand how it would be for a father to utter a certain word when his own children were missing. It was impossible for Ken Reinert even to think the word at that time. Finally he had to.

He called his parents back and said, "I'm sorry. I just couldn't say it. Susan. She was murdered."

When Ken got home that night his wife Lynn was waiting. They'd called everyone they could think to call and still hadn't located his children.

His wife dug through the trash and located two greeting cards that he'd recently received. They were homemade, one from each child. One message said:

Nobody else may know that you are the worlds greatest

dad, but I know you are. Happy Fathers Day.

Love, Karen

The other said:

There is no one better than you for a dad.

Love, Michael

Without mentioning the cards she put them in a safe place. There was a horrifying possibility that they might become priceless.

By Tuesday afternoon Jack Holtz and the crime man designated as evidence officer were on their way to the Reinert home in Ardmore. The evidence officer was Trooper Lou DeSantis. He was a little taller and a little older than Jack Holtz and looked and sounded like a game of stickball in the old Italian neighborhoods of South Philly. He was a city guy and Philadelphia was home, as opposed to VanNort and Holtz, who rated an assignment in Philly right up there with sandhogging and gassing stray cats. Harrisburg was plenty big for them.

It was usually Joe VanNort's style, as the sergeant in the criminal investigations unit, to, come into a case after the preliminaries were finished and they'd focused on a suspect. He was the best they had at interrogation. But this one involved missing kids. He was in on the legwork from the start.

Before it was over, Jack Holtz would be inside the Reinert home a dozen times. On this first trip it was to try to determine what had caused them to leave the house so abruptly on Friday night, just after the hailstorm. He found that the house was full of cardboard boxes packed with things for the coming garage sale. In the kitchen he found cereal bowls and milk glasses with milk still in them.

He checked the children's rooms. Karen had a Bambi bedspread. She liked books and stuffed animals close to her. Michael had a Star Wars bedspread. He preferred his favorite toys nearby, and his baseball mitt.

Both children had neat piles of clothing, enough for a day or two, folded on the foot of their beds. Michael had changed clothes after the game. The cops found his Phillies baseball shirt in the clothes hamper.

Wherever they had gone that night, they couldn't have intended to go far. They obviously planned to return shortly.

Susan Reinerts brother Pat Gallagher had insisted on meeting the police at his sister's home. He sat and waited as the cops searched and took photos and tried to lift latent fingerprints in all the rooms.

Pat Gallagher was distant, cool, and not friendly. He was several years older than his sister. Jack Holtz thought he was there to keep an eye on the silverware. Of course he was a suspect. To Jack Holtz and the man who trained him, everybody's a suspect.

Bill Bradfield received lots of notifications about the death of Susan Reinert. An early notification came from a woman teacher with whom he'd been romantically involved in the past.

Another came from little Shelly who informed Chris and Bill Bradfield of the news, exclaiming, "Guess whose name's in the paper?"

She was obviously not going into mourning.

Sharon Lee, Susan's friend and former colleague at Upper Merion, got the word on Tuesday from another teacher who'd heard a news broadcast. She immediately called Bill Bradfield at St. John's, but was told he was in class. She left her name and number.

He called her at 7:00 p.m. He was whispering. He admitted he was not shocked to hear about Susan Reinert because another teacher had already told him the sad story.

Sharon Lee asked when he had planned to see Susan again and Bill Bradfield said, well, when school started in September.

And that stunned Sharon Lee. Then she got mad. Very mad, because she'd been told by Susan all about the trip to England, and the marriage plans.

When she began pointing out a few of those things to Bill Bradfield, he simply said that Susan Reinert had been pursuing him, but he had always told her he wasn't interested.

When Sharon Lee asked if he had any idea what Susan was doing in Harrisburg, Bill Bradfield said that he believed she had a friend named Don Jones in the Harrisburg area.

By then, Sharon Lee was having trouble maintaining composure and she said, "All right, Bill, well how about the children? Do you have any idea where they might be? Is someone we don't know taking care of them? What do you think?"

And Bill Bradfield said, "Oh yes. How old were the children?"

After Sharon Lee had hung up, she was confused and upset to think that he was trying to deny involvement with Susan Reinert. She was more upset to think that he was pretending not to know anything about the kids.

Sharon Lee had been at Susan Reinerts house once when Bill Bradfield showed up unexpectedly. She saw him making a fuss over Karen who seemed to enjoy all his attention. He had given her an autograph book for her birthday and inscribed a little message in Creek.

She was most upset when she belatedly realized that he had spoken of the children in the past tense.

"How old were the children?"

They knew about the insurance very quickly. An agent from New York Life called the state police barracks and presented them with a motive when the first news flashes hit the tube.

They also realized that this investigation probably had little or nothing to do with the Harrisburg area, for whatever reason the body was dumped there. Joe VanNort had to bite the bullet and move his team of eight investigators to Belmont Barracks in Philadelphia

By the end of the first week, he was living in a Holiday Inn near Philly along with Jack Holtz who was stewing over having to raise his eleven-year-old son long-distance. Like Susan Reinert he was a divorced parent with custody of his only child. Fortunately, Holtz's mother only lived a few minutes from his home and could take over temporarily. He figured the investigation would be over before the holidays.

Joe VanNort had a lot of questions for Sue Myers and made an appointment with her for Tuesday night. He said that love and murder go together like Fred and Ginger and figured she'd have something to tell them. They'd already heard about the figftt in the faculty lounge.

When the cops got to Phoenixville they found Sue Myers waiting in her apartment with Vince Valaitis whom she'd called home from work. And when Vince saw them he looked as if he'd been caught in the bathtub by Jay Smith with a shampoo bottle full of acid. Wearing his hairnet.

Vince was as blanched as a dead azalea. His ear was glued to the telephone into which Bill Bradfield was saying, "You don't have to talk to the police! You 11 get yourself in trouble! Let Sue talk to them! Keep your mouth shut!"

Sue Myers invited Joe VanNort and Jack Holtz to sit and said, "Vince, that phone isn't working very well, why don't you use the one in the bedroom?"

And Vince nodded and tried to mumble a hello to the cops and sidled into the bedroom because he was so terrified he was losing feeling in his limbs.

He talked to Bill Bradfield a bit longer while Sue Myers told the cops the lie she'd been ordered to tell by Bill Bradfield, namely that they'd left for Cape May at four o'clock Friday afternoon.

When Bill Bradfield said good-bye and Godspeed and hung up, Vince began to discover that lying to the cops was like ski jumping. You can't get hurt as long as you stay in the air. And as one would guess, Vince was out of practice. The last time he'd tried lying to an authority figure was in the fourth grade and a nun rapped him with a ruler for it.

Now he was trembling before Joe VanNort whose ruler would probably tum out to be a leather strap, and Vince was expecting a thump or two across the nose as soon as he told his first whopper.

"We left here at four p.m. on Friday," Vince croaked, and they reacted like he'd just said toxic waste was good for New Jersey tomatoes.

"How well did you know Susan Reinert?" Joe VanNort asked, and that gave Vince a chance to start winging it.

He said how they were absolutely wrong to think that any of them would do anything to hurt Susan Reinert. Why, she was a woman who could easily get herself killed. She was sex crazy. She made a pass at him at a party one time, he said. She probably went out and made a pass at some bluebeard, Vince assured them.

There was only one problem with Vince's Method acting. He couldn't stare anybody in the eyes. He just couldn't stop looking up.

The cops couldn't have known that Vince was looking for The Man Upstairs. But Vince's Man Upstairs didn't resemble the Michelangelo ceiling. In Vince's case, the Big Guy wore a two-toned leotard. Vince wanted nothing less than the starship Enterprise to come swooping down on Phoenixville and take him out of this earthly nightmare.

When Vince ushered the cops out of the apartment that night, his good-bye face said it all. Vincent Valaitis, two minutes from hyperventilation, was silently screaming: "Beam me up! Beam me up! Beam me uuuuuuuuuuuup!"

Chapter
16

Snakebites

Chris Pappas was probably never closer to reviving the stomach ulcer he'd had at the age of ten. The summer session at St. Johns in Santa Fe was an endurance test. It took every bit of self-discipline and self-delusion to pretend that the glory that was Greece had any relevance.

They were getting clippings from the Philly newspapers. And Chris was no longer electric. His wiring was as tangled as Lebanese politics. It was bad enough when he thought Jay Smith had gone and done it, but somehow it was even worse when Bill Bradfield made an announcement.

"Chris," he said, "I don't think Doctor Smith killed Susan Reinert. It's not his style. I think he was set up by the mob to make it look like he did it."

Chris used the word "fuzzy" to describe what he felt when trying to follow Bill Bradfield's logic. After hearing that Jay Smith hadn't done it, he was fuzzier than Burlington Mills. Even as he was trying to articulate a logical response, Bill Bradfield had another notion for him.

"Of course," Bill Bradfield conceded, "it could have just been Alex, the kinky black guy from Carlisle. I told her a hundred times to stay away from that guyl"

"The mob," Chris Pappas mumbled. "Alex."

"If the police should ever talk to us, we've got to downplay our involvement with Doctor Smith," he warned. "For example, let's say that the police find out that you filed the serial numbers off Doctor Smith's rifle, that wouldn't look very good for you, would it?"