First Lady (40 page)

I was in the parking lot opening the car door when my phone rang. Josie Roth said, “The baby my sister was carrying. It wasn't Tyler's.”

• • •

An hour later, Dr. Roth sat in Cuddy's office repeating to him and to Bunty and Rhonda what she'd told me in the lab.

A few months before she died, Linsley Norris had confided to her sister that while Tyler was capable of penetration, her husband had never had an orgasm in her presence during their seven-year marriage. He had refused to discuss his inability or unwillingness to ejaculate and he had refused to seek help—either physical or psychological. Linsley was a college convert to Catholicism; in fact, it was at a local Catholic church that she'd met Tyler's mother Mary, and through her had met the son. It was Mrs. Norris who'd pushed the two together. Because of her faith, Linsley would not consider divorce, despite her unhappiness in her marriage. But her deep longing to have a child finally led her into an affair for just that purpose.

Cuddy asked, “Did Tyler know?”

She shook her head. “She never told me so, but I think he did. I watched the way he treated her that last month. He hated her.”

Bunty asked softly, “Do you know who Linsley had this affair with?”

Josie Roth didn't answer. She was struggling against tears and finally lost the fight and began crying.

I stepped beside her and offered her a handkerchief. I said, “Dr. Roth went with her sister when she had amniocentesis because she was worried about the baby's status. It was at that point that she told Dr. Roth about her affair. The baby's father was Fulke Norris.”

At seven in the evening, Cuddy called the task force together. Or what was left of it. The sheriff from Neville County had gone home once the Cathy Oakes homicide case was cleared. The volunteer cops from neighboring towns had been told that the FBI had taken charge of the Guess Who investigation, and thanks anyhow. Cuddy said he wanted the rest of us to know that we could withdraw from the case right now if we wanted to, but as chief he had made a decision. We were going to focus on a prime suspect whom we could not—could not, he repeated—officially investigate. We were going after Tyler Norris. Cuddy waited until the shock in the room settled. Then he said that if he were wrong about Tyler, he would be resigning as police chief tomorrow, July 4, Independence Day, at five P.M., and the rest of us at HPD might not even have the choice of resigning, since his successor would most likely fire us all immediately. So if anybody felt like they were trapped in the Alamo and didn't want to be there, it was time to polish up their Spanish and head for the door.

Nobody moved.

Cuddy advised us to warn any woman vulnerable to Norris that she should avoid being at home alone and should go nowhere unescorted.

Nancy came by to report that a search both of Lucy Griggs's apartment and of her old room at home had turned up nothing to tie her to Tyler. Nancy had shown his picture to John Walker and his mother Doris Nutz. John had identified Tyler only as Lucy's “teacher.” He'd never suspected an affair between them. Doris wanted HPD to know we ought to be sued.

Roid came by to report that Tyler Norris had continued for three hours on his strange rambling drive through town without ever leaving his vehicle, but had finally returned to his house, in front of which we had stationed another officer in another unmarked car.

Cuddy had to go to a meeting of the city council with the mayor. Carl Yarborough and he had the task of assuring the town managers that they shouldn't worry about the fact that Hillston had just been dubbed on Channel Seven, “the Southern Capitol of Sex, Death, and Rock'n'Roll.” They shouldn't worry that the streets had been gridlocked all day by a hundred television news vans on the lookout for serial killers and by a thousand motor-cycles in town to hear Mavis Mahar sing. They weren't to worry that the meadow behind Haver Stadium looked like Woodstock, a squatters' village of tents and trailers that had christened itself “Mavistown,” where the faithful waited for a chance at the ten thousand free tickets the rock star was giving away to her upcoming concerts—the one tonight and the one tomorrow night. That they shouldn't worry that vendors were hawking both Guess Who T-shirts and Mavis go-cups right here on the steps of the Cadmean Building.

We made jokes that Cuddy and Carl could point out to the council that they should look on the bright side—store shelves were empty and hotels were full, the media was fighting over the few taxis, restaurants had reprinted menus to double the prices. The circus was in town, the sky was Carolina blue, and Hillston looked good on television all over the country—well, except for the fact that a serial killer was on a rampage.

• • •

In Room 105, Rhonda, Bunty, Lisa Grecco, and I were trying to put together what we'd learned about Tyler Norris from his sister-in-law Dr. Roth. The summer night was cool enough for Bunty to wear a faded handmade quilt wrapped around her thin shoulders. “Oh I buy it,” she said in her slow mountain twang. “From what I've read so far—and Justin, your book on this homicide is good, real good—” From the FBI psychiatrist, this was high praise. She shifted in her rocking chair. “—I buy it from Fulke Norris. Weak man, vain man—teenage war hero like that, goes to your head. Women all over you. Then you write greeting card poetry, read it on the radio, beautiful voice. Women all over you again.

“But after a while, you're getting up there in years, your son's the smart one, you're jealous, he's jealous. You send him off to a damn military academy, make a man of him, but he'll never be the man you are. Son's pretty wife comes on to you, instant Viagra.”

“Why would she?” asked Rhonda, disgusted.

“Oh I buy it from Linsley too. Husband won't sleep with her. Even discount her religion, family pressure from both sides not to divorce is heavy duty. She wants the gene pool, she cons herself how it's all in the family. Fact is, it's payback. It's her lethal weapon. So maybe she does tell him about it. Maybe it's her Christmas present. ‘Guess what, Tyler, we're having your dad's baby.' Now we've got that big stressor that kicks it all off for our killer.”

Rhonda's tanned open face, so different from her friend's pallor, shuddered. “I've got relatives calling me a pervert and this nice normal girl gets her father-in-law to knock her up?!”

Bunty sipped the mug of tea Rhonda had brought her. “Faster we can pull him, the better. We're getting way out in deep water now. Tyler's in the equivalent of a feeding frenzy. It's gone beyond fixing things—getting rid of a blackmailer, getting rid of a witness. He's like a binge drinker. He's gotten to where self-protection's not his first impulse anymore. And when these guys get to kamikaze time, all bets are off. That's when your death toll takes you into double-digits.”

I agreed that there was a big difference between the fastidious, ritualized burial of Kristin Stiller and the slaughterhouse in which we'd found Margy Turbot, but I wasn't sure what Bunty was predicting. “You mean like mass murder, like shooting up a McDonalds?”

Bunty said, “No, no, nothing like that. We're headed for suicide, but it could be he wants to take a few with him.”

“Suicide's better than losing another innocent woman,” I told her.

“Can we avoid both please? I'd rather study him than bury him.” Bunty tapped the thick book of files.

Rhonda moved back and forth along the large map of Hillston and the surrounding county. There were colored pushpins in the murder sites as well as in Tyler's Balmoral Heights home and his family's lake house. The groups made clusters. She frowned. “I want to get in that house on Tartan Drive. He's keeping souvenirs in there. They always do.”

“Forget it, guys,” Lisa Grecco reminded us. “We can't touch him. We can't go near him. You do it, and even if this weirdo's got a whole drawer full of human eyeballs, he'll walk. That's the game, okay? This is all a game.” Lisa, the youngest deputy counsel in the D.A.'s office, was only two years out of law school. Like many of her generation who naïvely believed they could trust more in cynicism than sentiment, she always took a hardball approach to the law.

Rhonda groaned sarcastically. “Well, what do you think we oughta do, Lisa, follow him around and videotape him hacking another woman's heart out of her chest? Oh, sorry, we can't film him without his permission!”

I said, “If we had letters or photos, we could move on him. Lucy Griggs told Mavis Mahar in the limo. ‘I've got proof and he knows it too.' Couple of hours later, she's dead.”

Lisa took a drink of water from her plastic bottle. “What do you people think, you're going to come across a stack of creamy envelopes with a satin ribbon around them? I haven't written a letter on a piece of paper since my mom used to make me send thank you notes to my aunt who was still giving me video tapes of
Cinderella
when I was a junior at Princeton.”

I said, “You mean email? Just because I use wax and a goose feather, doesn't mean I haven't heard of computers. Lucy had a little cheap laptop in her apartment. She had web access through Haver, but believe me we checked that thing. No incoming saved mail. No sent mail on file offline. Nothing. Either she cleaned it out or somebody else did.”

“Maybe Norris?” suggested Bunty. “He'd think of a detail like that.”

The young deputy counsel was twisting hard at her hair as if she hoped the pinch would make her think more clearly. Then she clapped her hands together. “Justin, what did you just say? She used the Haver Internet?”

“Yes,” I told her. “Students get it. But if she printed those emails out, we can't find them. Maybe she actually carried them around in that mesh bag and he got them, along with the camera.”

Lisa nodded eagerly. “Listen to me. Faculty use that web too.” She checked her watch. “I'll give you two cases, okay. Wendy Freiberg got involved with one a year ago. She got called in because this was at State so NCBI caught the case. Some professor in the—I kid you not—religion department is checking out some skuzzy child porn on the web. So the university gets wind of it because—get this—they monitor their server. Hey, I mean, they're not as bad as the FBI Carnivore.” She waved her arm at the two female Bureau agents.

“Chomp chomp chomp,” Rhonda grinned: it was a comic reference to the FBI's extremely invasive national email surveillance technique that had come under attack from civil libertarians. “Hey, you kill six women, I say you lose some rights.”

Lisa nodded. “So State fires this professor, even though this is like some old geezer with tenure. He files a grievance, screaming invasion of privacy, yada yada yada, and the university goes, ‘Sorry, Sleazo, you log on through us, it's not private. It's State business and the State is not happy being in the child pornography business. So bye-bye.'”

“I see where you're going,” murmured Bunty. “There was a Haver civil suit back in the spring, right?”

Lisa nodded. “Couple of Haver biochemists were emailing each other all these genome schemes—patentable biotech-type stuff. So Haver seizes the correspondence. It goes to civil court. Haver claims they own the patents because they say anything on the Haver web is Haver intellectual property. Guess what, they win. Guess why this relates to our friend Professor Tyler Norris?”

Bunty said, “Because all email sent through the Haver server is stored in a back-up system for 365 days. If Norris and Lucy Griggs corresponded by email, there'll be copies in the Haver mainframe.”

Lisa grinned at her. “You got it.”

I said, “How do
we
get it without the mayor, the D.A., etc., etc., etc.?”

“I know a judge'll give me a warrant right now in the middle of the night to subpoena those files.” Lisa started looking up a phone number in her cell phone. “She's appeals court, lives nowhere near here. She'll do it for Margy Turbot.”

Dick Cohen, entering, passed Lisa as she hurried out the door of 105. “Sorry guys, I got nothing for you. No hairs, no prints, no semen, no help.”

“Nothing in Margy's mouth?” I asked.

“Sorry. I'm headed home,” he yawned. “I wanna see if my two kids, the ones I left off in sixth and seventh grade, are now attending the colleges of their choice. Anybody for strudel?” He set a large tin box on the conference table. “All the way from Brooklyn. My mother made it.”

Rhonda affably opened the box, broke off a piece of pastry but had difficulty chewing it.

Dick shrugged. “My mom should spring for priority, I keep telling her, Parcel Post won't cut it with strudel.”

“She could freeze it,” I suggested.

“Oh crap, that reminds me.” Dick turned around in the door. “Sam Chang faxed me this. Amazing guy, here he is testifying in Seattle and his brain's still spinning on our problem.”

I said, “A star is a star is a star.”

Dick found the paper. “We were muddling over some tissue discoloration extending from those match burns on G.I. Jane—”

“Kristin Stiller,” Rhonda reminded him.

“Right. Well, Sam was going along with the idea it all came from the sulfur matches, but now he's thinking you know maybe it's actually freezer burn. Maybe G.W. tried to cover the freeze spots with the match burns—”

I interrupted. “I thought you told me you checked weather reports. The ground out there never really froze.”

Dick waved off my question. “No, Sam's talking a real freezer, like she was kept in a fridge before the guy dumped her. Okay, see you guys tomorrow.”

R&B and I looked at each other. We all three knew what Dick's news meant. If Sam Chang was right, Dick's original certainty that Kristin had died no earlier than mid-January did not hold. In fact, she could have died Christmas Eve, the last day anyone actually saw her in Hillston. If so, and if Tyler Norris killed her because she was blackmailing him, he killed her
before
he murdered his wife. She was his first victim; Linsley, his second.

Rhonda tossed a hardball from hand to hand; it was like worry beads to her. “JayJay, we need to get in Tyler's house, see if he's got a deep freeze.”

It's a legend in the department that I can remember the location of almost any object I've ever seen; it's why I've always been the detective first to walk the scene of a homicide. I closed my eyes now and walked into the front hallway of Tyler Norris's house on Tartan Drive back on New Year's Eve, six months ago. Tyler had just been rushed to the hospital. His dead wife still lay on the floor, now covered by a plastic sheet. In memory, I kept walking—down three steps into the living room, through a double pocket-door opening into a dining room, through a swinging door into a kitchen, then into a rear hallway. On one side, the interior door to the garage. On the other, the door into the utilities room. In that room, appliances, shelves, a sink. A washer and dryer. Against the far wall, a large white object with a heavy lidded top. I told Rhonda, “He does have a deep freeze. I saw it.”

Was it possible that Kristin Stiller had been in that freezer from Christmas Eve until he dumped her off the access road? Was it possible that Linsley Norris had somehow discovered her in the freezer? Had we been wrong about his motives? Had Tyler killed his wife not because she was pregnant with his father's child and he hated her, but because she knew he was a murderer?

I said, “Big problem. I try getting a warrant in this county, Mitch Bazemore'll shut us down fast.”