Murder Suicide (18 page)

"When will you be there?  Can I come see you?"

Clevenger checked his watch.  5:10.  If he caught the six o’clock flight back to Boston, he could be in the office by eight o’clock.  Billy wouldn’t be home from the O.R. until later than that, anyhow.  He knew he was going behind Theresa Snow’s back to talk to her eighteen-year-old daughter, but there wasn’t anything forbidden about that in a murder investigation.  And he could probably arrange for Moffett to stay late, to have a third person around.  "Sure," he said.  "Why don’t you come by around eight?"

"I’m not doing well," she said, voice suddenly close to despair.  "I feel so empty."

"You’ve lost your dad."

"I’ve lost everything."

She sounded like she was at the end of her rope.  "Lindsey, if you need to talk to someone right away," he told her, "there’s no shame in heading over to an emergency room.  I’ll meet you at Cambridge Hospital."

"I can’t talk to most people."

"Can you promise me you’ll be all right for the next couple of hours?"

"I’ll be fine," she said, very quietly.

Clevenger felt like he was locked in a replay of his meeting with Grace Baxter, asking for another
contract for safety
, as if that guaranteed anything.  But he also knew Lindsey hadn’t said anything that would warrant getting the police to take her to a hospital against her will.  "You’re sure?" he asked her.

"You’re worried about me," she said, speaking through tears now.  "That’s so nice."  She cleared her throat.  "You don’t need to be.  I kill
other
people, remember?"

"Lindsey...  Where are you?"

"I’ll see you at eight."  She hung up.

Clevenger dialed back once, got her phone message.  He tried again.  Same result.  He thought about calling Cambridge Hospital, getting them to send a crisis worker to the Snow’s house on Brattle Street.  But he didn’t have a right to do that and he knew most of his anxiety wasn’t even about what might happen to Lindsey.  It was about what had already happened to Grace Baxter.

He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the seat, but that just brought Collin Coroway’s words back. 
She said she’d cut her throat
.  He opened his eyes, stared out the window of the cab at the bare trees rushing by.  The sun was falling, and the sky looked darker to him than it had just minutes before.

*            *            *

He wanted to sleep on the plane, but couldn’t.  He took out John Snow’s journal, glanced through it.  Most of the entries sandwiched between Snow’s drawings and calculations were rehashings of his central question — whether he had the right to exit his own life story.  But midway through the journal was a passage scrawled in especially tiny letters, written diagonally down the lower half of a page.  And it began with the word
Love
.

Love is the greatest obstacle to being reborn.  In love, one stakes claim to another human being, incorporating that person into his or her own self-image.  Lovers not only find it hard to imagine either existing without the other, they become a third entity — the couple.  This is why love feels so liberating when it blooms.

But is there not in every coupling also a slow death of each individual, a disappearance of the man and woman into one another?  Is this what people mean when they speak of loving someone to death?

I just love you to death.

Is the couple truly more worthy of survival than the two individuals?

Technology offers us a solution.  When love fades, a properly guided scalpel can wholly reconstitute the individual, cleanly freeing him or her from the tentacles of another rooted so deeply in his or her soul.

The singular human spirit can be set free from the crushing weight of shared emotion and experience under which it is buried.

The individual can be reborn with no guilt or sadness, for there is no memory of others left behind, only the brightest horizon ahead, the infinite potential of an entirely new story.

Clevenger put the journal down.  Snow’s fear of engulfment was everywhere in his writing, his worry that the ‘tentacles’ of his lover would reach deep inside him and never let go, that romantic love was a kind of intoxicating cancer that consumed the souls it linked.  Was that what falling in love with Grace Baxter felt like to him?  Had he ultimately decided to end their relationship and proceed with surgery out of terror that he would cease to exist if he fell in love with her completely?  And who would he have responded had he learned that a part of him was already growing inside her womb?

He took a deep breath and shook his head.  A profound sense of sadness settled inside him.  He wondered why.  At first he thought he was beginning to actually feel for Snow, to empathize with him, a man convinced that being embraced was always the prelude to being suffocated.  A man who had married in order to be left alone.  But then the image of Whitney McCormick came to him again.  She was only with him a split second, but that was long enough to help him see that he wasn’t sad only for Snow.  He was sad for himself.  Because living through his own kind of hell as a child hadn’t left him much better off.  Ultimately, he was alone, too.  He could care about his patients.  He could love his son.  But he wasn’t at all sure he would ever let himself be loved.

*            *            *

With a delay in Boston, Clevenger got to Boston Forensics ten minutes before Lindsey Snow, driving right past three die-hard reporters who must have been lurking outside the chain-link gates for hours.

Cary Shuman was one of them, a gritty street scribe who would have happily burrowed right under the asphalt of Chelsea’s crooked streets if he thought  there was any chance a story might be hidden there.  "Any leads, Doctor?" he yelled out, as Clevenger walked toward the entrance.

Clevenger didn’t stop.

"Is it true Grace Baxter was your patient?"

That broke Clevenger’s stride, but he forced himself to keep walking.

"You made it," Kim Moffett said, coming out from behind her desk as he walked through the door.  She had agreed to stay late.  She had on a black leather jacket, torn Levi’s and a pair of Prada leather sneakers — a pretty typical getup for her.

"Thanks for hanging out," Clevenger said.

"No problem."

"Everything all right?"

"Just great.  I’ve got plenty of company if I get lonely," she said, nodding toward Shuman and friends on the street outside.

He smiled, started toward his office.

"You know, you don’t look good," she said.  "Have you been sleeping?"

"I’m okay," he said.  He stopped, turned toward her.  "Thanks for asking."  Nobody did, anymore.

"Want me to order you dinner?"

"I’ll just grab something on the way home."

"Liar."

He smiled at her, turned and walked into his office.  He had barely taken off his coat when the intercom chimed.  "Lindsey Snow here to see you," Moffett said.

"Send her in."  He opened his door for her.

Lindsey glanced shyly at him as she walked past him, into the office.  She was dressed in the same tight jeans and black sweater she had been wearing at the house, but she had pulled herself together, putting on makeup and perfume and tying her hair back.

"I’m glad you came by," Clevenger said.  He motioned toward the chair Grace Baxter had sat in.  "Please."

She sat down.

He sat in his desk chair, swiveled around to face her and saw she was crying.

"Why can’t I keep it together?" she asked.

"Maybe because you’re not supposed to," Clevenger said.

She wiped her tears away, but they didn’t stop.

He let her cry.  Watching her, he saw again how she teetered between adolescence and adulthood, with a raw sensuality that had to deposit her in a kind of no-man’s land — too much a woman for boys her own age, too young for fully adult men.

She seemed cried out after a minute or so.  "I didn’t tell you everything today," she said.

Clevenger waited, remembering that pushing her had made her pull back.

"I did something terrible."

More bait.  He didn’t take it.  "Are you sure you’re comfortable talking to me about it?" he asked.

She just shrugged.

Several seconds passed.  He wondered whether he was being too aloof.  "You won’t scare me away."

She closed her eyes, swallowed hard, then opened them and looked straight into his eyes.  "I didn’t just tell him to die.  I made him
want
to die.  I mean, I took something away from him that made him want to live."

"What was that?"

"A
woman
."  Her cheeks flushed.  She looked down at the floor.  "He was seeing someone else."

From the bitterness in her voice, it sounded like she felt her father had been cheating on her, not her mother.  "Who?" Clevenger asked.

"Her name was Grace Baxter.  She ran an art gallery."  She pressed her knees together.  "She killed herself, too.  Right after my dad."  She hung her head.  "I’m a pretty bad person."

"How did you find out about her and your father?"

"She called the house once," Lindsey said, looking back up at him.  "She was, like, all strange on the phone.  Like she knew me or something.  And the way she said his name...  It was sickening.  I asked Collin, my dad’s business partner, about her."

That squared with what Coroway had told Clevenger.  "And what did he tell you?"

"That she was... you know... with my dad."

"How did you feel?"

"Like I told you, that my dad was a liar."

Clevenger stared into her eyes.

She held his gaze.  "And that she was a fucking whore."

The bulk of Lindsey’s rage was clearly directed at Baxter.  That made psychological sense.  John Snow had a passionless marriage, but a daughter he considered perfect.  That imbalance could have easily led Lindsey to consider herself the most substantial female in her father’s life.  There was not healthy Oedipal competition in the house.  She owned her father — until Grace Baxter showed up.

"I went to the gallery once." She said.

"Did you find her?"

She looked nauseated.  "How could I miss her?  I had been looking at her for months.  Did you see the painting over the mantel in the living room?  The naked woman behind the window?"

Clevenger nodded.

"It’s of her.  That’s how twisted she was.  She made him bring her home to his family."

"How did it feel, seeing her in the art gallery?" Clevenger asked.

"I wanted to vomit."

"Did you tell your father you knew about her?"

"Not exactly.  I told him he was a liar.  I told him I wished he would die."

The lie, of course, was that Snow would be Lindsey’s were it not for his rather lifeless marriage.  As the only female he adored, her developing psyche was deprived of coming to the healthy conclusion that her father was simply unattainable as a mate because he was
in love
with her mother.  Grace Baxter’s arrival on the scene showed Snow was willing to go outside his marriage, to be passionate — but not with Lindsey.  He would never be hers.  "And what did he say when you told him you wished he would die?" Clevenger asked.

"He said..."  Her eyes filled up.  "He said maybe I’d get my wish."

"When was that?"

"A few months ago."

"And had the two of you talked since then?"

"Not about anything important.  Not much at all.  There wasn’t anything to say."  She fought against her tears.  "Then I found something."

"What was that?"

"A note."

"From your dad?"

She shook her head.  "From that..."  She stopped herself.  "From her.  A suicide note."

Clevenger’s pulse started to race.  "Where did you find it?"

"In his briefcase."

"You were looking through his briefcase?"

"That’s where he kept the receipts from the Four Seasons Hotel," she said bitterly.  "They used to meet there.  I followed them once.  I wanted to see if they’d been there again."

"Do you remember what the note said?"

"This crap about how she didn’t feel alive without him.  How she hoped he would forgive her for killing herself.  And some really disgusting stuff."

He didn’t want to make Lindsey shut down, but he needed to know.  "Such as?" he asked.

She looked truly nauseated now.  "She said that when he ‘
entered
her,’ she ‘entered him.’"

Lindsey was describing the suicide note found on Grace’s nightstand.  "What did you do with the note?" he asked her.

She looked away.

He waited.

"I should have just put it back in his briefcase."

"But..."

She looked at him with something new in her eyes — a self-righteousness he hadn’t seen before.  "I gave it to her husband, George Reese.  I had my brother bring it to his office at the Beacon Street Bank."

"You told Kyle about Grace Baxter?"

"He’d been getting all cozy with Dad the last three or four months.  Like they were best friends, all of a sudden, even though Dad basically blew him off his whole life.  I didn’t want him getting sucked in, then finding out we were all getting ditched for her."

Kyle’s evolving connection with Snow clearly would have threatened Lindsey’s special place in Snow’s life.  By telling Kyle about Grace Baxter, she not only torpedoed her father’s affair, she destroyed any chance for a meaningful father-son relationship.  "When did he bring George Reese the note?"

"A week ago."

That information was all Coady would need to bring Reese in for questioning.  He had motive for one or both murders; he knew his wife was having an affair, and with whom.  And he knew it was no fling.  She was in love.  She didn’t want to live without Snow.