Murder Suicide (28 page)

Clevenger got back to the loft at 1:10
A.M.
   He made himself a pot of coffee, picked up his copy of Snow’s journal and sat down on the couch to read it.  He flipped page after page, stopping here and there to sample Snow’s philosophy, but finding his attention drifting again and again to Snow’s drawings of Grace.  They were where Snow’s passion was most obviously engaged.  They were where he seemed most human.

He flipped to the last drawing, in which Snow had drawn Grace’s face as a collage of numbers, letters and mathematical symbols.  He stared at it over a minute.  And, for the first time, it occurred to him that Grace might not have been intruding on Snow’s creativity, nor merely coexisting with it.  She may have been fueling it.

Was Snow using Grace Baxter?  Was she the first woman who had tapped his passion or merely a new source of energy he had tapped into?  Was he becoming more human, or was he a vampire, siphoning the life blood of a vulnerable woman?

The life blood
.  The words made Clevenger think again about the possibility Grace had sliced her own carotids.  If Snow had drained her emotionally and promptly discarded her, she might have turned his psychological crime into its physical equivalent, making her bloodless corpse the concrete symbol of their aborted affair.

But that scenario just didn’t square with the observations of Lindsey and Kyle Snow that their father was indeed transformed.  It didn’t fit with Jet Heller’s assessment that Snow had truly fallen for Baxter.

He put the journal down and closed his eyes, giving in to sleep he had denied too long.  But he woke after just fifteen minutes, thinking of something George Reese had said the day before at the police station.  He stood up and started to pace.  Maybe his memory was playing tricks on him, maybe he was making too much of words spoken in anger, but he couldn’t get them out of his head.

He picked up the phone and dialed Mike Coady, got him at home.

"Good morning, almost," Coady said, half asleep.

"When I was interviewing Reese yesterday, he screamed at me about how painful it was to find his wife bleeding to death."

"Yeah."

"Is that what you remember?  His exact words?"

"I think so."

"You
think
so?"

"No, no."  He let out a long breath, cleared his throat.  "I’m sure of it.  He said, ‘You know what it’s like to find your wife bleeding to death?  You have any frickin’ idea?’"

"That’s what I remember, too."

"Excellent.  You want to tell me why that’s important enough to call me in the middle of the night?"

"She wasn’t bleeding to death, Mike.  She was dead.  Her carotids were severed.  She couldn’t have been alive when he found her, unless he found her within seconds of the act."

"Maybe he didn’t realize she was dead until he tried to resuscitate her.  Maybe that’s what he remembers — thinking she was on her way out."

"But he knew she had tried suicide before.  He’d seen her with her wrists slashed.  Suicidal gestures.  Those were sun showers.  This was a goddamn hurricane.  I don’t see how he would mix up the two.  Unless..."

"What?"

"You said you found no razor blades stained with blood in the bathroom," Clevenger said.

"None."

"But Jeremiah Wolfe told us her wounds were from two different implements — something like a razor cut her wrists and something with a slightly thicker, stiffer blade — the carpet knife."

"I’m with you," Coady said, new energy in his voice.

"So where’s the razor blade?"

Coady was silent several seconds.  "Who knows?  Maybe she flushed it.  What difference does it make?  Cause of death was loss of blood from the carotids."

Clevenger wasn’t ready to share his theory.  It was one piece of a puzzle.  And he wanted the time and space to put the whole thing together.  If he told Coady what he was thinking, other cops would get wind of it, then Reese’s lawyer, Jack LeGrand.  Then there’d be time for LeGrand to generate a convenient explanation — Reese threw the razor blade in the trash downstairs and no one thought to retrieve it.  The EMT workers grabbed it and lost it.  Clevenger took it himself.  He’d start interviewing the responding officers to build a case for sloppy control of the crime scene.  "You’re probably right," Clevenger told Coady.  "Let me think more on it."  He wanted to switch topics before Coady got too attached to the one at hand.  "Did you find out anything about my truck?"

"Kyle Snow was at home last night.  Confirmed by his mother.  She seemed believable.  I couldn’t find Coroway."

"Gettin’ to be a habit with him."

"I’m glad you’ve got those cruisers downstairs.  Billy okay with them keeping tabs on him?"

Clevenger walked to Billy’s room.  The door was slightly ajar.  He wanted to watch him as he slept, the secret joy of every decent parent in the world.  He pushed the door open a few inches more, looked in.   And he saw that Billy was gone.

*            *            *

He walked downstairs, then up to the cruiser parked out front in the dark.  The officer, a baby-faced man who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, rolled down the window.  "Good morning, Dr. Clevenger."

"Morning.  Billy’s not at home.  Did you see him leave?"

The cop glanced nervously out his passenger window, then into the rearview mirror, like he was checking for him right then and there.  Not a good sign.  "I thought he was upstairs," he said.

Billy knew three different exits from the building, but Clevenger couldn’t imagine why he would want to slip out unnoticed.  And not knowing made his heart race.  "Thanks," he said.

He jogged back up to the loft, dialed Billy’s cell phone, got no answer.  He walked to his room, flipped on the light.  His bed was unmade.  He’d been asleep, or at least in bed, before taking off.  Maybe he’d gotten a call from a buddy of his with some bright idea to see a late movie.  But it was even later now than Billy would stay out when he was taking liberties on a school night.

He called Coady back, told him to put the word out to Chelsea police that they should drive Billy home if they spotted him.  Then he tried Billy’s cell phone again.  Nothing.  He walked back downstairs, then over to the Store 24 around the corner.  Kahal Ahmad, who worked the night shift, said he hadn’t seen Billy at all.

There wasn’t much more Clevenger could do.  He walked back to the loft and poured himself another cup of coffee.  Then he sat down on the couch, sipping it, looking out at the steel skeleton of the Tobin Bridge arching across the blue-black sky into Boston, occasional headlights snaking their way through its steel girders.  He let his head fall back, figuring he’d doze a couple minutes.

He woke to the front door opening.  He looked at his watch.  2:05
A.M.
   He stood up.

Billy walked into the room, looking anxious.

"What’s wrong?" Clevenger asked him.

He squinted into the distance, the way he always did when he was wrestling with his conscience, like he was trying to figure a way out of a jam or around the truth.

"The police detail is out front for a reason," Clevenger said.  "If you need to go somewhere, let them take you.  Just until this case is over."

Billy nodded.  "I didn’t want anyone following me."

"Where?  Where were you?"

"With Casey."

Casey Simms, his seventeen-year-old ex-girlfriend from Newburyport.  Clevenger felt all the stress leave his muscles.  Maybe Billy was back with her.  Or maybe they’d decided to call it off for good.  Either way, it sounded like a run-of-the-mill adolescent drama.  "You want to talk about it?" he asked.

"It’s all fucked up," Billy said.

"What?  What happened?"

"Everything."

"You think it’s over for good this time?"

He shrugged, hung his head.

Something was really weighing on him.  "What is it?  Did she hurt you?  You didn’t want it to end?  Believe me, I’ve been there.  You can tell me."

"You haven’t been there.  Not where I’m at.  I don’t think so, anyhow."  He looked away.

Clevenger let that warning register.  This wasn’t sounding like a simple breakup.  "Where’s that?" Clevenger asked.  "Wherever you find yourself, Billy, you’re not alone.  You won’t be, so long as I’m around."

He took a deep breath, squinted at something far away, again.  "She says she’s pregnant," he said.  "She did a test."

Clevenger tried to conceal his own shock and disappointment, which had to be a fraction of Billy’s, the panic of a life story wrenched in an unexpected direction, jumping whatever tracks he thought would carry him into a more certain future.  "Do her parents know?"

He shook his head.

"What do you think about it?" he asked.

"I want her to get rid of it," he said, angrily.  "But she won’t."

Clevenger nodded.  "How far along is she?"

"Like a month."

"Okay."

"Okay, what?" Billy said, choked up.

"Just that.  Come over here."

Billy walked over to him, stopped a few feet away.

Clevenger laid his hand on Billy’s broad shoulder, his fingers touching his powerful neck.  "We’ll handle it.  That’s what.  Whatever happens, we’ll figure it out together.  We’ll make it work together."  He pulled him close held him a few seconds, but let go when he realized Billy was rigid in his arms.

"I got to get some sleep," Billy said, avoiding eye contact.  He walked to his room, closed the door.

*            *            *

Billy turned out his light about 3:00
A.M.

Clevenger lay awake in bed.  He pictured Billy’s face when Billy told him Casey was pregnant.  He looked frightened.  Panicked.  And Clevenger wanted to make certain he understood his life could go on, even with the intrusion of events over which he had no control, even if one of those events was the birth of a son or daughter in his eighteenth year of life.

Clevenger had known long before ever hearing of John Snow or Grace Baxter that people were most at risk for depression and even suicide when they felt their lives had been hijacked, that they were passengers on a plane going somewhere they very much did not want to go.

Sometimes, when parenting Billy was the toughest, when memories of his own father’s brutality were the clearest, when he came to wonder whether that lunatic had obliterated something essential inside him, something inside other people that allowed them to feel comfort in the world and with one another, he felt hijacked himself.  And he had fantasized more times than he could remember about boarding one of the giant oil tankers that floated in and out of Chelsea Harbor, signing of for whatever work they could give him, and disappearing.

He thought of John Snow, how he had somehow generated the resolve to actually break free of his wife and children and business partner, but also from a woman he had fallen deeply in love with, a woman carrying his child.  The force of that bond was like gravity for most people.  It kept men and women circling one another for decades — sometimes with great angst, but round and round, season after season, year after year.

Something explosive had knocked John Snow out of Grace Baxter's orbit, something more powerful than their love.  Or at least something that felt more powerful.

Clevenger saw the light in Billy’s room turn back on.  He wasn’t sleeping any better than Clevenger.  A minute later he heard his footsteps in the main room, moving to the wall of windows overlooking the Tobin Bridge, stopping there.

Clevenger wanted to get out of bed and stand there with him, but he remembered how Billy had stiffened in his arms.  And he had to admit there were some things you couldn’t do for your son, like erase his mistakes.  You could suffer with him, but not in his place.

Billy was on the move again.  But this time his footsteps were coming closer.

He knocked on the door jam.

"Hey, buddy," Clevenger said, propping himself on an elbow, turning on his bedside lamp.

Billy stayed where he was.  He looked worse than he had an hour before — paler, even more frightened.

"Tough night," Clevenger said.  "I don’t think either of us is gonna get much sleep.  Maybe we should just throw on some jeans and grab pancakes at Savino’s."

Billy didn’t answer.

"Could throw in a DVD," Clevenger tried.

"I have something else to tell you," Billy said.

Clevenger’s heart fell.  He sat up on the side of the bed.  "I’m listening."

"I lied to you."

Clevenger waited.

"I didn’t just look at your computer files," Billy said.  He looked down at the floor, then back at Clevenger.  "I made copies of them."

"The discs?  You made copies?"

"The discs and the journal."

Clevenger felt a sense of impending doom.  Whatever had brought Billy to his door was troubling him enough to eclipse his panic over getting his girlfriend pregnant.  "Why would you make copies of the discs?" he asked.

"For Jet," Billy said.

"Excuse me?"

"I made them for Dr. Heller.  I gave them to him."

Clevenger was on his feet.  "You gave Heller copies?  He asked you to?"

"He asked me to tell him anything I could find out about the Snow case."

"Did he say why he wanted you to do that?"

"He told me he wanted to know who murdered his patient.  He wanted to help find that person.  He said whoever killed John Snow killed everyone who would have come after him, everybody who would have been able to get the surgery Snow was going to get."

That sounded noble — and difficult to believe.  The simpler explanation was that J.T. Heller was worried about being implicated in Snow’s murder and wanted to eavesdrop on the investigation.  That didn’t mean he was guilty, but it rocketed him up the suspect list.

"I’m sorry," Billy said.

He sounded like he meant it, but his feeling sorry didn’t fix anything.  "Why did you do it?" Clevenger asked him.

"I don’t know.  Nobody’s ever been as good to me as you.  Like tonight.  I figured you’d throw me out or something.  You didn’t.  So I wanted to tell you the truth about what I did."