Regrets Only (17 page)

Nancy adjusted her attire, pushed her hair behind her ears, and came out into the reception area. When Lucy extended a hand, she took it in both of hers and shook it vigorously. “I heard . . . I heard about Morgan and I just can’t stand it,” she said in a high-pitched voice with a Southern twang. For some reason, the sound was surprising. “It’s all too much, too awful, too . . . I don’t know what. I don’t even work Mondays, but my husband agreed to help me out with the kids, get them off to school. I told him to take them to McDonald’s for breakfast if he wanted to avoid problems. An Egg McMuffin and the kids don’t make a peep, so that’s the advice I gave him.”

“Because you wanted to come to the office?” Lucy redirected.

“I just need to get in and out before David arrives, and he won’t get here until noon or so because of rounds. He and I have problems enough and I just can’t face him, not now, not after what happened. I’ve got to get out of this place. I’ve had it. First Calvin and then that gun and now this.” The words spilled out of her.

“What gun?”

She stared at Lucy with a baffled expression. “You don’t know? You’re investigating Morgan’s death and you don’t know? David kept a gun in his office. A handgun, a pistol, I don’t know brands, but I know it held bullets and fired. We all told him he was crazy, but he wouldn’t listen. He said he knew what was best. Sure enough, just as I predicted, someone stole it about a month ago.”

Lucy flipped to a new page and began to write. “Has it been recovered?”

“Of course not. The police thought it was one of Morgan’s patients—this guy, Calvin. She already had a restraining order against him, as if those things are worth the paper they’re written on. I’m not sure she thought it could protect her. That’s when she started carrying a baseball bat. And sure enough, he wasn’t arrested. You’d know better than me what kind of investigation the police did, if any. Why David even kept a firearm in the first place is beyond me.”

“What can you tell me about this Calvin?”

“His name’s Calvin Roth. He’s crazy, and I don’t say that lightly. I see a lot of problems in my line of work, a lot of strange people, bless their souls, but he was in another league. I couldn’t tell you his diagnosis. Morgan was way too discreet and she took her obligations of privilege extremely seriously. But some screw in him was loose—or had come out, I should say. I almost lost a client over him one time because he wouldn’t leave after his appointment. Even just sitting still in a chair, he was intimidating. My client said he drooled, and it didn’t surprise me.”

“Do you know when Morgan got the restraining order?”

“I’m not sure. But it was a while back, around Christmastime, I think it was.”

“And she kept a bat with her?” It had to be the Louisville Slugger.

“Yes. I’d see her arrive with it in the mornings and leave with it in the evenings. Wouldn’t surprise me if she slept with it under her pillow.”

“But she continued to see Calvin as a patient?”

Nancy paused, apparently confused by the question. “You’ll have to excuse me. I really do need to get myself organized.” She glanced at her watch, the band of which appeared embedded in the flesh of her wrist.

“Please. If I could have just a few more minutes of your time.”

Suddenly Nancy’s breathing quickened, and Lucy watched her chest rise and fall at a much too rapid pace. She was hyperventilating. “Do you want to sit down?” she asked. “Or can I get you some water?”

“No. I’m fine.” Nancy leaned against the secretarial station for balance. She pursed her lips, exhaling loudly through her mouth. “What is it you want to know?”

“Was it just the three of you in this office suite?”

“We have a secretary, but she hardly ever shows, as you can see,” she said, indicating the dead flowers with a sweep of her hand. “Some health complaint or another. You’d think between three mental health workers we’d be able to cure our own secretary of hypochondria.”

“How long have you shared an office?”

“David and Morgan had been here for a while. I came in about two years ago. It’s expensive space, being so close to the hospital, and David certainly wasn’t going to give me a break on my share of the rent. He might have since I get half what he does for seeing patients and my office is smaller. But he told me it enhanced my reputation being associated with the two of them so I was actually getting something extra and I should be thankful. I don’t know. It was a mistake. Not the space—other than the issue with Calvin, my patients like it just fine—but being around him. He’s a very self-centered man. And arrogant as all get out, or whatever that expression is.”

“What about Dr. Reese? Did you know her well?”

“Morgan? Nobody knew Morgan well. She worked so hard that there wasn’t time to get to know her. But she was always polite to me.” Nancy stopped abruptly. “Look, my husband’s a lawyer so I know how this interview-with-the-police stuff works. If there’s a place I can reach you, I’m willing to call. But I can’t talk to you now.” When she stopped speaking, her lips quivered. She struggled to keep back tears.

Why was she running away? What was this all about? Was she afraid of Dr. Ellery? Or was her fear of something else? How much did she know about the fate that Morgan had suffered? Although her conduct didn’t make sense, it also didn’t make sense to alienate a potential witness by forcing her to stay in a place where she was frightened. Lucy handed her a business card. “I won’t keep you. But would you please call me so we can set up a time to meet? Your husband’s welcome to come, too, if that would make you more comfortable.”

Nancy nodded and took the card.

“And can you tell me which one is Dr. Reese’s office?” she asked, looking at the two closed doors off of the reception area. She didn’t want to have a run-in with Dr. Ellery for infringing on his privacy without a warrant. As long as she confined her search to Morgan’s office, and Morgan’s office alone, she could avoid any legal pitfalls.

“It’s that one,” Nancy said, pointing to the door farthest from the entrance. “If it’s locked, there’s a master key in the secretary’s desk. Part of the problem around here. Security’s not too tight.”

A key was unnecessary. Lucy opened the door and stepped into a large room, comfortably furnished with two upholstered armchairs facing each other and a desk with an ergonomic chair. Behind the desk, freestanding bookshelves were filled to capacity. Against the opposite wall, piles of books and files covered a credenza. A slight scent of rosemary was present in the air.

The carpeting in Reese’s office also showed signs of recent vacuuming. Lucy removed her shoes so as not to track any dirt from outside into the room, and walked the perimeter, glancing out the single window into the alley below. This was her favorite part of being a detective. Unlike many of her colleagues who thrived on the adrenaline rush of pursuing a suspect or making an arrest, for her the thrill was deciphering what mattered. It was a careful process of selecting what was relevant to a crime from among the millions of external details that made up a life. In this process that was in part deductive, in part analytical, and in large measure intuitive, she needed to trust herself as she’d learned to trust herself in other types of investigations. Only now the stakes were higher. Missing a critical clue meant a killer might go free.

She stopped by the bookshelf and scanned its contents: a
Physicians’ Desk Reference
, at least a dozen other volumes on medications, a DSM-IV-TR, a shelf dedicated to adolescent and childhood development, a section of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross volumes on strategies for coping with death, various psychiatric periodicals dating back years. Then her eyes stopped on two books down at the bottom, both of which had slips of colored paper protruding from their pages.

She removed the first one and stared at the black cover and orange lettering of a current volume of the
Social Register
. Opening to the flagged page, she scanned the list of names—more than a dozen “Herberts,” each with numerous seasonal addresses. Most hailed from New York City—if where one “wintered” could be considered the primary residence—with a Boston representative and two Philadelphia families included. She paused at the local names:
Mr. and Mrs. Jackson J. Herbert (Athena Preston)
wintered on Society Hill and summered on Mount Desert Island;
Mr. and Mrs. William Foster Herbert (Faith Aldrich)
resided in Gladwyne and Northeast Harbor. The long-established Pennsylvania-Maine connection at work. The next entry caught her eye.
Juniors: William Foster, Jr., and Avery Aldrich
. William and Faith Herbert had a daughter named Avery. Nothing revealed which particular listing had warranted Morgan’s attention; although Avery was an unusual name, it was not so rare as to rule out other conclusions. A friend or even a patient could be anyone on this page. Nonetheless, she copied the Greaves Lane address in her notebook before replacing the volume on the shelf.

The second book was a trade paperback with the title
Motherless Daughters.
A blurb on the cover read “. . . a must read for the millions of women whose mothers have gone—but whose need for healing, mourning, and mothering remains.” Lucy flipped through the well-worn pages, several of which had come loose from the binding. Blue pen underlined numerous passages. There were handwritten notations, brackets, and asterisks in the margins throughout. On the page marked by Morgan’s piece of colored paper, the author wrote of surviving emotional abandonment through focus on positive memories and traits.

How many times had Morgan read this book? Was her interest personal or professional? As Lucy replaced the volume on the shelf, she remembered Archer’s words. She was lucky to have a mother—a mother who cared, a mother who had devoted her life to her family, a mother who even after twenty-eight years was willing to discuss how best to iron a satin bow.

She walked back to the window. Staring at the nearby building with its still mostly dark windows, she remembered the trial of
Commonwealth v. Moses Walker
that she’d been involved with as a detective for the South Division. Moses had been fourteen at the time he coordinated and executed a series of home invasions around Jefferson Square. How a scrawny black kid had managed to return to South Philadelphia packed with two .38s, a .22, and a hunting knife and rampage for five straight weeks still baffled her. Despite a fairly good description and a collection of physical evidence, she and her partner had been unable to apprehend him. At one point, she’d even wondered if he literally disappeared into the underground water ducts after each horrible beating. Finally, it was a neighbor, hearing the desperate cries of a woman as she watched her husband being tied to a chair and beaten with the butt of a gun, who had waited below the fire escape and shot Moses in the thigh as he’d exited. The neighbor wasn’t licensed to carry but the prosecutor was more than willing to overlook that technicality.

Then, amid much controversy, the juvenile judge had allowed Moses to be tried as an adult because of the heinous nature of his crimes. The press called him a victim, a product of poverty and the destruction of family values. It was the classic ghetto saga: He had no father. His mother, a crack addict, put macaroni and cheese on the table only by sleeping with a panoply of undesirable men willing to give her five bucks a shot, ten if they wanted to take a turn at her adolescent son afterward. Moses had scars on his face from being scalded; his leg had been broken twice before it received a bullet. By contrast, the prosecutor painted him as an animal. Rehabilitation was meaningless. He was incapable of following a moral code. He had blood lust. He’d confessed that the popping sound of breaking a bone or crushing a skull excited him. His parental situation was irrelevant because he wasn’t human. This hadn’t been about money—in five home invasions, he’d gotten less than $300. He sought the thrill.

Moses hadn’t shed a tear or displayed any emotion during the three-week trial. He’d received multiple consecutive sentences that would put him away forever. And yet, more than the evidence, more than the passion of closing arguments, more than the defendant’s eerie calm, what haunted Lucy most of all was that moment as the courtroom security guards escorted him to lockup. His wrists cuffed and his ankles shackled, he turned to the audience, scanned the crowd, and set his eyes on a woman who’d fallen asleep in the back row. Then in a voice that could have belonged to a member of a boys’ choir, he’d called out repeatedly, “I love you, Mama. I love you, Mama.” Even after he was out of sight, his plaintive words echoed in the corridor.

The bond between mother and child never broke.

Lucy returned to the desk and sat down in the black nylon contraption that epitomized ergonomic design. What about Morgan? What was her story? Despite the thirty-six hours that had elapsed since the discovery of her body, her next of kin had still not been located. This woman apparently lacked a community of relatives. The only person who might be able to provide helpful information on her family was Mr. Haverill, but Lucy had held off on calling him until after Archer had had a chance to speak with him first. That opportunity couldn’t occur soon enough.

The top of Morgan’s desk held a fabric-covered blotter, a mug with the caduceus insignia of the medical profession filled with pencils and pens, and a stack of photocopied articles from various medical and psychiatric journals held down by a crystal paperweight from AmeriMed, the pharmaceutical company. A color photograph in a black frame showed Morgan beside a young woman with sandy-colored hair leaning against a split-rail fence. The pretty girl wore jodhpurs and held a riding crop. Behind them was a chestnut horse with a white star on its muzzle. Small digital numbers in the lower right-hand corner marked the date: April 27, less than a month before Morgan’s death.

Lucy held the picture up to take a better look. There was something about the girl’s features that resembled Morgan. Was it the eyes? Lucy removed an evidence bag from her satchel, labeled it, and inserted the framed picture.

Next, she slid the narrow center drawer open and gazed at its haphazardly arranged contents: two jars of Carmex, paper clips, rubber bands, a stapler and staples, dental floss, a small calculator with brightly colored numbers, pastel Post-it notes, a Mason Pearson hairbrush, nothing more than the usual accoutrements of a professional woman. But tucked in the back was a second photograph, this one unframed, yellowed with age, and curled at the edges. It had been torn and taped back together, making part of the background difficult to decipher. Lucy lifted it up to her eyes to get a closer look. Although the photo had been taken decades earlier, the figures in the middle were unmistakable. Wearing a pale pink cardigan and white Capri pants, Morgan stood beside Rodman Haverill, with the iron gates of their mansion visible behind them. He stared straight into the camera with his arm around her waist while she looked away over her right shoulder. Her arms dangled by her thin body, unwilling to return his affection.