Ring of Truth (20 page)

When she was acquitted, he wept and looked deeply relieved.

Artemis broke down in tears at that moment, too, a moment that followed his own guilty verdict, which he had absorbed with little change of expression. It was only for her verdict that he wept. And then, for the first time in the trial, she moved past the lawyers, toward him, and put out her right hand to touch his left arm. People standing nearby say that she looked up into his eyes, with her own eyes brimming, and whispered, “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry . . .”

No matter what his claims or her silence, at that pregnant moment Bob Wing and Artemis McGregor looked like two people in love.

* * *

Detective Jill Norman—“Norm”—thinks that Stuart McGregor was wrong to think he had watched Bob and Susanna fall in love in the grief group.

“They
didn't fall in love,” Detective Norman scoffs.
“She
did. He fell in love with her inheritance. It was just what he needed for himself, since he was busy turning himself into a saint by giving away almost all of the insurance money from Donna's death. Here came this pretty, lonely, kind of unpolished woman—just ripe for picking—and not only did she come with an inheritance of her own, but if he got married again the church would take out one of those enormous policies on her like they did on Donna. It was a double play for him.”

As Antonio Delano, the assistant state attorney would tell the jury with chilling effect in his closing argument, “That grief group was a perfect setup for manipulating and seducing vulnerable women, and the defendant knew it. If Bob Wing had been a spider and those lonely women had been flies, that group could not have been a more deadly trap. Sooner or later, one of them was bound to fall into it. All he had to do was string it and wait. Hold meetings regularly. Get the word out to the community. Attract new widows and divorcees, who are surely among the world's most vulnerable and needy people.”

Antonio spread his arms wide toward the jury.

On paper, his closing argument sounds melodramatic, but in the courtroom that day it was so compelling you could hardly breathe for the tension upon hearing it.

“And what did those women find at Sands Gospel Church?” Tony demanded. “Solace in their time of trouble? Oh, yes.” This was said with indignant sarcasm. “Did they find an understanding minister to counsel them? Oh, yes. Indeed, they did. Did they find in him a shoulder to cry on, an ear in which to pour their troubles, a font of advice for all the lonely aspects of their lives? Oh, yes. That's what Susanna found when she walked innocently into the trap known as the grief group. With all her sorrow, with all her money, Susanna walked into the trap, and it closed over her.”

Then with even greater conviction, the prosecutor turned his final argument toward the other defendant sitting at the table, separated from her alleged lover by their own lawyers. “But even spiders have mortal enemies. Male spiders are smaller, weaker than their mates, and if their mate is a Black Widow, the male himself gets caught in the trap. In this spider's web, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we had two deadly predators. A perfect match. Perhaps he would not have carried out his awful scheme if Artemis McGregor had not come along to encourage and assist him in it, almost as if they were joined in an evil perversion of wedding vows. ‘Till death do us part.’ Only it was Susanna's death they sought, so that they would not have to part. We do not know which of them struck the first blow. Or the second, or the twentieth. We do not know which of them first voiced the dreadful idea: ‘Let's kill her.’ We only know they did it,” he intoned, employing one of his boss's favorite lines to use in closing arguments in homicide cases. “We know they are guilty of her murder. Their motive was sex and money, the oldest and most convincing motives of all. Their means was a baseball bat, cruel and effective. And their opportunity was a Friday in August when they were together and Susanna was once again alone and defenseless.

“Please, do not leave her alone now, ladies and gentlemen of the jury. For once in her life, let there be people who care about her. You. And me. There was no one to care about Susanna after her parents died, no one to love her in all those foster homes, or when her first husband passed away. Please, do not leave her alone again.

“Be her friend, by being her advocate along with me.

“Stand up with me and say no! This sad life must not end without some vindication. There must be some justice for this lonely woman who had no one to protect her. Now she has me, which may not be much. But she also has the law, and you, and you have the power—the only power—to stand up for her now. I ask you, on behalf of Susanna, to find them both guilty of her brutal, lonely, terrible death.”

It was theater at its best, sincerely meant and delivered, and riveting, if only half successful.

I can't get the damn book out of my head.

Though it beats obsessing about George Pullen's death.

When Antonio Delano calls to say he heard what happened, I recall an earlier comment of his. “Why can't you give it up?” I'd asked him. “This isn't about me!” he'd exclaimed. If all else failed, if he couldn't convince me otherwise that Artie was a killer, he had sarcastically advised me to think about “public safety.”

“I should have listened to you, Tony,” I tell him over the phone. “If she's the one who killed George, I'll never forgive myself for taking her so lightly. What are the chances of convicting her on this one?”

“About as good as the last time, Marie. A search warrant hasn't turned up the bag at her house or in their cars. If we can't put her at the scene with some kind of physical evidence, we're going to lose this one, too.”

I say nothing, feeling awful.

“Marie, if it's any comfort, you're hardly the only one to underestimate Artemis McGregor. A whole jury did, remember? I'll bet Bob Wing did, too.”

“How can somebody look so sweet and do so many good works, yet be so evil? She didn't fool you, Tony. I should have paid attention.”

“So should your two friends,” he says, gently. “For god's sake, they owned a security company, Marie. They're ex-military. If they couldn't anticipate hazardous duty, how could you?”

But as I hang up from his call, I know that guarding our culdesac hardly prepared George and Bennie for what I led them into. It's many years since Vietnam. They were too old for this job, their skills were too rusty for what I asked of them, even if none of us guessed I was asking it.

Suddenly I feel another emotion arising out of the morass of
regret and self-pity I've been struggling in. It's rage. I
hate
her. Hate it that she can kill people with impunity. And I hate the idea that my book is going to let her off, just as the jury did, and only because nobody can seem to prove anything against her. I
hate
it. This is personal now.

When I think about a certain moment in the trial, a moment that turned the verdict in her favor, my skin crawls.

Tammi had put a character witness for Artie on the stand, a nurse from one of the retirement homes that Artie and Bob visited regularly. This young woman from the EverCare Center cried on the stand when she told about one demented old man.

“He doesn't have anybody. No family. No sons or daughters. And he's so sweet. Mrs. McGregor is the only person on earth who ever came to see him. Her and Dr. Wing. But she'd hold his old hands and talk to him as if he could understand her, and he'd just smile and smile. He misses her visits so much! Even though he doesn't know exactly who he's missing, he knows that somebody he loves is gone. I wish she could come back and see him again.”

That did it. One juror said afterward, “My mom is in a nursing home for Alzheimer's patients and it takes everything out of me to go see her, and she's my own mother. Anybody who would go visit senile people she doesn't even know has got to be a saint. Nobody like that could ever kill another person.”

It makes me feel sick to think about it.

And there's not a damned thing I can do about it.

But Sunday night I wake from a nightmare of being chased and feel in my gut an even more sickening thought: What if we've all been wrong? What if they've never been guilty, they've always been innocent? That's what they've claimed, without any quarter, both of them. What if an innocent man is sitting on death row and an innocent woman is holed up in her house, afraid to go out, pilloried by former friends and by people like me?

Sitting up in bed, I realize the key to that interpretation lies
in the very words of my own book that have been haunting me since Friday, when George was killed. Suddenly the admirable qualities of Artemis McGregor and Bob Wing pop into high relief, forcing me to look at them without prejudice: her selfless good works, the high recommendation from that unusual source—her ex-husband—and the way she looks, and conducts herself, like a sweet, kind, modest person. Then there's her reputed lover. But there's no proof of that beyond the infamous phone call and—possibly—the contents of a canvas bag that has never even been established as belonging to either of them. Contrast that, I instruct myself, with what is
missing
from the testimony against either of them: no other allegations of impropriety, no other women coming forward to accuse the handsome minister of sexual advances, not even a hint of infidelity by either one of them. If he's the sexual scoundrel he's made out to be, wouldn't there have been some other hint of it? Think of his dedication to the lives of other people, his crusade to extend the lives of other people, not to end them.

Once I have admitted these thoughts into my consciousness, I am forced to consider the fact that somebody else
could
have placed that bloody bat in Bob Wing's house. Many, many people had access to that foyer. In addition, why would a man so careful about footprints, a man who hid his own and Susanne's bloody clothing so well that it was never found, why would that man leave his handprints all over the murder weapon?

Tammi Golding made some of these points in her closing statement, but the jury—and I and most observers—didn't buy it. Maybe if she'd been able to offer up another suspect— anybody at all—she might have been able to create an aura of reasonable doubt, but she didn't. The jury was left with the murder weapon, the semen, and, worst of all, the lousy alibi, all pointing, reasonably, toward the Reverend.

I can see my way around those pieces of evidence.

But what I can't get around is the overheard conversation.
You've already got a wife and I'm it.
If Tony's right and those
three women told the truth, then Bob Wing was having an affair with Artemis and I believe they killed Susanna. Which means I still believe that Artemis struck George Pullen over the head and killed him, intentionally or not.

When I fall asleep again, the nightmares do not return, at least temporarily. By entertaining a fair doubt of my own prejudices, I have granted myself some peace of mind at last. As a result, I wake up feeling more rested, but also filled with even greater resolve to bring some kind of justice to the memories of Susanne and George. I rise from bed, thinking, “There must be
something
else left to investigate, some little thing we've all overlooked until now. There must be.” I can think of only two anomalies that have haunted me throughout my involvement in this case and in the lives of these people: one is sex, the other is rings and panthers. And while panthers are elusive creatures, I decide to go hunting for them first, because it feels as if the sex—the passion—is hidden even more deeply in the foliage, if it's there at all.

Susanna
12

On Monday, before I can leave on my hunting expedition, my new research assistant calls to report on what she had been doing for me. It feels like a total non sequitur to hear her talk about the Tobias chapter when I'm focused so intensely on more important things.

“I can't find out anything about the note,” Deb Dancer tells me. “There's nothing about it in your file and I checked with a couple of the sheriff's deputies who were there at the time, and they don't remember. You've got a copy of the inventory lists, and it's not on them. I went ahead and called Lyle Karnacki— remember him? Lucy's brother? Allison's uncle who's a Bahia cop? And he said he made them go over the place with a finetooth comb, but he doesn't recall ever seeing it. So is it okay with you if I contact Mr. and Mrs. Tobias and ask them if they know?”

This seems so trivial compared to the weight on my heart from George's death. I can barely concentrate on what she's asking, much less give a damn, but I play along because it's not her fault that I'm such an emotional wreck this morning. “Why would they know?”

“They probably don't,” she admits. “But I also want to know
what happened to that cake tin—remember that?—and I want a description of it for your book.”

“I like your attention to the telling detail, Ms. Dancer. Be tactful, all right?”

“Tact is my middle name,” she says, sounding strangely like me.

We're just about to hang up when it occurs to me to say, “I ought to warn you that you may not like Allison's parents. I don't know if it comes across in what I wrote about them, but she's an incredible control freak and he's like her slave who'll say anything to keep the peace with her.”

“Yeah, I sensed that, plus I read your background notes on them.”

“Okay, well, good luck. Let me know how it goes.”

“Ms.—Marie?”

“Yes?”

“Are you all right? I'm sorry, but you sound kind of down.”

“I am a bit, but you've cheered me up, Deborah.” And it's true that her energy has reinfused me with some of my own. “Call any time, okay?”

“Okay,” she agrees, sounding pleased and happy.

She didn't mention George Pullen's murder and I don't want to talk about it, so I didn't say anything, either. If she hasn't heard about it at the newspaper where she works, then maybe I'll get lucky. So far, it's been a brief news item, only one of several violent crimes that happened in Bahia on Friday, and not even the “worst” of them. There was a multiple homicide that distracted everybody. So unless some reporter learns that it was connected to the Wing homicide and that a celebrity author was involved, I may escape without the publicity. It's going to be hard enough to report it—confess to it—in my own book. I felt painfully foolish explaining to the Bahia cops why we were there in the first place, although Bennie told me not to feel that way. “Look,” he said, even in the midst of his own grief, “we were trying to do what these cops never managed to do—prove once
and for all that she's a killer. As far as I'm concerned, George died in the line of duty, trying to do a righteous and necessary thing. Don't apologize for this, Marie, because if you do I'll consider that an insult to his memory.”