Simple (20 page)

She always got to him when she wrapped around him, the way she held on to him. “It's torture not touching you at the office,” she said.

“I think you're marvelous. I don't know how you do it. You move around that place as if you don't notice me and don't even like me that much.”

“I care only about you,” she said quietly. “I'm trying to give you what you need.” She pressed tighter, as if she wanted to climb into him. “I care so much it hurts.”

“I love you,” he blurted. Since the words surprised even him he had to think about whether it might be true. The dangerousness of love, the doubleness of his life, hit him. He was alerted to danger that night, worried by his own words.

“I want to spend my life with you,” she said.

He cursed his body for getting him into this. “Let's talk about work,” he said abruptly. There was a tear formed at the corner of her eye, the way she was lying on her side. Her body made that perfect rolling-hills shape that painters loved. He traced it with his right hand, then cupped her chin. “Let's talk about work and get rid of sad thoughts.”

“I will spend my life with you.”

“How?”

“Because things change. They do. Your wife is undeserving and unprincipled—”

“Don't say that.”

“And dumb.”

“Please don't say that. It's complicated.”

“But she loves someone else. Have you no pride?”

“I have pride. Don't accuse me like that.” He got up. He left her alone in the bed. She started crying. “Just understand there are things you don't know.”

“Like what. Tell me.”

“Married life. People get bored.”

“It doesn't have to be that way. My parents didn't get bored.”

He thought, How does she know that? He thought, It's probably because they're boring people to begin with. He fumed and walked to the window of the motel room, pulling the heavy drape aside. It was bright evening out there still. Men were home at dinner with their families. Or off playing golf. Why did he need this?

“I love you. I'll wait.”

“We must be extremely careful.”

“I'll let you concentrate on the campaign.”

“Thank you.”

“I won't wait forever. I never did this before and I don't like myself for it and I want to make it right somehow.”

“Just hang on. We'll figure it out.” He suddenly needed to get out of that room, get his clothes on, and be away. Until the next time he saw her pretending to avoid him and wanted her all over again.

He shook off the memory now as he opened his mail. Ballet offering complimentary tickets, asking him to consider being on the board. He already had the symphony board and the Pitt board and the Cultural Trust. Could he take on another?

Request for money.

Request for money.

Why could she tease and tease like a pro and then turn gloomy? Did she actually like the simple fellow she made up the story about? Did she see him sometimes? Was it Cal?

He banished these thoughts and turned on his computer. His screensaver faced him with Monica and his boys.

He hated himself. He could go to the police, that nice one, the commander, and admit he had lied about his relationship with her. No more lies. Clean slate.

He would go to church. Next Saturday. He grew up on confession.
I took a baseball, I swore, I tricked my brother and got him in trouble, I stole money from my father's wallet, I masturbated eight times in one day.
Sin or adolescent behavior, it was a relief to seek forgiveness.

*   *   *

CHRISTIE STOPPED BY
the jail to talk to the old gnomelike doctor who had scanned Cal Hathaway's body for evidence of mosquito activity. “There was something that could have been an old bite or a mild bite, I can't tell. Some people don't react much to a mosquito. Some swell up like crazy.”

“Hm. I see. Not conclusive, then.”

“Right. Not conclusive. He was pretty jumpy, shy. But I managed an exam. One of the stranger requests I've had.”

“Keep it under wraps, would you?”

The doctor grunted a yes.

Christie spent the rest of the morning reading about mosquitoes until his skin itched. One site called them the most dangerous creatures alive because of the terrible diseases they could transmit. They were nasty little things, “little flies,” looking for hosts and drinking vampirically. Could one be a little witness?

He decided as he started toward the squad meeting room not to bother the others with this particular obsession. He'd scheduled the meeting later than usual, one o'clock, since he was hoping for more stuff from Baitz.

His detectives trooped in a bit more alert than they had on Sunday.

Christie first asked for the report on black cars. He started writing on the board. There were thirteen altogether, four in the neighborhood and nine at work.

Then gray cars. Nineteen altogether.

“Unless we hear something to the contrary today, I'll want you to check alibis for those people.”

“Yes, Boss,” they answered in a syncopated chorus.

“Home break-ins in Oakland. Burglaries, muggings?” He pointed to the two detectives he'd had going through those files.

“More muggings than break-ins. Two hundred and fifty-two muggings over the last three months. Reported muggings, that is. Some were faked-up claims when cell phones and iPods got lost, etc. Most were real. Most were never solved. The few that were solved were the dumb ones who used credit cards. Three are in the county jail, two are in other facilities. We also checked with Pitt and CMU and Carlow on these numbers because sometimes the university police have their own records. We added auto break-ins on our own because they yielded good prints. We've gathered files of fingerprints from all the vehicle break-ins and are ready to turn them over for comparison to anything found at the Price house if that should become necessary.”

Christie nodded appreciatively even though he heard the phrasing—
if that should become necessary.
Cal was such a perfect suspect. Who wanted to give him up? He wrote on the board,
Many muggings not solved,
and all the while he worried that he didn't have the full trust of his squad.
Jail and prison inmates off the list,
he wrote. “Make sure you delete these guys who are in jail,” he instructed. “And now for home break-ins?”

“A hundred eighty-nine the last three months. Three twenty-two—when we went back six months. Reported. Seventy doors left open, about a hundred through windows, the rest were doors jimmied.”

“How many solved?”

“About ten percent. Two of the jimmied doors were solved. We'd like to talk to those guys today. Both got released from jail early. They didn't take that much. So either of them might be at it again.”

“Thank you. Yes, I'd like for you two to search those guys out. Bring them in here and question them.” He wrote,
Question burglary suspects.

Although he'd already talked to Potocki, Christie asked him to report to the group on the interviews at the funeral home. “Give us a picture of Cassie Price and her friends and acquaintances.”

Potocki stood. “I found the interviews … telling and also puzzling. I talked to young men who went to school with her. They were noticeably upset, of course. No one came off as particularly suspicious. I asked them each if they had dated her. I kept getting a ‘no, but if only I could have' kind of response. This was pretty consistent. I kept pressing. Did she flirt a lot, keep a lot of guys on the hook? Believe me, I didn't ask it quite that way. But they seemed to say yes, she was fun and flirty. But then they also said she was off-limits, highly religious. She must have driven them a bit mad, from what I can tell.”

Dolan said, “I got some of this at work, too. The same thing. I'd summarize the personality as having some conflict about sex.”

“Colleen?” Christie asked. She was known in the squad for her former job, a counselor. She had the psych degrees.

Colleen flushed and swallowed hard. She stood. “I get angry when men bandy about the term ‘hysteric,' or ‘tease' or ‘cock tease.' So I want to be careful here. More harm has been done to women by men categorizing them as conflicted about sex. I don't mean this against any of you. I just want to make a caution for the record. Sometimes a woman just doesn't want a certain person, but she doesn't want to be mean about it. I think, to be honest, many men and women alike would, however, call Cassie Price irresponsible about her flirting, and that's that. She did not appear to want to engage in casual sex; she'd had that strict upbringing. Her parents will probably be shocked to find she was sexually active at all. But back to the point. Her personality was … defensive. She put a cheerful face forward, which made her generally liked. But she was secretive about sex. And apparently she felt she needed an extraordinary man to justify having sex. She was always in love, according to her sister, but it was always with someone in a position of power and not particularly attainable. I vowed confidentiality in my conversation with her sister, so I need for all of you to honor that. But the end result is important. It seems she was seeing someone she couldn't or wouldn't talk about.”

“Her sister said this?” Denman asked.

“Yes. But her sister didn't know who.”

There were murmurs.

Colleen sat.

Christie said, “We need to find out the who. It doesn't mean he killed her, but we will need to clear the man she was seeing.” He considered saying he was pretty certain it was Connolly, but he held his tongue. It was awfully salable information. He didn't need the headache of a leak right now. “Littlefield. Potocki. You were looking at her e-mails.”

Janet Littlefield reported, “She did a lot of work e-mails, and like I said they're ordinary—what reports she had received, when she would finish some project. There were some personal exchanges, but nothing about a boyfriend. One about shopping for work clothes that would look appropriate. Several when she bought her house—to the Realtor, the bank, her sisters. One with a friend who wanted her to go on vacation to the beach. She answered that she couldn't take the time off work because she needed the money for school. She did write to Carrie, her sister, to say when she was coming to visit. That was every Saturday except one in the last two months.”

“Is there any indication in the e-mails of what she did on Friday nights?” Christie asked. “I mean, work was done for the week. Did she say in the e-mails what she was up to after work?”

Littlefield shook her head. “Potocki read them, too.”

Potocki said, “No, nothing about where she spent her time.”

Christie said, “And it's looking like she took her car to work on some Thursdays and most Fridays and yet didn't go to her family until Saturday.”

Colleen said, “Even her sister thinks she was seeing the guy she was seeing on Friday nights.”

“Just so we don't jump to conclusions, let's ask neighbors if maybe she came back home on Thursday and Friday nights. This is delicate. Potocki, can you do that? Ask carefully. You know how quickly rumors spread.”

“This is a whole new ball game!” Hurwitz said.

“Maybe. At the very least there are people and events we need to clear.”

The room felt electric with this new possibility.

“Are you saying,” Hurwitz asked, “there's the possibility that the guy she was seeing went so far as to kill her and set up this poor shmuck?”

Christie shook his head. “I'm asking us to see what fits as a theory. What doesn't, we toss it out.”

There was a knock at the door, and Baitz came in. “Sorry,” he said. “Traffic.”

“That's okay. We had other reports to make.” Christie gestured him to the front of the room. “Go ahead.”

“Well, I went in early this morning. Very early. I've been working on the powder. The powder on the floor and under her nails? It's almost certainly all plaster dust and paint. Like when somebody is scraping a wall.”

Coleson and McGranahan practically jumped up into the air yelling, “Hurrah.”

Christie felt a little wire of depression bore into his body, head on downward.

“And I've been thinking,” Baitz went on, “about that astronaut idea. Look at a picture of an astronaut and what do you see? A guy all booted and covered up in white. Get it? You know what looks like that? One of those paint overalls. They're made of polypropylene and they're pretty indestructible. If we don't have any fabric traces on her and no blood under her fingernails, that could be an explanation. Those coveralls don't tear or shed.”

“Holy Moses,” Denman said in his very southern drawl. “We just went back to square one.”

Christie stood very still. He let them watch him thinking. Finally he said, “Okay, let's get to work on Cal's car. Let's check it for matching plaster dust.” He paused again. “Potocki. When you're in the neighborhood, would you also ask the people he worked for if he wore that kind of overall when he worked? Also, did he do any jobs that would kick up a lot of plaster dust?”

Coleson and McGranahan went glum again.

Christie sighed and knuckled his mouth as he figured out next steps. The others looked at him hard, but he couldn't read their expressions. “I want motive. I want a strong motive I can believe in. I'm not a hundred percent certain we have that with Cal Hathaway.”

“Jealousy of her other lover,” Nellins tries.

“Yes. Possibly. We can go back to Hathaway as many times as we want to try to establish guilt. But let's not miss anything else. Greer, Dolan, come with me back to the law offices. We can ask where she might have gone for that margarita.”

“She could have gone almost anywhere,” Colleen said.

“Don't I know it? Still, we can ask. I have appointments to see the father and the brother up there. Dolan, talk to all the married men who look like possible love interests for this girl. See who likes to go out for a drink. And Greer, you get to grill the women and the handler.”