The Couple Next Door (19 page)

‘That’s crazy! Then how do you explain our getting the onesie in the mail and the ransom money being taken?’

‘Marco might have faked the kidnapping, after the baby was already dead. And the empty car seat, the hit on the head – maybe that was all for show.’

She gives him a disbelieving stare. ‘That’s absurd. And I did not harm my baby, Detective.’

Rasbach fiddles with his pen, watching her. ‘I had your mother in for an interview earlier this morning.’

Anne feels the room begin to spin.

RASBACH WATCHES ANNE
carefully, fears she might faint. He waits while she reaches for the bottle of water, and waits for her color to return.

There is nothing he can do about the psychiatrist. His hands are tied. He hadn’t gotten any further with the mother, but Anne is obviously afraid that she’d said something. Rasbach is pretty sure he knows what she’s afraid of. ‘What do you think your mother told me?’ Rasbach asks.

‘I don’t think she told you anything,’ Anne says sharply. ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

He considers her for a few moments. Thinks how different she is from her mother – a very composed woman, busy with her social committees and charities and much more canny than her daughter. Certainly less emotional, with a clearer head. Alice Dries had come into the interview room, smiled icily, stated her name, and then told him she had nothing to say to him. It was a very short interview.

‘She didn’t tell me she was coming in this morning,’ Anne says.

‘Didn’t she?’

‘What did she say?’ Anne asks.

‘You’re right, she didn’t say anything,’ Rasbach admits.

Anne smiles for the first time in the interview, but it’s a bitter smile.

‘I have, however, spoken to one of your old schoolmates. A Janice Foegle.’

Anne goes completely still, like an animal in the wild sensing a predator. Then she stands up abruptly, her chair scraping the floor behind her, taking Rasbach and Jennings by surprise. ‘I have nothing more to say,’ she tells them.

Anne joins Marco in the lobby. Marco notices her distress, and puts his arm protectively around her. Anne can feel Rasbach’s eyes on them, watching as they leave. She says nothing as she and Marco walk out of the station. Once they’re on the street and hailing a cab, she says, ‘I think it’s time we got a lawyer.’

Rasbach is putting pressure on them, and it doesn’t look as if he’s going to let up. It has come to the point that even though they haven’t been charged, they know they’re being treated like suspects.

Marco is anxious about what happened in the interview between Anne and Detective Rasbach. There was panic in her eyes when she came out. Something in that interview had rattled her enough to make her want to get a lawyer as soon as possible. He tried to find out what it was, but she was vague, evasive.
What is she not telling him?
It’s putting him even more on edge.

When they arrive home and have fought their way past the reporters into the house, Anne suggests they invite her parents over to discuss hiring a lawyer.

‘Why do we need to have your parents over?’ Marco says. ‘We can find a lawyer without their help.’

‘A good lawyer will expect a hefty retainer,’ Anne points out. Marco shrugs, and she calls her parents.

Richard and Alice arrive soon after. It comes as no great surprise that they’ve already been looking into the best lawyers money can buy.

‘I’m sorry it’s come to this, Anne,’ her father says.

They are sitting around the kitchen table, the early-afternoon sunlight slanting through the kitchen window and falling across the wooden table. Anne has made a pot of coffee.

‘We think it’s a good idea to get a lawyer, too,’ Alice says. ‘You can’t trust the police.’

Anne looks at her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me they had you in for questioning this morning?’

‘There was no need, and I didn’t want to worry you,’ Alice says, reaching out and patting Anne’s hand. ‘All I told them was my name, and that I had nothing to say. I’m not going to let them push me around,’ she says. ‘I was only in there for about five minutes.’

‘They questioned me, too,’ Richard says. ‘They didn’t get anything from me either.’ He turns his eyes on Marco. ‘I mean, what can I possibly tell them?’

Marco feels a jolt of fear. He doesn’t trust Richard. But would Richard say anything to the police to stab him in the back?

Richard tells Anne, ‘They haven’t charged you with anything, and I don’t think they will – I don’t see how they can. But I agree with your mother – if you’re represented by a top defense lawyer, maybe they’ll stop pushing you around and calling you in for questioning all the time and start focusing on who really took Cora.’

Throughout this entire meeting at the kitchen table, Richard has been colder than usual to Marco. Richard barely
looks at him. They have all noticed it. No one has made more careful note of it than Marco.
How stoic he’s being
, Marco thinks,
about my losing their five million dollars. He hasn’t mentioned it once. He doesn’t have to.
But Marco knows what Richard is thinking:
My useless son-in-law screwed up again
. Marco imagines Richard sitting around in the lounge at the country club, drinking expensive liquor, telling his rich friends all about it. About what a fuckup his son-in-law is. How Richard has lost his beloved only grandchild and five million of his hard-earned dollars, all because of Marco. And what’s worse, Marco knows that this time it’s true.

‘In fact,’ Richard says, ‘we’ve taken the liberty of putting one on retainer, as of this morning.’

‘Who?’ Anne asks.

‘Aubrey West.’

Marco looks up, clearly unhappy. ‘Really?’

‘He’s one of the best goddamned criminal lawyers in the country,’ Richard says, his voice rising a notch. ‘And we’re paying. Do you have a problem with that?’

Anne is looking at Marco, pleading with him silently to let it go, to accept the gift.

‘Maybe,’ Marco says.

‘What’s wrong with having the best lawyer we can get?’ Anne asks. ‘Don’t worry about the money, Marco.’

Marco says, ‘It’s not the expense I’m worried about. It just looks like overkill to me. Like we’re guilty and we need a lawyer who’s famous for big, high-profile murder cases. Doesn’t that lump us in with his other clients? Make us look bad?’

There’s silence around the table as they consider this. Anne looks worried. She hadn’t thought of it that way.

‘He gets a lot of guilty people off – so what? That’s his job,’ Richard counters.

‘What do you mean by that?’ Marco says, slightly menacingly. Anne looks like she’s going to be sick. ‘Do you think
we
did this?’

‘Don’t be absurd,’ Richard says, reddening. ‘I’m just being practical here. You might as well avail yourself of the best lawyer you can get. The police aren’t doing you any favors.’

‘Of course we don’t think you had anything to do with Cora’s disappearance,’ Alice says, looking at her husband instead of either of them. ‘But you’re being vilified in the press. This lawyer may be able to put a stop to that. And I think you’re being persecuted by the police, who haven’t charged you and keep bringing you in under the guise of voluntary questioning – it’s got to stop. It’s harassment.’

Richard adds, ‘The police haven’t got anything on you, so maybe they’ll start to back off. But he’s there if you need him.’

Anne turns to Marco. ‘I think we should keep him.’

‘Fine,’ Marco says. ‘Whatever.’

Cynthia and Graham have been arguing for days. It’s been a week since the fateful dinner party, and they’re still arguing. Graham wants to do nothing, pretend the video doesn’t exist or, better yet, destroy it. It’s the safest thing to do. Yet he’s troubled, because he knows the right thing to do is to go to the police with the video. But it’s not legal to film people having sex without their knowledge, and that’s what they’ve been doing. The video shows Cynthia on Marco’s lap, and they’re enjoying themselves. If Graham and Cynthia were charged, it would be catastrophic to his career. He’s a comptroller for a very large, very conservative company. If this gets out, his career would be finished.

Cynthia isn’t interested in doing what’s right. What matters to her is that the video shows Marco going into his house at
12:31 a.m. the night of the kidnapping and coming out the back door of his house at 12:33 a.m., carrying the baby in his arms and into the garage. He’s in the garage for about a minute, and then he comes back into view and into the Stillwells’ yard. Shortly after that the soft-core porn starts.

Graham was horrified that the man had taken his own child, but he’d been indecisive, he’d dithered. He wanted to do the right thing, but he didn’t want to get into trouble. And now it is too late to approach the police. They would ask why it had taken them so long. He and Cynthia would be in even deeper trouble than they would have been for simply using a hidden camera to secretly film sex acts – they could now be charged with hiding evidence in a kidnapping or obstructing the law or something. So Graham wants to pretend that the video doesn’t exist. He wants to destroy it.

Cynthia has reasons of her own not to go to the police with the video. She has something on Marco, and it’s got to be worth something.

She will tell Marco about the video. She is sure that he will pay her handsomely for it. No need to mention it to Graham.

It’s a heartless thing to do, but what kind of man kidnaps his own child? He has it coming.

MARCO AND ANNE
are sitting at the kitchen table, attempting breakfast. Their toast is barely touched. They are both living mostly on coffee and despair.

Marco is silently reading the newspaper. Anne is staring out the window to the backyard, seeing nothing. Some days she can’t bear the newspaper and asks him how he can stand to read it. Other days she scours it from first page to last for any coverage of the kidnapping. But in the end she reads it all. She can’t help it. It’s a scab she can’t stop picking.

It’s the strangest thing, Anne finds, to read about yourself in the newspaper.

Marco gives a sudden start. ‘What is it?’ she asks.

He doesn’t answer her.

She loses interest. This is one of her hate days with the newspaper. She doesn’t want to know. She gets up and tosses her cold coffee into the sink.

Marco holds his breath as he reads. The story he’s reading is not about the kidnapping – but it is. He’s the only one who could possibly know it’s about the kidnapping, and now he’s thinking furiously, trying to figure out what to do about it.

He looks at the picture in the paper. It’s him. There is no doubt. Bruce Neeland, his accomplice, has been found dead – savagely murdered – in a cabin in the Catskills. The story is very short on detail, but a violent robbery is suspected. The man has had his head bashed in. If not for the photograph of the murdered man, Marco would have missed the brief news article altogether, and the valuable information it contains. The newspaper says his name is actually Derek Honig.

Marco’s heart pounds as he tries to put it together. Bruce – whose real name is not Bruce at all – is dead. The article does not say when he might have been killed. That might explain why Bruce didn’t get in touch when he was supposed to, why he hadn’t answered his cell phone. But who killed him? And where is Cora? Marco realizes with terror that whoever killed him must have taken Cora. And whoever killed him must have the money as well. He has to tell the police. But how does Marco tell them without revealing his own terrible role in this?

He starts to sweat. He looks up at his wife, standing with her back to him at the kitchen sink. There is an inexpressible sadness in the slump of her shoulders.

He must go to the police.

Or is he being a fool? What chance is there that Cora is still alive? The bastards have the money. They must have killed her by now.

Maybe they’ll ask for more money. If there’s even the slightest chance that she
is
still alive, he must let Rasbach know about this. But how? How the hell can he do that without incriminating himself?

He tries to think it through. Bruce is dead – so he can’t tell anyone anything. And he was the only one who knew. If they
find Bruce’s killer or killers, even if Bruce told them Marco was in on it, that’s not proof. That’s hearsay. There’s no proof that Marco took her out of the crib and handed her over to Bruce in the garage.

It might even be a good thing that Bruce is dead.

He must tell Rasbach, but how? As he stares at the photograph of the dead man, it comes to him. He will tell the detective that he saw this picture in the paper and recognized the man. He’d seen him hanging around outside the house. He’d forgotten all about it until he saw the picture. They might not believe him, but it’s all he can think of.

He is quite certain that no one ever saw him with Bruce. He doesn’t think anyone can put them together.

He couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t do everything possible to find Cora.

He will have to tell Anne first. He thinks for another minute, vacillating, and then says, ‘Anne.’

‘What?’

‘Look at this.’

She comes and stands over his shoulder, looking down at the paper where his finger points. She studies the photograph. ‘What about it?’ she says.

‘Do you recognize him?’

She looks again. ‘I don’t think so. Who is it?’

‘I’m sure I’ve seen him,’ Marco says. ‘Around.’

‘Seen him where?’

‘I’m not sure, but he looks familiar. I know I’ve seen him recently, in our neighborhood – around our house.’

Anne looks more closely. ‘You know, I think I
have
seen him before, but I don’t know where.’

Even better
, Marco thinks.

Before going to the station, Marco gets on his laptop and
looks for more information on Derek Honig’s murder, searching all the different newspapers online. He doesn’t want any surprises.

There isn’t much information. The case has attracted little notice. Derek Honig had taken some time off work before his death to stay at his cabin. He’d been found by the woman who cleaned the cabin once a month. He lived alone. Divorced, no kids. Marco feels a chill, reading this. The man he’d known as Bruce had told him he had three kids of his own and knew how to take care of an infant, and Marco had believed him. His own actions now shock him. He’d handed his baby off to someone who turned out to be a total stranger, trusting him to take care of her. How could he have done it?