The Couple Next Door (20 page)

Anne and Marco show up at the police station unannounced. The Audi had been returned to them the previous afternoon. Marco clutches the newspaper in his hand and asks for Detective Rasbach at the front desk. He’s in, even though it’s Saturday.

‘Do you have a minute?’ Marco asks Rasbach.

‘Of course,’ the detective says, and ushers them into the now familiar room. Jennings, right behind him, grabs another chair. The four of them sit, facing one another.

Marco places the newspaper on the table in front of Rasbach and points to the photo of the dead man.

The detective looks at the photo, skims the short article. Then he glances up from the paper and says, ‘Yes?’

‘I recognize him,’ Marco says. He knows he appears nervous, even though he’s trying his hardest not to. He looks the detective deliberately in the eyes. ‘I think I saw him around in the last couple of weeks before Cora was taken.’

‘Saw him where?’ Rasbach asks.

‘That’s the thing,’ Marco equivocates. ‘I’m not sure. But the minute I saw the picture, I knew I’d seen him recently, and more than once. I think it was around our house, in our neighborhood – on our street.’

Rasbach stares steadily at Marco, pursing his lips.

‘Anne recognizes him, too,’ Marco says, nodding at his wife.

Rasbach turns his attention to Anne.

Anne nods. ‘I’ve seen him before, but I don’t know where.’

‘You’re sure?’

She nods again.

‘Wait here a moment,’ Rasbach says, and he and Jennings leave the room.

Anne and Marco wait silently. They don’t want to talk to each other with the video camera in the room. Marco has to consciously fight his urge to fidget. He wants to get up and pace around the room but forces himself to stay in his seat.

Finally Rasbach returns. ‘I’ll go up there myself, today. If there’s anything relevant to your case, I’ll be in touch.’

‘How long do you think it’ll be before we hear from you?’ Marco asks.

‘I don’t know. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can,’ Rasbach promises.

There’s nothing Marco and Anne can do but go home and wait.

AT HOME, MARCO
is restless. He paces the house. He gets on Anne’s nerves. They are snapping at each other.

‘I think I’ll go to the office,’ he says abruptly. ‘I need to get my mind off things here and get back to some of my clients. Before I don’t have any clients.’

‘Good idea,’ Anne agrees, wanting him out of the house. She wishes desperately that she could have a long talk with Dr Lumsden. Lumsden had called her back quickly after the urgent message Anne had left on her voice mail, and although Dr Lumsden had been genuinely sympathetic and supportive, the conversation had not been nearly enough. Dr Lumsden had urged her to speak to the doctor who was covering her patients until her return. But Anne does not want to talk to a doctor she doesn’t know.

Anne thinks about confronting Cynthia. She doesn’t think Cynthia took her baby, not today. But she’d like to know what’s going on between Cynthia and her husband. Perhaps Anne is focusing on what might be going on between them because it’s not as painful as thinking about what has happened to her baby.

Anne knows Cynthia is at home. She can hear her occasionally on the other side of their shared wall. Anne knows Graham is away again – she saw him getting into a black airport limo with his bags earlier that morning, from her bedroom window. She could go over there, tell Cynthia off, and tell her to keep away from her husband. Anne stops her pacing and stares at the shared wall of the living room, trying to decide what to do. Cynthia is just on the other side of that wall.

But Anne doesn’t have the nerve. She is too distraught. She’s told the detective what she overheard, but she hasn’t yet confronted Marco about it. And Marco hasn’t said anything about it to her. They seem to have a new pattern of not speaking about difficult things. They used to share everything – well, almost everything. But since the baby, things have been different.

Her depression made her lose interest in everything. At first Marco brought her flowers, chocolates, did little things to lift her mood, but none of it worked, not really. He stopped telling her about his day, about how his business was doing. She couldn’t talk about her own work, because she didn’t work anymore. They didn’t have much to talk about at all, except the baby. Maybe Marco was right. Maybe she should have gone back to work.

She must talk to him, must make him promise that he’ll have nothing more to do with Cynthia. She is not to be trusted. Their friendship with the Stillwells is over. If Anne confronts Marco with what she knows, tells him what she overheard from the top of the stairs, he will feel terrible. He already feels terrible. She has no doubt he’ll stay away from Cynthia now. There’s nothing to worry about on that score.

If they survive this, she will have to talk to Marco about Cynthia, and she will have to talk to him about the business. They will have to start being more honest with each other again.

Anne needs to clean something, but the house is already spotless. It’s odd, the energy she feels now, in the middle of the day, fueled by anxiety. When she still had Cora, she would drag herself through the day. Right about now she’d be praying for Cora to go down for a nap. A sob escapes from her.

She has to keep busy. She starts in the front entryway, cleaning the antique grate that covers the air duct. The scrolled ironwork is covered in dust and has to be scrubbed by hand. She gets a bucket of warm water and a cloth and sits down on the floor by the front door, begins to clean it, getting deep into the grooves. It calms her.

As she sits there, some flyers are pushed through the slot in the door, landing beside her, startling her. She looks at the pile on the floor and freezes. But there’s no mail delivery on Saturdays. Anne realizes she’s been holding her breath and lets herself exhale.

She doesn’t open any of the mail any more. She would like to throw it all out, but Marco has made her promise to keep everything. He goes through all of it, every day, in case the kidnappers try again to get in touch. He doesn’t share the contents with her.

Anne takes her bucket and cloth and goes upstairs to clean the grates up there. She starts in the office at the end of the hall. When she pulls off the original decorative grate to clean it more easily, she sees something small and dark inside the air duct. Startled, she looks more closely, fearing a dead mouse – or perhaps even a rat. But it’s not a rat. It’s a cell phone.

Anne puts her head between her knees and concentrates on not fainting. It feels like a panic attack, as if all the blood is leaving her body. There are black spots before her eyes. After a few moments, the fainting feeling dissipates and she raises her head. She looks at the cell phone inside the duct. Part of her wants to put the cover back on, go downstairs for a cup of coffee, and pretend she never saw it. But she reaches in to grab it. The phone is stuck to the side of the air duct. She tugs, firmly, and it comes away in her hand. It has been fixed to the inside wall with silver duct tape.

She stares at the cell phone. She has never seen it before. It isn’t Marco’s. She knows his phone. He carries it with him always. But she can’t lie to herself. Someone hid this phone in their house, and it wasn’t her.

Marco has a secret cell phone. Why?

Her first thought is Cynthia.
Are
they having an affair? Or is it someone else? He sometimes works long hours. She has been fat and unhappy. But until the night with Cynthia, she never thought he might actually be unfaithful. Maybe she’s been completely oblivious. Maybe she’s a complete fool. The wife is always the last to know, right?

The phone looks new. She turns it on. It lights up. So he’s kept it charged. But now she has to draw a pattern to unlock the phone. She has no idea what it is. She doesn’t even know how to unlock Marco’s
regular
cell phone. She makes a few attempts, and it freezes her out after too many tries.

Think
, she tells herself, but she can’t. She sits numbly holding the phone, frozen in place.

There’s a lot running through Detective Rasbach’s mind on the drive to the crime scene in the Catskills. He thinks about the interview earlier that day with Marco and Anne Conti.

He suspects that this is Marco’s way of telling him that this dead man was his accomplice – and that Marco is asking him to help him get his baby back. They both know it may be a little late for that. Marco knows that Rasbach believes he abducted Cora and that he’s been outwitted. Clearly this dead man had something to do with it. He must be the mystery man who drove the car down the lane at 12:35 a.m. And what better place to hide the baby than in a remote cabin?

The baby must have been alive when she left the Contis’ house, Rasbach realizes, or Marco would not have come to him now. Marco is taking a big risk, but he is plainly desperate. If what Rasbach believes is true, it puts the mother in the clear – mental-health issues aside, she must not have killed the baby.

He is very interested in seeing what he will find at the murder scene.

Meanwhile Jennings is looking for a connection between Marco and the dead man, Derek Honig. Perhaps they’ll find something, however tenuous, linking the two. Rasbach doesn’t think so, or Marco wouldn’t have come to him. But Derek Honig is dead – maybe Marco feels it’s a risk he can afford to take, on the very slight chance he can get his baby back.

Rasbach is convinced that Marco loves his daughter, that he never intended for her to get hurt. Rasbach almost feels sorry for him. But then he thinks about the baby, who is probably dead, and the mother, who is shattered, and his sympathy disappears.

‘Turn here,’ he tells the officer driving the cruiser.

They take the highway exit and travel for some time on a lonely dirt road. At last they come to a turnoff. The cruiser bumps and sags down a rutted driveway overgrown with weeds and bushes until it comes to rest in front of a simple
wooden cabin, surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape. There’s another cruiser on the scene, obviously waiting for them.

The car comes to a stop, and they get out. Rasbach is happy to stretch his legs. ‘Detective Rasbach,’ he says, introducing himself to the local cop.

‘Officer Watt, sir. Right this way.’

Rasbach looks around, missing nothing. A glance beyond the cabin shows a small, deserted lake. There are no other cabins in view. A perfect spot to hide an infant for a few days, Rasbach thinks.

He enters the cabin. It’s 1970s vintage, with ugly linoleum flooring in the kitchen, a Formica table, outdated cabinetry.

‘Where was the body?’ Rasbach asks.

‘Over there,’ the officer says, jerking his head toward the main room. The room is furnished with mismatched castoffs. There is no doubt about where the body had been. The old dirty beige carpet is stained with fresh blood.

Rasbach stoops down to look. ‘The murder weapon?’

‘We’ve taken it to the lab. He used a spade. Hit him over the head with it. A few times.’

‘Is the face still recognizable?’ Rasbach asks, turning to look up at the other cop.

‘Battered, but recognizable.’

Rasbach stands again, considers taking Marco to the morgue to have a look.
This is what you’re playing at.
‘So what’s the theory?’

‘At first glance? We’re saying a botched robbery, but between you and me, there’s nothing here to take. Of course, we don’t know if there
was
something here. It’s a pretty isolated spot. Drug deal gone wrong, maybe.’

‘Or a kidnapping.’

‘Or a kidnapping.’ The officer adds, ‘It looked a bit personal, the way he was struck repeatedly with the spade. I mean, he was good and dead.’

‘And no sign of any baby things? No diapers, bottles, anything like that?’ Rasbach asks, casting his eyes around the cabin.

‘No. If there was a baby here, whoever took her cleaned up pretty good.’

‘What did he do with his garbage?’

‘We figure he burned some of it in the woodstove there, so we’ve been through that, and there’s also a fire pit outside. But there’s no garbage here at all, and nothing in the stove or the fire pit. So either our dead guy had just been to the dump or someone tidied up. There’s a dump twenty miles from here, and they get the license plates, and he hadn’t been there in the last week.’

‘So not a botched robbery. No one comes to commit a robbery, kills someone, and gets rid of all his garbage.’

‘No.’

‘Where’s his car?’

‘At the lab.’

‘What make is it?’

‘It’s a hybrid, a Prius V. Black.’

Bingo
, Rasbach thinks. He has a feeling the tires will match the prints in the Contis’ garage. And no matter how thoroughly someone cleans up, if the baby was here for a couple of days, there’ll be DNA evidence. It looks like they may have their first big break in the kidnapping of baby Cora.

Finally they may be getting somewhere.

MARCO IS AT
his office, staring blankly out his window at the view. No one else is there. He has no staff of his own on site. Since it’s Saturday, the rest of the building is quiet, too, for which he’s grateful.

He thinks about the meeting he and Anne had earlier in the day with Detective Rasbach. Rasbach knows, he’s sure of it. Those eyes of his seem to look right through Marco. Marco might as well have stood up and said,
This is the man I conspired with to take Cora for a couple of days and negotiate the ransom money.
He’s now dead. I have lost control of things. I need your help.

They have a lawyer now. A lawyer famous for getting people acquitted – people who are guilty as hell. Marco realizes now that this is a good thing. There will be no more interviews without the lawyer present. Marco no longer cares about his reputation; it’s all about staying out of jail and keeping Anne in the dark.

His cell phone rings. He looks at the display. Cynthia is calling him. That bitch. Why would she be calling? He hesitates, wondering whether to answer or let it go to voice mail, but in the end he picks it up.