The Fregoli Delusion (3 page)

“There was just the one.”

“And no current relationship?”

Chrissy shook her head.

“Did any of his relationships,
either before or since you were married, end badly?”

“Well, one ended when the woman
was killed in a plane crash. That was before we were married. The woman he was
involved with a few years ago, though, got married later. No hard feelings. I
think she lives in St. Louis.”

“Name?”

“Cynthia Troy. Now Cynthia Powell,
I believe it is.”

Hank wrote it down. “Where were
you this morning between six and seven o’clock
.
?”

“In bed, asleep. I usually get up
at eight. Lillian, one of the housekeepers, calls me if I’m not already up.”

“Did she call you this morning?”

“Yes.”

“All right,” Hank said, making
notes. “Thanks.” When he was finished writing he looked up at her. “Just to go
back for a moment, you said Mr. Jarrett had decided to retire. I don’t remember
reading anything about it.”

She shook her head. “There hasn’t
been an announcement yet. He was still working out all the details.”

“Who knew about it?”

“Oh, a few key people, I suppose.
All his senior people at the company, the board of directors, his son and
daughter.”

“Anyone particularly upset about
it?”

“I don’t really know,” Chrissy
admitted. “I imagine it caused quite a stir. Succession planning usually does.
There was a lot to do to organize his replacement, a lot of negotiations and
jockeying for position by people, and all that. But I don’t know anything about
it. You’ll have to ask Walter. He was in charge of it.”

“All right.” Hank made another
note, then tapped his pen on his knee. “I’d still like you to try answering the
question I asked before. Can you think of anyone who’d have a reason to kill
your husband?”

Chrissy stared at the toe of her
shoe. Finally, she shook her head. “No. A lot of people didn’t like Herb. I
don’t know very much about his business dealings because I didn’t really care
and he never talked about it with me, but I knew he could be ruthless when he
wanted to be. But I don’t know who’d hate him enough to actually kill him.”

“What about you, Mrs. Jarrett?
Have you received any threats or had any unexplained phone calls, e-mails, that
sort of thing?”

“No. Should I be worried?”

“I wouldn’t think so if you
haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary, but until we understand the
reason for the attack on your husband it’d be a good idea to be extra vigilant.
Before you go out again you might want to text that guy you mentioned.”

“All right, if you think I
should.”

Hank put away his notebook and
stood up. “I appreciate your time.”

“That’s all right. You’re just doing
your job.” She stood up and shook his hand.

As he turned away she put a hand
on his arm. “I should probably make myself clear about something.”

Hank turned back, waiting.

“It may sound like I’m just a
trophy wife, bought and paid for. That’s not the way it was.”

Hank said nothing.

“Herb really liked me. He used to
tell me that all the time, and I think he actually grew to love me, in his own
way. The feeling was mutual. The marriage was, um, consummated, and
occasionally we’d get together. It was always very nice. It’s not what people
will think. We were good friends and occasional lovers. I’ll miss him
terribly.”

“I understand,” Hank said.

“Maybe you do,” she said, tears in
her eyes. “After all, you’re one of us. If I can say that. But other people, the
public, they won’t understand. The media will have a field day.”

“You're going to have to ignore
the media,” Hank replied. “Their only motivation is to make money, pure and
simple. There’s nothing personal in it, even when it seems that way.”

“Okay,” Chrissy said. “I’m sorry.
Thanks for your patience with me.”

Outside in the hallway he found
Megan Winterbottom waiting for him with Sergeant Richard Booth and two other
uniformed officers.

“We’re parked just inside the
gate, Lieutenant,” Booth said. “She was just going to show us where Mr.
Jarrett’s rooms are. He had a private gym and a screening room. You want us to
secure them, too?”

“Yes.” He turned to Winterbottom. “Before
you show the sergeant around, I want to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course.”

“Did you see Mr. Jarrett this
morning before he went out?”

She shook her head. “Mrs. Jarrett
and I have rooms in another wing of the mansion. I was doing some work in my
office until we got the call from Mrs. Parris, so I literally hadn’t seen Mr.
Jarrett since yesterday and had no idea what had happened.”

“What was Mrs. Jarrett’s schedule
like today?”

“Fairly light, actually, thank
goodness. Lillian called her at eight and she was free until eleven. She had an
appointment with her dental hygienist, but we rescheduled it after Mrs. Parris
called. We’ve rescheduled everything for the next week.”

“All right, thanks. There’ll be
other detectives coming later who’ll ask you for a more complete statement, so
if anything else comes to mind, don’t hesitate to tell them.” He looked at
Booth. “Are the security guards cooperating, Rich?”

“Yes, sir. No problems there.”

“Good. See what they have to say
for themselves.”

“It’s on my to-do list.”

Hank nodded. “I’ll see myself
out,” he told Winterbottom.

“Of course.” She stood up and led
Booth and his officers down the hallway and through a set of double doors.

Hank went back to the grand entry
hall and out the front door, where he found Constance waiting for him.

“Can I give you a ride somewhere?”
she asked.

“I have to go back downtown,” Hank
said.

“Come along, then.”

They got into the back of
Constance’s limousine. She asked about his mother and he told her she was doing
well. She recalled, as she often did, how much she’d always enjoyed his visits with
his mother, retired State’s Attorney Anna Haynes Donaghue, when he was a small
boy. Friends since childhood, Constance and Anna would talk politics, drink
bourbon, and trade investment advice while Hank dawdled nearby, playing with
her collie dog.

“You were always such a polite and
quiet boy,” she smiled, “but very, very attentive. You never missed a thing,
did you? A good quality for a policeman to have.”

The small talk continued until the
limousine eased onto the expressway heading south toward Midtown. She turned to
look directly at him.

“I’d appreciate it very much,
Hank, if you could give your personal attention to this case.”

“I will.” Hank thought about
Bennett’s instructions that Hank assume the lead in the investigation and
wondered if the chief had received a phone call on the subject before issuing
his edict to Martinez. Perhaps he’d already known the identity of the victim
before hearing it from her.

“I know you have a lot of
responsibilities, but everyone will appreciate it if you handle things
personally. Your reputation as a police officer is so excellent, it’ll be
comforting for the families to know it’s in your hands.”

“We’re understaffed right now,”
Hank said, “and I’ll be the lead investigator, but Detective Stainer will be
doing a lot of the work, and we’ll need others to help as well, running down
leads, collecting evidence, taking statements.”

“I understand. Thank you, Hank.”
She sighed. “Please bear in mind that Brett’s actually a very gentle and
kindhearted young man. He wouldn’t hurt a fly. He’s just … different. You’ll
have to take what he says with a grain of salt.”

“Detective Stainer found him
pretty difficult to deal with this morning.”

“It’s because of his disability,”
Constance said.

“Disability?”

“I’ll let Walter explain it,” she
said. “Brett’s my grandson, but Walter’s been the one who’s had to manage
things on a daily basis. Just don’t judge the boy until you understand.”

3

Hank stepped out of the elevator
onto the ninth floor and turned left, passing the cubbyholes assigned to the
Arson Unit, and on into the larger open space assigned to Homicide. Along the
wall on the right were filing cabinets, a gun locker, a coffee machine that
dispensed poison in brown paper cups, a pigeon-hole mailbox, and a networked
printer and fax machine. Along the wall on the left were the captain’s office,
more filing cabinets, and the office of the supervising lieutenant which had,
until a month ago, been occupied by Bill Jarvis. Now it belonged once again to
Hank as it had before, several years ago.

In the middle of the open space
was the cluster of desks, arranged in pairs back-to-back, that served as the
detectives’ bullpen. As Hank skirted the bullpen on his way to his office,
Detective Jim Horvath hurried toward him, putting on his jacket.

“Home invasion, Hank. Chinatown.
Peralta’s waiting for me downstairs.”

Horvath was in his early thirties,
tall and slender, with a handsome, pleasant face and neatly combed straight
black hair. He’d been with Homicide for almost two years now and was showing an
aptitude for the job. His partner, Detective Amelda Peralta, was more
experienced, less chatty, and a stickler for procedure. She didn’t mind
explaining to Horvath his shortcomings when it came to homicide investigation
and Horvath, to his credit, took it with good humor.

Hank frowned. “Won’t Jarvis be
there?”

“I guess, but they called us,
too.”

Hank rolled his eyes. “No love
from the watch sergeants, either? Poor Bill.”

“Yeah, he’s a poor dickhead, all
right. Anyway, they want us over there. Maybe to keep a uniform from fragging him.”

“Maybe. Give me a call if he isn’t
there and you need me.”

“You got it.” Feeling under his
jacket to double-check for his sidearm, Horvath hurried off to the elevator.

The other two detectives assigned
to Homicide, Kaplan and Belknap, were currently off-duty. Hank was looking for
some sign of Karen, but instead he saw Detective Maureen Truly loitering
outside his office door. She moved aside self-consciously as he approached and
unlocked his door.

“Hello, Detective. How are you
doing?”

“I’m well, Lieutenant. You said I
could drop by, so I thought today might be okay. If, um, it’s okay.”

Truly worked in the Cold Case
Unit. She was thirty-one years old, single, short and lumpy, with wavy brown
hair and unflattering glasses with narrow red frames. When she’d learned last
month that Jarvis was leaving and that Hank was replacing him as supervisory
lieutenant, she’d approached him about a transfer to Homicide. He said they
couldn’t bring in anyone new at the moment, but she was welcome to come up and
talk to him about it further, if she liked. He didn’t think she had the right
temperament for Homicide, but there was something about her that he liked, and
he wanted to find out what it was.

Unfortunately, she’d picked a bad
time to show up for a job interview.

“Lou! Hang on a sec!”

Hank turned, his office door
swinging open. Karen was coming up the corridor from the interview room with
Walter Parris a few steps behind.

“Excuse me,” he said to Truly.

“No problem.”

“We’re not getting anywhere,”
Karen said, stopping in front of Hank. “The lawyer’s here, and nothing they’re
saying is making any sense.”

Hank looked over her shoulder at
Walter Parris. “You want a sidebar, Mr. Parris?”

Walter nodded. “There are a few
things I need to explain.”

“Come on in.”

Karen pushed by him, fuming.
Walter followed, eyes down. Hank glanced at Truly, hesitated, then motioned
with his head for her to step inside. He closed the door behind her, sat down
at his desk, unclipped his holstered sidearm, locked it in a drawer, and looked
at Karen.

“Is the witness being
uncooperative?”

Karen screwed up her face. “That’s
what I’d call it.” She shifted on her chair to confront Walter. “Look, Mr.
Parris, with all due respect, your son says he knows the guy he saw leaving the
scene, but you and your lawyer won’t let him tell me who it is. I’d like to
lock the three of you up for obstruction and throw away the fucking key at this
point.”

Walter opened his mouth but Hank
held up a hand. “Mr. Parris, just a moment.” He looked at Karen. “Walk me
through it.”

“He says he was in the park this
morning, taking photographs. Apparently it’s about a ten-minute walk from his
house to where he was when he heard the shot. He gets up at dawn and likes to
go for a walk. He doesn’t have a job right now, he says, other than this
photography thing.”

“He’s a freelance photographer,”
Walter said. “I can give you the name of his agent.”

“Great.” Karen glared at him, then
turned back to Hank. “He was busy taking pictures of trees or whatever the hell
when the shot was fired. He didn’t have line of sight. The path curves and
there were trees between him and where Jarrett got it, so if we buy his story
then he didn’t see it happen. He said when he heard the shot he turned around
and looked back in that direction. After a moment he started walking back
toward the curve. At this point he says he saw a guy running toward a car
parked at the curb. He says he took pictures of the guy. The guy saw him, ran
over, grabbed his camera from him, and knocked him down. When he got up, the guy
had driven away. So he walked around the curve until he could see where Jarrett
was lying on the path. He walked up to him but says he didn’t touch him, just
saw the blood and called his father. Says his father told him to wait and not
touch anything, that he’d be right there. So he waited. Took a couple of
pictures of the vic with his cell phone while he was standing there. We have
the thing. Expensive, naturally. He let us test him for GSR, by the way. It was
negative.”

The absence of gunshot residue on
Brett Parris lent strength to his story and suggested they could continue to
treat him as a witness rather than a suspect.

“Okay,” Hank said. “What does he
say about the guy he saw running away?”

“Zip,” Karen said. “That’s where
the roadblocks come up.”

Hank looked at Walter. “What’s the
problem?”

“I understand how serious this
is,” Walter said uncomfortably. “It’s not that we want him to be uncooperative.
It’s just that there’s … context that must be understood first.”

“Context?” Karen snapped. “What
the hell does that mean?”

Walter sighed and ran his hand
over his bare scalp. He was a short man, fifty-eight years old, and somewhat
stout. His hands were small and his fingers looked like little sausages. What
was left of his hair was gray stubble around the base of his skull from ear to
ear. He wore a yellow golf shirt, designer blue jeans, gray socks, and blue
Sperry deck shoes. He wore a gold wedding band on his left hand and an enormous
ring on his right hand that featured rubies and diamonds. His watch was a
Rolex. As chief financial officer of Jarrett Corporation, his annual income
would make Karen’s look like something you’d hand to a street person for a
sandwich at the lunch wagon down at the corner. At the moment, however, he
looked to Hank more like a father struggling to protect his son.

“Brett has a condition,” he said
finally. “We don’t normally talk about it to other people because we want Brett
to have as normal a life as possible. He started having difficulties as a
junior in high school. He attended Jesper Logan–”

“The private school?” Karen
interrupted.

“Yes, Detective. The expensive
one. He wasn’t athletic at all and his grades were mediocre at best and he’s
very introverted so he wasn’t very popular. He kept to himself. He endured
hazing and bullying, and we had to talk to the headmaster about it several
times. Brett was very depressed that year, but we told ourselves it was just
adolescence, something we all go through.

“After graduation he enrolled at
the University of Baltimore to do a program in communications. He lived in
residence on campus. His first year went okay but he ran into a lot of problems
as a sophomore. Behavioral issues, mood problems, paranoia. He was drinking a
lot, getting into trouble that way. We brought him home, and the doctors
diagnosed him as schizophrenic. We were devastated. He went on medication for
it, and his psychiatrist at the time suggested he go back to school, that it
would be good for him to pick up where he’d left off. We compromised by getting
him transferred to State so he could live at home and continue his degree here
in Glendale. It went all right for a few months, then he started drinking
again, skipped his medication, and went off the rails. The paranoia escalated.
We were very upset and took him to a different psychiatrist. She worked with
him for a year and then told us he had something called Fregoli syndrome in
addition to the schizophrenia.”

“Jesus Christ on a stick. What the
hell’s that?” Karen asked.

Walter spread his hands. “I was
just as skeptical as you, Detective. But believe me, after ten years of living
with this I understand it almost as well as Dr. Caldwell.”

“Dr. Sally Caldwell?” Hank asked.
“That’s his psychiatrist?”

“Yes.”

Karen rolled her eyes. Hank shook
his head microscopically at her. Dr. Sally Caldwell was a celebrity
psychiatrist who’d published several books and regularly appeared on television
as a popular guest on talk shows and news programs. He’d actually read one of
her books, on body language, and thought it was good, although it didn’t really
have anything new to say on the subject. Just the same, he understood Karen’s
reaction. A problem witness with a celebrity psychiatrist at the center of a
murder investigation in which the victim was the fifth-richest man in the state
was not a situation that would make any detective feel particularly
comfortable.

“What did she say about this
condition of Brett’s?”

“It’s a disorder in which the
person believes they’re being stalked by a particular individual who’s disguised
as various other people,” Walter said. “It’s apparently a rare form of what
they call delusional misidentification syndrome, DMS, where the person has what
she calls a disturbed familiarity with people. The area of the brain that
handles facial recognition doesn’t function properly all the time. There are
different forms of it, I guess, but Brett has what they call Fregoli syndrome.
He has a paranoid belief that a specific person is persecuting him. At first
they thought it was just the schizophrenia, but Dr. Caldwell recognized a very
specific pattern and realized it was this other syndrome on top of it.”

“Specific pattern,” Hank prompted.

“When he was in high school,”
Walter said, with obvious reluctance, “there was one boy in particular who
picked on him. It was hard to get Brett to talk about it, but when he did it
was always this same boy who was beating him up and tormenting him. We went to
the headmaster a number of times, and he spoke to the boy. Several times he
admitted to having bullied Brett, but on other occasions he vigorously denied the
accusations. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Then after Brett came back from
Baltimore we noticed he talked about this boy all the time. I knew the boy had
gone off to Connecticut to go to college, but Brett insisted he kept running
into him here in town and that the boy continued to have it in for him. He
talked about the boy stalking him, wearing disguises. To Dr. Caldwell this was
the key to diagnosing his illness as Fregoli syndrome. People with this
condition believe that a single person is persecuting them by following them
everywhere disguised as other people. He might look at you, Lieutenant, and believe
you were this boy disguised as a police officer. Then he might go outside and
see a courier go by on a bicycle and decide that the boy had switched disguises
and was after him again. It’s exhausting.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Hank
saw Maureen Truly leaning against the closed door, nodding as though she knew
what Walter was talking about. When he looked at her, she made eye contact but
said nothing.

“So he gets this all the time?”
Karen growled.

“Not exactly. It’s intermittent.
If he misses his medication, he gets it. If he’s under extreme stress, he gets
it. If there’s nothing at all unusual happening, he sometimes gets it. It might
go away over the course of a day or last for several days. They don’t really
understand a lot about it.”

“Who’s the boy, out of curiosity?”
Hank asked.

“His name’s Richard Holland. He’s
not a boy now, of course. He’s actually a senior executive with us,
vice-president of corporate and regulatory affairs.”

Hank’s eyebrows shot up. “He’s
Brett’s age and he’s an executive with your company?”

“He’s a year older, but yes, he’s
been with Jarrett for several years. H.J. brought him in. Apparently Holland’s
father worked for H.J. a long time ago.”

“Does he ever get violent when he
has these delusions?” Karen asked.

“No,” Walter replied emphatically,
“not at all. Look, he’s never hurt another person in his life. He’s been beaten
up before, as I said, but he never even tried to defend himself. He’d never hit
another person, not even at his most agitated. And he’d absolutely never shoot
someone with a gun. We have no firearms in our home whatsoever. He’s not
capable of shooting anyone.”