The Perfect Suspect (2 page)

“Listen to me,” David had said. “It's over. How many times do I have to say it?”

“But that's all wrong. Try to understand, David.” She could hear the hysteria working back into her voice.

“You have to go now.”

“Please don't do this.” She had been holding the glass. She couldn't remember whether she had taken a sip of bourbon, but her mouth felt dry, her tongue as thick as sandpaper. She must have set the glass on the lamp table, because she realized she had taken the gun out of her bag and was holding it on him, pleading with him, issuing orders. “Listen to me. Listen to me.”
Drop the knife!

“For godssakes, Ryan. Put the gun down.” She had heard the tremor in his voice, so unlike the candidate renowned for his cool demeanor, his control of every situation. “Don't do anything that . . .”

It was lost, all lost, in the explosion of the Sig. Her own life crashed around her, as if the beams and the plaster had fallen from the ceiling and she was left standing in the debris, staring at the lifeless body of David Mathews. You had to be ready to pull the trigger—that had been drummed into her from her rookie days. If you take out your gun, you must be ready to fire.

She had been shaking, her hands trembling so hard that she had difficulty shoving the gun back into her bag. She made herself step across the living room, searching for the casings. My God, there were three. She had shot him three times. Maybe she had fired off even more bullets. She managed to extract the gun and check the magazine. Three bullets missing. She stepped back to the lamp table and picked up the glass. She hadn't touched anything else, she was sure. She had been careful. David had let her inside, and she had walked past him without touching the door.

She had to get away. A neighbor could have heard the gunshots. People could appear out of nowhere. She backed across the living room and into the entry, not taking her eyes from David's body, so still and helpless and complete. There would be nothing more for David Mathews. She slid the glass inside her bag and used the front of her jacket to turn the doorknob. Still using the jacket, she pulled the door shut behind her.

She saw the woman then, halted in mid-step on the sidewalk next to the curb, a shadow swallowed in the darkness except for the white slacks billowing and shimmering.

Ryan swung sideways, out of the porch light, ran along the front of the house and rounded the corner. She kept running, slipping on the lawn, catching herself and finally throwing herself inside the gray Ford parked a half block away.
Never park in front
. She could hear David's voice in her head.
Park down the block so no one will connect your car to my house.

The street was quiet, wide and lined with oaks. The thick, heavy branches nearly obscured the mansions behind the deep swaths of lawn and curved walkways. She had pulled into the lane and forced herself to maintain a slow, steady speed, a resident returning home after a late night, not wanting to disturb the neighbors. She had felt the shaking deep inside, as if her heart had gone into free fall.

The woman on the sidewalk had seen her! In that instant, when she had looked in the woman's direction. An instant was enough for a witness to pick someone out of a lineup. She had seen it happen. Every instinct told her to drive around the block, find the woman and kill her. It would be obvious what had happened. Someone had gone to David Mathews's home, shot him, then shot the woman outside who must have been a witness. Logical, unsurprising, the kind of act homicide detectives would accept. She would have accepted it. A killer, wanting to make sure no one could identify him. Or her.

Instead, she had turned onto the thoroughfare that ran through the neighborhood west to the highway, on automatic now, her hands glued to the wheel, the straw bag with the Sig and the crystal glass tossed onto the passenger seat. Still calm on the outside, she thought, her heart pounding against her ribs, probably driving like a drunk, the slow, cautious turn, the effort to keep from swerving into the next lane. She kept going, the highway somewhere in the darkness ahead pulling her forward like a magnet. She was not a killer. It had been a horrible accident. The case could even be made that what happened was David's fault. Anyway, the shadow on the sidewalk would never connect the woman under the porch light of David Mathews's house with Detective Ryan Beckman.

She had followed the entrance ramp onto I-25 and forced herself to concentrate on merging into the traffic that curved to I-70. She drove west, the dark, ragged shapes of the foothills floating ahead for a while. Then she was climbing into the mountains, barely aware of the uphill pull on the engine, her heart still hammering, the image of David, shocked and surprised, thrown off his own game, running through her head. At one point, alone on the highway with no oncoming traffic and nothing but the enveloping darkness behind her, she had rolled down her window and thrown out the crystal glass.

She followed the exit to Frisco and drove through town. Moonlight traced the waters of Lake Dillon outside her window. Twenty minutes later she was in Breckenridge heading up the mountain toward the ski area. The condo she had rented was hidden in clusters of lodgepole pines, and the smell of pine drifted inside the Ford. She parked in the garage underneath, a voluminous cavern lit by dim overhead bulbs and bisected by rows of parked vehicles. The sound of her door slamming bounced around the metal and concrete. She rode the elevator to the third floor, let herself into the condo and leaned against the door a moment. She was safe. No one had seen her driving into the garage, making her way upstairs. Had she planned all the details, they could not have worked out so well. She turned on the table lamp, then slumped onto the sofa, giving in to the crushing sense of exhaustion.

The ringing of her cell cut through the silence.

Ryan blinked into the light flaring from the lamp a moment, trying to get her bearings. The night came back to her in a rush, like photos flashing in front of her. Finally she managed to pull the cell from her bag, and check the readout. Headquarters. She waited for two more rings, trying to still her breathing and control the erratic rhythm of her heart, before she answered. “Hello,” she said. Her voice sounded mute and thick.

“Ryan?” The sound of Crowley's voice drilled into her. “Did I wake you up?”

“What do you think?” Her heart had started up again. “What time is it?” She tried to bring the face of her watch into focus. 5:45 a.m.

“Sorry, your vacation's over. I need you here.”

“What are you talking about?” My God. The woman on the sidewalk must have gone inside David's house and found his body! But how had she gotten in? The door was locked. Maybe she looked through a window, saw David on the living room floor, and called the police.

“High-profile shooting,” the sergeant said. “David Mathews shot in his home last night.”

“Mathews, shot?” She clasped the cell hard against her ear. “Is he dead?”

“Two bullets in the chest, one in the thigh. Somebody made sure he was dead. I need you here.”

She managed a gulp of air. She felt as if she were in a race, trying to stay ahead of the man on the phone. What was he saying? She should investigate the case? It was so absurd she had to jam her fist against her mouth to keep from laughing. After a moment she heard herself say: “I have a three-day vacation, Sergeant.”

“Williams and O'Keefe are tied up with a shooting in Montbello. Bustamante and Greeves are still in L.A. investigating a possible connection to the gang shooting and the muggings in LoDo. I don't expect them back until tomorrow.”

“What about the other detectives?” The sense of absurdity expanded around her, as if she had stepped into a funhouse and was surrounded by an array of mirrors that reflected distorted and grotesque images. “You can find somebody else.”

“Not with your experience. This is the highest profile homicide we've handled in ten years. The press will be all over this, and that includes the national press. Television, radio, bloggers, you name it. We can't have any mix-ups. I need an experienced detective in charge, and you are it. How soon can you get down here?”

“I'm in Breckenridge,” she heard herself saying. The grotesque images in the funhouse mirrors seemed to be closing in. “I need a couple of hours.”

“I'll expect you in an hour and a half,” Sergeant Crowley said.

2

Catherine sat up with a start, her skin cold and prickly. She flipped the switch on the bedside lamp and blinked into the circle of light, trying to banish the blackness of the nightmare. The heavy noise of an explosion, the rise of wailing sounds in the distance and the sense that she was spiraling downward into an abyss—the nightmare was always the same. She had thought it was over. There had been almost six months of peaceful nights without the horror that had previously crashed over her for months and left her weak and disoriented in the mornings. But now the nightmare had started again. A dull wine-ache spread behind her eyes. She pulled her legs to her chest, leaned against her knees, and waited for the spasms in her stomach to stop. The warm, musty smells of early September drifted through the opened window. Rex was still asleep on his pillow in the corner, and for a moment, she thought it strange the golden retriever hadn't heard the noise and gone into a barking fit, the noise had seemed so real. Finally, she slid out of bed and spent ten minutes in the steaming shower with hot water pounding her shoulders and back. She began to feel situated again, the tile solid beneath her feet, the glass shower door cloudy, and the familiarity of the small bungalow gathering her in.

She wandered into the kitchen, dressed in a white cotton blouse, tan skirt and high-heeled sandals, her black hair still damp on her neck. Rex waited at the back door. She let him into the yard and watched him circle the lawn, stretching his muscles in the soft newness of the morning. The sky was pale blue with wisps of clouds rolling past and spears of sunlight falling through the leaves of the elm tree and scattering about the lawn. The pansies, daisies and petunias she had planted in the narrow garden near the back door seemed to be wilting with the end of summer. In the near distance, like a massive wall looming over Denver, were the silvery blue peaks of the Rocky Mountains.

She closed the door, started the coffee brewing, and turned on the little TV at the end of the counter. Leaving the volume low, she stared at the movie-star-handsome couple seated on sofas in a studio in New York almost two thousand miles away. An anchor woman interviewing a young Broadway actor who kept tossing his head to clear the mane of dark hair from his eyes. Catherine thought about the way people opened up to complete strangers—someone sitting next to you on the plane, or standing in a line, or tossing interview questions across a table—and divulged the most important parts of their lives. They were divorced, had lost a child, had a debilitating disease. It was as if they were compelled to divulge the information. Otherwise no one would really know them, or even see them. She wondered what she might say in that studio in New York: “Hello, I'm Catherine McLeod. Investigative journalist with the
Denver Journal
, forty years old and divorced. Last summer, I killed a man.”

She turned away from the TV and poured a mug of coffee. The almost empty bottle of Burgundy sat on the counter, a reminder of last night. What had she been thinking? Alcohol had only fueled the nightmares. Self-defense, the investigators had ruled. She had killed the man before he could kill her. There was no blame; and no charges had been brought. Yet she had relived the incident night after night, the horrible explosion and wailing, the spiraling downward, the feeling that she was disappearing, until she realized that, in the horrible instant when she thought she would die, she had experienced her own death. Except that, in the end, she wasn't the one who died. She had spent months in counseling. She had quit drinking, except for an occasional glass of wine with dinner, and gradually the nightmares became less frequent. But last night, when she'd gotten home, the bungalow had seemed so vacant and quiet, even with Rex jumping about, welcoming her. She had felt limp with loneliness.

She was accustomed to being alone, she had told herself. She had made her own way for two years since her divorce. For the last ten months, Nick Bustamante had been in her life. Hardly long enough to dent old habits of independence. So what if he had been in L.A. for ten days interrogating gang members about a gang-related murder and random muggings? Marie—she had always called her mother, who had adopted her when she was five, by her first name—was in New England visiting a cousin, but Catherine had gone to dinner several times with friends. A couple of times, she had gotten together with Dulcie Oldman, who had been helping her understand her Arapaho heritage, ever since she had discovered last year that she was part Arapaho. She had called Dulcie and gotten her voice mail, and at some point, she had dragged the wine bottle from the back of a kitchen cabinet.