The two detectives sifted through stacks of junk mail, bills and promotional letters selling car insurance and services to clean chimneys. McQ wondered why Quinn kept chimney cleaning mailers when she didn’t have a fireplace. There were prescriptions never filled and dozens of shopping lists, mainly for cleaning supplies.
They found a tiny scrap of paper with Quinn Roberts’ address handwritten in block letters in blue ink. That little bit puzzled McQuillan. The paper looked like it was torn from the corner of a newspaper and it had the date printed on it. The date was from a week before they found Quinn’s body. Next to the date was a big letter ‘C’ and small ‘a’ printed in old English style type. Why would Quinn Roberts have her own address handwritten on a piece of newspaper dated from the week before her death? She’d been living in that apartment for over six months. Maybe it was nothing, he thought, but possibly it was something. Beyond that, the rest of what they collected was mainly garbage, except for the stacks of letters and cards from her mother, sisters, and friends in New Jersey trying to cheer her up. Sad, he thought as he read each letter. This woman had been deeply loved.
For the next few weeks, McQuillan and his team pieced together the framework of Quinn Roberts’ life. At their Thursday morning briefing, McQuillan reviewed where they were with the hard evidence, what had been collected and what they were still waiting for from the lab. He then wrapped up with the personal details that had been had uncovered through the dozens of interviews.
‘Looks like the husband was a serial cheater and wanted out of the marriage for years,’ said McQuillan. ‘Not sure when his wife became aware of all of his extracurricular activities. According to her friends, despite learning about his other relationships, she didn’t want the marriage to end. Go figure.’
‘We’ve found out the husband liked college girls,’ said Crews. ‘And, we got a bunch of the lab results back and ruled out a few neighbors and the landlady but there were still a couple of samples that we haven’t identified yet.’
‘We may never get a match,’ McQ said. ‘So, it’s going to boil down to thorough police work if we’re going to crack this thing. Everyone clear?’
The following day, the two detectives spent some time nosing around UR and talked to a lot of students. They learned that Alec Roberts had a nickname with some of the female students, ‘Dr. A’. According to some of the girls, all you had to do was put out once or twice and you could move your grade point average way up. They said some of their classmates deliberately signed up for his courses with that in mind.
‘Last year,’ said one student, ‘I knew this girl who was a senior, and she wanted to get a job with Google when she graduated. She was worried her GPA wasn’t high enough. She registered for two of Dr. Roberts’ classes her first semester senior year and did what she needed to do. Now, she works in marketing at the Google headquarters in New York.’
Jesus Christ, thought McQuillan, my daughter’s in college. She gets all C’s. I guess that means she’s not sleeping with her teachers. The more McQuillan learned about Dr. Alec Roberts, the more convinced he was that there was something off about the guy. The two cops walked around the school looking for more information when someone directed them to a young woman with a long blonde ponytail. She was sitting at a picnic table deep into a book.
‘Excuse me,’ McQuillan said. ‘Are you, Chrissy Goodwin?’
She nodded. The two detectives pulled out their badges and flashed them. She was nonplussed.
‘I’m Detective McQuillan, this is Detective Crews, Newbridge PD. We’re working on the murder investigation of–’
‘Dr. Roberts’ wife?’ she interrupted with an affected accent. McQuillan nodded. ‘Everyone on campus is talking about it. So tragic.’
‘We heard you have a close relationship with Dr. Roberts,’ Crews said.
The young woman stared at the detectives for a moment. They could see she was a lousy liar before she even opened her mouth.
‘He’s a good teacher,’ she said slowly. ‘I took his class last year.’
‘I’m going to cut to the chase, Ms. Goodwin,’ Crews continued. ‘Some of your classmates reported you were romantically involved with Dr. Roberts.’
‘Then they should mind their own business. Yeah, I went out with him, it was no big deal. At first, it was kind of a rush, you know, he was my professor. I thought he was smart and he worked out a lot. He was in good shape for an old guy. He was married, but that wasn’t my problem. I wasn’t breaking my wedding vows. Besides, I figured it would help with my grade.’
‘Did it?’ the detective asked.
‘Look,’ she replied. ‘It was fun in the beginning, but then it got icky. Dr. Roberts had this idea of a woman in his mind, and he wanted me to be her. He got super intense about how I dressed, too. He loved trashy.’
McQuillan nodded as he wrote in his notebook.
‘Then he started to creep me out,’ Chrissy continued. ‘One day he said he wanted us to make a sex video. Wasn’t really my thing but YOLO. I may have slept with my married professor, but I’m not a slut. When the semester was over, I ended it. I got what I wanted, an A in History. Guess he got what he wanted, too.’
‘That guy is a real creep,’ McQuillan said to Crews as the two detectives walked across campus. When they parted ways at the main quad, McQuillan cut through the student center on his way to his car. That’s when he saw them.
A row of cream-colored metal stands lined the walls of the main hallway. Inside the bins were stacks of the free UR student newspaper, the Campus Times. McQuillan picked up a copy and stared at it. Something was familiar, but his brain wasn’t quite there yet.
Come on, McQ, think. Why does this seem familiar?
His eyes focused on the title. The title, Campus Times, was written in an old English style type. He covered up most of it with his hands, everything except for the ‘C’ and the ‘a’. Bingo. The color and type of paper along with the logo was identical to that torn scrap of paper with Quinn’s address scribbled on it in blue ink that they had found in her apartment. The date printed on it was from the same week Quinn Roberts was murdered. Now he had concrete evidence linking Alec Roberts or at least the University of Rochester to Quinn Roberts’ apartment. Who else would have had access to the UR newspaper? It had to have come from Alec Roberts. But how it got there, McQ didn’t know.
He drove directly to the district attorney’s office to plead his case to the Assistant District Attorney, Bernie Gonzales’, in person. He and Gonzales had worked on a number of investigations over the years and the ADA owed him a favor. McQ hoped to cash in one of them and convince the prosecutor to reconsider ruling out all evidence found in Quinn Roberts’ apartment. That tiny piece of paper he had just identified could be the game-changer.
‘Sorry but that still won’t fly,’ said Gonzales after he heard McQuillan out. ‘I’m not messing up my conviction record. The DA doesn’t let us take cases we don’t think we can win, even if we know the defendant is guilty. It’s a waste of taxpayer money. You know the drill.’
‘But this is different. What’s the problem?’
‘Half of Monroe County was walking around your crime scene.’
‘The first responder let things get a little out of control,’ McQuillan said, ‘but only for a short while. Once I got there, I assure you, everything was done by the book.’
‘We heard there was a stray dog stepping on and sniffing around the body,’ Gonzales continued. ‘The coroner found a dog hair on the lady during the autopsy. Your guys sent a urine sample to the lab that turned out to be dog piss and vomit that wasn’t from the victim but from the landlady. Your investigation is a mess.’
‘There were a few missteps, but now we’ve finally got solid evidence,’ McQuillan said.
‘A scrap of newspaper is your solid evidence?’
‘It had to have come from the husband,’ the detective said. ‘He’s a professor at UR. How else would it have ended up in Quinn Roberts’ apartment? Tha
t issue of Campus Times was printed a couple of days before we found her. If Alec Roberts hadn’t been to her place, maybe he wrote her address down so he could find it.’
‘Have you checked the handwriting?’ asked Gonzales, shaking his head.
McQ pulled out the scrap of paper and showed it to the attorney.
‘It’s only a few block letters, our handwriting guy said it would be impossible to identify it. Alec Roberts wrote it down and then went to find and kill his wife. What do you say, Bernie?’
‘It’s possible, but I still can’t use it.’
‘You’re killing me.’
‘Roberts’ defense attorney would have a field day with how everything was collected,’ said Gonzales. ‘Unless you find some evidence not retrieved at the scene or a new witness, I hate to tell you, this investigation is headed to Cold Case.’
‘Come on, Bernie,’ McQuillan begged.
‘If I know about the holes, then Roberts’ lawyer knows about them,’ said Gonzales as he turned to walk away. ‘Everything your people recovered, physical, DNA, would all get tossed. Sorry, McQ, I can’t take this to a grand jury. Get me something new that hasn’t been compromised.’
Part II
HOW MY PERFECT LIFE STARTED
Chapter 21
Eileen Delaney often joked that her oldest daughter, Erin, was like a football; ‘you could throw her across a field, and she’d bounce into the end zone all by herself’. Her youngest, Colleen, was the quiet and independent one, preferring to be alone and focused on a project, even when she was a toddler.
Her middle child, Quinn, was the one Eileen needed to be extra gentle with. Only five-and-a-half pounds when she was born, Quinn just wanted to be held. Whenever Eileen turned around, Quinn would be there, her little arms in the air, begging to be lifted.
‘Pick me up, Mommy,’ she’d plead.
While her older sister was off making friends and the younger one happily playing in her crib, Quinn would cling to her mother’s legs and sit as close as possible, like a lap dog.
‘You should have been born a kangaroo, Quinnie. Baby kangaroos live in a pouch in their mommy’s tummy,’ said Eileen to her five-year-old middle daughter.
The little girl’s eyes widened as she smiled at what she had just learned.
‘Mommy, I would like being in your pouch. Then you could carry me around all the time,’ Quinn said. Eileen laughed and shook her head because she knew her daughter meant it. That girl hates being alone, she thought.
From time they could talk, Erin and Quinn were the best of friends. Colleen, who was so much younger, was often an afterthought for her two older sisters. Once in a while, they would let Colleen play with them but most of the time, they bossed the poor thing around until she cried and their mother had to come to the rescue.
With a house full of girls, Eileen’s husband, Ed, was surrounded by a sea of pink, purple, and sparkles. Ed was a big, loud, burly guy. He was nearly six-feet-two and weighed two-hundred-and-fifty pounds and had a mop of thick black hair. Whenever Eileen saw Ed’s big frame sprawled out on the living room floor playing dolls with the girls, it always made her smile. Her husband had figured out that the best way to win over his daughters’ hearts was to play with Barbies. He was a tough guy on the outside but inside he was marshmallow fluff, and his girls knew that. Even when he’d bark at them, they never took him seriously.
‘Girls,’ he’d bellow. ‘I want your bedrooms cleaned and your clothes picked up, now! We don’t have maid service here, you know.’
‘Oh, Daddy, please. Stop yelling, you’re hurting my brain,’ Quinn would say, rolling her eyes as she walked past him with her hands over her ears ignoring his commands.
Erin and Colleen were carbon copies of their mother, with green eyes, strawberry blonde hair and a sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of their noses. Quinn, on the other hand, took after her father with a fair complexion, dark almost black hair and bright blue eyes rimmed by thick black lashes. She had naturally red lips that made her look like she was wearing lipstick. Once when she was in kindergarten, a few of the mothers gossiped that five-year-old Quinn was wearing make-up to school. Eileen Delaney set them all straight right away.
‘My daughter’s red lips are a gift from God,’ she said proudly. ‘She won’t ever need make-up like most girls.’
By the time she was fourteen, Quinn started developing physically, and the boys noticed. At first all the attention felt strange. She was more interested in playing with her friends or the family dogs but eventually, she came to appreciate and enjoy all the male admiration.
When Ed and Eileen saw what was happening, they laid down the law. No boyfriends until Quinn was sixteen. On the week of her sixteenth birthday, Quinn introduced her parents to her first boyfriend, and then another, soon followed by another. The parade of would-be suitors made her parents wonder if every boy at school had signed up for a turn to go out with their daughter.
At seventeen, and a junior in high school, Quinn started going out with Mark Miller. They dated for two years and she and Mark were each other’s dates to the junior and senior proms.
Eileen liked Mark well enough and thought he was basically a sweet kid. Ed, on the other hand, didn’t like any of the boys his daughters brought home; it was how he was wired. Nobody was good enough for his girls. He’d grunt when Mark came over to the house and Mark, to his credit, remained polite and tried desperately to converse. Eileen thought of pulling Mark aside and telling him not to try so hard with her husband, but part of her enjoyed watching their weekly death dance.
After high school graduation, Mark went away to college in Pennsylvania. Quinn decided to stay home in Cranbury and go to a nearby state school. She and Mark tried to keep their relationship going but like many high school romances, it had run its course. Turns out there were plenty of boys at college waiting for their turn to go out with Quinn Delaney.
The first time Quinn brought Alec home, her parents didn’t know what to make of him. They had heard the story about Alec putting shrimp up his nose fifty times and failed to see why Quinn found it so enchanting. Alec was different from the other boys Quinn usually dragged home. Most of the guys Quinn dated were the star football player or student body president; confident, smart, athletic. Alec was tall, thin and tentative and Quinn’s father made him visibly nervous.
Despite Ed’s disapproval, Alec and Quinn’s relationship flourished. They got engaged a few months before they both finished college. Eileen had wanted her daughter to wait, take her time and get married later. After much internal debate though, she kept her mouth shut, believing that every person was on their own journey and that meant her grown daughter was capable of making her own decisions. Anything Eileen said would likely fall on deaf ears anyway, she reasoned, because Quinn was ‘in love’.
The wedding was set for the following October. The whole family got caught up in the matrimonial whirlwind. There was much to be researched and selected – dresses, flowers, invitations, photographers, favors, music, and food, and they pulled it off. For months the Delaney women powered through wedding magazines and marched into countless numbers of bridal stores looking for that perfect dress.
They finally found ‘the one’ at a little dress shop in Princeton. It was a fitted creamy-white gown with long lace sleeves that hugged her body in just the right places. When Quinn stood on the stand in the middle of the bridal store wearing her veil and gown and the most beautiful serene smile, Eileen thought her daughter looked happier than she had ever seen her, glowing from within. It reminded the mother-of-the-bride of the time Quinn and Erin were about six and seven and had found a box filled with old sheer white curtains in the basement. Using the contents, the two girls had draped themselves in the fabric and played ‘bride’ for hours. They continued that game for years. Now, it was for real.
For the four bridesmaids, Quinn decided on blue strapless gowns, a color all of them approved of. That September, Eileen, the bridesmaids, and Linda Roberts
, Alec’s mother, threw Quinn a beautiful bridal shower in the Delaneys’ backyard. Quinn’s future mother-in-law, Linda, was Korean-American. She painstakingly made hundreds of homemade Asian dumplings and dipping sauces for the party. Most of the attendees had never had Korean food before and the Asian delicacies were the hit of the event.
During the party planning, Eileen got to know Linda Roberts a little. They were very different types. Eileen spoke her mind and was a bit of a maverick while Linda was quiet and reserved, a follower. It was evident to Quinn’s mother that Linda took the backseat in her marriage to her husband, George. George was a bit of a blowhard and Eileen noticed he was often dismissive with his wife. No matter, Eileen thought, it was none of her business. Her soon-to-be in-laws didn’t have to be her best friends.
When Quinn’s wedding train pulled out of the station, Eileen jumped on board to make the perfect day for her daughter but she noticed Quinn’s father didn’t have the same level of enthusiasm. At first, she thought it was just Ed being Ed.
‘So,’ she began one evening, ‘you haven’t said much about the wedding. It’s coming up. When are you getting fitted for your suit?’
‘I’ll get to it,’ he said not looking up from his newspaper.
‘It’s in four weeks.’
‘I know when it is, Eileen. I’m goddamn paying for it.’
‘You don’t have to bite my head off,’ she said. ‘Is it the money?’
There was a long silence, and Ed finally looked up at his wife.
‘I think he’s a jerk. My sweet little girl could have anyone in the world and she picked a putz, and that makes me sad. I wanted better for her,’ he said, shaking his head as he got up and walked out of the room.
Four weeks later, on a warm, sunny October afternoon, friends and relatives stood in St. Gabriel’s and watched the Delaney girls walk down the aisle in a blaze of white and robin egg blue. Eileen told herself that Ed had been too tough on Alec. Quinn was happy, and that was all that mattered. Alec was her son-in-law now, and they all needed to act like a family and support each other.
I Am Quinn Page 7