Cancelled Vows

by Lauren Carr

  “What did you find out from Gibbons?” Mac asked him.

  “She was going to talk to the expert who confirmed that the handwriting on the postcard had come from Walker,” Ed reported. “But unfortunately, she can’t do that. The handwriting expert is dead.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Mac replied while quickening his step. “Sometime yesterday … after Audra Walker’s body was discovered.”

  “Someone pushed him in front of a subway car on his way home last night,” Ed said. “Our killer doesn’t like loose ends. Gibbons said she’s going to talk to Lieutenant Wayne Hopkins this evening.”

  “Get me her home address,” Mac said. “I want to be there when this conversation takes place.”

  “Maybe it’s not Hopkins,” Ed said. “Could be someone on his team.”

  “In either case, I want a face to face with this guy,” Mac said. “The longer David’s on the run, the more trigger-happy these cops are going to be when they catch him.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Mac, I’ve got a cab,” Ed called to him from where the doorman had hailed a taxicab for them in front of the Four Seasons. “Are you and Gnarly ready to go?”

  “Just about.” Mac was urging Gnarly to make use of the fire hydrant before getting into the cab when his cell phone buzzed on his hip. Hoping that it would be good news from David, he grabbed the phone to check the ID. It was Doc Washington, the medical examiner in Garrett County, Maryland.

  “Hey, Doc,” Mac answered the call. “I’m assuming you’re calling about some autopsy reports I asked Bogie to pass on to you.”

  “The very ones,” she replied in her low, cultured voice. “You are aware that I’m at a disadvantage because these reports are over thirty years old and because I have no access to any of the physical evidence.”

  Mac handed the leash off to Ed, who ushered Gnarly into the backseat of the cab. “I’m just hoping you might see something that raises a red flag.”

  The driver apprehensively eyed the very large German shepherd as if he feared Gnarly would eat him.

  “There was one,” she replied. “According to Bogie and the police report, the kids killed in the car that went over the cliff were seventeen or eighteen years old, right? They were healthy, young Caucasians, one male and one female.”

  “Right,” Mac said. “Seniors in high school. This incident happened the night of the senior prom. Anything in the report jump out at you?”

  “Like that neither of them died in the fire?” she asked. “According to the autopsy report, neither of them had inhaled fire or smoke into their lungs. The girl died from a broken neck. All of the other injuries consistent with a car crash came well over an hour after she was dead.”

  “She was dead before she was put in the car?” Mac ignored Ed, who was gesturing for him to climb into the back of the cab.

  “But wait, there’s more.”

  “Tell me,” Mac said, urging her on.

  “The boy was not a boy,” Doc said. “According to skeletal structure and dental X-rays, I’d put the female at late teens to early twenties, but the male was significantly older. I’d put him in his early to midtwenties. Now I could be wrong. However, this was supposed to be a high school boy from a rural Southern town, right?”

  “Supposedly,” Mac said.

  “So what was he doing with bits of healed-over shrapnel in his legs?”

  “Shrapnel?” Mac repeated.

  “Shrapnel,” she said. “Healed over. It’s all over his legs—like he was in the vicinity of a bomb blast.”

  “Like a soldier who’d seen action,” Mac said.

  “Thirty years ago,” she said. “That was before the conflict in the Middle East.”

  “It wasn’t a suicide pact,” Mac said. “It was a homicide. Let me talk to Bogie.”

  “Mac, I’m at home,” Doc said.

  “I’m not asking what room you’re in,” Mac said. “Just hand the phone to Bogie. I need him to do something for me.”

  “Mac,” Ed whispered to him, “the meter is running.”

  “This will only take a minute,” Mac told Ed while Bogie picked up the line.

  “Figures you’d catch me with my pants down,” Bogie’s gravelly voice said through the speaker.

  “That is not a visual that I’m looking for right now,” Mac replied.

  “I can guess what you want,” Bogie said. “Doc already told me. Call Texas, and ask if any young couples including a soldier who had seen action were reported missing at about the time of Romeo and Juliet’s suicide pact. Are you thinking Audra Walker ran into Romeo and Juliet in New York?”

  “But so much time had passed,” Mac said. “The only way to prove it would be to prove that the boy and girl buried in Texas aren’t who everyone thought they were.”

  Bogie agreed. “But there’s no way a small-town deputy chief in Maryland is going to get the Texas authorities to exhume those bodies. If I call them, they’ll tell me where to go.”

  “Then don’t ask them,” Mac said. “Call them, and ask if they have any missing couples from around that time period. Make it sound like you’ve found them up in Deep Creek Lake.”

  After grumbling that it was worth a shot, Bogie asked how David was doing.

  “He’s okay,” Mac noticed that his voice went up an octave.

  “You’re lying,” Bogie said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t go into it right now,” Mac said. “He’ll be fine. Ed and I are on top of everything. How’s Chelsea?”

  “Fine.”

  Mac noticed that Bogie’s voice had gone up an octave. “What’s happening with Dr. Love?”

  “Do you mean Dr. Seth Blanchard?” Bogie asked. “He’s a good stand-up guy.”

  “Sounds to me like you’re rooting for him,” Mac said.

  “I only want what’s best for David and Chelsea,” Bogie said. “Wouldn’t it be better for them to discover that they aren’t the one for each other before the wedding instead of after?”

  “So he’s putting moves on Chelsea?” Mac asked. “I thought this was all in Archie’s imagination.”

  “Let me put it this way,” Bogie said. “The hospital gift shop had to close to restock their flowers.”

  “That’s not fair,” Mac spat out. “David isn’t there to defend himself.”

  “All’s fair in love and war, Mac.”

  As soon as Mac hung up, Ed urged him into the cab, and the driver, relieved to finally get a move on, hurried as best he could in New York’s evening traffic. The sooner he got them to their destination, the sooner he could get Gnarly out of his backseat.

  “Gibbons is going to be mad,” Ed told Mac several minutes later while handing a wad of bills to the cabdriver, who had delivered them to the apartment where Abby Gibbons lived.

  “Especially if she’s in on it,” Mac told his lawyer as he led Gnarly out onto the sidewalk.

  In the front seat, the driver sighed as if he were relieved he had gotten to their destination without being eaten.

  “We don’t know who the dirty cops are or who’s running things. For all we know, she’s feeding us a line, and she and Hopkins are running this whole operation together,” Mac said.

  Ed closed the rear door of the cab and tapped the hood to signal that the cabdriver could leave. “If that were the case, she would have never told us that those cops were dirty.”

  “She’d look guiltier if she told us they were clean, and we found out they weren’t,” Mac said. “Better for her to pretend to be on our side and keep us close so that she knows what we know.”

  “Do you think Gibbons is in on it or not?”

  Before Mac could answer, a loud crash followed by a high-pitched scream filled the air. More shrieks joined in before the noise came to a shattering halt as the body of Lieutenant Abigail Gibbons landed on top of
the cab that had delivered Mac and Ed to her apartment.

  Mac was the first to find his voice. “If she was, she’s not anymore.”

  In the shower, David stood with his face up to receive the full force of the spray. His eyes closed, he was alone with his thoughts of every woman who had raced in and out of his life, every relationship, and every mistake he’d made that had hurt those he loved.

  There was his mother, who, lost in her dementia, could not differentiate between him and his father, who had loved her but had also been in love with another woman, the famously brilliant Robin Spencer—Mac’s mother.

  David was in high school before he saw that the roots of his parents’ marital issues had to do with his father being in love with a woman he couldn’t have—all because he was too honorable to disrespect his wife by leaving her. In spite of the rumors that claimed otherwise, he never cheated on David’s mother. David knew that for a fact, because he had told him to his face when David had confronted him with the rumors.

  “Do you love Mom?” David had asked him in the blunt, direct manner of a teenage boy.

  “I would never hurt your mother, son,” Patrick O’Callaghan had said. That was on the day the principal called him to pick up David after he’d broken a boy’s nose for teasing him about his father’s alleged affair with the murder-mystery writer who lived at the end of Spencer Point. He found his son in the nurse’s office with an ice pack on his black eye.

  “But you are cheating on her?”

  “No, I’m not,” Patrick said. “Robin and I are friends. We may even be best friends. I haven’t had sex with her since she moved back here to Spencer.”

  It was not until much later that David realized the significance of the words “since she moved back to Spencer.” He had had sexual relations with her years before, when Mac Faraday had been conceived.

  “So you aren’t having sex with her,” David said. “But you’re in love with her.”

  Dressed sharply in his police-chief uniform—black slacks and white shirt—Patrick O’Callaghan stood up straight and stared at his son.

  His silence spoke volumes.

  “It’s true,” David said in a soft voice. “And she’s in love with you. It’s an affair of the heart.”

  After another long silence, Patrick said, “You are a very smart young man.”

  “Are you in love with Mom?”

  “I took a vow when I married your mother,” he answered. “I gave her my word that I would stay with you and her through sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, till death—”

  “And that’s the only reason you stay with her, when the woman you love lives only a couple of miles away—because of a stupid vow you took,” David said, tossing the ice pack aside.

  “A man, or a woman, for that matter, is only as good as his or her word,” Patrick said. “That’s why I don’t give my word lightly. Marriage is a commitment, and a real man doesn’t walk away from a commitment—otherwise, his words would have no value, and if his words have no value, then he’s not worth anything.”

  David stood up out of the chair. “What if he made a mistake when he gave his word?”

  Patrick stood up to him. “This is not your concern, Son.”

  “It’s my life, and that makes it my business,” David said. “I love Chelsea. If something happened and for some reason I thought she was gone, and I married someone else, and then Chelsea, the love of my life, came back, I’d leave the other woman like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  Patrick laughed at his son’s anger. “Oh, you young people know so much about life.”

  “Think about it, Dad,” David said. “Mom’s crazy—”

  “Don’t talk about your mother like that,” Patrick said.

  “It’s true, Dad.” David raised his voice. “She’s nuts. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe loving you and knowing that you’re in love with someone else—and knowing that the only thing keeping you home is your stupid word—has maybe contributed to her insanity? Think about it. If you had left her years ago, maybe she would have gotten over you by now—”

  “Or killed herself,” Patrick said in a somber voice.

  “But you’d be with the woman you truly love,” David said. “I’m never going to let anyone or anything come between me and the woman I truly love.”

  The sound of the door closing made David jump out of his thoughts. He almost banged into the shower door reaching for his weapon, which he had placed on top of the folded towel on the bathroom counter.

  Through the steam, he could make out Dallas standing in the middle of the bathroom.

  “Are you okay?” she asked. “You’ve been in here for so long, and your supper’s getting cold.”

  David wiped the water from his face. The sound of her sultry voice excited him.

  “I’m sorry if I upset you,” she said. “I mean, comin’ on to you and tryin’ to talk ya outta marryin’ Chelsea. It was low of me. Like I said, I’m not that type of woman. It’s just … I felt this immediate connection, and … I do love you, David.”

  There was silence, and David felt like he had to reply. All he could think of to say in response to her second declaration of love was “I know.”

  He heard the bathroom door open a second time. “Well, honey, don’t stay in there too long, or you’re gonna wrinkle up like a prune—and I don’t think Chelsea wants to spend her weddin’ night with a prune.”

  He heard the bathroom door close.

  Cocking his head, he waited, half expecting—or was it half hoping?—that she would open the shower door and step in with him.

  Opening the shower door, he peered out and saw that she was gone. Disappointment clutched at him.

  I’m marrying Chelsea, but I want Dallas. I want to be with Dallas, but I would never want to hurt Chelsea.

  “There was somethin’ very important that you left out—that you didn’t say,” Dallas had told him.

  “What was that?” David had asked her.

  “That you love her.”

  Among all the reasons I listed for not making love to Dallas and for marrying Chelsea, why didn’t I say that I loved her?

  “Do you love Mom?” David recalled asking his father that day in the nurse’s office.

  “I would never hurt your mother.”

  Why did I never notice that before? He didn’t answer my question. Why not? Because Patrick O’Callaghan was a man of honor and integrity. He would have never lied. He couldn’t say that he loved Mom because he didn’t.

  And me? I’m marrying Chelsea—why?

  “I never want to hurt someone that badly ever again. I’ve spent the last few years making it up to her and winning her trust again. Now I’ve made a commitment to her, and I’m not going to go back on my word again,” he had said.

  Turning off the water, David stared at the wall, allowing the water to drip down from his scalp, over his shoulders, and down his body.

  Is that what this has all been about? Trying to make amends for hurting Chelsea all those years ago? If that’s it, how long can a marriage based on guilt last? What will happen if I meet my Robin Spencer later on? I could end up hurting Chelsea worse than I already have.

  Opening the shower door, he stepped out and looked over at the spot where Dallas had been standing minutes ago, when she’d told him a second time that she loved him.

  What if I already have?

  Wrapping himself in a soft plush white bathrobe that came with the Plaza’s suite, David went into the bedroom and found Dallas stretched out on her stomach across the bed with her mother’s case file spread out in front of her. She was twisting and rotating her bare feet, which were at the head of the bed.

  Looking up from the folder, a grin of satisfaction crossed her lips while she took in the sight of him clad only in the white bathrobe. “You’re lookin’ good,” she sa
id. “Refreshed, I mean,” she added. She tossed her head in the direction of his salad with grilled chicken on the table. “Your chicken is cold.”

  “I’m not hungry.” He sat down on the bed next to where she was lying.

  Slowly, she raised her light-brown eyes from where he was sitting up to where the front of the robe had loosened, revealing his bare chest, and then up to his blue eyes, which were peering down at her. “You haven’t eaten all day.”

  “Maybe later,” he replied. “Would you like to take a shower?”

  Looking him up and down, a slow smile came to her lips. “Maybe later.” She shifted over to give him room on the bed. “I’m reading the police report for Mom’s disappearance.” She slid the report in his direction. “I think you should see this.”

  Tightening the belt on the bathrobe, David stretched out on the bed next to Dallas and picked up the report she had set out for him. The top sheet of the report gave the details of Audra Walker’s disappearance.

  Journalist Audra Walker had spent the day at ZNC studios being interviewed by their on-air journalists. The last one was with Yvonne Harding, who was interviewing her for a segment of Crime Watch. Afterwards, Audra returned to her suite at the Four Seasons. Witnesses, including her assistant, Letty Bolger, who was with her the whole day, saw her return and go to her suite. Letty had the second bedroom in the suite. Audra Walker stayed up to work on her next project. Letty went to bed. The next morning, Letty found that Audra’s bed had never been slept in and that she was missing.

  Cell phone records indicated that shortly after eleven o’clock, Audra had received a text from Yvonne Harding saying that she had information on her next project and that she should meet her in front of the News Corps Building.

  Yvonne Harding claimed she hadn’t sent the text to Audra Walker. Not only that, but she also hadn’t had Audra Walker’s cell phone number. The text had been sent from a disposable—a burner phone.

  “Nothing here that we didn’t already know.” David was aware that Dallas had moved in closer while he had been reading. Trying not to notice the sweet vanilla scent of her perfume, he flipped to the second page of the report.