The Girl In The Glass

by James Hayman

  “Your wife was naked.”

  “And Garrison?”

  “Fully clothed.”

  I frowned. “What were they doing?”

  “She was standing by a window. The morning light was shining on her body. A very beautiful woman, if I may say so.”

  “No, sir. You may most definitely not say so. Where was Garrison?”

  “He was standing at an easel near the door, drawing a picture of her. There were many other pictures of her around the room. Some strewn about the floor. Others, as it turned out, in a portfolio case. When I burst into the room holding a revolver, your wife screamed and grabbed a robe and put it on. Garrison came at me with clenched fists but stopped short when I pointed the gun not at him but at your wife. I had a feeling he might have risked his own life to attack me but he wouldn’t risk hers. Naturally, they took me for a burglar, which is what I had intended. Garrison offered me money.

  “Did you take it?”

  “Of course. What kind of burglar would I be if I hadn’t? I’ll deduct the amount from your invoice. I also scooped up a number of the drawings of your wife, both clothed and naked, and stuffed them into the portfolio case. I then warned them not to follow me or call the police, or I would shoot them. I took the portfolio case and went back down to the ground floor, where I took some silver candlesticks and a few other baubles to support the idea of a burglary. I left the house as quickly as possible and caught the next train back to Portland. And that’s it. The whole story. I can write it up for you in a formal report, but I’m not sure you want this all on paper.”

  “There was a bed in the room?” I asked.

  “Yes, but it was neatly made. I have no idea if they had been or were about to be engaged in any sexual acts other than a nude model posing for an artist. When I got back to Portland, I called an old friend on the Boston police force to see if there had been any reports of a burglary on Beacon Hill that afternoon. He said there hadn’t.”

  Chapter 46

  BY ELEVEN O’CLOCK, Maggie was exhausted. She hadn’t slept in over twenty hours, and it had been a rough twenty. She figured maybe it was time to head for home, open a bottle of wine, put her feet up and get back to the investigation in the morning. On the other hand, she thought, since 109 was more or less midway between Nasty’s and her apartment, she might as well stop by and catch up on what, if anything, had been learned from the interviews with the guests and catering staff.

  McCabe walked into the small lobby right behind her.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I work here, remember?”

  “How was dinner?”

  “We had a good time. Fore Street was jammed as usual, but we got a reasonably quiet table in the back room.”

  “Food good?”

  “Terrific. But even better than the food, I convinced Casey that I was totally cool with Sandy paying for Brown. Told her it was the least her mother could do after all the years of neglect.”

  “Good for you,” Maggie said. “I really mean that.”

  “Thanks. I know you do. But strictly between you and me, I’m still mightily pissed off about it. Probably always will be. But no way do I want my anger with Sandy to make Casey feel guilty about going to Brown. It’s my problem, not hers. Anyway, enough of that. How was your evening?”

  “Watching dead bodies getting sliced up? One of my favorite Friday night activities. On the other hand, we may have a brand-new suspect.”

  McCabe arched a questioning brow and Maggie told him about her conversation with Kraft.

  “The wife, huh? Guess we better have a little chat with her.”

  “If we can. So far she’s stonewalling us.”

  “Hmmm. Maybe she does have something to hide. How’d the autopsies go?”

  Exiting the elevator, they stood for a minute in the darkened hallway.

  “No big surprises,” said Maggie. “Knowles drowned pure and simple. No sign of bruising or knife cuts anywhere on his body. Like Terri told us, hemorrhagic shock from internal bleeding is the official cause of death for Aimée.”

  “Any semen?”

  “Yep. Like we expected, Terri found some inside.”

  “Anything unexpected?”

  “Yes. A couple of short gray hairs on Aimée’s chest. Definitely not hers. Definitely not Knowles’s or Dean Scott’s, and definitely not Ruthie’s.”

  “Our third man?”

  “I think so. The gray suggests he’s no kid, so I figure maybe he’s somebody who worked at Orion twenty years back when Deirdre was still there. Anyway, Terri sent it all up to Joe Pines in Augusta. Asked him to fast-track the DNA testing. Tox reports, as usual, are gonna take a while. I called Whitby afterward to let him know we could turn Aimée’s body over to whatever funeral home he wanted. Called Gina Knowles and told her the same thing.”

  They walked to the brightly lit conference room, where they found a dozen cops seated around the big table, poring over notes from at least a hundred interviews reports. If the count was right, it meant there were another hundred and fifty that still hadn’t come in.

  A pair of large black thermoses and some Styrofoam cups sat on a side table at the far end of the room. Maggie walked over and poured coffee into two, then handed one to McCabe. She grabbed a glazed donut from a box next to the thermos and began munching. Donuts and coffee for breakfast. Donuts and coffee for dinner. So much for healthy living.

  “I owe anybody?” she called out.

  “Department’s treating,” said Fortier, not lifting his eyes from the sheet of paper he was reading.

  “Thanks, Department,” said McCabe.

  Maggie found a chair and squeezed it into a small space between a rookie detective named Connie Davenport, who’d just been promoted to the Crimes Against Property unit on the other side of the floor and had been pressed into service by Fortier. McCabe leaned against the back wall.

  Maggie filled everyone in on the results of the autopsies.

  “How’re you folks doing so far?” asked McCabe. “Anything interesting?”

  “Not a lot that seems pertinent,” said Tom Tasco, who seemed to be in charge of collating the interviews. “Everybody says how gorgeous Aimée looked walking down the stairs in her slinky black gown. Half a dozen say, quote, ‘she took my breath away,’ unquote. Also what an absolute double she was for the woman in the painting.

  “The good news is a lot of people took pictures. A couple made smartphone videos. We’ve got ’em all here.”

  Tasco passed McCabe an iPhone. McCabe hit the Start arrow.

  The first video started with Aimée Whitby arriving at the bottom of the stairs, smiling and announcing, “Je suis Aimée.” Then Edward Whitby entered the scene, put his arm around her and said, “It has never ceased to amaze me how my beautiful eldest daughter has such an uncanny ability to upstage her father at the most dramatic moments of his life.” He lifted his glass. “To my dearest, favorite girl, who is, as you can see, a true incarnation of the first Aimée.”

  “You said there were others?” asked McCabe.

  “Yeah. I sent the whole package downstairs to see if Starbucks could isolate any faces in the crowd who weren’t on the guest or catering lists,” said Tasco. “Anyone who looked like he didn’t belong. Or anybody with an expression that doesn’t look quite right. Angry. Crazy. Agitated. Nervous. Whatever. He’s working with them now.”

  Starbucks was a young Somali named Aden Yusuf Hassan, who’d been the department’s resident computer geek ever since he started working part-time while still in high school. Aside from a four-year timeout to earn a degree in computer science at U. Maine Orono, he’d been with the PPD ever since. The nickname Starbucks came more from his addiction to strong coffee than for any resemblance to the Melville character. He drank endless cups of the stuff from morning till night. Not surprisingly, he never seemed to need sleep.

  “I’ve got something interesting here,” Detective Carl Sturgis called from the other side of the t
able. He too was holding a handful of interview reports. Everyone stopped talking and looked across at Sturgis. “I’ve found at least four different people who report seeing Aimée get into a nasty little tussle with a kid named Will Moseley.”

  “What kind of tussle?”

  Sturgis sorted the pertinent sheets and started reading aloud first from one, then from another. “ ‘Moseley was drunk.’ ‘Slurring his words.’ ‘Staggering.’ According to one witness, ‘He patted Aimée’s ass.’ Somebody else said it wasn’t patting. ‘He grabbed her ass then made a clumsy pass.’ ” Sturgis sorted again through the sheets. “Apparently Moseley also made some racist remarks about a black kid from Penfield named Aman Anbessa, who Aimée had been talking to. He’s one of her Penfield classmates. One woman said, ‘When Aimée felt Moseley touch her, she turned and slapped him hard enough to hurt.’ Seems Moseley clenched his fist in response, and it looked to the people watching like he was about to hit her back. He’s a good six foot four and apparently plays football at Yale, so it sounds like he could have done some real damage. Couple of the men on the terrace moved in to stop him. But Whitby’s security guy got there first and took over.”

  “Charles Kraft?” asked Maggie.

  “Yeah. Kraft got in Moseley’s face. Told the kid to leave Aimée alone. Then Edward Whitby shows up, the kid salutes, says a couple of ‘yessirs,’ and that was supposedly the end of it. But one person here says, ‘Moseley slinked off.’ ”

  “Is slinked a word?” asked Will Meserve. “Shouldn’t it be slunk?”

  “Whatever turns you on, Will,” said Sturgis. “ ‘Moseley slunk off. I thought he might come back and try to hurt Aimée.’ Another one says, regarding Moseley . . .” Sturgis sorted through some sheets of paper, found what he was looking for and said, “ . . . here it is. ‘If looks alone could kill, both Aimée and Mr. Kraft would have dropped dead on the spot.’ ” Sturgis looked up. “Looks to me like Moseley’s an obvious candidate.”

  “Yeah, except he’s twenty years old. Unlikely he’s got any gray hairs on his head or chest,” said Maggie. “Even so, I think we ought to talk to him.”

  “Gray hairs could be from Knowles,” said Sturgis. “He was thirty-six.”

  “Either way, Moseley’s on the interview list,” said Detective Bill Bacon. “Based on what Carl just read, I’ll move him up the priority list.”

  “Is he one of the R.W. Moseley Moseleys?” asked McCabe.

  “Yup. Son and heir. Also Edward Whitby’s godson. Couple of the Penfield girls we talked to said he was Aimée’s boyfriend back when she was a sophomore and he was in his last year at Penfield.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Very interesting. I interviewed a classmate of Aimée’s named Kristin Chalmers,” said Connie Davenport. “She was on the terrace when Moseley did his thing. Chalmers said back in junior year Aimée told her that she broke up with Moseley because ‘he doesn’t know what no means.’ Chalmers asked Aimée if she was saying Moseley had tried to rape her. Aimée’s answer? ‘I don’t think tried is the right word.’ ”

  Maggie felt a small shiver of excitement. Gray hair or not, Moseley was a possible rapist who not only had a motive but was also physically far more capable of killing both Aimée and Byron Knowles than either Julia or her mother was. As Edward Whitby’s godson, chances were also good that he was familiar with the details of the 1904 murder. Maybe he thought carving the A on someone who looked so much like the original Aimée would be a fun way to sign his work.

  “Moseley ever been in trouble before?” asked McCabe.

  “Not with us,” said Fortier. “I’m sure of that.”

  “Brian, check him out with ViCAP and CODIS. Also call the New Haven PD and the Yale campus cops. See if he’s been in any kind of trouble down there. Either way, find him and bring him in for a chat sooner rather than later. Be sweet about the invitation. I’d rather we didn’t have Moseley Senior lawyering him up before we can talk to him. Anybody have his cell number?”

  “Should be on the list Whitby’s assistant sent over,” said Cleary. “Yup. Here he is. 207-555-7483.”

  Cleary called Moseley’s number three times. Each time it went to voice mail. Finally, he said the hell with it and called down to Starbucks and asked him to start a GPS search for the phone and see if they could find out where it was. Cleary also asked Starbucks to see if he could isolate a shot of Moseley and, if so, what his expression might be.

  “Also ask him to isolate any shots he can find of either Julia or Deirdre McClure Whitby,” said Maggie. “I want to see their reactions to our girl’s grand entrance.”

  “A lot of people said they remembered talking with Aimée,” Fortier was saying. “A few, mostly kids and teachers from Penfield, remembered talking to Byron Knowles. ‘Mr. Knowles,’ as they called him. Nobody mentioned seeing anything other than Moseley’s bad behavior on the terrace that seemed in any way suspicious.”

  “Here’s one that I conducted,” said Bill Bacon. “With Margaux Amory? Y’know, the movie star? It was kind of interesting talking to her. She told me Aimée had enough of what she called ‘star quality’ to make it big in Hollywood. I asked her what she meant by that. She said if I didn’t know, she couldn’t explain it. Pretty full of herself, actually.”

  “Anybody say anything about talking with Julia?” asked Maggie.

  Before anyone could answer, Sally Caldwell, the department’s senior crime analyst, walked in the room. “Somebody just used Aimée Whitby’s debit card. Withdrew four hundred bucks from an ATM in the mini-mart over on Washington Ave.,” she announced. “Video from the machine is on its way over now.”

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Starbucks called to say he had the video and they could come down to take a look. Maggie, McCabe, Bill Fortier and Brian Cleary headed down to the second floor, where they found Starbucks hunched in front of one of his four flat-panel monitors, his eyes focusing on the image on the screen.

  “What have we got?” asked McCabe.

  “We have a full two minutes of footage, reasonable quality, of the person withdrawing the money. A lot of good full-face shots. She looks like a homeless lady.”

  The three of them leaned in as Starbucks went back to the beginning of the tape and started going through it frame by frame.

  McCabe shook his head. “I don’t think she’s our killer.”

  “I know she’s not,” said Maggie. “Her name is Lucy. I don’t know her last name, but she pushes her cart around my end of the hill every Tuesday night to grab the cans and bottles out of the recycling bins before Wednesday trash pickup. I say hello when I run into her. Occasionally give her a couple of bucks in addition to the bottles.”

  “She lives on the street?”

  “Yeah. I’ve tried a couple of times to get her to go over to Florence House. Even told her I’d drive her there.” Florence House was a shelter on Valley Street that provided both emergency and permanent housing for chronically homeless women. “She always says she will, but, as far as I know, she never has except when a blizzard’s coming.”

  “Okay, assuming she’s not the killer,” said McCabe, “how did Lucy get her hands on Aimée Whitby’s debit card? And when she did, did she get a look at whoever the real killer was.”

  “This time of year she sleeps rough. Woods off the Loring seem like as good a place as any. Which means she may have seen the whole thing. Which also means she’s probably the homeless woman Scott said he saw scurrying away from the site.”

  “I’ll have somebody take a printout over to the hospital and show it to Scott,” said Fortier. “See if he can ID her.”

  “The other question,” said McCabe, “is if she saw the bad guy, did he see her? If he did, she could be in trouble. Starbucks, would you please play the whole tape one more time from beginning to end?”

  The detectives watched closely as the woman named Lucy stepped up to the ATM machine. She looked around nervously. Then reached out and inserted the debit card into the slot and pulled it out. S
he looked around again before entering the PIN number.

  “Okay,” said Fortier. “We obviously have to find her. I’ll put out a high-priority ATL. Have dispatch get shots of her out to every unit in the city. Also send it to SoPo and Westbrook as well. Anywhere she could get to by bus.” ATL stood for Attempt to Locate. Soon every cop in the greater Portland area would be on the lookout for Lucy McCorkle.

  Chapter 47

  From the journal of Edward Whitby Jr.

  Entry dated July 22, 1924

  That night I confronted Aimée. I entered her bedroom after the house had gone to sleep. I locked the door and put the key in my pocket.

  She looked up from the magazine she was reading. “What is it, Edward?”

  “What were you doing in Boston yesterday?”

  “I told you. Shopping with Delphine.”

  “Oh really? Shopping? And what did you and Delphine buy?”

  Startled by the anger in my voice she said uncertainly. “We bought nothing. We didn’t see anything we liked.”

  “You saw nothing you liked? Nothing at all? Not even Mark Garrison?”

  “No. No. Of course not.”

  “Not even any of Garrison’s drawings? This one, perhaps?” I held up the unfinished drawing Garrison had been working on when Whelan had entered the room. “I think he captured your body rather well. Of course he captures it far better when he’s fucking you, doesn’t he? Then he gets to enjoy all you have to offer.”

  “He . . . I . . . we never.” I’d never seen Aimée so shaken or so tongue-tied. “No,” she finally managed to say. “That’s not true.”

  “Liar!” I slapped her hard across the face. She fell back, shocked. “You lying bitch!” I hissed. Then I slapped her again. She leapt from the bed, bleeding from her lip, and tried to run for the door. I grabbed her by her hair and pulled her down before she had gone halfway. She fell hard to the floor. She tried to slither away from me, pleading, swearing she had never done anything with Garrison. I turned her on her back, pulled up her nightgown and threw myself on top of her. “Liar!” I cried.