The Only Suspect

by Jonnie Jacobs

  CHAPTER 4

  Molly was in tears. Not about Maureen but because her favorite pair of pink tights had a tear in them. At least that’s what she claimed.

  “You must have another pair,” I suggested naively. We were already running late. In light of all that had happened, I found it hard to get worked up about a pair of tights.

  Molly jutted out her chin and glared at me. “You don’t know anything, do you?”

  Not about fashion, certainly. But I had a feeling that wasn’t the real issue. I took a breath to stifle my impatience.

  “I know you must be worried,” I said.

  She didn’t respond.

  “I’m worried about Maureen too.”

  I worried that she was hurt. Or dead. Or the victim of some sadistic and depraved rapist. I worried she’d left me. I worried that, whatever had happened, I was in some way answerable. Worry had about gnawed me raw.

  Nonetheless, for Molly’s sake, I wanted to sound reassuring. “The police are looking for her,” I said. “And we don’t know for sure anything bad has happened. She might just have gone away for a while.”

  “I don’t care where she is,” Molly snapped, turning her back to me. “I don’t care if she ever comes back.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and took another deep breath.

  “She’s not my mother,” Molly added.

  “That doesn’t mean you can’t be worried about her.”

  Molly looked at me a moment. “Do you think she ran away?”

  “What makes you ask that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t think Maureen likes me very much.”

  That caught me like a punch from out of nowhere. “Honey, that’s not true. Not at all true.”

  Molly twisted the ripped tights into a ball.

  “What makes you think Maureen doesn’t like you?”

  “It’s just the way she acts.”

  I’d thought Maureen and Molly had been getting along, but maybe that was because I wanted them to get along. “Acts how?” I asked.

  “Like I’m a big disappointment to her.”

  “That’s not so. She thinks you’re terrific.” But a part of me understood what Molly was feeling. Sometimes Maureen acted like I didn’t quite live up to her expectations either.

  Molly scowled. “I told her I needed new tights.”

  “Do you want me to help you find another pair for today?”

  She sighed dramatically, grabbed a pair of jeans from the floor, and stomped into the bathroom. “Never mind, I’ll wear something else.”

  While she finished getting ready, I went into the garage to unload the firewood from my trunk. I stacked the wood along the side of the house then pulled up the tarp I’d used to line the trunk and shook it out. I was folding it to return to my dad when I noticed a shoe in the trunk next to the wheel well. A dressy black sandal.

  I picked it up and turned it over in my hands. Had Maureen been wearing it Saturday night? That wouldn’t explain how it had gotten into my trunk though. I tried to remember what trips we’d taken recently, thinking it might have fallen from her luggage. A trip to the snow two months ago was all I could come up with. She’d hardly have packed sandals for that.

  Molly appeared, backpack over her shoulder. “Okay, I’m ready.”

  I dropped the shoe back into the trunk and shoved it out of view.

  But the image stayed in my head. A lone shoe, a woman’s shoe, in my trunk. Inexplicably. I felt like the air had been squeezed from my lungs.

  It was nearly one when I finished with my last patient of the morning. That left me about twenty minutes of my allotted ninety-minute lunch break. I wasn’t hungry—my stomach was so knotted I couldn’t have swallowed a bite—but I did need time to regroup. I went into my office and closed the door.

  Molly’s fifth-grade school portrait smiled at me from my desk. There was also a snapshot of her as a toddler with a head full of springy curls. Lisa had taken the photo while I jumped up and down like a clown to make Molly laugh. The bittersweet memory of that moment brought a lump to my throat. Sometimes the pain of losing her was so fresh it took my breath away.

  The most elaborately framed photo on my desk was of Maureen. It was a formal studio shot she’d had taken as a gift for me shortly after we were married. It was a good picture of her, and Maureen did not generally photograph well. She looked happy. Sparkly. Like a woman with an intoxicating secret. I loved the photo, though in truth I’d never seen her look quite so enticing in real life.

  What had happened Saturday? I tried again to pull up even a single thread of memory about the day. Sometimes I’d get close—a nanosecond glimmer that vanished into nothing the moment I tried to grab hold of it. But the harder I worked to remember, the more even those sparks were extinguished.

  The anguish lodged in my chest like a stone. I loved Maureen. Maybe not with the intensity and steamy passion I’d felt for Lisa, but with something equally gratifying.

  Maureen had reminded me a little of Lisa at first, which might have accounted for my initial attraction. They had the same fair complexion and chiseled cheekbones, the same full mouth. The similarities were superficial though. Maureen lacked Lisa’s spontaneity and outgoing manner, but she did make me laugh, which was something I hadn’t done much after Lisa’s death. And she kept me on an even keel, another thing I’d had trouble with on my own.

  Our marriage wasn’t without problems, but I told myself it was simply the fabric of making one life out of two. It took time.

  We didn’t fight so much as shuffle our way around our differences. For the most part, it worked. Occasionally, when things didn’t go Maureen’s way, she would grow quiet and give me a look that I took to mean, Why did I ever marry you, anyway? But I was guilty of similar transgressions. There were moments when I silently blamed her simply for not being Lisa.

  There was a knock on my door, and Ira poked his head in. “You got a moment? I’d like your opinion on the best course for ...” He’d reached the chair opposite mine at the desk. “Sam? What’s wrong?”

  I’d done a pretty good job of keeping it together all morning, but suddenly it was too much. “What isn’t?” I said. My voice broke midsentence.

  Ira closed the door then sat down.

  “You want to talk about it?”

  Ira and I went way back. Fourth grade, is what I remember, though supposedly we’d started kindergarten together. We’d been best friends all through high school. Although we went in different directions for college and med school, we kept in touch. Ira had come back to Monte Vista when I went east to practice, and he eventually went into partnership with my dad. When I returned five years ago, we’d tried to pick up where we left off at eighteen, but we’d changed in too many ways. I had Molly and a hole in my heart that had once been filled with the love of my life, Lisa. Ira and his first wife, whom I’d barely known, were divorced, and by the time I moved back, his second marriage was already failing. He wanted to party; I preferred to spend my evenings reading Dr. Seuss to Molly.

  We were still friends. We talked about lawn mowers and trends in the stock market, but we no longer had a bare-your-heart kind of relationship. Personal simply wasn’t a realm we explored.

  I’m sure Ira was as uncomfortable at that moment as I was.

  “Maureen is missing,” I told him. I could feel tears prick at my eyes, and looked away.

  “What do you mean?”

  I told him I’d gone by the hospital Sunday morning and come home to find her gone. I didn’t tell him about waking Sunday morning with my car in a ditch and no memory of the night before, or about the blood under my fingernails and the shoe I’d found in my trunk. I wasn’t sure either of us was ready for that kind of confidence.

  “You’ve called the cops?” Ira looked like a doctor from central casting, the kind nurses and patients go gaga over. Dark hair and eyes, and a mouth that curled into a perpetual smile. Even now, with concern clouding his face, he managed to sound reassuring.


  I nodded and filled him in on some of the details.

  Ira was silent for a moment. Then he shook his head slowly. “My God, Sam. This is ... unbelievable. I’m surprised you even came to work today.”

  “I almost didn’t. But I figured there wasn’t much I could do staying home. I’m not putting in a full day.”

  He seemed to be searching for the right words, finally settling on, “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ll probably print up some flyers or something. The detective I talked to suggested it.”

  Flyers might help, but they didn’t guarantee results. For every high-profile missing persons case, like Chandra Levy or Laci Peterson, there were countless others with stories just as compelling that never made a dent in public awareness. I’d checked the statistics the night before on the Internet. Last year, 35,142 adults had been reported missing in California alone, some 4,346 of them under suspicious or unknown circumstances. Most had received scant attention, despite efforts by family and friends for broader coverage.

  “I already checked with the bank,” I told him. “No activity on our account. I guess it’s a matter of waiting. And praying.”

  “If there’s anything I can do, just let me know.”

  “Thanks.”

  Ira checked his watch. “I hate to do this, Sam, but I’ve got a patient waiting. You’ll be okay?” He was clearly uneasy about leaving me, yet I thought I read relief too. Ira had never been one to embrace other people’s troubles.

  “No, I understand. I’ve got patients myself.”

  In the five minutes remaining before my next appointment, I called Detective Montgomery to see if she’d learned anything new.

  Instead of answers, she tossed back a question of her own. “Why didn’t you tell me you were arrested for your first wife’s murder?”

  The question caught me off guard, as she’d undoubtedly intended. I’d known the arrest would come up—it was a major reason I’d been reluctant to sound the alarm on Maureen—but I hadn’t expected it quite so quickly.

  The harsh light of scrutiny was damned uncomfortable.

  “Is it relevant?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Is it?”

  “No,” I said, “it isn’t.” And then I hung up.

  Of course it wasn’t relevant. I hadn’t killed Lisa. I couldn’t honestly believe I’d done anything to harm Maureen either, though the uncertainty of not knowing was agony.

  But to the outside eye, nothing spoke louder than the fact that I’d been charged in my first wife’s murder.

  Lisa and I were soul mates. You know those sappy movies where a man and a woman look at each other across a crowded room and the sparks start flying? The stories where they fall instantly in love and never look back? That was us. We were so in tune with one another it was almost scary.

  We met as undergraduates at Brown. I sat behind Lisa in Southeast Asian Civilization, and she took copious notes. I was too busy staring at her to write a word. I finally worked up the nerve to ask her out for coffee the second week of classes. She grinned and said, “I was beginning to think you’d never ask.”

  I went to Boston that summer to meet her parents. It was clear from the outset they weren’t happy about our relationship.

  The Pattersons were blue bloods, descendents of the early patriots. Hal Patterson was the CEO of a major investment banking firm and sat on the boards of such celebrated companies as Ford and General Electric. I was a scholarship student who didn’t play golf, ride horses, or sail. I’d never been out of the country except to walk across the border into Tijuana. I was a Democrat, and my grandparents had immigrated to this country from Russia. But most important, I wasn’t Julian Broward, Lisa’s high school sweetheart, whom they adored and whose family went back about as far as the Pattersons’.

  They didn’t like me, but they tolerated me with cool reserve then tried with everything they had to convince Lisa she was making a big mistake. The crowning blow came when she put aside her own plans for graduate school in order to follow me to St. Louis, where I enrolled in medical school. She was wasting her life, her parents told her, throwing away her future, and all for some small-town bumpkin with whom she had nothing in common. The fact that we loved each other wasn’t important. That I was studying to be a doctor didn’t cut it either. As far as they were concerned, I might as well have been going door to door selling brooms. After we were married, and especially after Molly was born, they softened a bit, but only on the outside. If they’d thought there was any chance they’d succeed, they would have driven a wedge between us in a heartbeat.

  We’d been married six years, and living in Boston for two, when Lisa was killed. We had plans to go out together that night, so Molly was with her grandparents. But during the day, I went biking, alone. Lisa was pregnant with our second child and wouldn’t have been able to join me even if she’d been into biking, which she wasn’t. I spent the day drinking in the fresh air and exhilaration of being outdoors after a long, cold winter. My mind was filled with thoughts about Lisa and Molly and the new baby, and how blessed I was to have them in my life. When I returned home, Lisa was gone.

  No note. No sign of a struggle. Nothing missing but her purse.

  Her body was found a week later in a nearby woodlands park. She’d been strangled and stabbed, her body dumped into a ravine. It took the police two months to decide to arrest me, but almost from the start there was speculation about my guilt.

  If not for my powerhouse attorney and a single holdout juror, I’d be sitting on death row. Which was why I was loath to put too much faith in the system now.

  CHAPTER 5

  My last patient for the afternoon, eighty-three-year-old Cy Bennett, was escorted into my office by his grown son. Although the senior Mr. Bennett was suffering from dehydration, vertigo, and a dry, hacking cough, he refused to acknowledge that he was sick. Not surprisingly, he balked at the idea of being hospitalized. In the end, his son and I prevailed, but not without some heavy cajoling.

  It was only three o’clock, but it had been a long day. I was ready to head home and confront my own demons.

  They came sooner than I expected, in the form of Detective Montgomery.

  She was waiting for me in the parking lot as I left the office. Her face bore the practiced lack of expression I’d noticed among police personnel following Lisa’s death. It was a big change from the sympathy I’d seen the previous evening.

  My gut tightened. News of Maureen? Please, I prayed, don’t let it be bad news.

  “Short workday for a doctor,” the detective said.

  It didn’t sound as though she was about to deliver bad news. Relief washed over me. “Well, I—”

  “But a long one,” she added pointedly, “for a man whose wife is missing.”

  A beat of silence while my relief gave way to wariness. I had a pretty good idea what she was getting at. “What was I supposed to do,” I asked, “sit home wringing my hands?”

  “It wouldn’t be unheard of.”

  I started to respond but thought better of it. For one thing, I’d learned through bitter experience that arguing with a cop wasn’t smart. For another, there was an element of truth in what she said. Perhaps I was trying to convince myself that nothing had changed. Or maybe I was trying to make it so, as if by sticking to my routine I could alter reality. To some degree, I’d taken the easier path—denial. In that respect, the elder Mr. Bennett and I had a lot in common.

  “I called the bank,” I told her. “No activity at the ATM or on our charge card. I contacted our cell phone carrier too. No outgoing calls since Friday, and she hasn’t checked messages.”

  Detective Montgomery frowned.

  “That’s not good, is it?” I knew it wasn’t good—the information had been sitting in my stomach like a lead weight all morning—but I guess I was hoping the detective would cast it in a more hopeful light.

  Instead, she ignored the question completely. “We’d like to go over your report again.”r />
  “We?”

  “My partner and I.”

  I looked toward the car she’d stepped out of. I didn’t see anyone there.

  “Down at the station,” she explained.

  “Why there?”

  Again, I knew the answer. They saw me as a potential suspect. They wanted me on their turf, and they wanted me to feel uneasy.

  In the latter regard, they were succeeding.

  “And if I refuse?” I asked.

  She gave me that blank look again. “Why would you do that, Dr. Russell?”

  “I’ve got to pick up my daughter soon.”

  “We won’t keep you long.”

  I followed her in my own car, wondering for the whole six blocks of the trip downtown if I was making a mistake. But refusing to cooperate wasn’t the best choice either. I thought about calling Jesse then dismissed the idea. He wasn’t practicing law anymore, and in any event, I didn’t want to feed their suspicions.

  We walked into the station together. Detective Montgomery showed me to a small interview room. The table was metal, as were the chairs. Along one wall there was a mirror, presumably one-way for monitoring what went on inside. The overhead lights were bright and glaring, the air stale. The room was nicer than the ones I’d been treated to seven years earlier in Boston, but it wasn’t about to win any awards for comfort.

  “Can I get you some coffee?” the detective asked.

  “No, thanks.” I could barely make my lungs work. My palms were sweaty.

  “Make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.” When she left, the door snapped shut with a metallic clink.

  An invisible steel band gripped my chest. In a flash, I was back in Boston facing Detective Frank Donahue and his peppermint breath.

  You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you.

  I shook my head, clearing the memory. This is different, I told myself. Maureen is missing, and the police are going to help me find her.

  The door opened again. I was expecting to see Detective Montgomery. Instead it was Dallas Pryor, who I guessed right away must be her partner. That explained why she knew about Lisa already and why I was a suspect. I found the clarification both reassuring and frightening.