by Sydney Bauer
David got the sense that Stephanie Tyler was almost ashamed of her lack of career advancement – ashamed or regretful, or maybe just resolved.
‘My husband works long hours, you see,’ she said, as if in justification. ‘And he travels to and from the west coast – he’s in television.’
‘I know.’ David smiled. ‘When Tony heard you married the famous Doctor Jeff,’ he said, referring to Stephanie’s husband, the popular TV talk show psychologist Doctor Jeffrey Logan, ‘he didn’t eat for a week.’
‘Or until the next eligible bachelorette came along,’ she said, and smiled.
‘Fair point,’ laughed David.
‘In the very least he’s. . .’
‘. . . consistent,’ they said together – and then laughed.
David looked at her, her long neck thrown back in that familiar joviality – her deep, enthusiastic, slightly guttural laugh filling him with memories from not so much happier, but definitely easier times. People’s lives didn’t always end up as you expected, he thought.
If anyone had asked him years ago who would have been the most likely of their BC graduate year to conquer the world, he would have named this bright-eyed, auburn-haired, sharp-minded woman hands down.
But here she was before him, looking small and fragile and meek – and while David could totally understand her decision to give up her career for family, respect it even, he wondered why she, of all people, appeared so defeated by the choices she had made.
‘Anyway,’ she said, taking his hand once again and this time squeezing it slightly in a gesture that told him how pleased she was to have run into him, ‘I had better find Jeffrey. Despite the fact that I am the lawyer in the family I am afraid he is the one who scored us a seat on the head table – and my absence, while perhaps not missed, will be duly noted.’
‘It’s been great to see you, Stephanie,’ said David. ‘In fact, Sara and I, we would love to have you over some time to . . .’
‘Catch up?’ She smiled. ‘Of course,’ she added, but her head was already shaking in the negative.
‘We’ll see each other soon then,’ he said as she got up to leave. ‘We’ll keep in touch.’
PART ONE
1
Friday 11 May
Three months later
‘Who’s in charge here?’ asked Lieutenant Joe Mannix as he lifted the yellow crime tape that cut off half of the narrow street so that he and his fellow Boston homicide detective Frank McKay could duck under and push forward towards the house.
‘O’Donnell,’ shouted the rookie, a kid named Reno who was sharp and ready to please. ‘We secured the scene as soon as we could,’ he continued to yell above the din. ‘But the media picked it up on the wires. They noted the address. Were here before we could even . . .’
‘Reno,’ yelled another cop, Reno’s partner, an older officer named Schiff. ‘The animals are encroaching,’ he said, lifting one arm to shield his eyes from the TV lights and the other to point at the barrage of five, six, maybe more ‘live transmission’ vans now blocking the well-preserved roadway and making it close to impossible for police and other ‘official’ vehicles to get either in or out.
‘I need you over here. I need . . . Oh, sorry, Lieutenant,’ said Schiff, recognising Joe. ‘I didn’t see you there. These lights are enough to . . .’
‘Lieutenant, Detective,’ interrupted a third police officer from behind. It was Sergeant Patrick O’Donnell, the most senior uniform on site.
‘O’Donnell,’ said Joe and Frank as they all shook hands.
‘We’ve secured the scene,’ said O’Donnell, now falling into step with the two detectives, turning back the way he had come. ‘The crime lab guys are already at work. Parked their vans out back.’
‘There’s a back?’ asked Joe.
‘Yeah,’ answered O’Donnell as they reached the house. ‘A narrow garage at the rear.’
‘Schiff,’ said O’Donnell, turning to the older of the two officers moving with them. ‘I need you to keep those people back.’ He gestured at the ‘audience’ with his thumb. ‘The ME’s technicians can’t fit their truck around the back entrance. We are going to have to bring the body out front and I don’t want these people gawking . . . Oh shit,’ said O’Donnell, now noticing the hubbub from above. ‘Helicopters,’ he said, craning his neck to look beyond the roof. ‘Our job is hard enough without all these parasites breathing down our necks.’
‘Who the hell is this guy?’ snuffled Frank McKay at last, as Schiff and Reno waved off and made their way back down the footpath. Frank had a heavy chest cold and O’Donnell instinctively moved a foot away so as not to catch his breath.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m on leave as of Monday and the missus will kill me if I’m sneezing my way through Florida. We’re taking the grandkids on vacation – me at Disney World, if you can believe that.’
O’Donnell took a breath. It was an old cop coping mechanism Joe knew, reminding anyone in earshot that life went on beyond the gruesome catastrophes of their profession. O’Donnell was a little shaken, Joe sensed, which meant this one must be worse than the usual. Not that the usual was ever actually anything near usual in your average guy’s stretch of the imagination.
‘Jeffrey Logan,’ said O’Donnell, back on the beat, answering Frank’s original question. ‘As in Doctor Jeff, TV psychologist extraordinaire.’
‘The relationship guru with the talk show?’ said Frank. ‘Jesus, my wife loves that guy.’
‘I thought the vic was a female?’ said Joe, getting them back on track as they took the sandstone front steps of the three-storey Beacon Hill brownstone two at a time. The crime scene traffic was thick and fast, the echo of police radios beeping and scratching beyond the front entranceway.
‘Sorry,’ said O’Donnell. ‘She is. She’s the doc’s wife. One Stephanie Tyler. She’s an attorney – works from home.’
‘A lawyer,’ said Mannix, the name ringing a bell.
‘Yeah, graduated magna cum laude of BC if the certificate on her office wall is anything to go by.’
And then he remembered.
They pushed into the hallway.
‘So what’s the story?’ asked Joe, trying to visualise the small-framed redhead he had met briefly a mere three months ago. His eyes danced over the expensively decorated rooms around him: the original artwork on the walls, the antique rugs under their feet, the European furniture, subtle lighting, heavy drapes and flower-filled vases.
O’Donnell flipped open his notepad. ‘Stephanie Tyler, thirty-eight. COD single gunshot wound to the chest. The weapon was a Mark VDGR, the calibre a .460 Weatherby Magnum.’
‘DGR?’ asked Frank.
‘Dangerous game rifle,’ replied O’Donnell.
‘So not for rabbits,’ said Frank.
‘Not unless they have a trunk and a pair of long ivory tusks to go with it.’
O’Donnell, Mannix and McKay put their backs to the hallway wall, allowing two crime scene guys to shuffle past with a nod. Joe noticed the looks on their faces. This one was bad, he could smell it.
‘This way,’ said O’Donnell, leading them towards the back of the house. ‘Vic was shot at the kitchen table while drinking a Shiraz and reading an old issue of Vanity Fair. The wine was one of her family’s, by the way. Tyler was the heir to the Rockwell Winery fortune.’ O’Donnell let this little fact hang, not attaching it to anything as yet, most likely because he was not too sure where, or even if, it might fit.
‘Shot came from just inside the kitchen door. Point blank. Bang!’ he said, kicking a louvred door open with his foot as they left the house through a side passageway and headed south once again.
‘Jesus, O’Donnell,’ said Mannix. ‘What’s with the merry maze?’
‘We need to approach from the side. The evidence guys are all over the blood spatter patterns near the back of the kitchen.’
‘Okay,’ said Joe, as they rounded the back courtyard which led down to a terraced entertaining
area. Big by anyone’s standards, but huge for a home in historic Beacon Hill – $4 mill-plus price tag or not.
‘Where’s the family?’ asked Frank.
O’Donnell shook his head. ‘That’s why I took you round the side way,’ he said, lifting his leg over a crouched crime scene worker huddled over a metallic case carrying fingerprint lifting powders and brushes. ‘This one, I swear, it has to be seen to be believed.’
They reached the side bi-fold doors and stepped into the kitchen. The image before Joe and Frank nearly blew them away. The back wall of the room was covered in blood and other bodily chunks. The pool of blood on the floor was massive – Joe guessed over four litres – and was now congealing on the tasteful limestone floor. The kitchen benches were covered in spatter, the shiny stainless steel sink now patterned with deep red tracks of fluid that had hit and slithered down its squeaky clean sides. There was even a hole the size of a melon through the under-sink cupboard where a bullet had obviously passed before smashing through the double-brick wall behind.
‘Jesus,’ said Joe.
‘It gets worse,’ said O’Donnell, gesturing towards the middle of the room.
Within seconds Joe could see he was right. The victim, Stephanie Tyler, was sitting on a white wicker chair, her entire body arched backwards so that her pale thin arms draped awkwardly over the sides of her chair. From behind, it looked like she had been pulverised, the hole between what would have been her shoulder blades at least the size of a soccer ball. The blast must have hit her in the chest from the front and had enough force to shoot her chair backwards at least four feet into the middle of the room.
‘What the hell kind of calibre are we talking here, O’Donnell?’ asked Joe, blinking his eyes at a photographer’s flash before refocusing on the police sergeant before him.
‘Not that I’m any expert, but Schiff, who knows a thing or two about this shit, tells me the .460 Weatherby is the most powerful calibre in the world. It, and the fancy customised rifles that fire it, are designed for those rich assholes who take pleasure in jumping a plane to Africa and facing off against charging elephants from less than a hundred feet away. The recoil on the bastard is something fierce.’
Joe nodded, taking the information in.
‘Where’s the family?’ asked Frank again.
O’Donnell shook his head once more. ‘I told you this one was a doozy,’ he replied, before directing them around a cooking island and into the kitchen proper.
‘They haven’t moved since we arrived,’ he said. ‘Doctor Jeff and his two kids refused to do so until he spoke to a detective of rank. To be honest, it has suited us fine, given their lack of movement is preserving the crime scene. Still, when you check this out you will wonder why the hell a father would . . .’
And then they saw it. Three people sitting at the kitchen table – evening out the fourth who had been shot across the room like a rocket.
Across from the mom, at the far end of the table, in front of the kitchen door, sat a young boy of no more than thirteen. His eyes were closed tight, his baggy white long-sleeved T-shirt singed at the shoulder and patterned with tiny spots of his mother’s blood.
Next to him, on his right, sat his father, the famous one – straight-backed, eyes unblinking, staring ahead at nothing in particular. He looked remarkably polished compared to the boy, his shirt crisp, his hair neat, his hands in his lap and his chest withdrawn as if afraid to be tainted by the spatters that had settled on the table before him.
Across from him sat the daughter – a pretty ginger-haired teenager who, Joe guessed, would have been about sixteen. She, like her father, appeared relatively ‘clean’, but was set apart from the other two, simply because she was the only one crying.
‘Jesus,’ said Frank.
‘I know,’ said O’Donnell, before approaching the table from the left. ‘Doctor Logan,’ he called out in a voice which suggested the doctor was hard of hearing. ‘These are two detectives. Lieutenant Mannix here is the commander of the Homicide Unit at Boston PD. As high as you can go on the ladder of – well, what he does.’
O’Donnell was about to say the ‘ladder of death’ which is how they referred to the hierarchy in BP homicide. But under the circumstances he had decided not to state the obvious.
‘Doctor Logan,’ said Joe, approaching the table without compromising the crime scene now mapped out by laser lights before him, his eyes flicking back towards the dent in the white kitchen door, his foot stepping over a hat stand that had obviously been knocked over by the blast.
‘I’m Lieutenant Joe Mannix and this is Detective Frank McKay.’
Logan finally looked up from the table and nodded. ‘I want to call a public defender,’ he said, his voice low and even.
‘You want to get up from the table and talk, Doctor?’ asked Joe, taking another small step forward, wondering how long it would take to get a public defender on the scene at 9.45pm on a Friday night. ‘It might be more appropriate if your children were taken somewhere other than . . .’
‘No, I told them to sit here. I wanted us to stay together, as a family, at least until . . . I want someone to get my business partner,’ said Logan, obviously linking two separate thoughts together. ‘Her name is Katherine de Castro. She will be waiting out front. I called her after I dialled 911. She will look after the children.’
‘Get de Castro,’ said Joe to O’Donnell, making sure that Logan heard the instruction. Something told him he needed to play this one cool, step by step, inch by inch. The doc looked ready to blow and there were still two extremely traumatised kids in the room.
‘Please, Doctor, you need to get up from the table so our tech guys can finish their job. Your children may need to be treated for shock.’
‘I know,’ said the handsome olive-skinned, pepper-haired man, before nodding at his two kids, a strange look of what Joe took to be pride in his large brown eyes. ‘They have been very brave,’ he added, using his legs to push the chair backwards and finally getting to his feet – and gesturing with his hands for his two children to do the same.
Joe’s eyes shot to the son, the younger sibling with the telltale spatter covering his upper body. His eyes were still shut, a smear of blood he had wiped across his otherwise clean face now gluing his eyelashes together. Joe turned to Frank.
‘Ring Cavanaugh,’ he whispered, having made the decision. ‘Get him here now.’
The paramedics moved in, and Joe pulled one of them aside quickly, issuing a short command before turning back to Logan.
‘I’ll have a defence attorney here within the half-hour, Doctor Logan,’ he said. ‘And while it is within your rights to remain silent until you have representation present, I have to advise you that it is also in your best interest to provide us with any relevant information regarding the incidents which led to your wife’s death as quickly as possible.’
Joe looked up to see Boston Medical Examiner Gus Svenson enter through the now open bi-fold doors. Joe met Gus’s eye and caught the brief expression of horror on his face, before the professional Swede nodded his head towards the victim. Joe nodded back, indicating that he was clear to get to work.
‘I know this is difficult,’ said Joe, returning his attention to the good looking TV star before him, noticing that his face was still thick with make-up from the afternoon’s filming. ‘But any information you can provide us now . . . anything you can . . .’
‘I killed her,’ he said, softly at first before repeating it with gusto once again. ‘I killed her. I shot my wife.’ It was like a declaration. A statement of fact. ‘It was an accident. My children were not involved,’ he added as if needing to make a point.
‘Doctor,’ began Joe, shooting a quick glance at McKay. ‘I . . .’
‘I’ll make a brief confession giving you the basic details, Lieutenant. But that’s all I am willing to share until my attorney arrives,’ interrupted Logan who, in that moment, turned to look at his dead wife once again before losing his footing and sh
uffling backwards to lean on the kitchen counter behind him. ‘Is Ms de Castro here? I . . .’
Joe called for a paramedic who rushed forward.
‘Don’t worry, Doctor. We’ll find her,’ said Joe. ‘In the meantime, why don’t you take a load off until your attorney arrives. You talk with him and then he’ll talk with us and then, we’ll sort this out, all calm and civilised like – one way or another.’
2
‘I don’t believe this,’ smiled Sara Davis, her face glowing in the muted candlelight. She was at the head of the white-clothed table when they brought out the cake – an old-fashioned ice-cream extravaganza in the shape of Cinderella’s glass slippers, no less. ‘You didn’t!’ she said, her aqua eyes looking across at her boyfriend and fellow attorney David Cavanaugh.
‘Well I never,’ said their office secretary and surrogate ‘mother’, the Irish-born Nora Kelly.
‘Is someone going to fill me in on the joke here?’ smiled their boss, mentor and friend Arthur Wright who rounded out their group of four. ‘Or are we about to be joined by a five-year-old with a Disney fetish?’
‘No,’ laughed Sara, who had opted for the cosy North End Italian eatery Il Ristorante for her thirty-second birthday dinner. This was the first place David had taken her four years ago – a working dinner following his taking on the case to defend Sara’s then boss, African–American civil rights attorney Rayna Martin, in a controversial murder trial. And it had been a special place for them ever since.
‘It’s just that . . .’ she began, shaking her head at David.
‘No,’ interrupted David. ‘We have to sing first, and then you have to blow out the candles, and then you have to make a wish, and then I will attempt to explain to Arthur and Nora why the thirty-two-year-old love of my life, an educated attorney no less, has a serious shoe fetish and once admitted to me that she had coveted Cinderella’s glass slippers since she was two.’
‘Not two,’ she protested. ‘I was three, maybe even four.’