by Robert Ellis
“Where did you learn all that?” Doyle asked.
“I was given access to the website before I was shot.”
“How did Baylor react?”
Matt paused a moment. He could still see the expression on the doctor’s face. He could still hear his voice.
“He said that I needed him.”
Doyle turned and gasped incredulously. “He what?”
Matt reached into his pocket and opened a fresh pack of nicotine gum. Everyone in the room was staring at him.
“He said that I still needed him. I just didn’t know it yet.”
CHAPTER 18
Matt wasn’t exactly sure, but he thought that he’d lost his footing. He thought that he’d missed something while talking to Dr. Baylor and that it was important.
He hadn’t been afraid. That was the trigger.
Once Baylor jabbed him in the back with the gun, once the shock wore off from being startled, only the horror of the actual crime remained.
Matt knew from his experience as a soldier in Afghanistan that fear was an instinctual response. Fear wasn’t something he could control. Fear couldn’t be switched on or switched off. Fear was an automatic response to danger and went side by side with his will to live.
Matt understood exactly who Baylor was and what he’d done to four innocent young women. Baylor had the Glock 17 and had taken charge of Matt’s weapon and cell phone. Matt had every reason to be frightened of the man.
So why didn’t his body perform the way it should have? What had overridden his natural response to being held by a madman?
Matt had always relied on his instincts and his imagination to survive, and he didn’t understand what was going on. Either he’d lost his touch or he’d missed a key component that he should have seen.
As Matt played it back in his mind, as he considered all the innocent people Baylor had terrorized, ruined, or killed, he realized that he hadn’t responded to the doctor as a threat.
And this worried him.
Matt zipped up his leather jacket and walked out of the Holloways’ mansion. For whatever reason, probably at Doyle’s urging, Rogers had returned the murder book to him. There were two trucks from the county crime lab still here, along with an almost endless line of patrol units parked on the grass along the drive. It was just after five in the morning. The murder victims had been removed by a team from the coroner’s office a few hours ago. Rogers and Brown had left around the same time, but Matt could see Doyle holding an impromptu press conference with the media on the other side of the street.
He could hear the federal prosecutor acknowledging the murders and making a preliminary statement for the morning news. He could hear a reporter shouting Baylor’s name and noted the anxiety in the man’s voice.
Why did Baylor pick Philadelphia? Why is he here?
Matt stopped listening. He was just grateful that the crowd of reporters and their camera people were far enough away that he hadn’t been noticed and could make a clean break for his car.
But then he stepped through the gate onto the street and was hit by the sudden shock of light from a video camera. It was Ryan Day, the celebrity gossip reporter, in Matt’s face with his microphone and backstepping his way beside his camera operator. When the reporter spoke, the drama in his voice sounded over-the-top.
“What’s it like inside, Detective Jones? Five more murders by the infamous Dr. Baylor. Another entire family dead. What are you feeling right now?”
Matt wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Flashing an affable smile that died off quickly, he ignored the question, kept his eyes away from the camera, and walked past both men. Then he got in his car and drove off. He could see them in the rearview mirror. They were still shooting until he reached the corner and made a left onto Sugartown Road. That’s when the camera light finally went dark.
Matt reached into his pocket, then stopped. Nicotine gum was useless. He needed a cigarette, and he needed one now.
On the drive to the Holloways’ mansion, he had seen a Wawa food market just off Sugartown this side of Route 30. Matt remembered reading a sign that said the store was open twenty-four hours. As he glided down the hill, he spotted the lights in the winter gloom and felt the pangs in his gut lessen some. The lot was empty. Matt nearly ripped the door off its hinges and climbed out of the car. Inside the market he could smell fresh-brewed coffee and counted ten glass pots filled to the brim. He poured a large cup and added two sugars. Walking over to the register, he noticed a basket of soft pretzels wrapped in plastic. He grabbed two and asked for a pack of Marlboros, a disposable lighter, and two packets of Advil.
He couldn’t move fast enough as he exited the market. He slammed the car door shut, got the engine started, and lit up. The cigarette tasted like shit and smelled even worse, and within a few seconds he remembered all five reasons why he’d quit. Still, he shook those reasons off one by one, then ripped open both packets of Advil and downed four caplets with his coffee. He took another drag on the cigarette, cracked the window open, and turned up the heat. He didn’t care how rank the cigarette smelled or tasted. His body was already beginning to relax, his mind sharpening. Within an hour, the pain from the wounds in his gut would fade away. If he followed up with two Tylenol caplets in a couple of hours and went back to a normal dosage of Advil two hours after that, he might make it through the day without having to open that bottle of Vicodin.
He pulled out of the lot, following the road into the valley and picking up the expressway into the city. Early morning traffic was still a long way off, and Matt made the drive with his foot on the floor in less than half an hour. By 6:30 a.m. he’d showered and shaved and was out the door, heading for Benny’s Café Blue.
He walked in with the murder book, ordered a cup of the house blend, and sat at the booth by the window. The sun still hadn’t risen, and he could see two young women and a middle-aged man working out on those StairMasters across the street.
He sat back and let his eyes wander down to the sidewalk. The trees were bending in the cold wind, the lights on the branches hypnotic after a night without sleep. He turned back, took a first sip of coffee, and gazed at the logs burning in the café’s fireplace.
He’d missed things. Important things. He knew it now.
It had been showing on Baylor’s face when they switched on the lights and returned to the second-floor landing. The expression on his face as the doctor moved closer and gazed at the Holloways. The curiosity in his eyes, that strange glint moving from one dead body to the next. Matt had noticed it at the time, but couldn’t fathom what it meant. Now he was ready to make a wild guess that didn’t feel so wild.
Baylor had been seeing the crime scene for the first time.
The first time.
Matt’s heart almost stopped. What if this really was different than LA? What if the doctor wasn’t looking for a scapegoat? What if he had told Matt the truth? What if someone else was out there? Someone off the grid. Someone the doctor had called special.
Matt let the idea settle in.
It would explain why he hadn’t seen Baylor as a threat. It would explain why he never felt like he was in danger and had no sensation of fear. His gut instincts had seen it from the beginning, even though it had taken until this very moment for his mind to catch up and cross the finish line.
Matt thought about the text message the doctor had sent him. Could Baylor have committed the murders and sent the message as a ploy in order to confuse the issue? Yes, but Matt imagined that human behavior, even in the case of a psychopath, wasn’t so complicated.
The more likely explanation was that the doctor had been telling him the truth. As Matt considered this concept, he could feel the main wheel in his gut click forward like the clock on the wall striking 7:00 a.m.
It felt so odd. So outrageous. So possibly righteous.
The doctor could be innocent.
He opened the Strattons’ murder book, checked who was sitting nearby, then began leafing thr
ough the crime-scene photos. He was thinking about something Baylor had said at the Holloways’. A question he’d posed just before leaving.
When you add everything up, what need was the killer trying to fulfill?
Matt’s eyes drifted from body to body until they came to rest on Tammy Stratton holding her thirteen-year-old son, Jim Jr. She was cradling the boy exactly the way Mimi Holloway had been holding her son, Nicholas. It suddenly occurred to Matt that these murders might not have anything to do with either Jim Stratton, MD, or David Holloway. Nothing to do with Stratton’s crime of giving his healthy patients chemotherapy or Holloway’s habitual acts of cowardice in killing big game. Matt had no doubt that both men were complete shitheads, but there was a chance, an emerging possibility, that these murders had nothing to do with them.
He looked back at the photo of Tammy Stratton. The death embrace. He thought about the order of things. Jim Jr. would’ve been the first to die. His mother holding him in her arms would have gone next.
These murders weren’t about greed. Matt was certain of it now. This was about a killer with a different issue. A killer with an entirely different motive.
Matt noticed that his fingers were trembling slightly as he made the revelation. This wasn’t about money or greed or even power. This was about Mommy.
A thought surfaced. Matt rushed through the set of photographs until he found a copy of the one Doyle had shown him in McKensie’s office at the Hollywood station. The image may have been dark, but it was shot from a distance and took in the entire crime scene. He focused on the mother holding her son, noting once again that their genitals were touching.
This was about Mommy.
But something else was going on here. That stray thought he’d had when he first examined the Strattons’ second-floor landing on his own. He had thought about the way the bodies were posed, the blood spattered all over the walls—he’d known it all along. His first impression of the crime scene had been the right one.
If Baylor had been trying to make a statement like he did in LA and New Orleans, this one seemed forced. It felt like he was straining.
The reason it felt different was the most obvious reason of them all. It confirmed everything in Matt’s mind.
There really was someone else out there. Someone special.
Matt saw a man approaching him out of the corner of his eye and slammed the murder book shut. When he looked up, Ryan Day was taking a seat on the other side of the booth and sipping a cup of coffee. His eyes through his wire-rimmed glasses were big and wild, and Matt guessed that the gossip reporter had caught a glimpse of the photograph.
Day set his coffee cup on the table. “We could help each other, you know.”
“We could what?”
“Help each other,” the reporter said. “I have information.”
Matt tried to reel in his exasperation. “About what?”
“About everything.”
Matt pushed his coffee aside, then checked the café and glanced out the window. When he didn’t see Day’s camera operator, he turned back. “Give me a sample,” he said. “Tell me something that will help me.”
Day leaned on the table, his brown eyes sparkling. “Okay,” he said. “Your father has hired two bodyguards. Both are former Navy SEALs and licensed to carry firearms. Apparently, your father thinks someone is out to get him. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”
Matt didn’t say anything for a long time. He sat back and stared at Day and let his mind roll out line. He already knew about the bodyguards. He’d seen them walking his father through the crowd of reporters on TV. When Matt finally spoke, his voice wasn’t much more than a whisper.
“I thought you hadn’t confirmed who my father was. That’s what you said yesterday.”
“He has to be your father, Jones.”
Matt shook his head slowly. “That’s all you’ve got?”
The reporter paused a moment, then leaned forward. “Do you know how many corporate-created, bitchy, no-talent celebrities I’ve had to push on my show to keep the ratings up and pay the bills? How many times I’ve wanted to lose my lunch after interviewing one of these low-rent reality stars? You have no idea how great it is to be working on a real story.”
“That’s the part I don’t get, Day. What’s the story?”
“Who your father is. Who shot you on Mount Hollywood. Who you really are, and why did Dr. Baylor save your life. That’s the story, and it’s a great story. I can’t believe you wouldn’t want to help me tell it.”
Day’s voice shook with emotion and more drama. The gossip reporter came off so sleazy that Matt thought about driving back to the apartment and taking another shower.
“I don’t think you can help me,” Matt said.
He picked up the murder book and got to his feet. Day grabbed his forearm.
“Please, I can help you,” he said. “Here’s something to get you started.”
“I’m not interested.”
Day narrowed his eyes. “Your mother’s maiden name,” he said quickly. “It’s not Clemens. It’s Stewart. Julie Stewart. That was your mother’s real name. It was changed in her early teens. Same with your aunt Abby.”
Matt clenched his teeth and gave the man with black hair and ultra-pale skin a long, hard look. Then he ripped his arm free, and walked out.
CHAPTER 19
Matt stepped off the elevator and hustled down the hall to the Crisis Room, wrestling with his emotions. He resented being led on by someone like Day whom he didn’t trust or even respect. He couldn’t afford to waste time chasing phantoms right now. Especially after making what he considered a significant step forward in his understanding of the Stratton and Holloway murders.
He burst through the door and cut across the room to the desk he’d been assigned. It was 7:30 a.m. Fifteen to twenty people were already here, but he didn’t know or recognize anyone.
Matt opened his laptop and switched on the power. As he waited for the machine to boot, he tossed over the idea of coming forward with his revelation about the doctor. He wondered how Doyle and Rogers would take it given the fact that he had no tangible evidence. Just thoughts and guesses and personal observations made before the crime lab had a chance to process their findings and file their reports.
The truth was that Matt wished he could talk to Dr. Baylor about his revelation. He wished that he had some way of making contact with the surgeon.
That, too, worried him.
Deciding that his best bet was to keep his thoughts to himself, to remain cautious until he found something so real even Rogers would be convinced, Matt pulled his laptop closer and typed a name into the search engine.
Julie Stewart.
He didn’t expect to get a hit. He wasn’t sure he even wanted one. But then he clicked the Search key with his cursor, and something strange happened.
Hundreds of links to articles were assembling on the screen. Julie Stewart was mentioned in books and newspapers. As Matt scrolled down, he spotted his aunt’s name as well. Photographs were included. The two sisters appeared very young—eight or nine years old—and were posted with two siblings Matt didn’t know existed, Joseph and Eleanor. But it was the names and photographs of his mother’s parents, Howard and Michelle Stewart, that dominated the listings. Matt had never met either one of his grandparents, nor did he know anything about them. He was only a boy when his mother died of cancer, and he was sent to New Jersey to live with his aunt. He clicked through the photo gallery, comparing their features with the vague memory of his mother’s face. When he couldn’t find a single image of anyone in the family that wasn’t at least four decades old, he guessed that something catastrophic had happened and recalled how his aunt never seemed to want to talk about her past.
Matt sensed movement close by and looked up. Doyle had just entered the conference room, closed the door, and picked up the phone. Kate Brown was looking his way as she sat down at her desk with a cup of takeout coffee and a bagel.
“E
verything okay?” she said.
Matt nodded. “Just catching up.”
Her phone rang. When she took the call, Matt’s eyes rocked back to his laptop. Something catastrophic had happened to this family. His mother’s family. Something no one wanted to talk about.
Matt sorted the listings by the most recent and found an article that had been published in the business section of the New York Times just a few years ago. It was a historical piece for the column Throwback Thursday on Wall Street. Another photograph of his grandfather was featured, along with his business partner, Robert Kay. Once Matt got a feel for where the story was headed, he checked on Kate Brown again, then turned back to his laptop and started eating up the words in huge bites.
Four decades ago Matt’s grandfather, Howard Stewart, had run a Ponzi scheme on Wall Street that burned down and caused a recession. Investigators estimated the size of the fraud to be in the neighborhood of thirty-two billion dollars. World markets before China’s rise, particularly in New York, London, Berlin, and Tokyo, crashed. Nearly five thousand investors in Howard Stewart Investment Securities LLC lost everything they had, including their homes and cars, their futures, their retirement accounts, their pensions, their savings. All of it gone in a single day, their lives ruined.
Yet Stewart and his business partner and many of the top executives at their investment firm had lost nothing.
The target of the investigation had always been centered on Matt’s grandfather. But after a few weeks, his business partner’s frequent claims that he was innocent and had no knowledge of the financial scheme began to fall on deaf ears. The two men had begun to argue as the net tightened. And one night, as Matt’s grandparents slept in their home in Maplewood, New Jersey, they were shot dead.
Matt’s heart skipped a beat. All he could think about was his aunt and his mother and what they’d gone through. According to the article, the four children had heard someone break into the house and sought refuge in the attic. When they heard gunshots, they waited until dawn, then the boy snuck downstairs and called for help.