by Joseph Badal
“Maybe . . . ?”
Comstock shifted in his seat and looked at Barbara. “Maybe I could have prevented her death.” He wiped his eyes with the handkerchief. He stayed quiet for most of a minute. Then he said, “It was so hard. I just didn’t know what to do.”
Questions bounced inside her brain, but Barbara knew that sometimes you could glean the best information when you let people talk, uninterrupted, at their own pace.
“She made my life a living hell. She’d go off like a bomb, with no warning. Then she’d be so warm, so funny. She was beautiful. I loved her more than anything in this world. Lately, however, she’d been on a tear, complaining about everything I did.”
Barbara processed that. There seemed to have been more than enough negative emotion in the Comstocks’ marriage to motivate violence.
“What’s your relationship with Constance Alban?” she asked.
Comstock’s face went red. “My God. Connie has lived with us for a couple months. Was she there when Victoria . . . ? Is she all right?”
“How about answering my question?”
It took him a few seconds to respond. “She’s the daughter of an old friend of Victoria’s, Marge Stanley. I came home from the office one day and she had moved into one of the bedrooms. I asked Victoria about her and all she said was the girl needed a place to stay. The relationship was between Victoria and Connie. I never felt comfortable with it, but . . . . I didn’t want to get into a big argument with Vickie about it. Arguments with her were painful and seemingly never-ending.”
“Were you afraid of your wife?”
Comstock jerked and shot Barbara a surprised look. “Connie’s mother, Marge, used to be Victoria’s best friend. Something happened between them years ago, when Connie was just a kid.”
“Something happened between them?”
Barbara glanced over at Comstock. The man rubbed his forehead; his face was red again. He looked very uncomfortable.
“Connie’s father, Joseph Alban, shot himself after Marge divorced him. Connie blames her mother for her father’s death.”
“Marge Stanley claims your wife convinced Connie of that.”
Comstock didn’t argue the point. He just shrugged.
“Until a year ago, your wife hadn’t seen Connie since she was little? There had been no contact in the interim, and the girl just shows up one day?”
Comstock shrugged again.
“Marge Stanley claims that when she was still married to Joseph Alban, your wife had an affair with him.”
His face paled; his mouth gaped open, then clamped shut. When he regained his composure, he said, “Marge Stanley filed a lawsuit against Vickie and me for interfering with her relationship with Connie. She alleged in her complaint that Vickie and Joseph Alban were . . . romantically involved back then.”
“What do you believe?” Barbara asked.
“I don’t know what to believe,” he said.
“Do you think Marge is a liar?”
Another hesitation. Then he shook his head.
“Do you have any idea where Connie Alban might be?”
“Not a clue. She has friends at the university, but I don’t know their names. You could keep an eye out for the car Victoria bought her. It’s a red VW bug convertible.”
Comstock went silent for a beat. Barbara wondered if he had finished.
Then he abruptly announced, “I control multi-million-dollar companies. I deal with type-A personalities and hold my own against the best of them. But I couldn’t begin to manage my relationship with Vickie.”
“Strong willed?” Barbara said.
“It was much bigger than that. Do you know what borderline personality disorder is, Detective?”
CHAPTER 8
Barbara and Susan drove to the University of New Mexico campus and spent an hour with a woman in the Registrar’s office. They walked away with lists of Connie Alban’s professors and their phone numbers; names, addresses, and phone numbers of all the students in Alban’s classes; and the address and telephone Alban had put on her registration forms for the prior semester.
“Let’s stop by the address on that registration form first,” Susan suggested.
“Good idea,” Barbara said.
Barbara drove off campus and stopped in front of a bungalow on Dartmouth Drive. Susan led the way to the front door and knocked. When no one responded, she knocked again on the door, this time with plenty of authority. A kid with a three-day beard, a body shaped like a question mark, and baggy eyes finally opened the door.
“Yeah?”
Susan presented her creds. “I’m Detective Martinez. This is my partner, Detective Lassiter. How ‘bout you let us in?”
The kid seemed flustered. He hemmed and hawed for a few seconds, then said, “Give me a minute. Okay?”
Susan shrugged.
The kid shut the door. Barbara stepped aside and peeked through a narrow gap between two filthy-looking curtains on a front window. She returned to stand next to Susan.
“Cleaning up for us?”
Barbara laughed. “Sort of. Looks like rats scurrying around.”
“Betcha the place smells like one huge roach.”
“No bet,” Barbara said. “The kid who answered the door is inside waving around a magazine, apparently trying to get rid of the marijuana odor. Knock on the door again. Let’s give the kid a break and tell him we couldn’t care less about what he and his friends are smoking.”
Susan rapped on the door six times. This brought the kid back. He looked flushed and seemed out of breath.
“You know smoking Mary Jane kills brain cells,” Susan said.
“We weren’t smok—”
“Look, kid. We aren’t here to make a drug bust, so relax. We just want to ask you a few questions about a girl who used to live here. Then we’ll go on our way and leave you to your . . . to whatever you were doing.”
“Okay, okay, come on in.”
The front room was furnished with a ratty-looking couch, two equally ratty chairs, a bean bag that looked as though it had lost most of its beans, and what appeared to be a brand new flat screen television. Got to have your priorities, Susan thought.
The kid introduced himself as Morton Longacre and invited them to sit down.
“How long have you lived here?” Barbara asked, after she declined to sit.
“Two years,” Longacre answered.
“Who else lives here?”
“Three others.”
“They here?”
“Yeah, they’re in their rooms.”
“How long have they lived with you?”
“Dave’s been here the whole time I’ve lived here. Simone and Gabby moved in this semester.”
“Go get Dave and have him join us.”
Dave was a portly, pimply-faced teenager with the glassy look of someone who spent more time puffing on joints than studying.
Susan wrote down their full names in her notebook and then said, “How long did you guys live with Connie Alban?”
Dave giggled. He seemed to try to force himself to act seriously but was obviously losing in that attempt. “That is one screwed up bitch,” he said, then giggled again.
“We kicked her out after a couple months,” Morton said. “All she did was scrounge off us and complain about her mother. Man, her moms must be one hard lady.”
“You know where we might be able to find her?” Barbara asked.
“What’s she done?” Dave said.
Susan pointed a finger at the kid. “We ask the questions. You got it?”
Dave gulped and said, “Sorry.”
“Last I heard,” Morton said, “she found herself a sugar daddy. Some rich guy down in the North Valley.” He ran a hand through his greasy hair and added, “Good riddance. What a head job Connie was.”
“Where else might we find Ms. Alban?” Susan asked.
The two guys looked at one another, hunched their shoulders. Morton said, “Don’t know.”
Barbara and Susan left the bungalow and returned to their unmarked. “Well, that was a big waste of time,” Susan said.
“Other than getting confirmation that Connie Alban has problems.”
Susan hitched a thumb toward the bungalow and said, “I wouldn’t rely too heavily on anything those tweakers said.”
CHAPTER 9
Susan and Barbara collected their personal vehicles from the downtown lot and drove separately to Trombinos Restaurant on Academy Boulevard.
After they were seated and had ordered drinks, Barbara asked, “You have any doubt about Turner’s story?”
Susan patted her mouth with a paper napkin. “Not a one. And, based on what you told me, her story matched Comstock’s.”
Barbara nodded as she signaled the waitress for the check. “The good news is we learned a hell of lot about our victim. I almost feel sorry for Maxwell Comstock. His wife must have been a raving, screaming bitch.”
“Changing your mind about Queen Victoria?”
“What do you mean?”
“You seemed kinda impressed with her after you watched that video at her house.”
Barbara shook her head. “I guess it was because she was so beautiful, so accomplished; not someone you’d expect to find butchered.”
Silence settled over them. It was decompression time. Susan didn’t want to return to her house and she guessed Barbara felt the same. But she needed to see if Manny had returned. Even though she hoped he hadn’t.
Susan swallowed the last of her iced tea, then pushed the glass away as the waitress brought the check. “I got this,” she said.
Barbara had both hands wrapped around her glass, making wet swirls on the wood tabletop. “I got a ton of laundry to do and my sink is loaded with dirty dishes,” she said.
“Yech. Sounds nasty.” Susan dropped some bills on the table, slid her chair back, and stood. “You coming?”
“I think I’ll hang around here for a while.”
Susan retook her seat and leaned forward. “You’ve been hung over almost every morning this week.”
“I don’t need a lecture, Susan.”
Susan raised her hands and said, “Sorry, I wasn’t being judgmental.” She met Barbara’s glare. “You’re my friend and my partner. I’m worried about you. Ever since Jim died, you’ve been—”
“What?”
“Come on, Barbara. You know your alcohol intake has gone up since Jim’s death.”
Barbara snatched the check off the table and pushed Susan’s money toward her. “You can go,” she said. “I’ll take care of this.”
“Shit!” Susan muttered to herself as she walked away from the table. “Why can’t I keep my mouth shut?” She glanced back at Barbara and saw her signal the waitress.
Barbara ordered a glass of wine after Susan left the restaurant, but after a couple sips she walked out. She knew Susan was right. She had come in hung over three, four mornings over the past week. But all of her drinking had been done at home. She hadn’t gone off the tracks so badly that she would drink in public and then drive her department-issued vehicle.
Barbara got more depressed the closer she got to her three-bedroom, one-story tract house in Albuquerque’s far Northeast Heights. She and her late husband, Jim, had bought the place a few years after she graduated from the Police Academy and two years before Jim finished law school. There’d been so much promise in their lives back then. They were twenty-two, excited about their chosen professions, and pumped up about their future together.
Six years later, Barbara was promoted to detective rank and Jim was a brand-new partner at one of Albuquerque’s best law firms. They’d planned on having kids, but she couldn’t seem to get pregnant, and they were always too busy to see what could be done about it. Then their world collapsed. Jim suddenly got headaches that quickly grew into full-fledged explosions of pain and nausea. Brain cancer killed him six months later.
His absence was an ache in her core that wouldn’t go away, even after two years. The ache always seemed worse when she stepped through the door of their house. Especially when she was sober.
The sight of the hardwood floors reminded her of how much Jim had loved this place, the many hours he’d spent refinishing these floors.
Jim’s presence was in just about everything. He’d been the one with style and color sense. The landscapes on the living room walls—two by Jeff Otis and a Carol McIlroy—had been a real extravagance, but Jim had loved them. The leather-backed wooden chairs were no more comfortable than on the day he’d bought them. But he’d said they were collectors pieces and would double in value in a few years. He’d been right. Barbara had seen another pair recently for sale at more than twice the price Jim had paid. But she still hated them. If she slouched in one, she’d skid right off the seat and onto the floor.
Barbara crossed to the long, narrow table behind the dark-brown leather sofa. She touched two fingers to her lips and touched Jim’s photo on the table, as she did every morning when she left and every evening upon her return. She knew she needed to let Jim go. She knew this without reservation. But she just couldn’t seem to make it happen. His memory was an ache in her heart. So far, booze was the only thing that dulled that ache.
She drifted from the living room to the study. It had been a bedroom, but they’d converted it so Jim could work there on evenings and weekends. She threw her jacket over the back of a plush chair and placed her holstered pistol on the desk.
This evening has the potential of becoming another bad episode in my depressing soap opera-of-a-life, she thought. She eyed the liquor cabinet at the bottom of the built-in bookcase. The booze would erase the bad memories—at least until morning. She knew alcohol would eventually jeopardize her career, ruin her health, perhaps ruin her life altogether. It had helped balloon her weight and she had recently realized she had begun to care less every day about the things that had brought her to law enforcement in the first place: Service, making bad guys pay for bad behavior, and the camaraderie of working with like-minded professionals.
She went to the kitchen and plopped two ice cubes into a glass, returned to the study, and pulled a bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet. She set the bottle on the desk, sagged into the plush chair, and eyed the bourbon while she rolled the cold, sweating glass against her forehead. Fight the urge to drink, she told herself. But the booze was not to be ignored. She poured two fingers of bourbon into the glass and downed the alcohol in one swig.
Barbara stared at the ceiling. If only she could pray that some supreme being would intercede and save her from herself, give her the fortitude to put the cap back on the bottle, lock away the evil genie. Her eyes moved slowly from the ceiling to the top of the bookcase. Her old textbooks were up there—dust magnets. She zeroed in on one of the titles: PSYCHOLOGY: ELEMENTS OF HUMAN BEHAVIOR. Divine intervention? she thought.
She could remember little of the psychology course she’d taken years ago, except for the anal-retentive professor. He should have been in therapy, not teaching psychology. She also recalled one of the chapters in the book was about borderline personalities. After Comstock asked her if she knew what a borderline personality was, he went into more detail about his wife’s condition and her behavior. He explained she’d been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. Barbara had patiently listened. She suspected Comstock needed to ease the guilt he felt about cheating while someone murdered his wife. If he hadn’t done the deed himself.
Barbara dragged a hassock over to the bookcase, kicked off her loafers, and stepped up to reach for the textbook. She blew dust off the top edge of the pages and carried the book to the kitchen, where she sat down at the table. In the book’s index, she found an entry for Borderline Personality Disorder, with several sub-categories, including: Borderline Personality, Borderline Narcissism, Common Symptoms, Dissociative Symptoms, Self-Mutilation. Barbara turned to page seventy-two.
The text listed an array of borderline personality disorder symptoms. It didn’t take B
arbara long to begin to really sympathize with Maxwell Comstock. Life with Victoria must have been impossible at times: Mood swings, sudden irrational anger, depressive episodes, and impulsivity. Other borderline hallmarks were sexual confusion and promiscuity, manipulation and obsession of others, and a skewed, paranoid view of reality.
On page seventy-five, Barbara learned that borderlines were indifferent to others’ needs, couldn’t handle rejection, continually sought approval, and had an exaggerated sense of self-importance. The ominous part of the diagnosis: No known cure.
SATURDAY
JUNE 26
CHAPTER 10
Barbara and Susan met at the Office of Medical Investigators on the University of New Mexico campus at 8:30 a.m. They sat next to one another in a glass-fronted observation room while a pathologist and morphologist worked on Victoria Comstock’s body. The bright lights in the autopsy theater made Barbara’s morning headache worse. They were barely five minutes into the autopsy when Barbara groaned, unsteadily got to her feet, and left the room.
She felt overwhelmed by nausea. Sweat dripped off her forehead. The restroom sign was visible twenty yards down the hallway. She rushed there, soaked a wad of paper towels in cold water, and patted her forehead. Then she soaked another pack of towels and pressed it against the back of her neck. Cold water leaked down her back and made her shudder.
After the nausea passed, she dried her face and neck and returned to the observation room.
Barbara felt Susan’s eyes on her as she retook her seat. But Susan didn’t say anything. She turned her head just enough to look at her partner, but Susan had already turned back toward the autopsy theater. Barbara wanted to apologize for what she’d said to Susan at the restaurant, but the pathologist diverted her attention.
“No one did you ladies a favor when they dumped this case in your laps,” the man said into the microphone that hung over the center of the metal autopsy table.