He’d drive to Greenwood Lake while it was still dark. There he’d visit Mrs. Schafley and the Harniks. It would be easier than shooting squirrels, because they’d all be in bed. The Harniks always left their bedroom window open. He could push it up and lean over the windowsill before they even knew what was happening. And he wouldn’t have to go inside Mrs. Schafley’s house. He could just stand at the bedroom window and shine a flashlight on her face. When she woke up, he’d shine it on his face so she could see him and know what he was going to do. Then he’d shoot her.
He was sure that when the police started to investigate, they would come looking for him. Mrs. Schafley had probably told everyone in Greenwood Lake about his wanting to rent a room from her. “Can you imagine the nerve of him?” That was the way she would put it. That was the way she always started when she was complaining about someone. “Can you imagine the nerve of him?” she’d asked Annie when the kid who mowed her lawn tried to raise his price. “Can you imagine the nerve of him?” when the guy who delivered her newspaper asked if she’d forgotten to give him a tip at Christmas.
Was that what she would be thinking in that second before he killed her? Can you imagine the nerve of him, killing me?
He knew where Lynn Spencer lived. But he’d have to find out where her stepsister lived. Carley DeCarlo. Why did that name sound so familiar? Had he heard Annie talk about her? Or did she read about her? “That’s it,” Ned whispered. “Carley DeCarlo had a column in that part of the Sunday paper Annie loved to read.”
Today was Sunday.
He went into the bedroom. The candlewick spread that Annie had liked so much was still on the bed. He hadn’t touched it. He could still see her as she was that last morning, her hands tugging so that both sides of the spread were exactly even, then tucking the extra material at the top under the pillows.
He spotted the Sunday supplement that Annie had left folded on her night table. He picked it up and opened it. Slowly he turned the pages. Then he saw her name and picture: Carley DeCarlo. She wrote an advice column about money. Annie had sent a question to her once, and for a long time afterwards looked to see if it was used in the column. It wasn’t, but she still liked the column and sometimes would read it to him. “Ned, she agrees with me. She says you waste a lot of money if you put charges on your credit card and pay only the minimum every month.”
Last year Annie had been mad at him for charging a new set of tools. He’d bought an old car at the junkyard and wanted to fix it up. He had told her it didn’t matter that the tools cost a lot of money, he could take a long time to pay them off. Then she read him that column.
Ned stared at Carley DeCarlo’s picture. A thought came to him. He’d like to upset her and make her nervous. From the time in February when she found out that the house in Greenwood Lake was gone until the day when the truck hit her car, Annie had been worried and nervous. The whole time, she also cried a lot. “If the vaccine is no good, we have nothing, Ned, nothing,” she’d said over and over again.
In the weeks before she died, Annie had been suffering. Ned wanted Carley DeCarlo to suffer, too, to be worried and upset. And he knew just how to do it. He would e-mail a warning to her: “Prepare yourself for Judgment Day.”
* * *
He had to get out of the house. He’d take the bus downtown, he decided, and walk past Lynn Spencer’s apartment house, the fancy one on Fifth Avenue. Just knowing that she might be inside made him feel almost as if he already had her in his sights.
An hour later Ned was standing across the street from the entrance to Lynn Spencer’s building. He’d been there less than a minute when the doorman opened the door and Carley DeCarlo came out. At first he thought that he was dreaming, just as he had dreamed about the man coming out of the house in Bedford before he set the fire.
Even so, he started to follow her. She walked a long way, all the way to 37th Street, and then crossed east. Finally she walked up the steps of one of those town houses, and he was sure that meant she was home.
Now I know where she lives, Ned thought, and when I decide it’s time, it will be just like the Harniks and Mrs. Schafley. Shooting her won’t be any harder than shooting squirrels.
TWENTY
“It was scary to see how on target Adrian Garner was yesterday,” I told Don and Ken the next morning. The three of us had been at our desks early, and by a quarter of nine were gathered in Ken’s office with our second cups of coffee.
Garner’s prediction that people would immediately conclude the piece of charred and bloodstained shirt was merely part of Spencer’s elaborate escape plan had come true. The tabloids were having a field day with the story.
Lynn’s picture was on the front page of the New York Post, and on page three of The Daily News. They looked as if they had been taken at the door of her building last evening. In both she managed to look simultaneously stunning and vulnerable. There were tears in her eyes. Her left hand was open, showing the medical padding on her burned palm. The other hand was clasping the arm of her housekeeper. The Post’s headline was wife not sure if spencer sank or swam, while The News had WIFE SOBS, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO THINK.”
Earlier, I had checked with the hospital and learned that Dr. Broderick’s condition remained critical. I decided to tell Ken and Don about him now, and about my suspicions as well.
“You think Broderick’s accident may have had something to do with your talking to him about those records?” Ken asked. In the few days I’d known him, I’d come to realize that when Ken was weighing the pros and cons of a situation, he sometimes took off his glasses and dangled them from his right hand. He was doing that now. The stubble on his chin and cheeks indicated that he had decided to start growing a beard or that he had been in a rush this morning. He was wearing a red shirt, but somehow when I looked at him, the mental picture I got was of him in a white doctor’s coat with a prescription pad protruding from his pocket and a stethoscope around his neck. No matter what he wears, and with or without stubble on his face, Ken has the look of the doctor about him.
“You could be right,” he continued. “We all know that the pharmaceutical business is as competitive as it gets. The company that’s the first to market a drug to prevent or cure cancer will be worth billions.”
“Ken, why bother to steal the early records of a guy who wasn’t even a biologist?” Don objected.
“Nicholas Spencer always credited his father’s later research with being the basis for the vaccine he was developing. Maybe somebody got the idea that there might be something valuable in the early records,” Ken theorized.
That made sense to me. “Dr. Broderick was the direct link between the records and the man who picked them up,” I said. “Could those records possibly be valuable enough that someone would kill him, rather than risk his being able to identify the man with reddish brown hair? Wouldn’t that suggest that whoever he is, that guy’s someone who might be traceable. He might even be from Gen-stone, or at least know someone from Gen-stone who was close enough to Nick Spencer to be aware of Broderick and the records.”
“Something we may be missing is that Nick Spencer may have sent someone to collect those records himself and then pretended to be surprised that they were gone,” Don said slowly.
I stared at him. “Why would he do that?” I asked.
“Carley, Spencer is—or was—a con man with just enough knowledge of microbiology to raise start-up money, make a guy like Wallingford—who managed to run his own family company into the toilet—chairman, let him fill a board of directors with guys who couldn’t manage their way out of a turnstile, and then claim he’s on the verge of proving he has the definitive cure for cancer. He got away with it for eight years. He’s lived relatively modestly for a guy in his position. You know why? Because he knew it wouldn’t work, and he was stashing away a fortune for his retirement when his pyramid club collapsed. But an added bonus would be for Spencer to create the illusion that somebody stole valuable data and that he was th
e victim of some kind of scheme. I say that his claiming he didn’t know about the records having been taken was done for the benefit of people like us who’ll be writing about him.”
“And almost killing Dr. Broderick is part of that scenario?” I asked.
“I bet it will turn out to be a coincidence. I’m sure all the service stations and repair shops in that area in Connecticut have been alerted to report any suspiciously damaged cars to the police. They’ll find some guy who was on his way home from an all-night bender or some kid with a lead foot on the gas pedal.”
“That may happen if whoever ran down Dr. Broderick was from that area,” I said. “Somehow, though, I don’t think he was.” I got up. “And now I’m going to see if I can’t get Nick Spencer’s secretary to agree to talk to me, and then I’m going to visit the hospice where Spencer was a volunteer.”
* * *
I was told that Vivian Powers had taken the day off again. I called her home, and when she heard who I was, she said, “I don’t want to talk about Nicholas Spencer,” and hung up. There was only one course left to me—I had to ring her doorbell.
Before I left the office, I checked my e-mail. There were at least one hundred questions for my column, all fairly routine, but then there were two other e-mails that jolted me. The first one read, “Prepare yourself for Judgment Day.”
It isn’t a threat, I told myself. It’s probably from some religious nut, a doomsday kind of message. I shrugged it off, perhaps because the other message really took my breath away: “Who was the man in Lynn Spencer’s mansion a minute before it caught fire?”
Who could have seen someone leave the house before the fire started? Wouldn’t it have to be the person who actually set it? And if so, why would he write to me? Then a thought came to me: The housekeeping couple hadn’t expected Lynn to be there that night, but had they seen someone else leaving the house? If so, why hadn’t they come forward? I could think of one reason: They might be in this country illegally and don’t want to be deported.
I now had three stops to make in Westchester County.
I elected to make the first one to the home of Vivian and Joel Powers in Briarcliff Manor, one of the towns that borders Pleasantville. Using my road map I found their house, a charming two-story stone dwelling that must have been over one hundred years old. A realtor’s sign was on the front lawn. The house was for sale.
Mentally keeping my fingers crossed as I had when I arrived unannounced on Dr. Broderick’s doorstep, I rang the bell and waited. There was a peephole in the heavy old door, and I sensed that I was being observed. Then the door was opened, the safety chain clearly in sight.
The woman who answered the door was a darkhaired beauty in her late twenties. She was wearing no makeup and needed none. Her brown eyes were enhanced by long lashes. Her high cheekbones and perfectly shaped nose and mouth made me wonder if she had ever been a model. She certainly had the looks it took to be one.
“I’m Carley DeCarlo,” I said. “Are you Vivian Powers?”
“Yes, I am, and I already told you that I would not be interviewed,” she responded.
I was sure she was on the verge of closing the door, so I said hurriedly, “I’m trying to write a fair and balanced story about Nicholas Spencer. I don’t accept the fact that there isn’t a lot more to his disappearance than what is being reported in the media. When we spoke on Saturday, I got the sense that you’re very defensive of him.”
“I am. Good-bye, Ms. DeCarlo. Please don’t come back.”
I was taking a chance, but I plunged ahead. “Ms. Powers, on Friday I went up to Caspien, the town where Nick Spencer grew up. I spoke to a Dr. Broderick who bought the Spencer home and who was holding some of Dr. Spencer’s early records. He’s in the hospital right now, a hit-and-run victim, and probably won’t make it. I believe that his talking to me about Dr. Spencer’s research may have had something to do with his so-called accident.”
I held my breath, but then I saw a startled look come into her eyes. A moment later her hand moved to unfasten the safety latch. “Come in,” she said.
The interior of the house was in the process of being dismantled. Rolled-up carpets, stacks of boxes clearly marked to show their contents, empty table tops, and bare walls and windows attested to the fact that Vivian Powers was on the verge of moving. I noticed she was wearing a wedding ring, and I wondered where her husband was.
She led me to a small enclosed sun porch that was still intact, with lamps on the tables and a small rug on the wide plank floor. The furniture was wicker with brightly colored chintz seat cushions and backrests. She sat on the loveseat, which left the matching chair for me. I was thankful that I’d persevered and had driven up and forced my way in today. Real estate wisdom is that a house shows much better when there are people living in it. Which made me ask, what was her rush to get out? I intended to make it my business to see how long this place had been on the market. I bet myself that it had not been listed before the plane crash.
“This has been my retreat since the packers started.”
“When are you leaving?” I asked.
“Friday.”
“Are you staying local?” I asked, trying to sound casual.
“No. My parents live in Boston. I’ll live with them until I find my own place. I’ll put the furniture in storage for the present.”
I was beginning to believe that Joel Powers was not part of his wife’s future plans. “Could I ask you just a few questions?”
“I wouldn’t have let you in if I hadn’t decided to let you ask me a few questions,” she said. “But first I have a few of my own.”
“I’ll answer them if I can.”
“What made you go to see Dr. Broderick?”
“I went solely to get background on the home where Nicholas Spencer was raised and anything Dr. Broderick might know about Dr. Spencer’s laboratory which had been in that house.”
“Were you aware that he had been holding Dr. Spencer’s early records?”
“No. Dr. Broderick volunteered that information. He obviously was troubled when he realized that Nicholas Spencer had not sent for the records. Did Spencer tell you they were missing?”
“Yes, he did.” She hesitated. “Something happened at that award dinner in February, and it related to a letter Nick received around Thanksgiving. In it the writer said she wanted to tell him about a secret she had shared with his father, and she stated that his father had cured her daughter of multiple sclerosis. She even put in her phone number. At the time Nick tossed the letter over to me to give the standard reply. He said, “This is as nutty as they get. That’s totally impossible.”
“But the letter was answered?”
“All his mail was answered. People wrote in all the time, begging to be used in an experiment, willing to sign anything for a chance to get the cancer vaccine he was working on. Sometimes people wrote that they’d been cured of some ailment and wanted him to test their homespun remedies and distribute them. We had a couple of form letter responses.”
“Did you keep copies of these letters?”
“No, just a list of names of people who got them. Neither of us remembered that woman’s name. There are two employees who deal with that kind of mail. But then something happened at the award dinner. Nick was very excited the next morning and said he had to go right back to Caspien. He said he’d learned something terribly important. He said that his gut had told him to take seriously that letter from the woman who wrote about his father curing her daughter.”
“Then he rushed back to Caspien to collect his father’s early records and found that they had disappeared. This happened around Thanksgiving, at about the same time the letter came into the office,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“Let me get this straight, Vivian. You think there was a connection between that letter and the fact that his father’s early records were taken from Dr. Broderick a few days later?”
“I’m sure there was, and Nick was
different after that day.”
“Did he ever say who he went to see after he left Dr. Broderick?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Can you check his calendar for that day. The award dinner was on February 15, so it would be February 16. Maybe he jotted down a name or number.”
She shook her head. “He didn’t write it down that morning, and he never put anything on his calendar after that day—I mean, anything about appointments outside the office.”
“Suppose you had to reach him, how would you do it?”
“I called his cell phone. Let me correct that. There were some events already scheduled, like medical seminars, dinners, board meetings—those kinds of things. But Nick was out of the office a lot those last four or five weeks. When the U.S. attorney’s people came to the office, they told us that they’d learned he’d been to Europe twice. But he didn’t use the company plane, and no one at the office knew his plans, not even me.”
“The authorities seem to think he was either making arrangements for face-changing plastic surgery, or he was setting up his future residence. What do you think, Vivian?”
“I think there was something terribly wrong, and he knew it. I think he was afraid that his phone was tapped. I was there when he called Dr. Broderick, and looking back at it, I wonder why he didn’t just say that he wanted his father’s records. All he did was ask if he could stop in.”
It was obvious to me that Vivian Powers wanted desperately to believe that Nick Spencer had been the victim of a conspiracy.
“Vivian,” I asked, “do you think he seriously expected the vaccine to work? Or did he always know it was flawed?”
“No. He was driven by his need to find a cure for cancer. He lost both his wife and his mother to that terrible disease. In fact, I met him in a hospice two years ago when my husband was a patient there. Nick was a volunteer.”
The Second Time Around Page 10