“Radcliffe, Radcliffe, I don’t think so. Oh wait, I think I extracted a tooth from her several months ago, but I never associated the name with the article in the newspaper. What a shame…I guess I did know her.”
Ruth thought that his speech seemed slightly affected and he was acting a bit strange, but she decided that he must be embarrassed not to have realized that a murder victim whose picture was in every newspaper had been his patient.
“But tell me, why do the police think Franklin is involved?”
“Franklin claims to have had a dream, a premonition of the murder. He described it in such detail that the police believe he must have been involved. But you know all about the dream—Franklin said he described it to you weeks ago.”
“No, I’m afraid Franklin’s memory must be failing him. He never told me about a dream. What did he tell you?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything other than the fact that while I was at the police station, Franklin asked me to contact you, and he told me you would know all about it.” Ruth was suddenly aware that she might be giving away too much information. It wasn’t her place to tell Dr. Green that Franklin was her patient. She needed a cover story.
“I’ve been working with the police,” she said, “unofficially, helping to solve Sylvia’s murder. I happened to be present when Franklin was questioned.”
“I know Franklin has been having some problems lately and has been distraught, but he seems worse than I imagined,” said Dr. Green. “I’ll contact an attorney and have him call Franklin today. I’m sure this will all sort out.”
***
The door opened just a crack, and two eyes gazed into the darkened room. At first, everything looked normal. A medium-size lump under the covers, about the length of a sleeping child, indicated that all was as it should be and the day had come to a peaceful end. Just as Ruth Klein was about to quietly close the door and back away, a strange light caught her eye. It was as though the child under the covers was glowing, radiating light that increased and decreased periodically with movement from under the covers. Ruth tiptoed to the side of the bed, leaned over her iridescent progeny, and said, “Emma, what are you reading under there?” The light was immediately extinguished. Not another movement or any sound came from the bed.
“What are you doing under there?” Ruth asked. While the words were still falling from her lips, Ruth wished she could take them back. She always thought of Emma as a small child, a baby, but time was passing, and Emma had now grown into adolescence. Ruth put her hand to her mouth to symbolically stifle any ill-considered words. Could she have just embarrassed her young daughter? She tried to think back to when she was first reaching puberty. A thoughtless remark by a parent could leave emotional scars that could last throughout adulthood. You’re a psychologist, she told herself; how could you be so crass?
Ruth leaned over the bed and gently placed her hand on what she hoped was her daughter’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I didn’t mean to embarrass you. You know you can talk to me about anything. If you have any questions about anything at all, you can ask me. Now don’t be frightened; you haven’t done anything wrong, and I promise, no matter what you ask, I won’t be upset.”
The covers slowly began to roll back, and Emma’s face appeared. “I do have one question,” she said in a low, halting voice. She reached under the covers and retrieved one of Ruth’s manila folders. “Do all your patients tell you their deepest secrets?”
“What?” she said, confused by the playfulness of Emma’s tone. Then she saw the patient record folder in Emma’s hand. “Where did you get that?” she almost shouted. “You know you’re never to read anything from my files. You’re in a lot of trouble, missy. Give me that folder, and the flashlight, and go to sleep. Taking that folder was a very bad thing to do, and we’re going to talk more about this in the morning.” Ruth tossed the covers back over Emma’s head and stormed out of the room.
After Ruth closed the door, she thought about what had just happened. She was angry about the stolen file folder but also relieved. She reviewed her compassionate response to her fear of having embarrassed Emma, and then her anger at the child’s infraction. She settled into a living room chair and said aloud, “Well, that should screw her up for about a year.”
Ruth looked at the tab on the folder. It said “Sylvia Radcliffe” in bold letters.
She hoped that Emma hadn’t associated the name on the folder with the reports of Sylvia’s murder on the TV news. Ruth reached out, lifted the wineglass she had filled before checking on Emma, and took a sip. She leaned back and felt a melancholy mood coming on as she opened the folder. Ruth hadn’t reviewed any of her notes about Sylvia since her death. Now would be a good time to close out the file and store away the records.
A blank space in her notes from one of their last meetings reminded Ruth of her lapse of concentration during that session. She smiled as she recalled how relieved she was when she realized that she had recorded the discussion. Discussion? It was more like a monologue, she remembered.
Ruth reached down next to her chair and rummaged around in her briefcase until she found the recording. She placed the memory card into her handheld recorder and pushed play.
She felt disheartened at the sound of Sylvia’s voice. It was hard for her to believe that she was gone. She sounded so animated, so opinionated, so alive. Ruth drank her wine, only half listening to the recording and picturing Sylvia rushing through her door at exactly five minutes before the hour every Tuesday. Every Tuesday except the last one, when Lieutenant Peirce showed up in her place to say she was missing.
Suddenly, something on the recording registered in Ruth’s mind. She pressed stop and then rewound for several seconds. She wasn’t sure what concerned her, but she had to hear it again.
“I knew he was married, but I think he was coming on to me. Or maybe I was coming on to him, I’m not sure. He gave me his card and said he would call me next week to meet for a drink, he…”
Ruth rewound more of the recording and played it again.
“I know it was a terrible thing to do, but I made up reasons to see him. I told him that I had this pain in my tooth…”
Ruth began to feel very uncomfortable. Something about these statements seemed wrong. She rewound further.
“Dr. Green had extracted a tooth just two weeks before…”
Ruth stopped the tape. He knew her well, she thought. Why would he lie?
If they had been having an affair, he might have lied because he was married and needed to keep the affair secret, she suspected. That made sense to her. But now that Sylvia was gone, he could have said it was nothing more than a doctor-patient relationship, and no one could have proven otherwise. Ruth felt that there was more to the story of Sylvia and Dr. Green and maybe more to the murder than a senseless killing during a burglary. She felt excited by the possibility of solving this case. Now she needed to know more. She needed to know it all. She needed to know who murdered Sylvia and why.
She wondered if Dr. Green’s reluctance to state the extent of his relationship with Sylvia had a darker purpose. Now Ruth didn’t usually jump to conclusions—well, actually she did—but she was trying to avoid doing so again. She walked to her desk and took a fresh manila file folder from her drawer. She wrote across the top of the folder: Who killed Sylvia Radcliffe? She then tore a page from her notepad and divided it into three columns, printing a title across the top of each column:
1. A murderous act by a serial killer.
2. Sylvia knew her murderer.
3. A random killing during a robbery.
She sat with her elbows resting on the desk and her head in her hands, wondering which of these possibilities she should pursue. She drew a circle around number two, Sylvia knew her murderer—that seemed to be the most logical place to start. Ruth downed the rest of her wine and thought about her next move. Solving this murder was important to her, but she had to ensure that it didn’t interfere with the more imp
ortant priorities in her life. Emma’s welfare and happiness were her number-one priority. Her psychology practice, from both a professional and a financial standpoint, was second. Now there may have been other pressing priorities that she should have considered, but finding Sylvia’s killer seemed to be right up there just below the other two.
***
“You’re going to be late for class,” Ruth shouted as she sat in her car with the motor running and the window rolled down.
The front door to the two-story colonial home opened, and Emma called out, “I can’t find my karate uniform.”
“It’s in your gym bag on the chair in the foyer. You put it there yourself when it came back from the laundry so that you wouldn’t forget it,” Ruth answered. Then she smiled and thought, I swear that girl gets more like me every day.
On this Saturday morning after dropping Emma off at her karate class, Ruth decided to drive to her office and spend the morning organizing her work for the coming week. Out of the corner of her eye, as she passed the art supply store on the boulevard, she saw something of interest in the window. She abruptly stopped her car. A screech of tires, honking horns, and a string of expletives from the drivers behind her indicated that she may have stopped a little too abruptly. “Sorry,” she yelled and waved her hand as she pulled to the curb.
A half hour later, upon reaching her office building with her purchase, Ruth found a parking space just twenty feet from the front door. How lucky. She opened the trunk of her car and lifted out the three dry-erase whiteboards, each two feet by three feet, and the three aluminum easels on which they would stand. I can do this in one trip, she thought. Ruth was proud of being self-reliant and clever enough to solve her own problems. She connected the shoulder strap to her briefcase and slung it over her head and left shoulder. The shoulder strap on her purse assumed the same position, but on the opposite shoulder. Next she tucked the three whiteboards, neatly tied together with string, under her left arm, placed the bag with the markers in her teeth, and leaned the easels against the car. Next she slammed the trunk, tucked the easels under her right arm, and finally started toward the building. Not so difficult, she thought. Unfortunately this left no body part available to turn the doorknob to the office building’s front door. Ruth stood at the door, trying not to drool on the paper bag in her mouth while contemplating her next move. Just then a man opened the door from the inside and held it as she squeezed, decked out with all her visual-aid paraphernalia, through the narrow space.
“Can I help you with some of your packages?”
“No, I’m OK,” Ruth mumbled through the bag in her teeth. “I do this all the time.”
Just then the bag began to slip from her lips, and as she lugged the packages down the hall, the bag fell. Her attempt to break its fall with her foot altered her balance and allowed two of the easels to slip from under her arm and clatter onto the tile floor. “I’m OK,” she announced to the man watching at the door. “I do this all the time.” As she leaned forward to push the two easels with her foot, the string on the whiteboards snapped, sending the boards to the floor in front of her. Unperturbed by the noise or the debris on the floor, Ruth just continued to systematically kick each item to her office door. “I’m OK,” she grumbled. “I do this all the fucking time.”
Upon reaching her office, Ruth calmly fished her keys out of her purse and turned and smiled at the man still holding the front door open at the end of the hall while she unlocked her office door. She put a doorstop in place to hold it open and proceeded to kick each item through the doorway, some of the larger items requiring more than one kick to make it through. After all the items were safely strewn about her waiting room floor, she leaned back through the doorway into the hall and waved at the man standing with his mouth open, still holding the front door. “Thank you,” she said as she disappeared into her office.
***
Ruth was inspired. Her hands trembled as she set up her three easels and whiteboards, placing a marker in each tray. She picked up one of the markers from the floor twice and finally threw it in the wastepaper basket after it kept slipping off its holder because of the angle of the easel’s bent legs, a result of its trip through the doorway.
At the top of each of the boards she printed: Who Murdered Sylvia Radcliffe? On the first board she wrote, “Franklin Jameson.” Under his name she listed all the evidence that led her to suspect him. For some reason—maybe it was the timidity she’d observed in his personality, maybe it was his disability—she didn’t really believe that he was capable of murder. Of course it could also just be his good looks that persuaded her.
The evidence was damning. He claimed to have made the 911 call giving the location of the body. He described details of the murder not published by the police, and his knowledge of Sylvia’s yellow rose tattoo was very disturbing. He claimed not to have known Sylvia, but since Sylvia’s appointment time with Ruth was just before Franklin’s, he could have seen or even met her on her way out of Ruth’s office days prior to the murder. It was possible that he knew her.
Ruth tapped her marker against the second whiteboard before committing a name to it. She hesitated and then wrote, “Dr. Hyrum Green.” She really had no strong evidence to support an accusation, but he did lie about the extent of his relationship with Sylvia. Ruth wrote, “Dr. Green had an affair with Sylvia.”
Ruth began to realize that Dr. Hyrum Green made her more and more nervous each time she saw him. The evidence of his involvement in the murder was pretty thin, but she was still suspicious.
On the third board she wrote, “Killed by an unknown burglar during a robbery.” This was the conjecture advanced by the newspaper. It was purely circumstantial, but if Sylvia had surprised someone during the robbery…
Ruth stared at the boards lined up against the wall. Two of the suspects were known to her, the other was not. Which should she pursue?
She decided to handle this as professionally as possible. She would focus her investigation on a suspect that she knew and didn’t like—Dr. Hyrum Green.
26
Sam Peirce stepped out of his car in the parking lot of 29 Office Park Place. He placed his hand on his stomach and felt a slight rumbling as he looked longingly at the fast-food restaurant across the street. He had been up since 5:00 a.m., and breakfast had been almost five hours ago. As he looked toward the restaurant, his hand slipped from his stomach to his belt. Peirce grasped his belt buckle and the waistband of his trousers and pulled them away from his body. He chuckled. The gap between his stomach and his belt had grown to three inches during the last few weeks and was becoming wider by the day. His eyes turned back to the restaurant, and with a short sigh, he walked away, toward the office building.
“My name is Lieutenant Sam Peirce. Would you tell Dr. Green that I need to speak with him for a few minutes?” Peirce said to the receptionist when he arrived at Hyrum Green’s office.
“Do you have an appointment, Mr. Peirce?”
“No, I don’t, and it’s Lieutenant Peirce, of the county police. Please tell the doctor that it’s important that I speak with him now.”
The receptionist huffed a little and looked at Peirce in a way that convinced him that she was hoping he needed a tooth drilled, preferably without Novocain, but she got up from her desk and disappeared into the inner office to deliver the message.
Minutes later she reappeared and guided Sam into a dental examining room. “The doctor will be in shortly,” she said and walked back to her post.
Sam paced back and forth between the examining chair and the counter containing a tray of stainless steel instruments. He wasn’t good at waiting, especially when he was the bearer of bad news. On a large-screen television at the head of the room, a man was preparing a chocolate cream pie, and the television morning news staff was anxiously waiting for him to finish while they held their plates and forks at the ready. Sam reached up and pressed the off button, and the screen faded to black. Satisfied that he had removed the temptati
on as well as the distraction, he finally sat in the large dental chair and began to examine his fingernails. A handheld mirror on the instrument tray attracted his attention. While he waited, he held the mirror up to his face and studied his front teeth.
“We could whiten those within a few weeks if you like,” said Hyrum Green as he entered the room.
Peirce placed the mirror back on the instrument tray. “Sorry, I was just killing time until you came in. Don’t they look white?”
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant…”
“Peirce,” Sam said. “When was the last time you saw your dental hygienist, Michelle Ackerman?”
“She left about three weeks ago to visit her family in Colorado. I was expecting her back last week. It does seem strange that she hasn’t called. Is she all right?”
Sam stood up. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that she was killed more than two weeks ago.”
Hyrum picked up the tray of instruments from the counter and stared at them for a moment, then placed them back on the tray stand a little too forcefully. Peirce watched Dr. Green closely. The doctor’s hand was scratching his chin, and his eyes were downcast. He turned away from Peirce, staring at a point in space somewhere between the floor and the wall. Suddenly, he seemed to compose himself. “Was it an accident of some sort?”
Sam had been a police officer for more than twenty years, and during that time he had developed a keen sense of observation. He had watched the reactions of hundreds of people as they received unhappy news. Hyrum Green certainly had a right to be upset, but Peirce’s instincts told him that something else was afoot here. This didn’t seem to be sadness that Hyrum Green was exhibiting; it looked more like relief.
“The investigation isn’t complete, but we believe she was murdered. The evidence might support a homicide during a robbery. We’ll know more in a few days.”
“This is the second murder during a burglary this month,” said Hyrum. “I understand you have someone in custody for the first murder. Do you think both women were murdered by the same man?”
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