by Jason Pinter
Early in her second term, Wright’s husband, Nicholas Drummond, accused her of infidelity. The Ashby Bulletin printed lewd texts, photos, and emails she’d apparently sent to a twenty-two-year-old staffer named Sam Wickersham. Wright furiously denied the affair but couldn’t explain the abundance of communication. She claimed she was being framed. She had very few defenders. Rachel followed it in the news—from a distance.
Wickersham also claimed he witnessed Wright drunk during government meetings, and when a reporter from the Bulletin found an empty bottle of Jim Beam in her wastebasket, the picture of the offending bottle was splashed above the fold with the headline “Constance-ly Sauced?” Wright denied the drinking accusations, but by then it didn’t matter.
Her political career came crashing down, and her marriage exploded in a matter of weeks.
Drummond cleaned Wright out in the divorce and soon after remarried a young woman named Isabelle Robles, who came with a trust fund that would have made Scrooge McDuck jealous. Constance Wright disappeared from public life. She was occasionally spotted pushing a shopping cart at the grocery store or sitting alone with a pack of Twizzlers at a movie. But the Constance Wright who was poised for greatness ceased to exist.
Constance was strong and smart, born with contacts and power and money, all the advantages she could ever need. She had everything. And none of it saved her reputation, or her life.
When Rachel moved to Ashby, Constance Wright had shown her kindness. And then her life was torn apart while Rachel sat back and watched. She’d believed Constance but had stayed quiet. But she was tired of monsters roaming the countryside unchecked.
She was going to make sure somebody paid for Constance’s murder.
CHAPTER 10
The news of Constance Wright’s death hit Ashby like a bomb, and the aftershock rumbled far and wide.
The front page of the Ashby Bulletin ran the headline FAREWELL MS. MAYOR. The Chicago Tribune’s website read DEATH OF A DYNASTY. Notable cable channels sent crews to cover the police press conference. Rumors had begun to spread that Constance Wright’s death was being treated as a homicide. Along with the winter wind came whispers of suspects and conspiracies. Constance Wright’s previous transgressions were forgotten and forgiven while the city mourned. At least for one day.
Rachel sat riveted to the morning news. Her eyes fixated on the laptop’s livestream. Her children could have been waving around samurai swords or painting the kitchen with Velveeta, and she wouldn’t have turned her head.
Lt. Daryl George was scheduled to kick off the APD press conference that afternoon. Lieutenant George would be joined by Detectives John Serrano and Leslie Tally. They would brief the media on Constance Wright’s death and the current investigation, take questions, and for the most part give the assembled reporters the runaround.
Rachel knew firsthand that killers often enjoyed surveying the aftermath of their handiwork. They liked to witness the destruction they’d wrought. There was a decent chance that whoever killed Constance Wright would be watching the press conference. In person. The FBI’s Crime Classification Manual divided killers into three groups: organized, disorganized, and mixed. Organized killers planned their crimes. They were thoughtful yet remorseless. Disorganized killers often killed due to passion or an uncontrollable urge. This killer was organized. He or she would take pride in their work. Which meant Rachel needed to be at that presser.
For a prominent victim like Constance Wright, information would be kept close to the vest. Rachel couldn’t rely on the morsels spoon-fed to the press, and even though Serrano and Tally seemed competent, she’d been fooled before and still had a distrust for law enforcement. She had to find the truth on her own.
“Mom!”
Rachel spun around, nearly spilling her coffee all over the laptop keyboard.
“What is it, hon?”
“Were you distracted?” said Megan, bounding down the stairs.
“Where did you learn that word?”
“Miss Wooster in homeroom told Alec Titus he was distracted because he was playing Candy Crush on his cell phone.”
“Alec Titus has a cell phone? He’s seven.”
Megan nodded.
“So . . . can I have—”
“Absolutely not. Wouldn’t want you to be distracted.”
Megan left in a huff and got on the school bus.
Eric came downstairs wearing headphones. Rachel motioned for him to take them off. He rolled his eyes but did so.
She gave her son a once-over and said, “Nebraska.”
“Lincoln.”
“Nevada.”
“Carson City.”
“OK, smart guy. Japan.”
Eric looked stymied. “We haven’t done foreign countries yet.”
“All right, Doogie Howser, we’ll hold off on other countries.”
“Who’s Doogie Howser?”
“Never mind. Have a good day, kiddo.”
She went to kiss him, but he ducked and sped out the front door.
Rachel watched Eric walk down the block, his shoulders hunched inward, hands in his pockets. When he was a boy, he’d been so carefree, confident, joyful. She hadn’t seen that Eric in a long, long time. Nearly seven years. But at least he no longer woke up screaming.
Rachel walked in the door of the Ruggiero & Barnes law firm at 8:57 a.m. While she waited for Steve Ruggiero to arrive, Rachel devoured everything she could about Constance Wright’s death and the life she’d led before she died at the foot of the Albertson Bridge.
Scouring old interviews and profiles of Constance Wright, Rachel learned she’d met Nicholas Harold Drummond at Harvard, where he’d run the 4 x 800. They’d split briefly after college, then reunited and married at twenty-eight before moving to Ashby. She’d won a seat on the Ashby City Council the following year.
Rachel clicked over to the Ashby Bulletin website. They’d run three pictures side by side on the home page:
1) Constance Wright graduating from Ashby High, beaming with a thousand-watt smile, golden tassels streaming from a red cap. Her curly reddish-brown hair gave her an even more youthful appearance.
2) Constance Wright and Nicholas Drummond standing outside the Apley Court dorm their freshman year at Harvard on a gorgeous, golden spring day. They had their hands stuffed in each other’s back pockets. They were an insufferably cute couple.
3) Constance at city hall taking the oath of office after being sworn in as the seventy-ninth mayor of Ashby and the youngest in the city’s history. Nicholas Drummond stood behind her, smiling. The caption read “The First Family of Ashby.”
Rachel looked at Nicholas’s smile. It seemed a little too wide, a little too forced. It seemed like the kind of smile worn by a man who didn’t take kindly to being overshadowed by his wife.
Rachel’s blood boiled as she read on. When Steve Ruggiero finally graced the office with his presence at 11:00 a.m., Rachel nearly snapped at him for breaking her concentration. He ripped off his boots and tossed them into the hallway, slush splashing onto Rachel’s legs.
“Hold my calls; think you can handle that?” he said, slamming the door before Rachel could answer. She took a tissue and wiped the gunk from her clothes.
She heard him lock his door. Rachel had seen Steve in plenty of foul moods but never cared enough to ask why. As long as she had health insurance and a W-2, she didn’t care if Steve Ruggiero came in with his hair on fire. She hated the job and certainly didn’t need the money, but if she lived as an unemployed single mother, people would ask questions.
A moment later, she heard Steve shouting. Then, at 11:30 a.m., four of the partners entered his office. They shouted at each other for the next two and a half hours before the partners left. Men. Always thinking they could fix their problems by raising the volume of their voice.
Then Steve came out and said, “I’m going to lunch. I may or may not be back today. Just reschedule the rest of my calls. Think you can handle that?”
Rachel
smiled sweetly and said, “I’ll do my best.”
If looks could kill, Steve’s remains would have fit inside a can of tuna.
He nodded, then left with a quickness that suggested he was concerned the world might run out of Grey Goose.
Once Steve was gone, Rachel pulled up the Ashby PD website.
The presser was to be held at Bauman City Hall in downtown Ashby. Bauman Hall had been named after Philip Bauman, Ashby’s fifty-sixth mayor, who had overseen the construction of the Albertson Bridge. To add insult to injury, following Constance Wright’s resignation, Deputy Mayor Alan Caldwell had awarded a $15 million contract to Magursky Construction, already owed millions by the Wright family, to repair and refurbish the bridge as its supports began to rust.
It was scheduled to begin at 3:00 p.m. Rachel checked her watch. 2:03. She could make it. She grabbed her coat and left the office quickly and quietly.
Detectives Serrano and Tally stood inside the foyer to Bauman Hall, preparing to face the mob. Bauman was a large red sandstone building four stories high with curved windows and brick steps that led to four two-story Ionic columns. The scaffolding had once been a pristine copper color but had deteriorated to green with corrosion over time. Waiting outside Bauman was a phalanx of reporters larger than any Serrano had ever seen in his tenure on the force. There were dozens of cameras and reporters and vans and satellite hookups, plus a horde of onlookers all cordoned off behind rope. In addition to the local crews, Serrano saw trucks from CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and NBC. Constance Wright’s death was a national story.
Lt. Daryl George would introduce the conference and briefly review the facts of the case and then turn it over to Serrano and Tally. Lieutenant George was fifty-nine but looked thirty-nine, which, since he was forty-three but looked fifty-three, made Serrano hate him. George woke up at 4:30 a.m. six days a week, swam fifty laps in the Olympic-sized pool at a local health club, didn’t drink, and ate only foods that came directly from the ground or an animal. Serrano joked that Lieutenant George ate only meat from animals raised on special organic resorts where they played squash and got hot stone massages while drinking kombucha and coconut water.
Lieutenant George had invited Serrano to work out with him one morning a few years back. After a few years of hitting the bottle a little too hard, Serrano agreed, figuring it was about time to whip himself back into shape. He met the lieutenant at his health club and squeezed into a pair of old swim trunks that had fit better fifteen pounds prior. Ten laps in, Serrano was reasonably sure he was going to die. Twenty laps in, he wished he had died.
And in the locker room, Serrano got to see George in all his glory: he had muscle definition no fiftysomething should possess. He’d slipped on an undershirt and liberally doused himself in Yves Saint Laurent cologne.
Lieutenant George wore that cologne every single goddamn day, and Serrano could smell him coming from down the block. Everything about the man was by the book, but there was a kindness behind the resolve. He’d scored a big payday by working as a technical adviser on one of those cop shows where every detective had impeccable hair and makeup. Serrano regularly worked sixteen-hour shifts, and there wasn’t enough hairspray and pancake makeup in the world to make him look TV ready. George drove a light-blue Chevy Camaro that other officers referred to behind his back as the Smurfmobile. But he was a good cop. Thirty-five years on the force. And Serrano would follow him into battle any day of the week.
Serrano walked up to the double-wide windows and peered out onto Tellyfair Green, a six-acre park outside Bauman Hall currently covered in a thick blanket of snow. Serrano could tell which TV crews were local based on how they dressed. Locals wore heavy knit gloves, thick, chunky scarves, and puffy jackets. The out-of-towners were decked out in Burberry coats and thin gloves that looked good on camera but had the insulation of toilet paper. They were the ones doing laps around their news vans to stay warm while the local reporters waited patiently for the presser to begin.
“This is already a madhouse,” Lieutenant George said. “This investigation is going to be watched very closely. It’s imperative that we keep things in-house. After today, I don’t want anyone talking to the media without my say-so.”
“We can’t help leaks from within the department,” Tally said. “Those news vans at the bridge the other night. Somebody in the department tipped them off.”
George nodded, sighed. “I’ve been dealing with that for twenty years. That’s why the flow of crucial information doesn’t go beyond the three of us.”
“You got it,” Serrano said.
“Constance Wright was a good woman,” Lieutenant George added. “She was a good mayor. The media loves a scandal. But beyond all that tabloid crap, she supported the department and gave us every resource we needed. She had friends on the force.”
“Constance Wright’s family had more enemies than Julius Caesar,” Serrano said. “A lot of powerful people lost a lot of money when the Wright Corporation went belly up.”
“And with Constance’s family either dead or disgraced, the debts passed to her,” Tally said. She looked at Lieutenant George. Her voice trembled with anger, remorse. “Why didn’t we do more? If she had friends on the force, where were we?”
“Beg your pardon?” George said.
“You said it yourself,” Tally replied. “She gave us everything we needed. Always had the department’s back. Did we have hers? Did we ever send a squad car to check on her after the town turned on her? No. And so she slipped through the cracks. We could have caught her, Lieutenant.”
Lieutenant George remained silent but bowed his head.
“Not everyone on the force was such a big fan of Constance Wright,” Serrano said.
“If you can’t keep your personal grudges out of this, Detective,” George said bluntly, “I’m happy to reassign this investigation.”
“You’ll have my best, sir,” Serrano replied. George nodded warily.
Serrano’s phone vibrated. He took it out and checked his email.
“We got Wright’s phone records from Verizon,” he said. He opened up the file and skimmed quickly, looking for the last batch of calls and texts prior to her death.
“Holy crap,” Serrano said.
“What is it?” George said.
“Guess the last two people Constance Wright called before she died.”
They waited. Finally Tally said, “You’re not actually going to make us guess, are you? OK, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.”
“Close. Nicholas Drummond and Samuel J. Wickersham.”
“Well, holy shit,” Tally said. “Her ex-husband and the kid she had the affair with? That’s better than my guess. Why in the hell would she be calling them? Drummond, maybe. Ex-husband, there are always issues to go over. Taxes and whatnot. But Wickersham? He ruined her.”
“Guess we’ll have to talk to Misters Drummond and Wickersham,” Serrano said.
Serrano showed Tally the call logs. “Look: both calls were only a couple of seconds long. Which means she either hung up or didn’t leave a message.”
Lieutenant George thumbed his chin, thinking. “Keep this from the press until we know more.”
“I would have believed this was a suicide in a heartbeat,” Tally said. “Her life is ruined, she pulls a J. D. Salinger recluse deal. The pregnancy . . . I still can’t wrap my head around that.”
“If not for that Marin woman,” Serrano said, “we just might have chalked this up to suicide.”
Tally said, “I think that Marin woman just got lucky.”
“Didn’t sound like luck to me,” Serrano replied. “The toenails, the tooth, those could all be chalked up as circumstantial. And she also knew it was Constance Wright before it was released to the public. Hector didn’t pick up on the wind trajectory and rate-of-fall stuff. Neither did Montrose or Beene.”
“She’s a civilian,” Tally said, curtly. “A nobody.”
Lieutenant George interrupted them. “Done chatting? Ready?”
“I think I see Anderson Cooper out there,” Tally said.
“Really?” Serrano said, perking up.
“No.”
“You’re a dick sometimes, Leslie.”
She smiled and took a bow.
Lieutenant George said, “Let’s get this circus started.”
The harsh wind bit into their faces as they opened the doors to Bauman Hall. Lieutenant George walked to the podium, jaw clenched. The severity of the situation was etched on his face. Serrano and Tally flanked George on either side. It was a bright afternoon, no shade. The sun reflected off the snow, making it hard to see the crowd. Serrano held his hands together in front of his stomach. At his first press conference, twelve years ago, Serrano had clasped his hands behind his back. He’d figured it would make him look stoic. Afterward, Lieutenant George had told him he’d looked like he’d needed to take a piss.
So from that day forward: hands folded in front.
They waited as Lieutenant George adjusted the microphone. Serrano had given press conferences before. But not like this. And not for people with the notoriety of Constance Wright. He’d never seen the press corps so quiet. They didn’t want to miss a word.
The wind blew east to west, meaning Serrano inhaled the lieutenant’s pungent cologne with every breath. Even for this, he had to smell like a French brothel.
“Thank you all for coming,” Lieutenant George began. “At 1:13 a.m. on the night of December eleventh, 911 dispatch received a call about the presence of a body at the base of the Albertson Bridge. Upon confirmation of the deceased, the Ashby PD forensics team, along with Detectives John Serrano and Leslie Tally, arrived at the scene to find the body of former mayor Constance Wright. According to early forensic analysis, Ms. Wright had been dead approximately two hours prior to the 911 call. Our hearts go out to the family and friends of Mayor Wright. She was a beloved member of our community, a true public servant, a woman who dedicated her life to Ashby. She loved this town with devotion and passion, and it saddens us to speak of her death at such an early age. At this point in time, we are treating Constance Wright’s death as nonaccidental.”