by Carrie Smith
Codella’s forehead was a twisted map of confusion. Finally she continued, “I need to know what this has to do with your taking Philip Graves’s keys.”
Susan remembered slipping Philip’s keys out of his pocket and into her own on Wednesday night while Rose and Roger weren’t looking. “Philip knew my secret. He had evidence. I wanted that evidence back. That’s all. I had nothing to do with his death. In fact, I hoped against hope that I could revive him—if only to demand his silence in exchange for saving his life. But I also knew that if he didn’t survive, I couldn’t let those documents fall into other hands.”
Codella’s eyes narrowed. “Those words sound well-rehearsed, Doctor.”
“Maybe so, but I assure you, they’re the truth.” Susan glared into the detective’s skeptical face. “I did not kill that man—although I’m hardly sorry to see him gone.”
“When did you find out he knew about you?”
“A week ago. He sent me an e-mail asking me to meet him at a diner. His note read, ‘Does your husband know?’” Susan recalled reading the note several times. “I’m sure he meant to frighten me.”
“And you went to meet him?”
“What else could I do?”
“What happened at that meeting?”
“He pushed some papers across the table—my entire case study written by the Johns Hopkins doctors.” Susan recalled skimming the dense typed pages that described her condition in the terms of a far less enlightened era and detailed every surgical procedure in her “successful” reconstruction. “He watched me read. I’ll never forget his triumphant little smile as he sat there sipping his black coffee. When I couldn’t bear to read any more, I pushed the pages back at him, and he said, ‘No, keep them, Susan. They’ll remind you of the agreement we’re about to make.’”
“What agreement was that?”
“Philip promised never to print another copy of those documents, not to reveal my secrets and destroy my life in the process, if I cooperated with him.”
“By doing what?”
“By voting against Peter Linton’s cemetery proposal.”
“But why? Why was that so important?”
“Because he wanted to use the church to take revenge on his wife. His ex-wife, I mean.”
“Revenge for what?”
“For ruining his life,” Susan explained. “His wife divorced him and walked away from their marriage with the apartment they’d bought together. She fell in love with someone else. He was a very bitter man.”
“But how did his revenge rest on defeating that proposal?”
“Peter’s cemetery plan would have solved the church’s fiscal crisis,” Susan explained, “and Philip didn’t want the crisis resolved that way. He wanted the vestry to approve the sale of our air rights. You see, he’d made a side deal with a developer. He was going to get an insider price on a high-floor luxury co-op in one of the developer’s other buildings.”
“He admitted this to you?”
Susan nodded. “He was feeling pretty full of himself in the diner that night. He knew I couldn’t blow the whistle on him. He told me how he’d run into his wife and her new husband a few months earlier in the bread line at the uptown Fairway. I could feel his rage as he described the encounter. I’m not a psychologist, but if you ask me, all his insecurity, bitterness, and jealousy coalesced in that chance meeting, and he became determined never to feel small again in her eyes. I think he was desperate to win back the status she’d stripped from him, and he used his scholarly expertise to devise a plan. It’s ironic, when you think about it. Philip used to lecture everyone about the dangers of tyranny. And it turns out he was the tyrant in our midst. He was making St. Paul’s into his own little puppet state.”
“And Roger Sturgis was being blackmailed too?”
“I can’t think of another reason why he’d vote against the proposal. Peter’s plan was solid. Vivian supported it, and Roger is married to Vivian’s niece.”
Codella didn’t speak for several seconds. “That still doesn’t explain why you gave the keys to Roger,” she finally broke the silence. “You’d spent years hiding from everyone. Why suddenly trust someone else with the truth? Why didn’t you go to Graves’s apartment yourself?”
Susan had second-guessed this decision over and over since Wednesday night. She recalled how she’d clasped Roger’s hand in both of hers and passed him the ring of keys after Philip was pronounced dead. “I knew there was very little time to search his apartment before the police went in there. I know myself well, Detective, and although I had the nerve to lift those keys from Philip’s pocket, I knew I didn’t have what it took to break into his apartment. But I believed Roger did.”
“And did Roger go there? Did he find those documents?”
“I don’t know.” She remembered Roger’s words yesterday. Don’t call me again. I’ll call you. But he hadn’t called her. She watched Codella type notes into her iPhone. “I know what I did was wrong, Detective, and I’m sorry. I really am. But I felt so desperate. My husband—I—”
Codella cut her off. “Did you go to Philip’s apartment a day or two before the vestry meeting to talk to him? Did you drink a glass of wine in his apartment?”
“Me? Why would I do that?”
Codella was watching her closely. “We have some evidence—some trace evidence—that may help us in our case. Are you willing to give us your fingerprints and a buccal swab so we can confirm that you don’t match this evidence?”
Susan massaged the base of her neck. “I don’t see any reason not to, but I’ll need to speak to my lawyer first.”
“You mean Peter Linton?”
“Peter? Peter’s not my lawyer.”
She watched the detective’s eyes narrow in concentration. “How do you suppose Philip Graves got the information he used to bribe you?”
“I wish I knew. The records he showed me were decades old. They wouldn’t have been easy to come by. Because of my condition, of course, I take hormones, and I have certain screenings on a regular basis. If someone hacked into my current medical files, and if they were at all suspicious or medically astute, I suppose those clues might have sent them on a deeper dive. But they would’ve had to go into very old digitized hospital archives. I think whoever did that had far better technology skills than Philip had.”
Codella leaned forward in a way that signaled her understanding. “You mean you think someone helped him.”
CHAPTER 56
Michael walked Muñoz to the door. Before Muñoz turned to go, he pointed to the boxes in the living room. “Don’t you think you should unpack your things before I get home?”
“I’ll have to move some of your things to make room in the closet.”
“I guess you will.” Muñoz leaned in and kissed him good-bye.
A shift change had occurred in the Bellevue ER since yesterday evening. A nurse told Muñoz that Stephanie Lund had been transferred to the medical intensive care unit on the second floor. Muñoz found his way there, showed his shield to an ICU nurse, and asked to speak to Stephanie’s doctor.
“Dr. Varghese is the attending. He hasn’t started morning rounds yet. I’ll see if I can track him down for you.” The nurse picked up a phone. A minute later she said, “He’ll be here in a few moments.”
Varghese was a tall, slim Indian man with an affable smile. “I’ll need permission from the family to speak to you, Detective,” he said apologetically. “The parents have been here since late last night. They’re in the ICU waiting room. Why don’t we go and see if they’ll give me permission.”
Muñoz followed Varghese to a small room where a middle-aged man and woman sat on a couch holding hands. Muñoz introduced himself.
“You’re the detective investigating what happened to Stephanie?” the mother asked.
“I’m one of them,” answered Muñoz.
“Who did this?” demanded the father, a stocky man with puffy bags under his eyes.
“We’re trying to
figure that out, Mr. Lund. And it would help me greatly if I could ask Dr. Varghese some questions. Would you mind giving him your permission to speak with me?”
“We want to hear too,” said the father.
“Of course,” Muñoz said as he turned to the doctor. “We need to know how long Stephanie was lying in her apartment. If we can narrow the window of time when the attack could have occurred, it might help us figure out who could have done this.”
“You have a suspect?” interrupted the father.
“Not yet,” Muñoz answered patiently. He turned back to Varghese. “We know she was alive and well until just after three o’clock early yesterday morning when we finished questioning her at the church. We assume she went straight home, but we can’t be certain, of course. The last cell phone call she received was on Wednesday evening—before she arrived at the church—and the last call she made from that phone was earlier in the day. The question is, how long after she left St. Paul’s did someone go to her apartment?”
Varghese opened the medical file he’d carried to the waiting room. He glanced at the scribbled notes, closed it, and thought for a moment. “Her CPK level was high.”
“CPK?”
“It’s a protein that leaks into the blood when there’s a muscular injury—from a fall, from dehydration, or from being on the floor too long. We see high CPK levels all the time in elderly patients who fall and aren’t found for many hours. They lie in the same position so long that the skin breaks down. I’d have to guess that Stephanie was lying in one place without food or water for at least twelve hours.”
The mother’s sudden sob echoed the anguish of Emily Flounders’s daughter, Martha, on Wednesday night. Muñoz turned and apologized to the couple. “I’m sorry to have intruded on you at such a terrible time.” He thanked Varghese, left the room, and waited for the doctor to emerge. They walked to the other end of the corridor before Muñoz asked his last question. “What’s her prognosis?”
The doctor’s expression was grim. “She stopped breathing shortly after she was brought in. She went into cardiac arrest, and we resuscitated her in the absence of a DNR. She’s had one flat-line EEG, and she has no evidence of brain activity on physical examination. It’s wait and see for the moment, Detective, but I think we know where this is headed.”
Muñoz did. Stephanie Lund was about to be homicide number three.
CHAPTER 57
Todd was at the sink when Anna entered the kitchen. The faucet was running, and his professional juicer was spinning. She stared at his back while he plunged two fat carrots down the feed chute. Orange-brown liquid spilled from the spout. He turned and glanced at her clergy collar with a look that suggested he found it sexually repellent. He covered his disgust with a feigned smile. “You want some juice? Apple, celery, carrot, and cilantro.”
“No.” She pulled out a chair at the table and sat.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “Let me fix you one. It’s a great combination. You’ll feel better.” He pushed three stalks of celery down the chute and the juicer’s motor roared. He poured a glass of the liquid and sipped it. “Mmmm. Here, try it.” He held it out.
She pushed the glass away. Did he seriously think his juice concoction could compensate for betrayal? Was he going to pretend the police didn’t think he was a suspect?
He came behind her chair and kneaded her shoulders. But his thumbs dug too forcefully into her muscles. He wasn’t in tune with how her body reacted to touch. She pulled away. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Relaxing you,” he answered in a specious tone. “Why didn’t you come to bed last night?”
“You have to ask me that?”
He returned to the sink.
She went to the refrigerator, pulled out a block of cheddar, and set it on a small cutting board. She took a knife from the rack and returned to her chair. “I can’t be married to you anymore.” She unwrapped the cheese.
“What?”
“You heard me.” She cut a thin slice that curled toward the cutting board.
“You’re just distraught over what’s happened at the church.”
Anna squinted, holding the knife in front of her. “Do you ever notice how often you tell me how I’m feeling? You have absolutely no idea what I think or feel.”
“Maybe not. But I know when you’re acting like a child.”
“I’m not the child in this relationship. You are. That’s why you lost your job. You couldn’t take any criticism. And what are you doing about it? Surfing the Internet. Running out to Starbucks for your so-called networking meetings. Fucking around with Stephanie Lund.”
He stared at her.
“Your little episode at the police station yesterday only confirmed what I already suspected. I’m not blind, Todd. If you were actually going to job interviews as often as you claimed, you’d have a job by now,” she said. “It’s been nine months. Nine months. And you’ve got skills companies kill for.”
“It’s a shitty economy.”
“Really? Because according to NPR, the unemployment rate is declining. You know what I think? You don’t want a job. You want to breeze in and out of here and have your little affairs while I do all the work.”
“I didn’t marry a priest,” said Todd. “I married a business major. I didn’t sign up to be the ‘first husband’ of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.”
Anna set the knife on the table and looked him squarely in the eyes. “My role at that church is important to me, Todd. It gives my life meaning. And if you loved me, you would want that for me.” She felt both powerful and terrified saying this. Power, it occurred to her, came with facing your terror and discovering that it wouldn’t destroy you. “You’ve never supported what I wanted.”
“I married a woman who wanted to spend her time with me—to hike and go mountain biking and—”
“And whatever else you like to do.” Anna finished the sentence for him. “But people change, Todd. They develop different needs, and if you love someone, if you really love them, then you make room for their change.”
Todd’s cold eyes glared at her, and she allowed herself to feel the full force of his resentment. When she was certain that no residual warmth accompanied his rancor, she spoke. “For the past four years, I’ve pretended our relationship was healthy and happy. I even gave birth to a child to convince myself we were meant to stay together. And it’s all because I was too ashamed to admit—to myself and to this congregation—that my marriage is a failure.” Hot tears spilled over the rims of her lower eyelids and rolled down her cheeks, but she didn’t wipe them away. Let him see her shame. “But I won’t hide the truth anymore, Todd. I’m no more perfect than any of my parishioners, and you know what? That’s all right. In fact, it’s liberating. I feel relieved knowing that I won’t have to be the person you punish daily rather than accepting responsibility for your own failures.”
His face tightened. “I wouldn’t have had an affair in the first place if you hadn’t been completely infatuated with Philip Graves.”
Anna picked up the knife and waved it in front of his face. “Don’t try to turn this around on me. You’re the one who was shoving your dick where it doesn’t belong. And an hour from now, I have to go and console your little girlfriend’s parents and pray over her comatose body on life support. I just hope to God you’re not the one who put her in that coma.”
“How can you even suggest that?” he hissed.
“How can I not?” she answered.
“I’m your husband. I’m the father of your child, Anna. You need to stand by me.”
“Stand by you?” She laughed until he took the knife from her hand in one swift movement, tossed it on the counter, grabbed her wrists, and pulled her close.
“You need to stand by me,” he said again. “We need to get through this together, and then we can talk about the future.”
Anna tried to wriggle free, but he held her wrists tighter.
“Are you with me, Anna?”
She was about to say no, but the look in his eyes made her stop.
“Are you with me?”
“Let go of me, Todd.”
“You don’t want them to know about your affair with Philip, do you?”
“I didn’t have an affair with Philip.”
“They’ll think you did. And you’ll never get another parish, you know. Are you with me, Anna?” His artificially gentle voice sounded so chilling that she froze, and an icy comet’s tail of fear streaked down her spine.
She finally jerked her arm free. “I have to take Christopher to preschool.” Did he notice the trembling of her voice? “And then I’m going to the hospital.”
CHAPTER 58
Haggerty stared at his computer screen. Roger Sturgis’s credit score was near perfect. He had an American Express Centurion Card—the infamous “black card”—as well as a Visa and MasterCard with large credit limits. He paid his monthly balances on time and in full. He had no mortgage or other personal loans, and he’d never filed for personal bankruptcy or been foreclosed on. Why, Claire wanted Haggerty to find out, had Michigan Avenue Ford in Dearborn, Michigan, run a credit report on him yesterday? Unless Haggerty went straight to Roger Sturgis, there was only one way to get the answer.
He tapped the dealership telephone number into his cell phone. A recorded message offered him the extensions for new car sales, used car sales, and the service department. He selected new car sales, and a man’s too-chipper voice answered, “Michigan Avenue Ford. This is Bill Price.”
“Good morning, Mr. Price.” Haggerty tried to keep all traces of New York out of his voice. “Are you by any chance the salesman my buddy Roger Sturgis spoke to yesterday?”
“Who?”
“I guess not,” said Haggerty. “My friend Roger was in there yesterday. Can you tell me who helped him buy a car?”
“Hang on.” The salesman placed him on hold. When he came back a minute later, he said, “I’m transferring you.”
Then another enthusiastic voice said, “Jim Johnston. What can I do for you?”