Beautiful Maids All in a Row

by Jennifer Harlow

  Luke looked down at his coffee uncomfortably, then back up at me. “You were very lucky to have found each other,” he said softly. “You should be thankful for the time you had together.”

  “I guess I’m just greedy,” I said. “I want more.”

  The waitress returned with two coffee cups. “Decided yet?”

  “Two chilis, please,” I told her.

  She scribbled it down and left us alone again.

  I looked down at my coffee with a sigh. I paused, then said, “Do you think he’d be upset I came back?”

  “No,” Luke answered. “He was so proud of you. Always. Anyone could see it.”

  “I didn’t deserve him,” I said. “I was a horrible wife, Luke.”

  “No, you weren’t.”

  “Marriage is supposed to be a partnership,” I said. “You’re supposed to take into consideration your partner’s feelings and fears. I know he was the butt of a lot of jokes at the hospital. It took a strong man to be married to a woman who could kill someone with her bare hands.” I shook my head. “All those jokes at parties about him being a Bureau wife. All the late nights with you. Putting off children when he was dying to have them. Why did he put up with it?”

  “Because he loved you.”

  “What good did it ever do him? All his support, and understanding, and love, and what’d I do? I betrayed him. I cheated on him! I got him killed! I—”

  Suddenly Luke grabbed my shoulders hard and squeezed so it was painful. “Listen to me once and for all,” he said, his voice as hard as his eyes. “Things happen, good and bad. You can’t control them, you can’t explain them, and you are not always responsible for them. What happened was a tragedy, but you can’t go back in time. It’s done. All you can do is learn from it and move on. The past is in the past; we’re in the here and now.”

  A spark of recognition ignited in my head. “What did you say?”

  “Move on,” Luke repeated. “Live for today.”

  I shook my head. “No, what did you say about the past? The exact quote.”

  He thought for a second. “I said, ‘The past is in the past; we’re in the here and now.’ Why?”

  My breath caught in my throat. “Where did you hear that phrase?”

  “I read it. It was in—”

  I leapt off my stool in excitement. “We have to go back! Now!”

  “Why?”

  “I KNOW WHO HE IS!”

  Everyone in the diner turned to look at the crazy lady. Ignoring them, I strode out of the restaurant into the warm night, running the two blocks and practically jumping through the metal detectors. Just as the elevator door opened, Luke entered the building, running to catch up with me. He jumped in just in time.

  Methuselah sat behind his desk reading a magazine when we stepped off the elevator. “Back so soon?”

  “Luke, sign us in,” I instructed as I ran over to my boxes.

  On the top of the pile of boxes was the one I’d been looking for earlier. I threw the lid off hard enough for it to go sliding across the floor. My adrenaline pumped so hard I probably could have thrown the lid across the Potomac if I’d wanted. I found the item of interest right on the top where I’d left it. I took it out, tossing it onto the table above me. If I remembered correctly, two boxes below had the same item in it, and as I tore through the box, I found out I was correct. I tore through Amanda’s and Patricia’s things, and tossed the same item on the table from each box. Both Luke and Methuselah stood to the side, watching me rifle through boxes like a woman possessed, which was exactly what I was. When the final item was found, I tossed it on the table with its companions.

  “Open them,” I commanded Luke.

  “You can’t open the evidence bags until the trial,” Methuselah chimed in.

  “Fine, I’ll open them.” I grabbed the first one and pulled off the seal, then did the same with the other three.

  “Iris, what…” Luke said as I opened the final one.

  I lined them up one by one in a row so they ran the length of the table. “Look,” I said.

  Four books, telling people to live in the here and now. Bestseller for over a year, on the bookshelves of over a quarter of America, including four brutally murdered women.

  And each one was inscribed with the handwritten words, “Best wishes on a bright here and now, Dr. Jeremy Shepherd.”

  Gotcha.

  Chapter 16

  “You are out of your mind,” Luke said.

  “The hell I am.”

  “Everyone has that book,” Luke said.

  I grabbed the nearest copy, shoving it in his face. “Each book was signed, which means he met every one of them.”

  “I met him too,” Luke said. “He came for a book signing at Barnes & Noble. I was there, but so were a hundred other people.”

  I tossed the book I held and picked up the one inscribed to Justine. The receipt still stuck out. “The one on E Street, right?” I handed him the receipt. “Justine was there too. She bought four picture books for Gabriel. What do you want to bet she was holding those books when she met him? It doesn’t take much to put two and two together. Books for a little boy equals has a little boy. He probably even asked her about them.”

  “He didn’t say anything to me when I met him.”

  “You’re not an attractive petite brunette without a wedding ring.”

  “That signing was three months ago. You really think he waited that long?”

  “Yeah, I do. He had to find out who she is and where she lives. That takes time.”

  “He only had a first name to go by. There are a lot of women named Justine or Audrey in the world.”

  “Maybe he asked them what they did for a living. It would narrow the field down considerably.”

  “It’d still take a lot of work to find them.”

  “The man I spoke to will do anything to get what he wants. He wanted them, and he did everything in his power to get them.”

  “There isn’t a book for Sarah Illes,” he pointed out. “We can’t prove he met her.”

  “She worked in New York, the same city I’d bet dollars to doughnuts Shepherd lives in. They could have met at a party or restaurant, I don’t know. Even though she didn’t have a—Wait!”

  I couldn’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner. I bent down and began digging through one of Audrey’s boxes. I remembered something else about The Now in there. There it was: a DVD with Dr. Shepherd’s catlike grin on the cover. I stood and handed it to Luke.

  “You said before that Audrey’s card was used at the flower shop, but the card was in her purse.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I saw one of his infomercials the other night. They were selling that DVD.”

  “So?”

  “The only way to get it is by ordering it through his company. You have to give them your credit card number. What do you want to bet the card that was used to buy this was the same one used to buy the roses?”

  “It’d be just another coincidence,” Luke said.

  “Yeah, but they’re adding up, aren’t they?”

  “Maybe,” Luke said. “But why use that card? If he does have access to thousands of numbers, why use hers?”

  “It’s another dare. He has to know we’d look at her bills for that card and mark the easiest ways to steal the number, namely Internet and telephone orders. Nothing this man does isn’t carefully planned out. He has contingencies to his contingencies, hence the gun he used to kill the ranger.”

  “Iris, this is just a lot of conjecture, barely even circumstantial. We can’t prove any of it.”

  “We can prove he met them at least. He was in all of their cities at some point in the past three months where he had direct contact with them. Hell, he even fits the profile to a T.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “He lives in New York, where the first two worked. He’s successful, fits the age bracket, is incredibly intelligent, has a job that allows him to move around, and h
e’s a fucking doctor!”

  “He’s a psychiatrist,” Luke said.

  “Exactly! They have to go through four years of medical school and a one-year internship at a hospital. And as a psychiatrist he has access to thiopental sodium.”

  “How? I thought it was an anesthesia.”

  “It’s also used in hypnosis. The man on the phone even told me that. He could easily acquire some and say it was for a legitimate reason.”

  “He doesn’t practice anymore,” Luke said. “I read it in People.”

  “Then we’ll find out how he got it.”

  Luke shook his head. “I don’t know, Iris.”

  I scoffed. “What more do you need?”

  “Something a little more solid than credit cards and guesswork.”

  “If this were anyone but the great guru Dr. Jeremy Shepherd, we would be on the first plane to New York.”

  “But it is him, and we can’t just pull in such a high-profile man and accuse him of killing six people. The man went to college with the governor of New York, for God’s sake!”

  “I don’t care if he’s Hillary fucking Clinton! It’s him! I feel it in my bones, Luke. And if you let me, I can prove it.”

  “And how exactly do you propose we go about doing that?”

  “I have no idea,” I admitted. “If you let me talk to him, maybe…”

  “No way. If the press finds out, he’ll sue us for libel and retreat into his lawyer. Besides, if he sees you, he could disappear or destroy evidence.”

  I thought for a moment. “Okay, we need to go through the archives and pull every article on him. We need to see his birth certificate, arrest record, articles of incorporation for his businesses, LUDs, credit card bills, everything. We should show his picture to Audrey’s son, see if he’s the man who approached him.”

  “The word of a five-year-old won’t hold up in court,” Luke said.

  “Worst it can do is prove me wrong. When we have enough evidence, circumstantial or not, we go in for the kill.”

  “We have to be a hundred percent sure before we interview him.”

  “I know. And even then…” I sighed. “We have a lot of work to do. You need to call in everyone so we can sift through his life.”

  “When I tell everyone who we’re looking into they’re gonna laugh. Reggie might not even go for it.”

  “When we present him with the evidence,” I said, gesturing to the books, “he’ll have no choice. Besides, Shepherd is just a person of interest. We’re not arresting him. Yet. Shepherd won’t even know.”

  “Let’s keep it that way.” Luke looked down at the open books laid out. He closed the covers one by one. “You go through these boxes again and pull out anything connected. I’ll call everyone in and begin the search.”

  “You should send his picture to Richmond and have them go around to all the hotels to see if he stayed there in the past week.”

  “Until we have something more substantial, I don’t want even a chance for the press to get wind of this. We can’t take the chance someone will call them.”

  “Okay, but it’s bound to happen sometime.”

  “I know, but let’s delay the inevitable as long as we can.” He sighed. “If you’re wrong, we could be in some pretty serious shit.”

  “You said it yourself: I’m never wrong.”

  Chapter 17

  For a day and a half I ate, slept, and drank Jeremy Arthur Shepherd, M.D. I even knew his shoe size—a size twelve, just like the footprints at all the murder scenes. Damn, was I good.

  The good doctor was born at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York City forty-six years prior, to Laurence and Louisa Crowe-Shepherd. Louisa was heiress to Crowe Hardware Stores, the sixth-biggest chain in America. A working woman before it was fashionable, Louisa was the chairwoman and CEO of Crowe Inc. Laurence’s job, it seemed, was to sit on the board of directors and do what his wife instructed him to do, earning a generous monthly allowance for this honor. When Jeremy was just a boy of three, poor Laurence was killed in a drowning accident at the family’s summerhouse in the Hamptons. Nobody even reported him missing. A local found his body washed up two days later. It was after his father’s death that the boy began to stutter, but with thousands of dollars and a lot of patience, that problem went away a few years later.

  Jeremy’s youth was fortunate, only the best. He attended Westmont, one of the best private schools in New York, receiving high marks in every subject. He was even crowned New York’s top speller after winning the state spelling bee at age seven. In the summers Jeremy would accompany his cousins and uncle on his father’s side to the family cabin in the Catskills, the same one he owns today. His mother never went with her son, instead staying behind to work.

  As Shepherd grew into a man, he became more and more hostile. At age eleven, Shepherd was expelled from Westmont for attacking a fellow student with a pencil, blinding the boy in one eye. No charges were filed, but Louisa put the boy into therapy, which must have ignited his love of the human mind. For seven years Shepherd saw Dr. Carl Waverly, and the doctor was instrumental in getting him into the Yale School of Medicine after Princeton. He was also the only one who helped him through the worst time of the young boy’s life.

  One April day when Shepherd was twelve, Louisa neglected to look both ways while crossing Madison Avenue and was hit by an oncoming ambulance. The now orphaned Jeremy was sent to live with his uncle, aunt, and four cousins a few blocks away. After his mother’s death, Shepherd became a model student and man with no known problems or crimes, though several pets in and around his building were reported missing during his period of residence. The police never questioned him. In high school, he was the president of his class, the lead in several school plays, and captain of the tennis team. Almost every page in his yearbook had a smiling Jeremy Shepherd on it. After graduating as the class valedictorian, Shepherd went on to Princeton as a Pre-Med student. Having no interest in the family business, at age eighteen he sold Crowe Inc. for $50 million.

  Princeton apparently suited the attractive young millionaire. Besides winning three state tennis championships, Shepherd was the president of Phi Kappa Psi, the prestigious fraternity. The only bump in Shepherd’s road came during his third year, when Shepherd was accused of raping a freshman—a brunette freshman—at a frat party. Melissa Joy contacted the police and campus security the day after the attack. Shepherd denied the accusation. The campus rallied around their golden boy and the day after Shepherd was interviewed, Melissa dropped the charges. She returned a week later to Des Moines, and six months later she committed suicide. After her death, it was found that her bank account contained upwards of $50,000. Shepherd graduated Princeton a year later and went on to Yale, where he became a doctor of psychiatry.

  After Yale, Shepherd returned to New York to join Dr. Waverly’s practice, occasionally donating his services pro bono to Bellevue and other psychiatric hospitals. At age thirty-seven Shepherd broke out on his own, opening the Shepherd Clinic, which offered mental health care to indigent families. There were eighteen such clinics across New York State, with more expected. Then at age forty, Shepherd wrote a moderately successful book entitled The Staircase of the Mind. Dealing with the five stages of grief, it instructed a person how to move on after the death of a loved one. My mother actually gave me that book after Hayden died. I tossed it in the trash with the rest of the self-help books.

  Dr. Shepherd devoted his life to those clinics, often working six days a week. He did find the time for a social life, though. Considered one of New York’s most eligible bachelors for over ten years in a row, Dr. Shepherd dated socialites, models, and actresses, all of whom were leggy, blond Amazons. He was currently living with former aerobics instructor Diana Hall, age twenty-six. The couple met at a party thrown by Donald Trump two years before. She came with rocker Lenny Kravitz and left with Dr. Jeremy Shepherd. A month later, she was living in his Park Ave penthouse.

  Live in the Now came out around the same time S
hepherd met Diana. For the first six months it did poorly, selling only ten thousand copies. But after he hit a few national shows, and threw millions of dollars into advertising, the sales skyrocketed into the millions. At last count, over ten million copies had been sold in America alone. Shepherd began to travel around the world, giving seminars on how to “live in the now” at fifty bucks a pop. The companion book on embracing second chances and the journal to monitor the readers’ progress came out later. Shepherd Inc, which sold the books, cassette tapes, and DVDs, was estimated to be worth upwards of $20 million, all of which went to support the Shepherd clinics and various other charities.

  When he wasn’t doing infomercials and seminars or popping into his various clinics, Jeremy enjoyed spending time at his cabin in the Catskills. His hobbies included hang gliding, white-water rafting, hunting, bungee jumping, and rock climbing. The only run-ins with the law since college had involved speeding: he’d racked up $10,000 in speeding tickets for driving his Porsche over a hundred miles per hour on the interstate numerous times. Besides the need for speed, Dr. Jeremy Shepherd was a man among men. He should have been canonized a saint for all his good works.

  The more I found out about the acclaimed Dr. Shepherd, the less confident I grew about being able to convict him for littering, let alone six murders. Who in their right mind would have thought the man could be responsible for raping, killing, and cutting up women?

  Me, that’s who. I was in a very tiny minority, though.

  After Luke called everyone in that night and laid out my theory about our suspect, I could see a few snickering faces in the back, mainly Roth and Liu. The rest seemed a little bewildered, as if we were accusing the President of these crimes. Whether or not they believed, though, their superior had assigned them a job, and they went to it. By the next day we had copies of Shepherd’s birth certificate, school records, arrest records, tax returns, insurance papers, articles of incorporation, and every press clipping from his birth announcement to the charity event he attended the night we began looking. The credit card bills we subpoenaed were disconcerting. His card was used in Samsonville in the Catskills at Percy’s Market three times during the time he was supposed to be stalking the women in D.C. and Richmond. Without interviewing the owner of the market—Lamb strictly forbade any interviews—there was no way to know if Shepherd was the one to use the card. But Andrew Burke picked Shepherd out of a photo array without hesitation. And the cherry on top was the Browning nine-millimeter registered to Shepherd, the same type used to kill Bruce McIntyre. Still, it wasn’t good enough for Lamb.