The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  “You mean he’d force himself on you.”

  “Well, yeah, in a way. But it was more complicated than that. Because some of the time I was into it. There was like this flip point where it became a turn-on.”

  Carolyn doesn’t mean to frown, doesn’t mean to judge, but her anger must be showing through her eyes, for Beth suddenly turns away, ashamed.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she says. “I’m sick. But you wanted the truth and that’s the truth. I know it wasn’t healthy. Some relationships are based on trust. Ours happened to be based on distrust.”

  “But it didn’t start out that way.”

  “No. No, it didn’t. Or maybe it did and I just didn’t realize it.”

  “Why didn’t you leave him? Why didn’t you find another guy?”

  “Well, part of me was fearful of what he’d do if I did leave. He’d put spyware on my phone and he had someone following me.”

  “He had someone following you?”

  “Sometimes. And the rest he did through technology.”

  “Did you report it to the police?”

  “No. I didn’t really have any proof he’d done anything. He wouldn’t hit me or anything. We didn’t have big shouting matches and domestic disputes. I mean, a lot of the time, he pretended everything was fine.”

  “So, what was your plan? To let this go on indefinitely?”

  “No, I’d given myself a deadline to figure things out.”

  “What date was that?”

  “June third. My birthday.”

  “Was there a prenup?”

  “No.”

  “He didn’t try to get you to sign one?”

  “I refused.”

  “So he asked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he have his lawyer draw up papers?”

  “No, it didn’t get that far. I just said I wasn’t signing anything. It was his idea to get married, not mine. I mean, here I was marrying this guy who’d been my fiancé’s close friend, plus all the circumstances of the accident and he wants a prenup for me to get on board. I don’t think so. Fuck that.”

  “Well, I could see how he might not trust you completely.”

  “Sure.”

  “Sure, what?”

  “Sure, he might be concerned. But I was committed. Really, I was. But that meant that he needed to be, too.”

  “Okay. I’m not sure what exactly that means, but it’s good. Say it just like that. Because right about now Madden is going to ask you something like, ‘Well, Ms. Hill, how much was Mark worth when you married him?’” She pauses, waiting for an answer, but when it doesn’t come, she says, “Did he tell you how much he was worth?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “How much do you think he was worth when you got married?”

  “I don’t know. Not that much. Somewhere north of twenty million.”

  Carolyn lets out a little laugh. “Not that much?”

  “For around here, no.”

  “And if you were to get divorced, how much did you expect to walk away with?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t really think about it.”

  Was he worth more to her dead or alive? Carolyn thinks. That’s something she’s sure the detectives and Crowley’s office would be looking at. It depends on the will, of course—and any life insurance policy. But if she can show that it was in her best interest to keep him alive and just divorce him, that will help eliminate her motive—or at least reduce it considerably.

  “You’re wondering about his will, aren’t you?” Beth reads her mind, which feels a little eerie.

  “Yes. Did he have one?”

  “We both did.”

  “And do you know where you stand?”

  “He said I would be ‘taken care of.’ That’s all he said. We didn’t discuss it much.”

  “And what about a life insurance policy?”

  “I don’t know. He never mentioned it. I just said that if he didn’t want me to work that I needed my own bank account and I needed two hundred thousand dollars put into it at the beginning of each year. That was my main concern.”

  “An allowance?”

  “You could call it that. But I really saw it as my salary. He wanted me to work for him.”

  “At the office?”

  “At being Mrs. McGregor. I was expected to support him. You know, I used to have a fairly prominent role at a nonprofit called Jumpstart. They organize volunteers from nearby colleges and schools—students—to go in and read to little kids who come from homes where their parents never read to them. It really makes a big difference in their lives. I was the West Coast regional director.”

  “I thought you were in wine sales.”

  “I was. When I met Richie. But frankly, it’s not the best job to have when you’re depressed. At the end, I was doing some consulting for the Idaho Wine Commission to help try to popularize Idaho wines, and let’s just say I was educating myself to the product a little too much.”

  “Idaho has wine?”

  “Yeah, it’s called Sawtooth. Quite good in fact. They were more known for their whites but have been doing some nice reds lately. Anyway, Mark finally said, enough, you can help organize fund-raisers and we’ll give money, but it’s ridiculous for you to be working full-time for seventy thousand a year. He was right. It didn’t make much sense. Except I need to work, for my own good. But he didn’t really understand what it meant to me. I ended up resenting the fact that he didn’t want me to work.”

  “Okay, so if I’m to understand this correctly, you basically didn’t like your husband much anymore.”

  “It was a bit more complicated than that.”

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Well, imagine it like this. You’re hooked on a drug. And that drug is incredibly intense and wonderful for about twenty minutes. It’s awesome. But the side effect, the hangover, whatever you want to call it, is just brutal. It lasts days. You know the ratio is off. And part of you hates yourself for knowing it and still doing it. But then the other part, that part that can’t forget the twenty minutes, keeps you coming back. Does that make any sense?”

  Carolyn nods, wincing a little as she does. There may be something to work with there but it would take serious sculpting. The word “unconventional” popped into her head. Ms. Hill and and Mr. McGregor had an unconventional relationship. Where do you go from there? How much do you say? Christ.

  “Okay,” she says. “We’re going to have to get all this down to shorter responses. But let’s move on to Richie for a minute. Why don’t you tell me about your more recent interactions with him. You said you’d spoken to him a few times after he got out of prison.”

  “Yes, twice altogether on the phone. And then I saw him yesterday.”

  Carolyn blinks. At first, she doesn’t think she’s heard right. Did she say yesterday?

  “Excuse me. Yesterday? Is that what you said?”

  “Yes. I saw him yesterday. I gave him his engagement ring back. I figured he could use the money.”

  Carolyn is stunned. “Is there some reason you didn’t tell me this last night? Is there some reason you didn’t mention that to the police?”

  “I wasn’t thinking incredibly clearly last night. And they never asked me specifically when the last time I’d seen him in person was.”

  Carolyn puts her hand across her face. Feeling a headache coming on, she briefly kneads her right temple with her thumb. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me, she thinks, remembering something Cogan had once told her about how certain patients wouldn’t always tell him exactly what was wrong when he first started examining them. After going through a whole battery of questions and getting poked and prodded, the patient would casually mention that he or she had some pain or symptom that made it obvious what their real problem was. Cogan called it the oh-I-forgot-to-tell-you moment. This is clearly one of those moments.

  “I’m sorry,” Beth says. “I just couldn’t handle it. Imagine you wish something and
it actually comes true. But it’s a bad thing—a really bad thing. I felt horrible.”

  Carolyn lets her hand drop from her face. “Look, you should know something. I was going to tell you this after we spoke but I’ll tell you now. I just got a call this morning from Detective Madden. He says they arrested Richie last night on suspicion of murder. They have some evidence he was in your garage last night.”

  Beth doesn’t react. She doesn’t seem surprised. She just lowers her head, then closes her eyes for a moment, as if she’s taking a moment to make a silent prayer.

  “You don’t seem surprised by that,” Carolyn says.

  “He didn’t do it,” Beth says. “He wouldn’t have.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because when I saw him yesterday I didn’t just see him. I didn’t just give him his ring back.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I slept with him.”

  If Beth’s first admission has left her stunned, the latest one leaves aghast. Her mouth hangs open.

  “You had sex with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where? At your home?”

  “No. We went to a place.”

  “What place?”

  “Watercourse Way.”

  Watercourse Way. She’s heard of it. It rings a bell. A motel? No. Not a motel, a …

  “You mean that spa place in Palo Alto? On Channing?”

  “Yeah. You can rent a room out. You know, with a hot tub.”

  “Christ.”

  “I know,” Beth says.

  Carolyn stares straight ahead, lost in thought. She’s trying to figure out how she can spin that one. She looks at her watch. They’re supposed to be at the police station in ninety minutes. There’s no way she can prep her in time. Not with all this. And now she wonders whether Beth should be saying anything at all. For the first time, she feels like she may need some help. She thinks of calling Clark.

  “Do you know if Richie told them anything?” Beth asks.

  She looks at her. She hadn’t considered that. What had Richie said?

  “No, I don’t.”

  Beth’s expression changes. Suddenly, she seems helpless and terrified all over again. Her lip trembles a little as she speaks. “I’m sorry. I should have said something earlier. They’re going to think I’m lying now, aren’t they? They’re going to think I had something to do with it.”

  Carolyn puts her arm around her shoulders. For a second she feels as if she’s her friend. But if she were her friend, she’d probably toss off some throwaway line like Pam had earlier. Everything is going to okay. We’ll get through this.

  But instead she says:

  “Well, I can see why you called me now.”

  15/ SEDITION

  LOCATED IN THE FOOTHILLS OF SOUTHERN SAN MATEO A FEW MILES from where the 92 freeway intersects the 280 freeway, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Forensic Laboratory and Coroner’s Office is a 30,000-square-foot modern one-story warehouse-like structure that, back when it opened in 2003, was heralded as the greenest building the county had ever built. Whenever Madden sees it now, he thinks it’s something out of the shelter magazines that his wife, who’s developed an alarming interest in interior design, keeps bringing home. It has solar panels splayed out across nearly its entire sloped roof, eco-friendly bamboo flooring, energy-efficient lab equipment, and large windows that have been designed to flood the open workspaces inside with natural light.

  Since it’s a Saturday morning, just a handful of people are in a building that normally houses close to forty full-time employees, and the parking lot is practically empty. Lyons is waiting for him on the steps leading up to the main entrance, wearing a white lab coat and smoking a cigarette. Madden manages a smile as he gets out of his car.

  “You got here quick,” Lyons says.

  Typically, it takes a good twenty to twenty-five minutes to get here from the Menlo Park police station in light traffic, but Madden has made it in around fifteen.

  “Saturday morning,” he says. “No one’s on the roads.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “When did you get in?”

  “Around seven.”

  Lyons takes a long drag on the cigarette, turns his head upward, and exhales hard through pursed lips, watching the tight stream of smoke blow away with the wind. The strong breeze plays with the ropes on the flagpole at the entrance of the building, pounding against the metal rod with a discordant, percussive clang. An enormous American flag flies overhead, fluttering noisily.

  Madden pops his trunk and removes the evidence bags, which are stacked neatly on top of one another.

  “What you got for me?” he asks.

  “Shoes, laptop, couple of diver’s knives, some other personal effects,” Madden says.

  “How’d the apartment look?”

  “Neat.”

  Lyons takes another drag, then taps the tip of his cigarette on the pavement, killing it gently. After inspecting the tip, he sticks the stunted cigarette into his white lab-coat pocket, stands up, and takes the top two evidence bags from Madden, leaving him with the bag containing the laptop.

  “Come on,” he says. “I have something to show you.”

  He takes Madden inside. A Hispanic-looking woman security guard waves them past the front desk. They walk down a hallway, pass through a cubicle area, then proceed through another hallway, where they pass a door marked Chemicals Lab, followed by the ballistics testing area, and finally they reach the forensics lab. Because this is where they process DNA evidence for severe crimes and perform autopsies, security is tight. Lyons swipes his ID card through the scanner and the door buzzes open.

  “You haven’t been here for a while, have you?” he asks Madden as he places the plain brown evidence bags down on a counter. Each bag is sealed with tape and has an evidence description and “chain of custody” label affixed to the side, which Madden has filled out with the required information.

  “Not since the Hughes case,” Madden says.

  The lab room looks a lot like a high school or science lab. The black tables are high so you can stand at them, and tall swivel chairs are parked at the half dozen or so work stations, most of them with white coats hanging over the backrests. There are microscopes and other testing equipment on some of the tables and various bottles of chemicals perched on shelves around the room. Each work area has a special overhead light attached to an adjustable arm and track, but there is plenty of natural light streaming into the room.

  “They never prosecuted anybody on that one, did they?” Lyons says, starting to enter the numbers on the bags into the computer.

  “No. Crowley didn’t like the percentages. And no one seemed to care too much.”

  Early last year a drug dealer and general scumbag named Louis Ramos had been shot outside his home in the Belle Haven section of Menlo Park. No witness came forward and the subsequent month-long investigation yielded almost no information. Then they had a little break. Burns learned that Hughes had gotten into an altercation with a former girlfriend’s current boyfriend a few days before the slaying. Harsh words were exchanged along with a blow or two. Burns’s source said that three days later, the boyfriend walked up to Hughes while he was sitting on his porch, drew a gun, and shot him. Simple as that. But they never came up with the weapon, didn’t have a witness, and the probable killer had concocted an alibi they’d failed to puncture. Crowley wouldn’t touch it, so the case was still open a year later.

  “That was your last murder, wasn’t it?” Lyons says.

  “Yeah. Been busy—but more with weird stuff. Had an audio sexting case the other week.”

  “Audio sexting? What the hell’s that?”

  “Guy records him and his girlfriend having sex. Then, after they break up, he starts texting her saying he’s got the recording and is going to put it up on the Internet if she doesn’t continue having sex with him.”

  “Bluffing?”

  “Oh no, he had it. Very clear. Hig
h quality, too. You could definitely tell it was her. And the kicker is the guy was slightly autistic, which made things even worse. It was a goddamn mess.”

  “Minors?”

  “She was. He wasn’t.”

  Lyons is a silent a moment, then says: “You ever think about quitting? A lot of people asking that, you know. If it were me, I wouldn’t risk it.”

  “Risk what?”

  “Them changing the rules on me. I’d be out of here in a heartbeat if I’d done my time like you.”

  “They’re not taking anything away. It’s all grandfathered in. And we were excluded from Measure L.”

  “I don’t know if you noticed, but the state’s fucking bankrupt. And the pension fund is down a third of what it was.”

  “Menlo Park’s okay,” Madden says. “If anything, they’re just going to freeze our wages and hit us with a higher healthcare contribution. That’s what they’re talking about.”

  A couple years ago, the city council agreed to raise officers’ pay close to twenty-five percent over a period of three years to help offset a wave of departures to other, higher-paying police departments and government agencies. Between retirements and defections, the Menlo Park Police Department had lost thirty of its fifty officers between 2005 and 2008. Now, though, in the “new economic reality,” the city council’s tune had changed. They were looking to shave where they could and control costs for the future. Measure L’s passage had raised the retirement age for new non-safety city employees to 60 from 55 and allowed them to collect only 60 percent of their salary for 30 years of service instead of 81 percent. However, the police were excluded from the measure and had retained their retirement equations.

  Lyons laughs. “You’re crazy, man. You could retire, get a little consulting gig, maybe do some PI work, really rake it in.”

  “I know. That’s what the wife wants me to do. Wants to send some extra money to her family in Nicaragua, maybe even help her sister who’s here. I already send a thousand a month now.”

  “Just say no. You got kids. You need to look out for them first. Doesn’t she want what’s best for you guys?”