Sidney Sheldon's the Silent Widow

by Sidney Sheldon

  He needs to feel important, Johnson thought. Either that or he’s trying to distract me from something else. Some evidence he doesn’t want us to find.

  ‘I assume you have security here, sir?’ Johnson asked, although he already knew the answer. He’d passed the bored, poorly trained guards on his way in, and observed the CCTV cameras throughout the property.

  ‘Naturally,’ said Carter. ‘It’s a valuable property.’

  ‘Including cameras?’

  ‘Yes. But not in the master bedroom.’

  The cufflink twirling took on a more frenzied pace.

  ‘Not in the master bedroom,’ Johnson repeated. ‘Why’s that?’

  The banker gave a smirk worthy of a thirteen-year-old. Puerile, as Dr Roberts would say. ‘I’m sure you can take an educated guess, Detective. My security guards receive a live feed from those cameras. Let’s just say I value my privacy. Besides, I don’t need cameras in the master suite. All the entrances to the house are filmed, as is the upstairs hallway. Anyone coming in or out would be visible.’

  ‘Right,’ said Johnson. ‘And I imagine you reviewed the footage from those cameras yourself. After you found the rat.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘But no one was there?’

  ‘No one other than my regular household staff, no. That’s the uncanny thing.’ Carter twisted the cufflink again, so violently he was in danger of ripping it off.

  ‘So.’ Johnson asked the obvious question. ‘How do you suppose this “warning” was placed in your room?’

  Carter looked irked. ‘I have no idea. You’re the detective. You tell me.’

  ‘Well, if no one else showed up on the footage, then it had to be put there by a staff member, didn’t it, sir?’ Johnson said, with a patience he didn’t feel.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Carter insisted with a shake of the head. ‘I trust my household employees. They’ve all been subject to exhaustive background checks – and I mean exhaustive. There’s no way—’

  ‘Perhaps you can show me the rat, sir?’ Johnson interrupted, standing up. ‘I’ll have it removed and we can run some tests.’

  ‘Show you? Oh no, I can’t show it to you.’

  I knew it, Johnson thought. Delusional is right.

  ‘And why’s that, sir?’ he asked wearily. He had no idea how therapists like Nikki Roberts dealt with this shit on a daily basis. Didn’t they ever want to punch these people’s lights out?

  ‘Well, I found it late last night, as I explained,’ Carter began defensively. ‘My housekeeper doesn’t arrive until eight in the morning and naturally I couldn’t leave the thing lying there till then. God knows what diseases it might carry. So I took it out to the trash myself.’

  ‘You disposed of the evidence,’ said Johnson.

  ‘I had to.’

  ‘And did anyone else see this rat, before you threw it out?’

  ‘Well, no. Like I say, it was late—’

  Johnson got to his feet.

  ‘Where are your trash cans, sir? Might it still be out there?’

  At least Carter Berkeley had the decency to blush.

  ‘I’m afraid they’ll be empty by now. The garbage men came early this morning. I guess I should have considered that …’

  It took Johnson over an hour to drive back to headquarters, in heavy rush-hour traffic. He arrived in a foul mood. His visit to Carter Berkeley had confirmed the banker’s mental instability, but not much else. There’d been no new leads relating to either murder – Carter didn’t know Lisa, had barely interacted with Trey and had never heard of Brandon Grolsch. Not that he was a suspect, but he also happened to have cast-iron alibis for both crimes. In other words, the trip had been a complete waste of Johnson’s time.

  His spirits weren’t improved when Goodman cornered him the moment he walked into the building and announced they’d been summoned to the chief’s office for a progress report.

  ‘Now?’ Johnson groaned.

  ‘Right now. In fact,’ Goodman looked at his watch, ‘he’s pissed you’re late.’

  ‘Late? How am I late?’ Johnson protested. ‘He only just called the meeting! I was in here at seven thirty this morning, for Christ’s sake. Which reminds me, where the hell were you?’

  ‘Sorry,’ Goodman mumbled. ‘I had a late night. Something came up.’

  Something had come up, last night at the bar with Nikki Roberts, and again this morning as Goodman lay in bed alone, thinking about her warm, slender, needy body and what might have been yesterday evening, if only he’d allowed himself to give in to it. He wanted to. God knew he wanted to, wanted her, Nikki, more than was good for him, or for this investigation. Despite her opening up to him about her husband’s death and her struggles with grief, Goodman had resisted the temptation to take things further – for now. But in terms of new leads the fact was he had nothing concrete to show for last night’s investigative efforts beyond his still-raging hangover.

  ‘Goodman! Johnson! Anytime today!’ Chief Brody’s booming voice echoed down the hall, slicing into Goodman’s aching head like a meat-cleaver.

  ‘Sir.’

  Both men shuffled obediently into their boss’s office, taking the seats he indicated.

  ‘So,’ Brody began grimly. ‘Your case.’

  A heavyset man in his early sixties with a quick temper, not unlike a darker version of Mick Johnson, Chief Brody was evidently not in a good mood either.

  ‘We’ve got two bodies, both cut up like rag dolls. No arrests. No suspects. We’ve got a leading psychiatrist getting death threats. And as one of the victims, her patient, was a hot piece of ass with a married, billionaire boyfriend, we’ve got the press all over it like mold on a stinking cheese.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Goodman, looking at the floor.

  ‘But it gets even better,’ Brody went on, glaring at both detectives. ‘We’ve also got a leak! The internet’s going crazy with trash talk about some zombie killer on the loose. This morning they were covering this zombie nonsense on the NBC 4 news! I mean, what the hell, boys?’

  ‘The leak could be from the ME’s office,’ Johnson said defensively.

  ‘Do I look like I care where it’s from?’ Brody countered.

  Johnson pressed on: ‘Jenny Foyle found skin cells under the first victim’s fingernails that were a DNA match for hairs found on the second victim. Both belonged to a junkie called Brandon Grolsch, whom we believe to be deceased. That tallies with what Jenny found, sir. The dead cells under the nails.’

  Chief Brody sighed deeply. ‘So you’re telling me your chief suspect – your only suspect – is dead?’

  ‘Brandon Grolsch isn’t a suspect,’ said Goodman. ‘He died of an overdose eight months ago. Our working theory is that the perp had access to Brandon’s corpse. That he deliberately planted Brandon’s DNA on the bodies, knowing that Grolsch was officially still “missing”, in hopes we’d pin the murders on a dead man and stop looking.’

  ‘That’s one of the working theories,’ muttered Johnson.

  Chief Brody grimaced. ‘What’s the other one?’

  Goodman’s face echoed the question. Last he heard, he and Johnson were on the same page about this.

  ‘It doesn’t involve zombies, does it?’ asked Brody.

  ‘No, sir. It doesn’t.’ Johnson cleared his throat. ‘It involves Dr Nicola Roberts, the psychologist at the center of all this.’

  Goodman rolled his eyes. Johnson ignored him.

  ‘Detective Goodman and I have spent the four days sifting through Dr Roberts’ patient records and session notes, among other things. We both agreed that she was the obvious link between the two victims. Goodman felt – feels – that Dr Roberts herself may have been the killer’s target.’

  Brody’s eyes narrowed. ‘But you don’t agree?’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t,’ said Johnson. ‘Dr Roberts’ notes on the first victim, her patient Lisa Flannagan, reveal as much about Roberts herself as they do about Flannagan. We know she was d
eeply disapproving of Lisa’s affair with Willie Baden, and of her abortion, and that she was less than sympathetic about Lisa’s struggles with Vicodin. The tone of Roberts’ comments struck me as odd for a therapist, someone whose job is to listen without judging. But these notes are full of judgment, sir. And they’re full of rage, too.’

  Chief Brody turned to Goodman. ‘You’ve read them, Detective. Do you agree?’

  Goodman shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. It was true that Nikki’s notes on some of her patients, including Lisa, could seem unduly hostile at times. Then again, they were never intended to be read by outsiders, but were merely personal musings, aide-memoires to help with future sessions. More importantly, the picture Johnson was painting of Nikki pointedly failed to mention his own rage towards her, his relentless twisting of the evidence to try and make Nikki look guilty and paint her in the blackest possible light.

  ‘The notes do make judgments, sir,’ he admitted grudgingly.

  Johnson let out a mocking laugh. ‘Judgments? Roberts makes it abundantly clear that she’s morally repulsed by this young woman. She talks about Lisa Flannagan needing to be “made accountable” for her actions, about the suffering she’s caused Baden’s wife and others. It’s a theme that runs through a lot of the notes.’

  ‘What’s a theme?’ the chief asked, confused.

  ‘Nikki Roberts has a grudge against mistresses,’ Johnson said matter-of-factly.

  ‘That’s a stretch, Mick,’ Goodman jumped in.

  ‘Is it? I don’t think so,’ said Johnson, warming to his theme. ‘So anyways, her notes got me thinking about why she might bear that particular grudge,’ he continued, ‘and I realized, it must have had something to do with her husband.’

  ‘Isn’t the husband dead?’ Chief Brody sighed, rubbing his temples wearily. He could feel a headache coming on.

  ‘Yes, he is.’ Johnson sounded excited, as if he was moving towards some sort of punchline. ‘Dr Douglas Roberts was killed in an unexplained auto accident on the 405 last year. But guess who he was with when he died?’

  Chief Brody and Goodman both stared at Johnson. Neither of them were in the mood for guessing games.

  ‘His mistress!’ Johnson announced triumphantly. ‘Some Russian chick. She was in the passenger seat. Died too, killed instantly. The first Dr Roberts knew about her husband’s affair was the day he died, when the emergency crew cut two bodies out of the wreckage! Can you imagine what that must feel like? The pain? The humiliation? When the whole world believed you had some perfect, fairytale marriage? Including you?’

  Johnson was looking directly at Goodman now, with an infuriating I told you so expression on his face.

  Goodman struggled to process this new information. Nikki had opened up to him about her husband’s death only last night. She’d alluded to feelings of anger, mixed in with the loss, and to finding things out about Doug that she hadn’t known before. But she’d never said anything about a mistress. Apart from anything else, Goodman found it hard to believe that anybody lucky enough to be married to Nikki Roberts would want a mistress. Willie Baden cheating on over-the-hill Valentina was one thing, but this? It almost made him wonder whether Johnson was making the whole thing up.

  ‘How’d you know this?’ he asked, more aggressively than he’d intended.

  ‘It was reported online,’ Johnson answered. ‘Not at the time but a few weeks later. A brief, one-line mention of a female passenger. But I did some digging with Doug and Nikki’s friends, and they all confirmed it. The dirty secret she’s been trying to hide, how the anger’s been eating away at her—’

  ‘OK, so the shrink’s husband was playing away,’ Chief Brody said gruffly, cutting him off. ‘What does this have to do with our murders?’

  ‘Well, sir, I’m curious about this whole mistress thing, especially as Roberts never so much as hinted about it to us,’ said Johnson. ‘So two days ago I go looking for the accident report, to see what I can find about Doug Roberts and this Russian woman he was seeing.’

  Goodman could contain himself no longer. ‘You never told me any of this!’ he exploded.

  ‘Hey, you were “busy”, remember?’ Johnson shot back. ‘You haven’t exactly been Captain Transparency yourself, my friend. In any case, there was nothing to tell because, guess what? Turns out, there is no accident report.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Chief Brody asked. He was growing tired of riddles.

  ‘Exactly what I say,’ said Johnson. ‘There is no report in the system. Either one was never filed, or it was filed but someone deleted it later.’

  This was interesting. But it still wasn’t a theory on who killed Lisa Flannagan and Trey Raymond, as Chief Brody pointed out.

  ‘I’m getting there, sir, I swear,’ insisted Johnson. ‘So now I’m really curious, because this accident did happen. It was in all the papers at the time, along with a big, whitewashed obituary in the LA Times about what a great and saintly guy Doug Roberts was, his beautiful, grieving widow, they’re both so young, yadda yadda yadda. But no mention of the Russian broad. That little nugget only came out later, online. So anyways, I tracked down the shop where they took what was left of Doug Roberts’ Tesla after the accident. Spoke to an engineer there who told me they’d checked out the car’s computer systems and it looked as though they might have been messed with before the crash.’

  ‘“Messed with”?’

  ‘Hacked into remotely,’ Johnson explained. ‘He couldn’t be sure, but it looked to him like faulty code might have affected both the steering and the brakes, once the car reached a certain speed. He says he told his boss, who said he would report it to the police.’

  ‘And did he?’ Chief Brody asked.

  ‘There’s no way of knowing. Because like I said, there is no report. And because Damon’s boss dropped dead of a heart attack on Easter morning.’

  Chief Brody took this in silently. As did Goodman.

  ‘So,’ the chief asked Johnson eventually. ‘Your theory?’

  ‘My theory, sir, is that Nikki Roberts is a psychopath. She finds out her husband’s doing someone else, while she’s in the middle of fertility treatment; totally loses it, pays someone to tamper with his car. She stages an accident, killing him and the mistress.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Goodman muttered, but Johnson was on a roll.

  ‘The plan works like a dream. Her husband and his Russian fancy woman are both dead, and no one suspects a thing. She’s emboldened, but she’s still mad as hell about the affair, and that anger needs somewhere to go. So she develops a grudge against all mistresses, all marriage wreckers – like her patient Lisa Flannagan. It becomes an obsession with her. And remember, at this point she’s already killed once and gotten away with it. I think Nikki Roberts had Lisa Flannagan murdered. I think she paid a hitman to do it, possibly using Brandon Grolsch’s remains as some sort of forensic cover story, like Goodman suggested.’

  ‘Don’t drag me into this!’ Goodman’s frustration was mounting. ‘This is total bullshit, Mick. You have no evidence against Nikki Roberts. None!’

  ‘I don’t agree.’ For once Johnson kept his cool. ‘It’s circumstantial, sure, but there’s a pattern here, a pattern of deceit. She said she was “fond” of Lisa Flannagan, but her notes plainly show otherwise. She said she loved her husband, but multiple friends have attested to her flashes of rage over his affair. I think Nikki Roberts is a very smart woman. But I also think she’s a pathological liar and a murderer. She’s behind this, Chief. I know it in my bones.’

  ‘Your bones,’ Goodman scoffed. ‘What does that even mean? You’ve had it in for her from the start.’

  ‘And you wanted to sleep with her from the start!’ Johnson retorted furiously. ‘It’s clouded your judgment.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Chief Brody stepped in. ‘Knock it off, both of you. What about Trey Raymond?’ he asked Johnson. ‘Weren’t he and Nikki Roberts close?’

  ‘On the surface, maybe. But underneath,
who knows?’ said Johnson. ‘Maybe Trey knew about Doug’s affair all along and helped hide it from Nikki? Or maybe he found out she was behind Doug’s “accident”? Or that she killed Lisa Flannagan, who we know Trey had the hots for. I don’t have the details yet, sir,’ Johnson admitted. ‘Like I said, it’s a theory.’

  ‘OK.’ Chief Brody laid his palms down on the desk in a gesture meant to indicate the conversation was over, at least for the moment. ‘It’s a theory, and I’m open to it.’

  ‘Chief!’ Goodman protested, but Brody cut him off.

  ‘Just like I’m open to the frankly insane idea that someone stole a corpse in order to pin these murders on some “missing” junkie. OK, Detective Goodman? I’m an equal opportunities employer. But what I need now isn’t theories. It’s facts. I need hard evidence. I need an arrest, boys.’

  ‘Sir,’ Johnson mumbled submissively.

  ‘Mick, until you get me that evidence, Goodman’s right. You gotta stop harassing Nikki Roberts and her patients.’

  ‘Harassing?’ Johnson bridled. ‘Who’s harassing?’

  ‘I’ve had three complaints, Detective. Four official complaints. One from Dr Roberts, one from the mother of Treyvon Raymond, one from Carter E. Berkeley III, and one from Willie Baden. All of them described you as rude, belligerent …’

  Goodman watched in amusement as his partner’s complexion turned from white to red to something close to purple. To Goodman’s surprise, however, Johnson managed to regulate his tone when he replied.

  ‘With respect, Chief, Nikki Roberts is a psychopath, Carter Berkeley is a fantasist with well-documented psychological problems, and Willie Baden’s an old-fashioned asshole—’

  ‘He’s also a rich and powerful asshole, Detective,’ said Brody, leaning back in his chair. ‘As is Carter Berkeley. You may not be aware, but Willie Baden donates six-figure sums to the LAPD benevolent fund every year, and Carter Berkeley’s bank has given us over a million dollars.’

  Johnson frowned. ‘I wasn’t aware of that.’

  ‘Me neither,’ chimed in Goodman.

  ‘And is that supposed to buy them something, sir?’ Johnson asked archly.