So many suspects think that cooperating with police will make them look innocent. In reality, talking to law enforcement is a one-way street. Lawyering up is a sure sign of guilt. But without real evidence of innocence, too much cooperation can look even worse.
“Since you’re shooting straight with us,” Rogan said, “why don’t we just come out and ask: Why shouldn’t we suspect you?”
Mitch looked up at his perfectly white ceiling and shook his head. “I don’t know. Honestly, I understand how they’re making it sound. Hell, not just how it sounds—how it looks. I get it: every time I read a story about a woman getting victimized, I say the same thing—it’s got to be the husband. And when I realize how I must look to the outside world—”
Ellie thought he might cry, but he pressed his lips together, focused on a spot on the blank white wall behind them, and continued. “I’m the asshole who let a sixteen-year partnership with a smart, beautiful, intelligent woman—the mother of my children—slip away. I’m not making excuses. We just—it sounds clichéd, but we grew apart. I never stopped caring about her; I never stopped respecting her. But I got to this point—and, Jesus, I feel so selfish trying to justify my feelings. If I could change any of it, on the off chance it would prevent what happened to Helen, I’d do it in a second. But I know the reality of the situation, so I have no choice but to try to explain how it got to the point where I look like a murderer. It’s what a lot of couples go through: the kids come along, you’re both still working, you start snapping at each other more and more. Eventually, we were distant enough to create room for a third person. I assume you know about Lisa. Now I understand why people warn you: don’t talk to the woman next to you on a plane; head straight to your room instead of the hotel bar after that presentation at a medical conference; avoid temptation at all costs. But once I met Lisa, it was too late. I realized we only get one life. That’s what I said to Helen during one of our last stupid counseling sessions. God, what a lie that was, sitting there twice a week, when I was already in love with someone else. There she was, trying to save the marriage, while I was just biding my time, trying to break the news. I told her—we only get one life, and we’re both still young enough to have another fifty years of happiness. It happens that way sometimes: people move forward and start over again. But then some monster murders the mother of my children, and I’m on the front page as the d-bag willing to kill her for a clean break. I’d give every day I have left to bring Helen back, I swear.”
“But, now that Helen’s gone,” Ellie asked, “isn’t it true that you have a better chance at that happy life you wanted? No ex-wife in the picture. Only one household to support.”
“You sound just like Santos and Hayes. Look, I thought Lisa and I were of one mind about starting a life together. But I guess she assumed I could leave my wife and still have the three-story townhouse and disposable income. She loves me. She loves the kids. But she’s a surgeon with her own money and didn’t want to marry a man who had to pay so much in child support and alimony that he took an apartment an intern would rent.”
“But now that there’s no alimony—”
“You’re wrong. Lisa had a problem getting married given my financial situation, but we were still very much together, just without the entangled finances. It’s not like she wanted her own kids, and not everyone needs the piece of paper, you know?” Oh, did Ellie ever know . . . but the last thing she needed to think about now was her own situation. “Now that I’m the guy who supposedly killed his wife to be with her? Let’s just say it’s a little frustrating that people think Helen’s death somehow helps me be with Lisa.”
Rogan was out of his chair, pretending to pace near the dining room table, which was covered with files and notebooks. “What’s this over here?”
Mitch looked up at the ceiling and shook his head. “Great. So I can either look uncooperative by asking you to leave, or come clean and tell you that I broke medical-privacy laws by going through Helen’s patient files.”
“And why would you do that?” Ellie asked.
“Because to my knowledge, no one else had. Santos and Hayes saw Helen as some kind of fluffy romance counselor. They seemed to assume that just because her practice wasn’t in the center of Crazytown, her patients couldn’t be dangerous. And that’s the irony—Helen told me she was interested in psychology in the first place because of the real sickos. But once she was doing the actual clinical work, it was too heavy. Depressing. Instead of helping her patients, she was scared of them. So she went into private counseling to get away from—from that darkness. But I’m convinced her killer is in here. He knew her as a therapist. That’s why he went to the office.”
Guilty men didn’t pore over a table full of files in their off hours.
“So who should we be looking at?” Ellie asked.
He sighed and shook his head again. “I don’t know yet. There’s the couple where the husband is a teacher accused of sleeping with a student. He seemed to think Helen made him sound like a child molester, which of course he is. Then there’s the husband who finally admitted the reason he was coming home late; he was sneaking back into the restaurant where he works to pilfer money from the safe. Maybe he was worried Helen would tell someone.”
Neither theory sounded compelling, and he knew it. He suddenly swept a pile of files off the table. “Damn it!”
Rogan caught Ellie’s eye, as if to say, The man’s got a temper.
“I’m sorry,” Mitch said, bending over to pick up the papers. “I don’t know what else to do. I can’t live like this forever. I keep thinking about Sam and Jessica. At some point, will even they begin to wonder?” He extended the files in his hands toward them. “Please take these. Maybe you’ll see something I missed, or you can dig back further and find more patients, from the past. When she was getting her Ph.D., she worked with people who were seriously mentally ill. One of them could have tracked her down.”
Rogan crossed his arms. “We’ll promise to take a look at every theory.”
“Call a Dr. Alex Sumner. Please. Do you know him?”
They both shook their heads.
“He’s a psychiatrist. I think he serves as an expert witness in a lot of insanity cases. We saw one of those courtroom sketches in the newspaper a few years ago, and I remember Helen telling me he was one of her professors during her internship. It was at Cedar Ridge Behavioral and Psychiatric Care. Even back then, I guess he was such a big deal that he’d travel across the state in different clinical rotations. That’s how she got to work with him.”
“And you remembered his name all these years later?” Rogan asked. Ellie could tell her partner was still searching for a revealing slip of the tongue, something to confirm the other detectives’ suspicions.
“No, I remembered the case. It was awful. The nanny who killed the children?”
They both nodded their recognition, but Ellie’s mind was somewhere else. Something about the connection between this Dr. Sumner and Helen Brunswick was bothering her.
“Helen and I were saying it was every parent’s nightmare. Then she made the comment about knowing the defendant’s psychiatric expert from her early interest in abnormal psych. I was grabbing at straws yesterday, Googled the case, and found Sumner’s name. I left a message with his office, but I guess . . .” His voice trailed off. He guessed that busy psychiatrists didn’t return phone calls from suspected murderers.
Ellie realized now what had been nagging her. The internship he’d mentioned hadn’t been listed on his wife’s credentials, apparently because she hadn’t completed it.
“Where did you call Dr. Sumner?” she asked.
“At his office.”
“I mean, where geographically?” she clarified. “He’s in the city?”
Mitch nodded.
“But before, you said your wife was able to work with him because he traveled around the state.”
“Yeah, that’s right, because at the time, she was still in her internship at Cedar
Ridge.”
Rogan saw where the conversation was heading. “And Cedar Ridge is where exactly?”
“Upstate. Just outside Syracuse.”
“Which direction outside?” Rogan asked.
“Um, I guess east? About thirty miles?”
Ellie looked to Rogan for a lesson in New York State geography, but he was moving on. “What exactly was your wife studying with Dr. Sumner up there?”
“At the time, she was specializing in the treatment of people who manifested antisocial and criminal behavior. She never spoke much about it, other than to say it got to be too much for her.”
Ellie was doing the math in her head. Helen Brunswick would have been starting a postgrad internship right around the time someone was murdering women in Utica.
They waited until the elevator doors closed to speak.
“East of Syracuse,” Ellie said. “That’s near Anthony Amaro’s territory, right?”
“Yep, thirty miles east makes it closer to Utica than Syracuse, in fact.”
“And it sounds like she was working with the heavy-duty nutjobs. It’s conceivable that one of them has been stalking her all this time.”
“Nearly twenty years. That’s a long time, Hatcher.”
“Could be someone who was hospitalized or on his meds in the interim. Something could have retriggered the obsession. Come to think of it, her murder coinciding with the end of her marriage made Mitch look guilty.” The elevator doors parted, and she continued to speak as they made their way to the building’s exit. “But if someone was watching her, the breakup could have been the event that convinced her stalker to make a move.”
“There’s a far simpler explanation: he knew his wife’s past—at a loonybin in Utica, right around the time someone was killing the women of Utica—and that’s exactly why he hired someone to replicate Amaro’s MO when he took her out.” He held the lobby door open and she stepped outside.
She was still processing Rogan’s response when a man with a camera stepped in front of them and snapped a picture. He was faster than the well-coiffed woman with the microphone: “Detectives, why were you speaking with Dr. Mitch Brunswick?”
Ellie held her forearm up instinctively against the bright light shining above the cameraman, but the television correspondent kept yelling questions. “Why has the district attorney’s office assigned a fresh look to the case?”
Ellie felt Rogan pushing her toward the car. How did the media know so much already? As she fell into the front seat, she heard the reporter’s final question: “Is it true that you have evidence connecting Helen Brunswick’s murder to the crimes of convicted killer Anthony Amaro?”
Rogan jumped into the driver’s seat and gunned the engine. Once he pulled away from the curb, he looked at her and frowned. “And boom goes the dynamite.”
PART TWO
VICTIM NUMBER FOUR
CHAPTER
THIRTEEN
The law office of McConnell and Associates was typical of a small partnership in New York City: shared space with a few other lawyers in the same predicament added up to one floor in a respectable building with a respectable-looking communal staff. Kristin McConnell’s office exceeded expectations, however. Given that the original McConnell, Harry, had been Amaro’s court-appointed lawyer, Carrie would not have been surprised to find peeling paint and loaded mousetraps. But now that the man’s daughter, Kristin, was in charge, Carrie recognized a large canvas on the interior wall as the work of a contemporary of Jackson Pollock.
Beneath the artwork were two large cardboard boxes, marked neatly with labels that read: “Anthony Amaro, 8/5/96.”
“You must be Carrie.” Kristin looked to be Carrie’s age—mid-thirties—but handled herself with a confidence that Carrie was still searching for.
“I called you on a lark,” Carrie said. “I can’t believe you still have records this many years later.”
“Like I said on the phone, long story. The old man didn’t believe in throwing files away, and he retired before getting around to computerizing the documents. I swore to him that I’d retain all client records for twenty years, and I spend a small fortune on storage keeping my word. I have them filed by date of conviction and do a purge every four months. That’s how I was able to get you these so quickly. Honestly, you’re doing me a favor by taking them two years early.”
“Well, I really appreciate it.”
“Amaro’s challenging his conviction?” Kristin asked.
Carrie nodded, unsure how much she should reveal. “It’s part of a larger project. Major issues with the police department’s lead detective.”
“I know Linda Moreland’s work. Your client could certainly do worse.”
Carrie smiled.
“How much do you know about my father?”
“I know he was Anthony Amaro’s lawyer.”
“That’s as much as I expected. I’m probably the only attorney our age who knows what a lion he was in his era. A true voice of the downtrodden. I actually remember this case: he took it pro bono because it was one of the very first cases that was death-eligible in the state of New York.”
Carrie was now regretting that she hadn’t taken the time to conduct a quick Google search of Harry McConnell. His daughter clearly admired the man.
“The client made a point of saying how appreciative he was of your father’s representation on his behalf.” Did that sound as stupid in the room as it sounded to Carrie’s own ears?
“He worked when he should have been enjoying his last healthy years. His opposition to the death penalty was that strong. At least he was able to see capital punishment go down with barely a whimper before this state ever saw a single execution.”
Carrie found herself confused by the direction of the conversation. “I’m sorry if you lost him prematurely.”
Kristin shook her head. “No, my father’s still living and breathing. He just doesn’t remember everything. He had the curse of being told by his doctors early on that he’d lose his memory to Alzheimer’s. I don’t even know why they bother telling people. What are you supposed to do? I wanted him to retire and spend his last capable days enjoying life. He wanted to spend them in practice, and he forced me to make two promises: one—to keep these idiotic files for twenty years, and two—to tell him when it was time to hang it up so he didn’t shortchange his clients. So when you thank me for these dusty documents, just trust me that the second promise was much harder to keep.”
Carrie still didn’t know what to say. She’d been raised in a family that didn’t talk about any of its hardships, and this total stranger was telling her about the difficulties of handling her father’s dementia. “Well, hopefully, your father’s insistence on hanging on to these documents will be fruitful. I take it you kept up his practice?”
“Nope. Thank God that wasn’t the third promise. Personally, I can’t stomach criminal defense work. Took me a while to realize that. I represent crime victims, in fact, because no one else does. The prosecutors represent the state, whatever that means. The defense attorneys do whatever they need to do to get the defendant off. I represent the victims—which usually means pressuring the state to do what’s right, and pressuring the defendant to pay up and plead guilty.”
Carrie was wishing she had sent a messenger to pick up the Amaro files. “Wow, that sounds like a really interesting practice.”
“So is Amaro claiming ineffective assistance of counsel?”
The shift in tone was palpable. What had sounded like a mournful daughter’s meandering now sounded like an attorney’s cross-examination. “No. Um, there’s new evidence. It’s still coming together, but the claim is that he’s innocent.”
“Yeah, but we both know that’s not a legal thing. You have to have a basis for constitutional error at trial. I’ve learned over the years that these shitbags my dad bent over backwards for are perfectly willing to claim ineffective assistance of counsel when that’s the last egg in the basket.”
Carrie was
done smiling. She bent over and lifted both boxes. Kristin didn’t offer her a hand. And, once again, Carrie wondered what the hell she had gotten herself into.
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Ellie’s desk shook as Rogan slammed down his phone. “And that makes oh-for-five,” he declared.
As Helen Brunswick’s next-of-kin, Mitch Brunswick had waived his deceased wife’s rights to privacy, enabling them to obtain her educational records. Based on those records, they knew that in Helen’s early efforts to complete a postgraduate internship in abnormal psychology, she had completed rotations at five different mental health institutions in ten months. She had only two months remaining when she decided to withdraw from the program.
Now they were looking for some connection between her studies, the Amaro victims, and her murder. But so far, none of the hospitals would release information about the identity of her patients, or even the general type of patients she was treating.
Rogan tapped his nails against his desk. “You realize it’s just a matter of time before the press finds out we’re calling around upstate mental institutions, asking about Helen.”
“I still can’t believe those reporters were camped outside Mitch Brunswick’s building yesterday. How do you think they knew about the connection to Amaro?”
“It could have been any kind of leak,” Rogan said. “Or, frankly, it might’ve been Mitch Brunswick himself. He’s the one who sent us on this wild goose chase. Pretty smart, when you think about it. Read some old newspaper articles about a serial killer’s signature. Hire someone to do the job, using the same MO. Then send the letter tying the murder to the old cases, using information no one else would know. Call the press to divert their attention. Then just happen to mention that she used to work the nuthouses upstate.”
All Day and a Night: A Novel of Suspense (Ellie Hatcher) Page 8