He raised his right eyebrow, a thing I’d noticed he did when he couldn’t think of a smart response.
The parking lot at the Preserve resembled a lake, but I didn’t have to walk on tiptoes in my new Aquatalia waterproof riding boots.
It was four in the morning now. It took three long presses on the buzzer to wake Connor. His voice on the intercom sounded like it belonged to something pulled from another dimension.
Disoriented from being pulled out bed, he scowled when he opened the door. The black hooded bathrobe he wore made him look like a boxer ready to enter the ring. He looked back and forth between me and Antelope—creatures out of a nightmare, there to torment him.
Finally, Antelope spoke. “Can we come in, please? I have some bad news. Something happened tonight.”
“Come in, then.” Connor took several lazy steps backward and we walked past him into the dark room. A sliver of light came through the half-open door to the master bedroom. His silence made me wonder if he’d taken a sleep aid and now he couldn’t wake up.
He hit a panel on the wall with the palm of his hand, and mood lighting brought the living room into focus. Connor covered his eyes and dimmed the lights.
The place wasn’t my style, more GQ metrosexual, but it was classy and clean—unusual for most heterosexual bachelors of this century.
At the kitchen island, he pulled three chrome stools out, hopped up on one of them, and swung his legs. The digital clock above the stove read 4:15 a.m. Connor stared at it and shook his head like a swimmer surfacing from a deep-water dive.
“How bad?” he finally asked. “What now?”
“Did you see Max Hart earlier tonight?” Antelope asked.
“You know the answer. What happened to Max?”
“We’ll do my questions first; it works better that way.”
Connor stood up and leaned toward me, so close I smelled the alcohol on his breath.
“Good evening, Dr. Hunt. May I inquire about the reason for your presence in my home tonight?”
Beside me, Antelope shifted in his seat, but he didn’t say a word at first. I held my tongue, knowing that Connor was attempting to take control by bypassing Antelope’s instructions.
After a beat, Antelope answered for me, signaling his alpha status, his determination to run the meeting. “Dr. Hunt is consulting on the investigation of Stacey’s murder. What happened tonight may have bearing on that case. What time did you start and end your visit with Max last night?”
When Connor didn’t answer, Antelope reached into his pocket and took out his phone. “I want a video and audio recording of this interview,” he said and handed me his phone. He looked at Connor. “Five minutes, Collins; here or at headquarters, you choose. At this time I’m not charging you with any crime. Call an attorney if you want. I’m here to investigate an unattended death by gunshot, and you’re getting in my way.”
Connor’s head went back and his eyes widened like he’d been hit in the head with a basketball; he looked stunned and hurt. “No way, you’re bullshitting. He’s dead? What happened?”
Antelope stood. “Get dressed. Play time’s over.”
“No, hold on, do it here, ask your questions.”
“Start the recording,” Antelope told me.
I pressed play.
“This is Detective Beauregard Antelope, Sweetwater County Sheriff’s Office, with Dr. Pepper Hunt, consulting psychologist, interviewing Mr. Connor Collins at his residence—The Preserve, Unit 306, Rock Springs, Wyoming—in the matter of the unattended death of Max Hart on June 28.” He focused on Connor. “Please state the time you met with Mr. Hart on June 28.”
“Roughly 10:00 p.m.,” Connor said. “I didn’t make note of the specific time.”
“Where did this meeting occur?”
“He picked me up here. We drove around town.”
“Why did he pick you up?”
“He called me earlier in the evening and said he had something he wanted to talk to me about.”
“Was he intoxicated?”
“Max could hold his liquor pretty well. He might have been. It’s hard to tell with Max. He wanted a beer, so we went to Liquor Mart and I bought us a six-pack. He drank two craft beers.”
“What did he want to talk to you about?”
“Old times; our friend Tim who died; honestly, I was in no mood. I can barely keep my head up these days. Max was in a bad place too. Both of us flat-out ruined about Stacey. We talked for a while, and then he dropped me off. He wanted more from me and he didn’t get it. I had no idea he was ready to do something like this.”
“Did he tell you he remembered the day he was injured?”
Connor laughed and looked away. He had the same faraway look I’d noticed that day when we’d visited him in his office—in another world, where he preferred to stay.
“Mr. Collins?” Antelope said.
“How is this relevant?”
“Did he tell you he didn’t believe the injury was accidental?”
It was almost dawn. Pale light came through the cracks in the drapes. Connor looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. Antelope, on the other hand, looked strong enough to take on a wild horse.
“No. We didn’t discuss anything like that.” Connor looked at the stove clock again. “I have to be up in a few hours for court. We’re way past five minutes.”
“One last question. Did Max give any indication he planned to take his own life?”
“Hell no, he never gave any indication he was suicidal. I never would have left him alone if he had.”
We walked out into a rosy dawn that felt at odds with the night’s tragedy. As we drove back to my house, I thought about how it would take time for me to process Max’s death, the loss of this person, my patient. Psychotherapy is intimate work. It takes place between two people in a small room where emotions, memories, sense of self, relationship to others, the patient’s whole internal world, opens to the therapist like a gift wrapped up in many layers. Inside those four walls, the heart and soul, the mechanics and meaning of a life, are revealed for the purpose of analysis and understanding.
It wouldn’t be easy saying good-bye to Max Hart.
“You once told me you don’t require a lot of sleep,” Antelope said as he pulled up in front of my house.
Halfway out of the car and half-asleep, I turned and looked back at him.
“Can you come with me to the morgue tomorrow morning? Fern Hart is scheduled to identify the body, and I anticipate she’ll need some professional support.”
“What time are you thinking?”
“We scheduled it for 9:00 a.m.”
I did the mental calculation. “Time for two hours of sleep, a shower, and breakfast. I’m there.”
CHAPTER 51
The morning was too achingly beautiful for the terrible task of escorting Max’s mother to the morgue, with a bright sun and temperatures predicted to rise into the nineties by the afternoon. The weather forecast indicated a few days’ reprieve from the recent rainy spell that had made the week since Stacey Hart’s murder especially desolate.
The morgue was located in the county Detention Center south of town on Highway 191. When I signed the contract to be on the county payroll on an as-needed basis, I’d toured the multimillion-dollar complex. It was an impressive, technically sophisticated law enforcement center—funded exclusively, like every county building in Sweetwater County, by the proceeds the county received from the oil companies who mined in its rich land. Deputies were to bring Fern Hart there; I rode with Antelope.
On the way there, Antelope told me a search of Max’s trailer house had yielded a handwritten will, stock certificates, and $20,000 in cash. Max had named me as executor of the will.
I was still processing this information as we entered the Detention Center. There were so many different departments in the building, each in a different spoke of the wheel fanning out from the central command control center. Although I’d had a tour of the morgue and the medi
cal examiner’s quarters when I first visited, I couldn’t remember exactly where they were located. Antelope, however, seemed to know exactly where he was going.
We had just been buzzed in by the officer at the door of the morgue when the receptionist called to say Fern Hart had arrived.
“You stay here. I’ll escort her in,” the duty officer said.
We waited in the small cubicle between the door leading to the corridor circling the wheel spokes and the one that led to the morgue.
“You can wait outside for us,” Antelope said. “No need for two of us to be in there with her, and I have to be. I just need you here for after she makes the ID.”
I nodded. “It’s bound to be difficult for her.”
“Here they come now.” Antelope looked past me through the glass window toward the main steel door to all the pods.
I heard the sound of their shoes hitting the squeaky-clean floors, a mild crunching sound, as they made their way to the morgue. The door opened and the four of us were temporarily trapped in the glass cubicle; I felt an immediate, claustrophobic crush in my chest. I looked at Fern Hart’s face; she looked like a zombie, red-eyed and empty of strength. She said nothing.
Seconds later, the door opened, and they filed into the cool inner space housing the morgue.
I leaned back against the wall, my feet crossed at the ankles and my arms across my chest. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine I was somewhere other than a morgue. I didn’t want to think of what Mrs. Hart and the two men were seeing on the other side of the door.
The only dead body I’d ever seen was not cleaned up and laid out on a slab in a morgue. It was covered with blood from two gunshot wounds, one to the head and one to the heart. I shook my head in a futile effort to dislodge the image I knew I would never be able to get out of my mind.
It was the last time I would see him. The damage from the bullets was extensive. I went along with his family’s suggestion of cremation.
I knew someday I’d want to look at the photographs of him alive and handsome, so I put all the pictures from our life together in a safety deposit box. They were proof that I’d once had a normal life. Two years had passed since then, and I still wasn’t ready to look at them. The picture I held in my mind, as ugly and disfigured as it was, was an accurate depiction of my deceased husband—liar, cheater, betrayer of trust. What I hadn’t admitted to anyone was my belief that he’d gotten what he deserved.
When Antelope and Mrs. Hart were finished in the morgue, the three of us met in a conference room with a wall of windows overlooking the desert. There were sofas and chairs upholstered in pale green. It was a comforting space, and I felt grateful to be there instead of some windowless inner office.
I looked at Mrs. Hart. “Can you tell me what happened last night?”
“Max came to stay with me for a few days,” she said. “I was having a hard time after the funeral. He left the house for a few hours to go to therapy and the gym. He came home early and went upstairs. Around six o’clock, our usual suppertime, I went up to check on him. He was asleep in his old room. He looked as peaceful as a baby, and I didn’t have the heart to wake him. I came back down and picked on some of the casseroles people left. I watched a little television—the news and my shows, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune. A movie came on, some Lifetime thing, but it didn’t catch my interest. So I went up to bed. I stopped to check in on Max first. He was still sleeping, so I headed off to bed myself.”
“Tell me about the money. How is it Max had twenty thousand dollars in cash in his trailer?”
Her eyes widened. “I don’t know. Where would he have gotten that kind of money?” She shook her head. “I don’t know why I didn’t put it together . . .”
“What didn’t you put together, Mrs. Hart?” Antelope asked.
“He’d been falling apart for weeks. Max was depressed, Detective, don’t think I didn’t know. And I believe he had a significant substance abuse problem. He denied it, but are any of us the best judge of our own faults? The depression and the chronic marijuana use and alcohol on top of it—it all got the best of him. Remember, Doctor, I called you right after the funeral?”
“You thought Max killed Stacey.”
“It’s unbearable to be right about something like that. But if he went to make a confession, I guess it’s true.” She raised her eyes to the ceiling. “Dear God, what has happened to my family? I thought I knew my children, but it’s obvious I didn’t know them at all.”
CHAPTER 52
Connor dressed in black jeans and his leather jacket, dark watch cap, leather gloves and sunglasses stashed in the pockets. The bulk of the Luger strapped to his ankle brought him comfort.
With Stacey gone, he lived in fear. He walked through his days like a hunted man with a feral animal darting in and out of his path, a predator advancing from the shadows. He needed to talk to Kelly.
What did Max tell her? The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that Max would have talked to the only living person who would care about this sad part of their shared history.
And what did she think? What would she do? These questions had cycled through his mind all day. He felt dizzy with fear and utterly unable to plan.
The two people he’d always talked to when he got in this state, Stacey and Max, were dead. He thought about talking to Father Bellamy, but whenever he talked to him it felt like having a magic wand waved over him: the worries disappeared but a low-level anxiety remained. Sometimes he thought the priest lived in a world of his own, with different rules and logic.
And he was too dependent on the man. The two of them had talked more than once about how it had developed—a natural need, seeking a father figure because of growing up without his own father. As a child and as a teenager, he’d craved the attention of adult men. Even now, as he considered becoming more independent, making decisions and living life on his own terms without seeking Bellamy’s advice, he wondered if he could do it. Stacey had wanted him to lean on her.
He was exhausted and stressed from days of questioning, being asked the same questions over and over—first about Stacey and now about Max—all designed to trap him in a lie. The detective wanted to break him down.
He needed to talk to Kelly. He could make the twelve-mile drive to Green River in less than fifteen minutes if he pushed the BMW to the limit. He switched on his radar detector and flew past the big rigs driving over the speed limit on the interstate. In no time at all he could be at Sage Drive and the fancy house Kelly lived in with her parents and son.
Just after midnight he drove into the quiet neighborhood and cruised past the dark house to a low-rent apartment complex three blocks away, where he parked on the street next to the crowded lot. No one cared who came and went there, and no one would notice one more car parked on the suburban street late at night.
In less than ten minutes he was back at Kelly’s place. He found a dark house and an empty driveway.
Idiot! He’d planned to surprise her, catch her off guard, even scare her, anything to make her open up and tell him the truth. After all, only the two of them remained—a situation he planned to use to his advantage. In his heightened state of anxiety, he hadn’t thought about the possibility that she might not be home.
At the rear of the house, he found her room. Stacey had told him once that Kelly always slept with her window open. Her fear of closed spaces had started when she saw her brother in his coffin.
On a small hill behind the house, he found a spot hidden by the juniper shrubs with a view into the large bedroom. Moonlight poured in through the skylight onto an empty, queen-size, four-poster bed with a silk canopy.
When she texted the other day, she’d said to come by any time, that she missed him and wanted to see him. Where did she go off to?
He walked back around to the side of the house and hoisted himself up to the high windows of the attached garage, checking to see if her car was inside. Nothing.
An idea formed: he could
slip in through her window, take a look around to see if Max wrote anything down, while he waited for her to come back.
As he contemplated doing this, full awareness of the illegality of that action lit up in another part of his brain. He worked on one side of the law; breaking in would put him clearly on the other side. But deciding to go into her room without permission gave him a sense of control, and for the first time in a week his heart pumped in a steady beat, not with the galloping pulse of fear. That was enough to propel him into action.
He slipped on the leather gloves before he touched the screen, which resisted and stuck in its track. After a few moments of pushing and pulling, just as he was about to give up, it released and slid up and out of his way.
As he stepped into Kelly’s private space, an unexpected thrill—the same thing he’d felt as a kid shoplifting, the mark of a twisted soul—made it worthwhile. He lowered the screen and clicked it back into place.
Being in her room alone and unseen filled him with a sweet feeling of exhilaration. He searched her desk, a slow task using the light from his phone. It was stacked high with files and papers; the drawers were the same, stuffed full with no sense of order. It would take days to do a thorough search.
A new idea cracked open, and he felt a sudden, physical snap in his brain as his mind changed and the truth of his intrusion—the violation and deceit, the depravity of it—emerged.
He should not be there.
As he headed back to the window, headlights flared outside, flooding the space outside the window.
Not enough time to get out the back window and replace the screen. He ran into the kitchen.
A car door slammed outside and footsteps sounded on concrete.
He was through the door running. He heard a crashing sound in the kitchen.
He slipped on the wet grass and went down on his knees. Got up and started running again.
Security lights on the lawn. The shadow of a woman.
He made it up the bank, over the low wall, and away into the night.
On a Quiet Street Page 20