Another wave of pain crashed around us when Sampson got hold of Billie’s grown children to tell them their mother had died of a massive heart attack caused by the damage done to it by Lyme disease.
Andrew, an attorney in Boston, was dumbstruck. “I thought … she said she’d beaten it, John.”
“We all thought she had, even the doctors. You heard them, Andrew,” Sampson said. “We were going for a walk this morning and she collapsed in my arms, but not before telling me how much she loved you and Kari.”
Andrew choked up and then cried, “I can’t believe this. I mean, why Mom? She had so much left to give.”
His younger sister, Kari, had much the same reaction when Sampson reached her at the advertising agency she worked at in New York. She screamed, sobbed, and then demanded to know what had happened.
Sampson was a rock for them, answering every question, then he asked them to come to Washington to help prepare for their mom’s funeral. They said they’d come as soon as possible.
Sampson, drained by those two calls, went off to be with Willow. I called the medical examiner’s office to request that Billie’s body be treated with kindness until the undertakers came for her.
When John returned, he slumped down in an overstuffed chair and closed his eyes. “I’ve been shot three times in my life. This is worse than all of them combined.”
“I wish I could tell you different, but you’re going to feel that way off and on for a long time.”
Tears seeped out from under Sampson’s closed eyelids. “It feels like we were two trees so close that our roots and branches were all combined, and something I can’t even explain just grabbed hold of her and tore her right out of the ground.”
I listened quietly. This was the aftershock of grief, the phase of trying to find a way to psychologically accept a tragic loss. I’d talked many people through this. It’s easier when you don’t know the victim. But Billie had been like a sister to me, and I was still struggling to find a way to accept her death in my own heart.
Sampson made his hands into fists and sat upright, shaking his head.
“I’m no good to anyone like this,” he said.
“You’re allowed time, John. Lots of it.”
“There will be time,” he said firmly. “But not now. I have to stand up for Billie when she needs standing up for.”
“Let’s do that,” I said, and we called the rectory at St. Anthony’s to arrange for a funeral Mass the following Saturday. Then we contacted Billie’s favorite restaurant and organized a reception for mourners there after the funeral.
Bree and I stayed until midafternoon, when we knew John’s stepchildren were on their way and Willow was taking a nap.
“We are a call away,” Bree said. “Always, John.” He hugged her, said, “I’m trying to find the courage to go into our bedroom.”
I said, “I know this will seem impossible, but try to go in there with gratitude for all the amazing years you had with her. Go in there thankful for the great experiences you shared and the love you still feel for her before you even think about her being gone.”
Sampson said, “I don’t know if I’m there yet.”
“Try.”
“Okay, Alex,” he said, and he went back inside.
CHAPTER 27
THE FOLLOWING MORNING AROUND ELEVEN, Ned Mahoney and I listened to the hydraulic locks being thrown behind the bulletproof, Plexiglas doors to the psych unit and saw them slide back under the watchful eye of a redhead in a white lab coat.
Dr. Alice Martel smiled, shook our hands, and led us to a conference room. “Elaine has given me permission to talk to you about her case,” she said.
“You’ve had a chance to evaluate her?” I asked.
“Not a definitive evaluation, but I spent time with her yesterday after she’d had a decent night’s sleep,” Dr. Martel said. “And another half an hour earlier this morning. I can tell you her current state remains irrational at times, jumps from subject to subject in midsentence, and she tends to focus on certain wrongs that her late husband allegedly perpetrated. And she asks over and over when she can see her daughters.”
“Can we talk to her?”
A knock came at the door.
Dr. Martel glanced up and waved in a harried-looking man with a neatly trimmed beard and horn-rim glasses. “You’ll have to ask her counsel,” Dr. Martel said. “Thomas Bergson. Dr. Alex Cross. FBI Special Agent Mahoney.”
Bergson shook our hands. “You brought her in. Prevented the suicide.”
“She prevented it herself once she saw the world differently,” I said.
“Can we speak with your client?” Mahoney asked.
Bergson appeared torn but said, “I’ve just spoken with Ms. Paulson and she wants to cooperate if she can. But I want to state clearly and for the record that allowing you to talk with her in no way constitutes a decision on the defense’s part as to whether Elaine Paulson is of sound mind. I think the jury’s still out, right, Dr. Martel?”
“It is,” the psychiatrist said.
“We just want to talk to her,” Mahoney said. “Get her perspective.”
Bergson said, “Do you know when the ballistics report will come in?”
“Next couple of days,” I said. “We sent it to the FBI lab at Quantico, rush.”
The public defender paused, then nodded. “Okay. Half an hour. Nothing admissible in court pending Dr. Martel’s findings.”
“Agreed,” Mahoney said.
Ten minutes later, Dr. Martel wheeled a wan Elaine Paulson wearing a hospital gown and robe into the conference room.
She had an IV in her arm that Martel said was for fluids to treat her dehydration.
“Thank you,” Elaine said as soon as she saw me. “For doing what you did, Dr. Cross. I … I want to live for my girls, just like you said.”
“Love is the most powerful force in the universe,” I said.
“It can build you up or destroy you,” she replied, bobbing her head a little too vigorously. “I can see now that that was my relationship with Randall, build up and destroy … and when can I see Tina and Rachel?”
Mahoney said, “After our talk, I’ll see what can be done.”
Elaine’s story came out in fits and fragments, and it was jumbled and tangential at times. She told us she’d had a crush on Randall Christopher from the first moment she saw him, at a basketball game their sophomore year at Maryland. They met by chance at a party, started talking, and did not stop for hours.
Christopher wasn’t like the other athletes she knew. He understood he wasn’t good enough to go professional, and his passions were teaching and coaching to make an impact on teens.
They fell in love and got married after graduation. Christopher became a teacher in an inner-city school in Baltimore and found out what worked and what didn’t work when it came to motivating students the way a sports coach might. Elaine worked at a financial firm for the seven years her late husband spent at the school. Her substantial salary enabled him to think long term about establishing a school of his own design based on his own theories.
“Randall liked being a maverick, going against the grain,” she said. “It fit with infidelity.”
She suspected that he’d had several affairs over the years, all short-term flings that were followed by long periods of monogamy when he was an excellent father and husband. A year ago, as people began urging Christopher to run for office, she recognized signs from earlier affairs and suspected that her husband was once again dallying outside their marriage: He was working late. He had to spend an extra day on the road. He’d shy away from her when she tried to initiate intimacy.
“A woman knows,” she said. “I expected the affair to end in a week or a month, as they had before. But this was different. This had a whole other level of stink about it.”
She smelled faint whiffs of his affair on his clothing, the scent of perfume.
Two months went by, then three. Christopher seemed more distracted, inv
enting more reasons to be away from the house. But when she confronted him, he denied everything, said this was just his life getting more complicated, that he was trying to juggle the school and a possible mayoral run.
“I know it was stupid, but I went off my meds around then and started to obsess about the affair,” she said. “Pretty soon it was all I could think about.”
One day Elaine decided to follow her husband, and she caught him going into Kay Willingham’s town house in Georgetown when he’d claimed he was attending a breakfast prayer meeting. Another time, she caught Kay going in the back way to the charter school after hours.
“They’d have sex in his office,” she said acidly. “Easy, close to home, and sneaky. I think they liked that. I mean, he knew I suspected, and here he was, throwing it in my face.”
“You confront him again?” Mahoney asked.
“I did,” she said. “Randall admitted it, said he loved her and that he was sick of my ups and downs. He said he was leaving me.”
“When was this?” I said.
“Ten days ago?”
“Did he move out?”
“Into his office at the high school,” she said. “That’s why I was there that night he was killed. In the schoolyard.”
CHAPTER 28
THE FIRST FORTY-EIGHT HOURS after Randall Christopher walked out were the worst. Elaine sent the girls to her mother’s in Baltimore and locked herself in her bedroom, weeping, drinking, phone off, everything off.
“I’d think about killing myself. I’d think about killing Randall,” she said. “I’d think the problem was me and beat myself up. But then I’d think, No, and get angry. Randall was the one who cheated. Not me. Elaine Paulson? She is a good woman, a good mother. But her thoughts, they just kept coming back to Randall and how he left her.”
I thought it was odd that she’d started talking about herself in the third person. “Explain why… Elaine—you—were at the murder scene.”
“I know who I am and I’m getting to that,” she said, suddenly upset with me. “Please, I was trying to think differently at the time, I really was, but it wasn’t working. For every good thought, I’d have five bad ones about losing Randall to a woman ten years older than me, and the bad ones became interlocking obsessions, playing over and over in my head.”
She said she soon felt compelled to spy on her husband, to find out what he was doing in his new life without her. Four days before her husband’s body was found, she said she woke up at three thirty a.m., unable to sleep. She decided to go for a run.
That run led her by the school, where she saw a light on in Randall’s office. But on early runs the following morning and the morning after that, the light was off.
“He was staying at her house, I guess,” she said. “I mean, I knew he was. But I couldn’t help waking up and going for a run the fourth morning.”
Elaine claimed she jogged toward the school campus, going past the bodega and the laundromat and crossing the street to Harrison Charter, which puzzled me, because Sampson said he’d watched the footage and didn’t see anyone on it.
Before I could press her on that, she said her husband’s offices were on the second floor, northeast corner of the building. She said she stopped below the windows, looked up, and to her disappointment saw the lights were off for the third morning in a row.
“But Randall often worked in two adjacent rooms, a formal office where he met parents and a smaller personal space where he liked to get things done,” Elaine said. “I went around the north end of the school to the football field so I could look back at the window to the smaller office, but it was dark too.”
I remembered the two offices from our search of the school and was following her description in my mind. “What did you do then?” She hesitated and closed her eyes. “I’d decided to loop back through the rear parking lot and head home when I heard this popping noise, two of them, and then a woman’s scream that got cut off with two more pops.”
Elaine said she stood there petrified for several minutes and then crept forward. She started to take a peek around the corner of the building when flickers of movement caught her attention.
She opened her eyes. “I can’t be sure, but I believe it was a person crouched over and moving in the dark shadows over near the football stands.”
“Headed?” Mahoney said. “Direction?”
“North,” she said.
“Male? Female?”
Elaine said she didn’t know. Her heart was beating so wildly, she was just happy when the person vanished into the dark. Then she looked around the northwest corner of the school and south through the rear parking lots. “There were two of them, males, running away from the dumpsters,” she said, motioning with her hands. “Headed south. They wore dark hoodies and went through a hole cut in the fence that gets you into the alley.”
I nodded. I knew the hole in the fence. I’d used it.
Elaine said she stood there at the northwest corner of the school, unsure of what to do. Then she figured she’d better see what had happened before she called 911.
She shook her head. “I had no idea it would be… them. No idea I’d find them… like that.”
You could see her visibly reliving the horror of the moment, her hand covering her mouth. She had wanted to scream at the sight of her husband and the woman who’d stolen him from her, both of them half naked and dead.
“At first, I was in shock, sensory overload, like it wasn’t really happening, and yet it was happening, and I just knew my entire life was shattered. Mine. The girls’. All of it was gone.”
“Why did you run?” Mahoney asked. “Why didn’t you call the police?”
“Because I knew how it would look. Jilted wife who just happens to be there in the middle of the night, just happens to hear the shots and sees the killers leaving? My mind said, Look at Randall’s face one last time, Elaine, and then get as far away as you can as fast as you can.”
“Did you have the pistol with you at that time?” I asked. “The one you had in the sand dunes?”
Elaine looked confused. “The gun? That night? No.”
“But you had it with you another night at the school?”
Elaine peered into the distance, frowning. “I wasn’t going to shoot them with it. I swear. Scare them. It’s all I wanted to — ”
Bergson, her attorney, threw his arm in front of her. “And that will be all for today, thank you, Detectives. We’re done here and anxiously await the results of the ballistics report on Ms. Paulson’s pistol.”
CHAPTER 29
MAHONEY AND I BOTH LEFT the hospital with Elaine Paulson’s final words about her pistol and her confusion as to whether she’d had it at the scene the night of the crime echoing in our heads: I wasn’t going to shoot them with it. I swear. Scare them. It’s all I wanted to—
“She certainly had the gun with her on another night,” Mahoney said out on the sidewalk. “And she meant to threaten her husband and Kay with it.”
“Definitely,” I said. “And Sampson says she wasn’t on the bodega security footage, so she didn’t enter the campus the way she says she did. Can you make some calls to Quantico to get the ballistics report speeded up?”
“They were swamped and irritated when I called there yesterday,” he said, then he cocked his head as if he had an idea. “We’re supposed to sit down with the vice president tomorrow morning. I’ll call his office, see if they can get things moving.”
“I’d try Breit or Price first,” I said. “You’ll get straight to Willingham.”
Mahoney did, talking to Agent Price and giving him the pertinent numbers to call.
At that point, Ned had to return to FBI headquarters to brief his bosses on the case and I decided to check in with Sampson to see if he needed help or a friendly ear. But my calls just kept going to voice mail.
“Call me, brother,” I said after leaving three earlier messages. “Love you and I have your back one hundred percent and always.”
; I decided to return to Harrison Charter School and the crime scene to see if the layout jibed with Elaine Paulson’s description of the night of the murders. I found a parking space south of the main school entrance and across the street from the apartment building where workers in respirators were sandblasting the brick face.
I got out and tasted dust on the breeze. Burying my nose and mouth in the crook of my elbow, I squinted as I hurried north out of the dust plume, then brushed it off my shirt. I gazed around, reorienting myself, imagining Elaine with a pistol in her fanny pack coming here.
She said she’d run by the bodega but we knew that wasn’t true from the security footage. So how had she come here? Did it matter?
Elaine Paulson claimed she’d gotten to the northeast corner of the school building, looked up at her husband’s formal office, and saw the light off. From that point forward, I walked the path Elaine Paulson had described to us that morning.
At the northwest corner of the school building, I stopped. The rear of the stands about fifty yards across the parking lot blocked my view of the football field beyond. But I could see how someone could have been moving there along the back of the stands in the shadows heading north. And the three dumpsters across the parking to the south would certainly have blocked Elaine’s view of Kay’s Bentley.
My eyes followed the route Elaine said the two hooded males had taken, going south from behind the dumpsters to that hole in the fence. So who had gone north in a crouch? And who were the two hooded males running south? Were the three people she said were on the campus grounds working together? Were they part of a conspiracy?
Given that someone had tampered with most of the security cameras in the area, I decided the whole thing absolutely reeked of a conspiracy to assassinate Kay and Christopher. The fact that their jewelry and money had been taken could easily be explained as a diversion to suggest a robbery gone lethal.
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