Compulsion (11 page)

"That puts Bishop in a whole new light," he said.  "How about Billy?  What did you learn from him?"

"He says he’s innocent."

"What do you think?"

"I’m not sure what to think.  Billy says his father’s been beating him, badly.  He has welts all over his back to prove it.  He also seems convinced that his father is the one who killed the baby.  He even suggested a motive:  according to him, Darwin never wanted twins.  He pressured Julia to get an abortion.  Ranted and raved about it, all hours of the night.  But she wouldn’t give in."

"And Bishop’s used to getting his way," Anderson said.

"Probably in any way he has to," I said.  I took a deep breath and let it out.  "We’ve got to remember, though:  Billy’s no saint.  He’s a sociopath, whether he murdered Brooke or not.  He may be lying about his father’s feelings toward the twins.  The wounds he showed me could even have been self-inflicted."

"This case keeps getting more complicated," Anderson said.  "There’s another wrinkle."

"What’s that?"

"My friend Sal Ferraro, a private eye out of Brooklyn, did a little research for me.  Turns out Claire Buckley’s job description must be something more than the traditional nanny.  She and Darwin traveled together to San Francisco, Chicago, Palm Beach, London, and Buenos Aires, just this year.  No other family members had reservations on any major airline for any of the dates they were away."

"She could be an executive assistant type," I said, even though I didn’t really believe it.

"According to Sal, they only booked one room at each of the hotels where Bishop checked in," Anderson said.  "There were plenty of room service charges for two meals.  And there was a hell of a lot of wine and champagne on the tab."

"The man has his needs," I said.

"So, if I’m Darwin Bishop," Anderson said, "looking to hook up with my nanny, maybe make her Mrs. Bishop number three, I might not like the idea my present wife is saddling me with twins.  I might see that as a direct threat to my future."

I winced, wondering whether Anderson’s own conflicted feelings about his unborn child might be coloring his perspective.  But I went with the theme he was developing, because it did seem powerful.  From my perspective, Darwin Bishop was starting to eclipse Billy as the lead suspect in Brooke’s murder.  "Bishop is a man who has recreated himself," I said.  "He’s Jay Gatsby.  He rises out of poverty, sheds his Brooklyn roots and accent, plants his flag on the Upper East Side and Nantucket.  He’s at the top of the world.  He wouldn’t take kindly to anyone telling him that he can’t go forward with his plans.  In fact, he may experience people who get in his way as, quite literally, trying to do him in, trying to kill off his vision of himself.  Then he’s psychologically prepared to defend himself — by lethal means, if necessary."  I paused.  "What do we do to protect the other baby?" I asked.

"I’m not sure there’s much we can do," Anderson said.  "The D.A.’s office has decided to charge Billy with the murder.  Tom Harrigan is in court today seeking an order to arrest him and bring him back to Massachusetts.  New York seems to be cooperating.  Making the case that Tess Bishop could be in danger from another family member isn’t going to fly."

"Even if it’s true," I said.

"I wish it were always about that, Frank," he said.  "Welcome back to my world."

Chapter 6

I flew to Logan and got to my loft at about 9:30
P.M.
  I listened to my phone messages and found one from Julia Bishop.  My pulse started to race, partly because the message took me by surprise, partly because Julia’s voice took me back to feelings I hadn’t felt since parting with Kathy.  It was a voice full of intelligence and worldliness at the same time as it brimmed with vulnerability.  She said she needed to meet me, alone, but didn’t say why.  And I found myself not only willing but
wanting
to see her, something I should have pegged as trouble right off the bat.

The phone number Julia left on my machine was different from the one directory assistance gave me for the Bishop’s home in Nantucket.  I dialed it, taking the chance she would be somewhere she could talk.

"Yes," she answered.

"Frank Clevenger," I said.

"I’m glad you called."

"Where are you?"

"A friend’s house.  Here on the island.  But I have to get back home."

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"Can we meet?"  Her tone had urgency and a hint of fear in it.  "I could come to Boston tomorrow.  Win has a full day of business meetings at the house."

"Of course," I said.  "Did you have a specific place in mind?"

"Wherever you like," she said.  "I can be in the city by one."

"Bomboa Restaurant," I said.  Bomboa was tucked in an alleyway, and quiet in the afternoons.  "It’s right downtown on Stanhope Street, around the corner from Mistral, if you know that place.  I’ll wait for you at the bar."

"
I’ll wait for you at the bar — another sign of trouble
," the voice at the back of my mind said.

"I’ll see you then," she said.  She hung up.

I didn’t know exactly why Julia wanted to meet, but I knew I was being invited deeper into the Bishop family’s psyche.  That reassured me I was burrowing toward their truth.  It also worried me because I sensed that the journey would end in a very dark place.

I felt tired enough to sleep.  I undressed and laid down, but my mind wouldn’t shut down.  I kept going over what Billy had told me about being beaten by his father, what I had learned from Darwin Bishop’s rap sheet, and what North Anderson had told me about the romance between Bishop and Claire Buckley.  If Bishop was hiding behind gentility, if he was someone who had tried desperately to extinguish parts of his life, then he would find it that much easier to extinguish another life.  The dying embers of a man’s repressed pain have the unwieldy habit of catching fire, spreading underground, and burning down everything nearby.

Billy might even have been expressing his father’s destructiveness when he torched property and tortured animals.  He could be what psychiatrists call the
designated patient
— the family member everyone points to as the insane one, the black sheep — when the truth is that that person is simply less able to resist acting on the pathological dynamics alive elsewhere in the household.

But then there was Claire Buckley.  A wild card.  I knew almost nothing about her, other than that she was playing confidante and counselor to Julia while sleeping with Julia’s husband.  And she was the one Julia relied on to help care for Brooke’s surviving twin, Tess.  I felt glad I would be seeing Julia the next day.  Maybe there was a chance I could move her to let the baby stay with grandparents, or somewhere else off the Bishop estate.

After half an hour lying there awake, wrestling with my suspicions, I realized a good night’s sleep wasn’t in the cards for me.  I got up, pulled on my boots, jeans, and black T-shirt, and headed out to the truck.  I felt like grabbing a drink, so I decided to grab a coffee at Café Positano.

Carl Rossetti, my renegade attorney friend (and onetime patient), was standing at the espresso bar when I walked in.  His long black hair was tied in a braid.  I took the space next to him and nodded at Mario.

"What’s new, chief?" Rossetti asked.  Before I could answer, he held out his pinkie, showing off a diamond solitaire that had to weigh over two carats.  "What do you think?"  He took a drag off a cigarette.

"I guess it’s okay," I said.  "I mean, if you’re planning to get engaged and give it to your girl."

He smiled and spewed a thin stream of smoke up toward the silver tin ceiling.  He probably thought I was kidding.  "I got it off Scotty Deegan as a fee," he said.  "I handled a drug case for him before Judge McClure in Federal Court.  Possession, intent to distribute five hundred pounds of weed.  We did good.  Thirty-six months in Allenwood.  Easy time.  Maybe a halfway house after two years.  So it was a score."

"He came to the right person," I said.  I meant it.  If I were in trouble, my first call would be to Carl Rossetti.

He waved his hand back and forth, admiring the stone as it caught the light.  "I would never cough up the cash for something like this, but when it falls in your lap, what the hell, right?"  He shrugged.

"It’s a little flashy for my taste," I said.  "It may even be a little flashy for your taste.  And that’s saying a lot."

"Sometimes you got to stretch," Rossetti said.  He slapped my shoulder.  "So tell me, already, what’s happening in your world?  You still hanging around that beautiful Brazilian from the other night?"

It seemed like more than a few nights had passed.  I pictured Justine getting dressed in my apartment the morning North Anderson had run my doorbell.  "She’s back in Brazil," I said.  "I’d be over there myself if I hadn’t gotten called into the Bishop case.  You remember:  the baby on Nantucket."

"Of course.  The Russian kid," he said.  "He’s pleading insanity?"

"It doesn’t look that way.  He says he didn’t do it."

He smiled.  "What else is he going to say?  Does he have a lawyer?"

"Not that I know of," I said.

"Put in a good word for me, if you get the chance."

"Two nights ago you told me the kid was guilty, for sure."

"He’s still gonna need an attorney," Rossetti said.  "And I could use that kind of payday.  My other clients aren’t billionaires."

Mario delivered my coffee.  I sipped it.  Then I bummed a cigarette off Rossetti, lighted it, and inhaled as much smoke as my lungs would hold.

"Can you share anything you’ve learned about the case?" Rossetti asked.

Rossetti was peculiar-looking, but he was also peculiarly brilliant.  I welcomed the chance to run some of what I knew about the Bishop case by him.  "One of the things I dug up," I told him, "is that Darwin Bishop — the father of the suspect — has a record of domestic assault.  He beat his first wife.  He also violated a restraining order she took out against him."

"You’re joking," Rossetti said.

"I pulled his rap sheet.  It’s all right there in the public record."

"Then I respectfully withdraw my previous opinion."

"On?" I asked.

"The Russian kid," Rossetti said.  "I hereby rescind his conviction."

"Why?"

"Because, until further notice, the father’s your man, doc.  I don’t care how many cats the boy strangled, or how many times he pissed his bed."

"But why do you say that?"

Rossetti held both hands in the air, like a conductor.  "As if you didn’t already know all this, men who beat up on women are different than the rest of us.  Okay?  They’re unhinged.  Out there.  Without feelings.  And anyone arrogant enough to violate an order of the court, when it could get him a year or more in jail, is different, too.  He doesn’t get the idea of boundaries — like, where his life stops and other people’s start."  He let his hands settle back to his coffee cup.  "If you or I were the subject of a restraining order, we’d be twenty miles from ground zero at all times.  We’re not gonna screw with the justice system once it buries its teeth in us."  He paused, sipped his coffee.  "Add up the two charges, and what you have here is a violent crime occurring in a household where the father is a violent offender with no regard for the law.  Ten to one, he did it."

"Not every domestic abuser graduates to murder," I said.

"That’s why it’s ten to one and not a million to one.  If it was open and shut, the police wouldn’t need you.  The friggin’ department could buy another cruiser with what you’re gonna charge ‘em."

"There were five people at home the night the baby was killed," I said.  "Darwin Bishop and his wife Julia, their two sons, Billy and Garret; and the nanny, Claire Buckley.  The D.A. is going to arrest Billy and try to prosecute him.  What do you think of his chances for a conviction?"

"Pretty good, with the father’s testimony," Rossetti said.

"He’s not testifying," I said.  "He said he’ll do anything necessary to protect Billy from a jail term."

"Very noble.  Watch what happens when they call him to the stand, though.  My guess?  He suddenly
remembers
something important — and very incriminating — about his son’s behavior that night.  He may even get all broken up about having to divulge it."  He nodded to himself.  "Look for tears.  You won’t find any.  Unless the guy’s even better than I think."

"I’ll keep my eyes open."

"I’d put a pair in the back of your head, too," he said.

"Meaning?"

"You’re playing in the big leagues now.  Bishop is a billionaire.  I don’t think you fully understand what that implies.  He has one thousand million dollars.  That buys him reach you can’t imagine.  He’s got police, politicians, and judges he can call for favors.  He has powerful investor friends who rely on him to keep generating money for them.  If you’re a threat to him, you’re a threat to them.  They can come for you in a dozen different ways.  You’re expendable."

"I’ve been against the wall before," I said.  Strangely, what I had in mind wasn’t my having joined Trevor Lucas and the hostages he had maimed on the fifth floor of Lynn State Hospital — the case that had all but ended my work in forensics.  I had my own childhood in mind — my having been held hostage on the third floor of Lynn tenement house with a violent alcoholic.  Making that connection bothered me.  I had to wonder whether any of my suspiciousness of Darwin Bishop could be grounded in the ill will I felt for my father.

Rossetti blew out another long stream of smoke.  "Don’t get me wrong.  I know you can take care of yourself, Franko.  But you haven’t been up against anything like Darwin Bishop.  If you think you have, that’s just another advantage he’s got over you."

I took a deep breath.  "I’ll keep looking over my shoulder," I said.  After a year away from forensics, just forty-eight hours back in it had put me in harm’s way again.  But I wasn’t about to raise any white flag.  "If this kid isn’t guilty, he’s not going away for life," I said.  "I’m not going to let it happen."

"This one’s important to you," Rossetti said.  "Personally."