Dark Truth (11 page)

“So they had the case all sewed up.” Mitch rubbed his chin.

“I’m sure they thought they did. Older man, popular, good-looking professor. Pretty, young, star-struck coeds. Stephen Madden isn’t the only man in that position to sleep with his students. I’ll bet it’s more common than you think,” Regan said.

“I admit, it looks like an easy catch. Maybe too easy,” Mitch told Nina. “I’ve been tempted to take the easy way out myself, many times. I’m not judging the cops. But it’s always been my experience that if something looks too obvious, it generally is.”

“So you think we should at least look into it?” Nina asked.

“Oh, yeah. If nothing else, it’ll give Mitch and me something to do. Think of it as a sort of parlor game. Some people like chess, some people like puzzles. We like to look into old murders.”

“Well, just for the sake of argument, let’s suppose my father did not kill those girls. And let’s say they were raped. I think we’d all agree that would take Olivia out of the picture.” Nina looked from Mitch to Regan. “Who else is there?”

“An excellent question. Who else would have had motive to kill those girls and pin the blame on the professor?” Regan got up and went into the study, and returned a moment later with a notepad and pen. She wrote POSSIBLE SUSPECTS on the top sheet of paper. “Any thoughts on that, Nina?”

Nina shook her head. “I can’t even begin to imagine who would have done something like that.”

Regan added several question marks to the page.

“What would motivate someone to kill and put the blame on someone else?” Nina asked. “For that matter, what would have motivated my father to have killed those girls?”

“The prosecution’s theory was that the affairs were coming to an end and he was afraid they’d tell someone,” Regan pointed out.

“There are statements in those files from other girls who’d slept with my father over the years. Quite a few of them. I’d think if he’d been afraid of someone talking about their affair, he’d have started killing them off long before he did.”

“Good point.” Regan nodded, and jotted down MOTIVATION???? under her previous notations.

“The murder weapon was never found, was it?” Regan asked.

Nina shook her head. “Not by the police, anyway. My father claims to have found it.”

“Right, the letter he wrote to Olivia.” Regan nodded.

“I would have liked to have seen that,” Mitch said.

“You can.” Nina rose. “It’s in my handbag. I brought it with me because Kyle insists on seeing it.”

“Your stepbrother? Olivia’s son?” Regan asked.

“Right. I was really trying to avoid having him see the letter. I didn’t want to share with him the fact that my father thought his mother killed those girls. But he was adamant, he wants to read it.” Nina turned to Regan. “I ran out of excuses not to show it to him. I did tell him I didn’t think it was a good idea, but he wants the letter.”

“Don’t let him keep it,” Mitch told her.

“Why not?”

“Because we might need it later,” he explained.

“Oh, right, he’s going to turn it back over to me so that I can use it to prove his mother was guilty? That’s not going to happen.”

“May I see it?”

“Sure, Mitch.” Nina took her bag from the counter and opened it.

“Is your copy machine working?” Mitch asked Regan.

“Yes.”

Nina held out the envelope, and Mitch took it, opened it, and read the letter through one time before handing it to Regan.

“Would you mind making a copy of this for Kyle?” he asked.

“It’ll just take me a sec.” Regan went down the hall in the direction of her office.

“He’s going to want to know why he’s getting a copy and why I’m keeping the original.”

“You can tell him that the original letter is in the hands of the FBI.” Mitch grinned. “And you won’t be lying.”

Regan returned in a minute and handed the copy to Nina. Mitch reached out for the original, and read it over one more time.

“He says he found the weapon—clearly a knife— but he doesn’t say what he did with it.” Mitch looked up at Nina. “You have any thoughts on that?”

She shook her head.

“No, but since he’s accusing Olivia, wouldn’t he have found it around the house someplace?”

“That’s what I’d think,” Mitch agreed. “And if he found it there, he probably left it there, wherever it had been hidden.”

“He says he’d planned on talking with Olivia the next day, when he got home after his last class.” Regan picked up the copy that lay on the table and scanned it. “So if the police didn’t find it the day they arrested him and searched the house, then maybe your father returned it to the hiding place.”

“So we go back to the house and try to get in and search for a logical place,” Mitch told them. “Assuming the house is still standing and we can find out who owns it now.”

“No mystery there,” Nina replied. “Dad’s will provided for the house to come to me upon Olivia’s death, but I signed it over to Kyle. It’s his house now.”

Mitch cut to the chase. “So, in other words, if we want to search for the murder weapon there, we’re going to have to get his permission to look for it.”

“The murder weapon we need in order to prove his mother killed four girls and framed my father.”

“What are the chances he’s going to let us do that?” Regan asked.

“What do you think?” Nina rested her elbow on the table, her chin in her open palm.

“Yeah.” Regan grimaced. “That’s what I was afraid you’d say . . .”

T
hirteen

Nina’s hands were sweating on the steering wheel as she parked in front of the house on Oak Drive. She was worried about how Kyle was going to react to reading her father’s letter, and she was concerned about the fact that sooner or later, the premises were going to have to be searched for a murder weapon that may or may not have been hidden there. How was she going to pull that off with Kyle now holding the keys? She wouldn’t be at all surprised if he got really angry and tossed her off the property.

She tried to put herself in his place, and wasn’t sure how gracious she’d be. It was all she could do to remind herself that she was only the messenger. Of course, throughout history, it had been the messenger who’d been shot.

“Hi.” Kyle came out the front door. “Watch that pile of stuff there.”

He pointed to the boxes that lined the curb.

“I called for a trash pickup for this week, and the borough was supposed to send a truck over on Friday, but it never got here. I’m hoping it doesn’t rain over the weekend and make a mess, because I’m not going to drag all this back inside.” He waited on the sidewalk for Nina to round the front of the car, where he gave her a quick hug. “Most of that is from the basement. You won’t believe all the stuff in the attic. You should take a look at it, by the way. I think there are some things that belonged to your father.”

Before she could respond, he hastened to add, “I know you said you didn’t want anything from your father, but there are some old photographs. Might be his parents, his grandparents. You might want to take a look.”

“I think I’ll do that. Thanks.” She nodded. She’d never known her father’s family very well. After her parents divorced and she lived with her mother, she rarely saw relatives on her father’s side.

“Come on in.” He held the door aside for her.

“Hey, you’ve been busy.” She walked into the living room, where the walls had been freshly painted pale beige. “This looks great.”

“I’m trying to go room to room. Whether I stay for a while or sell, the house has to be freshened up a bit. I spoke with a Realtor the other day, and she said I’d need to do stuff like that, brighten up the rooms with paint. Painting is easy and it’s fast, so I thought I’d start with that right away.”

“It really has made a difference.”

“Well, she also told me to throw some slipcovers on the sofa and chairs. Do something different on the windows, since those drapes have been there for as long as I can remember.”

“Guess it’s time, then.”

“Yeah. It’s time.” He gestured for her to come into the kitchen. “I was just having coffee. I’ll pour a cup for you and then we can get down to business.”

“Business?” She sat at the kitchen table and draped her purse over the back of the chair.

“The letter.” Kyle handed her the cup he’d just filled for her.

“Oh. The letter.” She smiled as if it had merely slipped her mind, when in fact she’d thought of little else since he’d asked her for it. She slipped her handbag off the chair and took out the folded piece of paper. “Actually, I made a copy for you. Whether or not you’re going to want to keep it after you read what my father had to say, well, that’s going to be up to you.”

“Well, let’s see.” He sat opposite her at the table and put out his hand.

Nina gave Kyle the letter, then sat back and sipped her coffee. He began to read, and she rose and walked to the back window. She looked out as if she were seeing it all for the first time.

She stood with her back to him and heard the rustling of the papers as he went from one page to the next. When she finally turned back to the table, he was rereading the first page. She sat back down, and watched his face as he read, searching for some indication of what he might be feeling. He’d not said a word, nor had his expression changed. What, she wondered, could be going through his mind?

Finally Kyle looked up and said, “Of course, this is all nonsense.”

“I don’t know what it is, Kyle.”

“You can’t believe for a minute that my mother was the Stone River Rapist?” His eyes narrowed and his mouth slid into a smirk. “A fifty-two-year-old woman did not rape and murder those four girls.”

“I can’t explain why he thought what he thought.” Nina shrugged. “I can’t imagine how she could have been guilty, and yet I can’t imagine him just making up such a thing.”

“And this part here”—Kyle’s voice rose slightly—“this part where he refers to what must have been the murder weapon. If he’d found it, and he thought she’d used it, why didn’t he tell his lawyer? Why didn’t he tell the DA?”

“I think he’s pretty clear on that point. He felt his actions were responsible for causing her to do what she did. What he
believed
she’d done,” Nina explained. “He says he knew he’d caused her terrible pain, and that—”

“Well, he got that much right.” Kyle tossed the letter onto the table between them. “She was devastated by all his affairs. Sometimes I’d come home from school and find her crying. Just sitting someplace, crying. Weeping as if her heart was breaking. Which of course, it was.”

“She told you that? She told you that my father was cheating on her?”

“Not at first. But later, she did. She said they’d only been married for a few months when he had his first affair.” He looked at Nina darkly. “Can you imagine how that must have made her feel?”

“Why did she stay with him, all those years? Why didn’t she leave him?”

“The way your mother did?” He held his mug by the base and not by the handle as he drank from it. “That’s why your mother left, you know. Because he cheated on her, too.”

“No. I didn’t know that.” She felt her spine straighten just a bit as she spoke. “But I’m not surprised. If he was unfaithful to Olivia so soon after their marriage, it stands to reason it was a pattern that had already been set.”

“Well, he says it right in his letter. The man was a sex addict. Just couldn’t get enough of those young girls,” Kyle said bitterly.

“Apparently not,” Nina replied softly.

“Oh, God, Nina, I’m so sorry.” Kyle reached across the table for her hands. “Honest to God, I wasn’t thinking. This has just come as a shock to me, that’s all.”

“I understand. It came as a shock to me, too.” She squeezed his hand, then slipped hers out of his grasp. “I wasn’t sure how you’d react to it.”

“I just don’t believe it.” He picked up his mug with both hands and raised it to his lips. “I don’t give it any credence whatsoever.”

She fell silent, both hands in front of her on the table. She began to pick at her nail polish.

“Nina?” Kyle set the mug on the table. “You don’t think there’s anything to this, do you?”

“I believe that my father found what he believed to be the murder weapon, and for reasons that I don’t understand, he believed it pointed to Olivia as the killer.”

“He doesn’t say what he found or what he did with it.” Kyle skimmed the letter again. “Except that he hid it someplace.”

“Someplace here,” Nina told him. “Maybe in his study, in the garage, in the attic.”

“I seem to remember that the police searched this place pretty thoroughly and on more than one occasion,” Kyle reminded her. “If it was here, how did they miss it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it will ever be found.”

“I suppose you were planning on taking a look.”

“I wasn’t even going to ask. I can’t imagine how I’d feel if I were in your shoes.” She avoided meeting his eyes.

“Hey, if you want to go through this place, turn it inside out and upside down, you go right ahead. If you think you can find what all those cops couldn’t, I say, go for it.”

“Are you serious?” She looked up.

“Of course I’m serious. And I’m that certain there’s nothing to be found. I don’t know why your father had this crazy idea—maybe being in prison did something to his mind, who knows?”

“Well, I’d like to take a look around.” She nodded. “I can’t thank you enough for being so understanding about all this. I wasn’t sure how you’d react.”

“Thought I’d toss you out on your ear?”

“The thought did cross my mind.”

“Never. We’re the survivors. I can’t be angry with you for something your father did.” He drained the last bit of coffee from his mug. “By the way, what did you do with the original of the letter?”

“Oh, a friend of mine is looking it over,” she replied without thinking, then immediately regretted it.

“A friend?” He tilted his head at a slight angle. “No offense, Nina, but this isn’t the sort of thing you’d share with a friend.”

“My friend is a writer. She’s also one of my authors, one of the authors I edit.”

“Regan Landry.”

“Right. How did you know?”

“I’ve read some of the books she worked on with her father.”

“I’d heard that a lot of people in law enforcement read them.”

“Her father was damned good. Damned shame about that whacko shooting him to death like that.”

“Yes, it was. Josh Landry was a great guy.”

“So, are you two planning a book about your father?”

“Not really. I would like to know the truth, though.” She looked at Kyle across the table, and took a deep breath. “I didn’t know my father very well. The things I’ve learned about him, through reading the police files . . .”

“You’ve seen the police files?” His eyebrows rose. “On the cases he was convicted on?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to know.” She shrugged. “I wanted to know what happened. After all these years of pretending that none of it mattered to me—that he didn’t matter to me—I want to know the truth.”

“I think the jury found the truth.”

“Perhaps they did. And maybe you’re right. Maybe the stress of the trial distorted his thinking or made him delusional or paranoid, who knows?” She leaned forward in her seat. “I want to know, Kyle. I want to know the truth.”

“And you think that by reading the files, by talking to Regan Landry, you’re going to find the truth?”

“Hey, I’m open to suggestions. You have a better idea, or a different starting point, let’s hear it.”

“I don’t think trying to prove my mother was the killer is a good place to start to look for the truth.”

“Well, let’s take her out of it, then. And for the sake of argument, let’s take him out of it, too. Let’s start with a blank slate. If it wasn’t him, and it wasn’t her, who was it? Who else would have had a motive?”

“I’m sure the police asked themselves the same thing.”

“Not on your life. Why would they have done that? They thought for sure they had the right man. Why would they have wasted time looking for another suspect? My father admitted to having had affairs with each of those girls. I’m sure they felt that alone was sufficient to have made him guilty.”

“Don’t you?”

“Why would he have killed his girlfriends when the affairs were going so well?”

“Maybe they weren’t. Maybe he was trying to dump them and was afraid they’d start talking about the relationship.”

“I think that’s what the police decided on as motive, but I think that’s the easy way out. I’ve read through all the police files. The detectives did a good job talking to the friends and close relatives of the victims. They all said they knew the girls were involved with someone, they didn’t know who, but the girls—each of them—had let it be known that they were very happy in the relationship. That doesn’t sound like a girl who’s about to be dumped.”

“Maybe she didn’t know she was going to be dumped.”

“Following your logic, then she’d have no reason to start talking.”

He sat silent for a long minute.

“The point is, there might have been someone else who had motive to want my father discredited, to have him out of the picture. The letter he wrote indicates to me that he believed Olivia did it to get back at him, to punish him. I know it’s really, really hard, but if you could try to be as objective as you’re asking me to be, is it such a stretch that a woman who was betrayed the way your mother was—a woman who’d had to put up with so much over the years—is it so hard to believe that she’d want to get back at him for all he’d put her through?”

Kyle rubbed his temples.

“No. I suppose it’s not a stretch for a woman to want to retaliate in any way she could, if she’d had enough of it.” He nodded. “Theoretically, of course. I still don’t believe my mother did it.”

“I don’t think I do, either.”

“So where does that leave us? You take Mom and Stephen out of the picture, who’s left?”

“That’s what we’ll need to figure out.” Nina leaned back in her seat. “Can you think of anyone else who’d have had a motive to set my father up?”

“No. Remember, I’d already graduated from college by the time this happened. I’d moved on.”

Nina opened the letter Kyle had left on the table and idly reread passages. She came to the bottom, and read the last paragraph over several times.

“I know this is going to sound outlandish, but do you really think Father Whelan was in love with your mother?”

“Not so outlandish.” He smiled sheepishly. “I don’t think it’s a big secret. He’s always had a thing for her. Nothing ever happened between them, I’m pretty sure of that, but I do believe he loved her.”

“Did he know about my father’s affairs?”

“She might have told him.” He thought about it for a second, then said, “She probably did tell him.”

“Well, if he’d loved her all that much, and my father was hurting her so much, is it out of the question that he’d want to hurt my father? To get my father out of the picture, or fix things so that he couldn’t hurt Olivia anymore?”

“I think that’s a real stretch. I think that would be easy, you know? The priest in love with the beautiful woman whose husband didn’t deserve her . . .”

He shook his head.

“Just smacks of a trite mystery plot. Not very original.”

“Sometimes trite is true,” she told him. “There’s a reason why things become clichés.”

“It just doesn’t ring true to me.” He tapped his fingers on the tabletop. “Now, if it were Dr. Overbeck we were talking about, I’d say there could be some smoke from that fire.”

“Overbeck?” Nina frowned. “He was at your mother’s funeral. I remember him. He was in the English department. I heard my dad say once that Dr. Overbeck would love to have Dad’s position in the department.”