Don't Be Afraid (16 page)

Emma abruptly tugged at Amy’s other hand, pulling her away. “Let’s swing,” she said. She shot a fierce look at Paul before smiling in a winsome way at her mother. “Just you and me.”

“Emma!” Amy was embarrassed. “Maybe Mr. Marsh wants to join us.”

He laughed gently. “Paul, please. No, I wouldn’t want to intrude in your mother-daughter time.”

“Perhaps another time then,” Amy said.

“That would be great.” He pulled out his wallet and extracted a business card. “Call me anytime.”

She left him at the old playground with his little boy and walked back with Emma, taking care to keep hold of her hand, to the new playground across from the parking lot. As they approached, she saw the strange man who’d been smoking lingering against one of the cars. When they got to the park, he was gone.

Early Monday morning, Mark left his parents’ house to find his car blocked by a small, wiry man with a shock of red hair and a feral grin.

“Peter Gibson,” he said, sticking out his hand as if Mark was meeting him at a party and not on a quiet suburban street.

Mark shook hands, feeling the dull throbbing behind his eyes that always accompanied his hangovers. “Yeah?”

“I’m with the
Steerforth Herald
, Detective Juarez. Care to comment on how the investigation’s going?”

“It’s going,” Mark said. “I’ve got work to do, Mr. Gibson, so if you’ll excuse me.” He looked pointedly at the man and then at his car.

“Sure, yeah, of course.” Peter Gibson bobbed his head in affable agreement, but didn’t move an inch. “Just one thing, detective. This is the second murder in two weeks in Steerforth—is there a connection between the two crimes?”

“It’s under investigation,” Mark repeated. His head was really throbbing. He thought longingly of the aspirin in the glove compartment.

“Is a serial killer loose in Steerforth?”

His eyes whipped up to Gibson’s. “Where did you hear that?”

“I’ve got sources. They say the killer’s leaving notes with the bodies—”

“Your source is wrong—there are no notes—”

“But it is the same guy, right? Is he going to kill again?”

Juarez pushed past him and opened his car door. Gibson wedged his small body between the door and the frame. “The public’s got a right to know if there’s a killer at large, detective.”

“The police will protect the public from any killer,” Mark said, prying him out of the door.

Gibson’s grin got wider. “Can I quote you on that?”

“Get away or I’ll arrest you for impeding a police investigation.”

The reporter was still standing there when Mark sped away. Mark eyed him in the rearview mirror until that shock of red hair disappeared from view.

He drove into Manhattan, grateful that he was going to the Upper East Side. He told himself that he was only concerned about traffic, and not that he was happy to avoid passing familiar streets.

He couldn’t stop his mind from counting the blocks, though, and remembering one street in particular and its prewar brownstones. He couldn’t help recalling the thin maple trees spaced along the sidewalk, their branches straining upward to catch glimpses of the sun between the buildings. It had been autumn when they’d met, and he’d been plucking a gorgeous orange-red leaf from the sidewalk when he’d heard a laughing voice declaring that those leaves belonged to the building. He’d looked up to see a smiling face, the dancing eyes flirting with him.

Mark switched stations on the radio, hunting for chatter, anything to drown the memories. Things of the past were in the past. It was over and had to be over. He had a new job, a new life and he had to accept that.

The offices for Chris Moran’s law firm were at a posh address. It was an old building with newer design elements, high end with wood and chrome. Juarez paced in the outer office, looking at the black-and-white photos of old Manhattan and even older partners on the walls.

The receptionist, a gazellelike creature with almond eyes and lips that looked enameled, eyed him as if she’d like to call security to have him removed. He’d dressed up, too. Nice pants, nice tie. Still, he felt out of place.

It was a long fifteen minutes and then a tall, strikingly handsome man strode through the glass doors and headed for Mark. He was wearing a suit that must have cost more than Mark made in a year. His hair was the blond of summers on the cape and his skin still bore the faint glow of a tan.

“I’m Chris Moran,” he said, his voice full of the confidence born of prep schools and trust funds. His lips were turned up in a smile of welcome, but his pale blue eyes held a question. He smelled faintly of expensive aftershave. “And who might you be?”

Mark introduced himself. He flashed his detective’s shield. He said his piece about a murder investigation. When he mentioned Amy, her husband, who’d been listening patiently, uncrossed his arms and ushered him through the glass doors and into his office.

“I’m not sure I’m following you, detective,” Moran said once they were seated, one behind and one in front of the large mahogany desk. A silver paperweight and a leather blotter with silver trim adorned its surface, along with a mahogany inbox piled high with briefs. There were no personal photos anywhere to be found.

“Is my wife a suspect in these crimes?”

“We’re questioning everyone, sir,” Mark said with practiced ease. Not that Chris Moran seemed to need pacifying. If the news upset him, he was hiding it well.

“Why are you questioning me?”

“Just routine. Your wife discovered both bodies. You’re her spouse and might be able to shed some light on your wife’s relationship to the deceased, etcetera. It’s just what we do—dotting the
i
’s and crossing the
t
’s.” He smiled, doing his best to convey that this was casual. Two guys getting together to talk. Some people were actually fooled by that.

“I don’t think I can help you, detective,” Moran said with his own smile. “My wife and I are separated and have been for over seven months.” He spread his hands as if to indicate that he had nothing to share.

“But you go to Steerforth regularly, right? To see your daughter?”

The man’s face barely changed, an almost imperceptible tightening of the lips, but Juarez was used to looking for the reaction and he noticed it.

“Yes, of course, detective. I visit my daughter as often as my schedule allows.”

“Were you in Steerforth on Tuesday, the sixth of September?”

“If it was a Tuesday, I’m sure I was working.”

“The following Friday, the sixteenth?”

Moran’s smile was strained. “Again, detective, if it was a weekday I’m sure I was here.”

“This would have been in the evening on the sixteenth.”

“If you need to know precisely what I was doing, I’m sure my secretary can pull my calendar up for you.”

“That would be great,” Juarez said. Moran buzzed his secretary and had Juarez repeat the dates in question. The secretary said she’d buzz him back.

“Did Amy send you?” the lawyer asked as they waited. “This isn’t about the murder investigation at all, is it?”

“Excuse me?” Juarez said and Moran laughed in a nasty way.

Leaning forward in the large office chair, he leveled an index finger at Juarez. “If this is about the mortgage, you can tell her to forget it. She has to sell—I’m not bailing her out this month.”

Juarez kept his features blank. “I don’t know anything about your mortgage, Mr. Moran. I’m a homicide detective investigating two murders. Did you know Sheila Sylvester?”

Moran settled back in his chair and picked up the silver paperweight, his face settling into a sour expression as if the detective wasn’t playing his game. “I met her once,” he said. “Brassy woman. Bit of a bitch.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted to kill her?”

Moran snorted. “I’m sure you can find a lot of people. She had a lot of opinions and she wasn’t afraid to share them.”

“Did you dislike her?”

“Enough to kill her, you mean?” Moran smiled, tossing the paperweight from hand to hand. “I didn’t know her well enough to dislike her or to kill her.”

“Yet you sent her a letter telling her that she’d better stop filling your wife’s head with—what word did you use—
crap
?”

Surprise, fear and anger passed in quick succession across Moran’s face like storm clouds while Juarez kept a bland smile on his own. “I think I’ve got a copy with me,” he said, reaching into the breast pocket of his jacket. “Let’s see what you wrote.”

Moran dropped the paperweight back on his desk, shifting in his seat as Juarez unfolded the copy of the letter he’d found in Sheila’s home.

“Aah, I was right—
crap
was the word you used. You wrote, ‘Leave Amy alone and stop filling her head with all your feminist crap.’”

“There was a context for that, detective.”

“Yeah?”

“She was telling my wife to demand all sorts of things from me, that she should screw me in the divorce.”

“So you wrote her this letter to put a stop to that?”

“Yes. I wanted her to mind her own business.”

“What did you mean when you wrote—” Juarez looked down at the letter again. “ ‘If you don’t stop, I’ll be on you like flies on shit and you’ll be sorry you ever heard my name.’ ”

Moran laughed weakly. “A little poetic license, detective.”

“So you weren’t threatening her?”

“Not in the way you’re thinking!” The lawyer sounded genuinely shocked. “With legal action, sure. I wanted her to know that I would sue her interfering ass, that’s all.”

The secretary buzzed back in with the calendar information. The lawyer had been having dinner with a client on the sixteenth and then drinks with a friend. She had minimal information for the sixth. A meeting in Hoboken at nine
A.M.
, but nothing before then.

“Plenty of time to get back and forth from Steerforth, wouldn’t you say?” Juarez looked expectantly at the other man.

“In this traffic? That’s difficult at the best of times, detective.”

“But not impossible.”

Moran actually looked nonplussed for a moment. That was satisfying. “Look, if my meeting wasn’t until nine, I’m sure I was here. Someone will have seen me. I certainly wasn’t in Connecticut, detective.”

“Still, it would help me out if you had someone to vouch for that. Also, I need the name of the friend you were having drinks with on Friday night.”

“I hardly think that’s necessary.” Moran managed a look of outrage that probably worked in a courtroom, but didn’t affect Mark. He simply waited.

After a moment, Moran opened a drawer in the mahogany desk. He pulled out a small leather notebook and flipped through its pages. A black book, Mark realized, and understood that something more than this man’s sense of entitlement had driven the marriage to ground.

“Christina Rawson,” Chris Moran said after a moment. Without being asked, he took a note off a pad engraved with his initials and scribbled a number on it.

“Here.” He handed it to Mark, who glanced at the exchange before pocketing it. Then he stood up.

“Thank you for your time, Mr. Moran.”

Moran walked Juarez as far as the receptionist, convivial since he believed he’d alibied himself for both dates. As Juarez headed toward the elevators, Moran stopped him with a final question.

“This Meredith Chomsky—was she a ballbuster, too?”

 

 

Chief Tom Warburton presented the picture-perfect image of the small town head-of-police. He was in his mid-sixties, tall, broad-shouldered, with a thick, white head of hair, a rugged face with a chiseled chin and a stomach that hinted at the rock-hard man he’d once been. He had just enough paunch to convey maturity without suggesting too many Krispy Kremes.

He had the gift of a reassuring smile that conveyed order, moral righteousness and problems solved that had gotten him re-elected to his office more than fifteen times. He’d run unopposed for years, but still used the campaign slogan some ad agency had developed for him in the 1970s: All crime solved before its prime.

He was smiling now, greeting the phalanx of reporters that had gathered for the press conference he’d organized in the brand-new conference room he’d managed to get state funding for after 9/11.

Standing behind him and off to the sides were the deputy chief, a couple of captains, and Lieutenant Martin Farley, head of homicide’s detective bureau and Mark’s immediate boss. Tall, thin, and freckled, with a long face and eyes perpetually red-rimmed, he looked like a giraffe coming off a crack habit. He had none of the chief’s charisma but all of the crap.

“Nice of you to show up,” he growled as Mark slipped into the room.

“Didn’t want to steal your thunder, boss,” he said, giving him a shit-eating grin. He sat down next to Black at the end of a long table that had a podium for the chief at its center. Several microphones were distributed along its length.

“I hate this kind of thing,” Black said, pulling nervously at his collar. He looked more pasty than usual and there were little bits of red-tinged tissue paper stuck to the side of his neck where he’d cut himself shaving.

“Detective Juarez, how nice of you to join us.” The chief’s voice made both Mark and Black flinch.

“Sorry, sir, I was interviewing a suspect,” Mark said.

The chief leaned in to the two men, cupping a giant calloused hand around the microphone closest to them. “Sit up straight and follow the script, boys, and we’ll give these jackals what they want to hear so we can get back to work. Got it?” His smile never wavered, but his eyes were piercing steel.

He didn’t wait for their reply, but Black nodded his head anyway, nervously patting down his thinning blond hair. Mark pulled his chair closer to the table and looked, for the first time, at the audience before him.

Reporters were still filing in, but more than seventy-five percent of the seats had been filled. Television cameramen, with their massive cameras, had taken up strategic positions in the rear and on the sides. TV and print reporters, some with microcassette recorders, others with small notebooks, were chatting with one another or talking into cell phones. A few were typing away on laptops.

Mark tried to still the anxiety that he felt on seeing them. It wasn’t as if any of them were the same reporters that he’d faced after the shooting. Stories about out-of-control cops had been popular in New York and they were eager to paint him as the trigger-happy cop who had it in for poor street hustlers. His face, glowering and stunned, had greeted him from the front pages of tabloids for a few weeks running, opposite a photo of the boy, which had probably been taken in the eighth grade because he’d looked so young and angelic. Then some crazy had shot up a subway train and they’d forgotten all about him.