Eyes of the Innocent: A Mystery (22 page)

And why shouldn’t I be a bit queasy? If I was right, Rhonda Byers had killed three people. And even though one of them had it coming, two of them were innocent children. I didn’t want to talk to a person like that. I didn’t even want to be breathing the same air.

Still, there was a story to be written. So I rang the doorbell. I heard footsteps, then a woman who was probably Rhonda Byers’s sister—same height, same build, same bearing—answered the door.

“May I help you,” she said without emotion.

“I’m Carter Ross. I’m a reporter with the
Eagle-Examiner
and—”

“She’s not here,” the woman said immediately, and started closing the door with all due haste.

Under normal circumstances, I’m all for getting a door slammed in my face. It’s the sort of thing that lets a reporter know he’s still alive. But I couldn’t let it happen this time. So I stuck my foot across the threshold before the door could shut.

“I know this is a difficult time for the family,” I said, as the door bounced off my shoe. “But we’re just trying to make our coverage as complete as possible and I was hoping for her help.”

The woman was about to find a new way to tell me to get lost. But then, from an inside room, I heard that authoritarian voice.

“Let him in,” Mrs. Byers said.

I was escorted into a dim living room, where Rhonda Byers was sitting on a Queen Anne–style couch with the shades drawn. Her bare feet were propped on a nearby coffee table. She was no longer dressed in the gray suit and uncomfortable shoes. It was now a sweatshirt and jeans. I surmised a girdle had been removed as well.

The room did not have a television, just a lot of shelves packed with books, all of them spine out. She was a reader, obviously. There were knickknacks, but the room didn’t feel especially cluttered. I sometimes get my decorating styles a little mixed up, but I was fairly certain the room would qualify as Victorian. Except it wasn’t your charming Aunt Beverly’s Victorian, where all the little baubles have stories behind them. It was your stern Aunt Helga’s, where everything had a brittle feeling, like you couldn’t move anything—not even the air—or something would break.

“Mrs. Byers, Carter Ross from the
Eagle-Examiner,
” I said.

She offered no greeting, smile, or handshake, which was fine by me. I didn’t particularly feel like returning any of them.

“We’re writing a story about the hours leading up to the councilman’s disappearance,” I continued. “I was hoping you could fill in some blanks for me.”

She looked at me with the same expressionless face her sister wore.

“Mr. Ross, I’ll be honest, I don’t want to talk with you, just like I didn’t want to go on television today,” she said, without much enthusiasm. “But the police tell me that media attention is good, because it will help them find Wendell. So I’ll do what I can.”

Okay, so that’s how she was going to play it: the dutiful wife sacrificing herself to bring her poor husband back home. I could roll with that.

“I’d like to go through the final forty-eight hours before he disappeared,” I said. “It would start Friday evening. What were you and Mr. Byers doing that night?”

During the next hour or so, she went over everything, and I drilled her on every inane detail. It was a long succession of political fund-raisers, pancake breakfasts, civic association meetings, high school basketball games, and so on. It was the sort of thing you expected from a local politician—the hobnobbing with the moneyed set, the glad-handing with the constituents, the seeing and being seen. Windy was a man on the go.

But, strikingly, he wasn’t on the go with Mrs. Byers. At every stop on Windy’s itinerary, I kept asking where she was. And she always seemed to be somewhere else—reading at home, or at a church function, or at her sister’s house. She admitted she had no idea where Windy was at certain times, or that she had only learned where he had been after the fact. She often was uncertain about when events began or ended. She never seemed to be able to offer an exact time when her husband arrived back home.

It gave me the window I felt I needed to see if I could bait her a little.

“You and your husband didn’t seem to spend much time together,” I offered.

“We were both very busy,” she said, trying to dismiss it easily.

I didn’t let her.

“I know this is difficult to talk about,” I pressed. “But I have to ask: Were there problems between you and Mr. Byers?”

Rhonda glanced nervously at her sister, who had been sitting in the room quietly listening.

“I … I wouldn’t say problems…”

She was faltering, if only slightly. This was my chance to see if I could start playing with the dials on her thermostat and add a few degrees to that icy blood of hers.

“Well, what would you say then?”

“Is it … is it really necessary to bring my … my marriage into this? Into your article?”

“At this point, everything is relevant,” I insisted. “I don’t mean to be rude”—actually, I did—“but I have to ask the question: Is it possible your husband was having an affair?”

Finally, the sister exploded.

“How does that matter?” she demanded. “The man’s been kidnapped!”

“It’s—” I began but was drowned out.

“You have a lot of nerve—”

“Jeannette, I’ll handle this,” Rhonda insisted.

Jeannette leaned forward as if she was going to object some more, but Rhonda held up a hand, “I’ll handle this.”

“Young man,” she said, turning toward me, having already cooled herself back down. “Can we talk off the record?”

“Sure,” I said, and put down my pen, which up to this point had been waving furiously.

“Are you married?” she asked.

“No.”

“Well, Wendell and I have been married for twenty-eight years,” she said. “After a while it gets … well, it’s not like I thought it would be.”

“How so?” I asked, and resisted adding, you mean on your wedding day you never envisioned murdering him in cold blood and making it look like he disappeared?

“I don’t know how it happened, but we drifted apart,” she said. “We were in love when we were younger. I really believe that. But it was always hectic, with me chasing after the children and him in politics. After the kids were out of the house, I thought it would get better because we’d have more time to spend together. But it got worse. He did his thing. I did mine. Separate worlds.”

“So why not divorce him?”

“I don’t know,” she said, sighing and looking away. “I think you have to be angry with someone to go through all the trouble of getting a divorce. And I couldn’t summon enough feeling for him to hate him that much. But to say we had a marriage anymore?”

She shook her head.

“Yet I’m told you always went to the council meetings,” I said. “Why?”

She stopped and thought for a moment.

“I guess I found it interesting,” she said. “That was maybe the one area where we still shared a common interest. We could talk about that. I’d like to think he … I guess I think he valued my opinion on those matters.”

Uh-huh. Probably Windy was like Tommy. He needed Rhonda to explain stuff to him.

“But other than that, you barely saw each other?” I asked.

“That’s true,” she said, shaking her head again. “I can’t believe I’m saying it, but it’s true.”

“So, and again I hate to be rude”—no, really, I didn’t—“but is it possible your husband has met someone else and is off with her somewhere right now? It happens, you know.”

Yes, Mrs. Byers, your husband just ran off. No, Mrs. Byers, I’m sure you didn’t do anything untoward. Wasn’t that the illusion she wanted the world to believe? Isn’t that the story she hoped I would buy? The offer was on the table. All she had to do was take it.

But she didn’t. Maybe she was too smart to be that obvious.

“I … I don’t know,” she said. “I’m so … More than anything, I’m sad for him. I worry he’s gotten himself in trouble. I just hope he’s all right.”

She looked at me and blinked, like she was trying to keep tears from tumbling out her eyeballs. Maybe she was. She was so convincing, I actually believed her for a moment.

God, I felt like a cub reporter. Where was my cynicism? My natural suspicion? That little voice in my head that told me to distrust everything I heard? What was I, going soft?

“Do you think you have enough for your story?” the sister asked, finally taking control of the situation.

“Enough for now,” I said, because we had been at it for an hour and I wanted to leave while I still had my disbelief.

“Then I think it’s time you go,” she said. “My sister has been through too much already.”

And this time Rhonda didn’t object.

Neither did I. Short of a tearful confession—which Rhonda Byers was far too cagey to give me—I had gotten what I came for. Raines and I could go over everything now. It was time to leave.

I bid the Byers sisters farewell and led myself to the door, with Jeanette close on my tail. As I walked through the foyer, I lingered slightly, pretending to fumble with my jacket until I saw what I was looking for: a big, smudgy streak of blood, about two feet long and as obvious as a snake on a sidewalk, on the molding near the floor.

It seemed odd Rhonda Byers hadn’t cleaned it up yet. Perhaps the police had instructed her to leave it undisturbed, in case they needed to do more testing. I was glad they did because it gave me the chance to study it.

I’m no forensics expert, but it looked like the kind of smear you’d get if you were dragging a bloodied body out the door.

Primo cultivated his relationship with Councilman Wendell A. Byers slowly, having learned from other failures not to push too far too fast.

The important thing was to keep the initial favors small: a phone call to the city engineering department to prod them for an approval; or a letter to the water authority to speed up a permit for a sewer hookup; or an introduction to a fellow council member, with a few kind words about Primo as a developer.

All the while, Primo kept the contributions coming. A Newark council campaign was a surprisingly expensive endeavor. Sending out mailings, making local media buys, maintaining campaign offices and staff, printing posters and lawn signs—it all added up. Even a longtime incumbent like Byers had to shell out $250,000 or more to hold his seat. What’s more, keeping a healthy campaign fund in between elections helped fend off the wolves. Would-be candidates weren’t keen to challenge a well-financed opponent.

So the need for cash was constant. And Byers was no different from most politicians in that he hated fund-raising—the glad-handing, the overpromising, the grubbing for money from friends. That’s where Primo came in. The more money Primo gave, the less Byers had to raise himself. It was easy and, above all, it was addictive. Any candidate would enjoy having to spend less time with his hand out.

Once Byers was hooked on the money, the size of the favors steadily grew. And it became more quid pro quo. Do this, I’ll give you that. Influence for sale. And beyond the help in navigating the city bureaucracy—which saved numerous headaches—was the real golden goose. Land.

In a place like Newark, city-owned land was abundant. For many decades, owners who fled to the suburbs—or absentee landlords who decided to cut their losses—simply abandoned their properties rather than continue to pay the taxes on them. After a few years of nonpayment, the city would seize the property. After a few more years, when whatever structure left on the property had been vandalized beyond the point of repair, the city knocked it down.

It all had the effect of making the city of Newark far and away the largest owner of empty, developable land within its own boundaries. For a long time, the land was essentially worthless. But then, as Newark’s building boom began in the late nineties and then picked up momentum after the turn of the millennium, it rapidly began increasing in value. And, under statute, the sale of this land was the purview of the city council, which had to approve all deals.

For Primo, this was the real benefit of having a councilman in his pocket. Generally speaking, if one councilman wanted a land sale approved, his colleagues would stay out of the way and allow it to happen. Professional courtesy ruled.

Again, Primo started small, with a parcel here or there, then built up to larger chunks of contiguous land. With the way Primo had his business set up—in an endless chain of seemingly unconnected LLCs—no one even realized Councilman Byers was always recommending sweetheart land sales to the same person.

It allowed Primo an abundant supply of nearly free land on which to build houses. And in the most densely populated state in America, where land was always at a premium, it gave Primo an enormous edge on the other developers. It was basic economics. Getting one of your chief raw materials for virtually nothing did wonderful things for the bottom line.

Primo paid for the privilege, yes. But the cost was nothing compared to the benefit.

CHAPTER 6

As I drove back toward the office, I could feel one of those wiggling, niggling suspicions trying to work itself free from deep underneath my skullbones. Except, of course, the moment I became aware of it, my conscious brain began doing a little dance all over it. Whatever small hint of genius may have been forthcoming was stomped back down, hopefully to resurface at a later time.

Clearly, it was something about Rhonda Byers. Had she been too cool? Or too melodramatic with the near-tears? Had she given away anything I hadn’t noticed?

Nothing came to me. And Kevin Raines wasn’t going to be any immediate help—his cell phone went straight through to voice mail.

“Sergeant, it’s your confidential informant. Give me a call when you have a moment,” I said, then left my number.

By the time I got back, it was six o’clock and there was some serious typing going on in the newsroom. Tommy looked like he was holding a staring contest with his computer screen. Tina had her shoes off and feet curled underneath her, a sure sign she was rewriting someone’s lede. Buster Hays was banging on his keyboard with his usual vigor—having been raised on a manual typewriter, he still hit the keys like he was making sure his letters stood out nice and crisp.