Murder Suicide (31 page)

All he could do now was listen.

She zipped up her jeans, slipped into her shirt.  "One thing about my father," she said, buttoning buttons.  "He never used me."

He shook his head, thinking how indelicate and how misunderstood he had been at the same time.  "I didn’t make love with you to get you to do anything," he said.

"I guess it just feels that way."  She put on her shoes, grabbed her jacket off the back of the desk chair.

"Whitney, wait."

"For what?"  She stormed out.

He walked to the windows and looked outside, saw her cross the street and disappear into the Public Garden, the icy branches of the trees swaying in a light wind.

*            *            *

Kim Moffett held up a short stack of messages when Clevenger walked through the door to Boston Forensics.  "John Haggerty called three times about that new case," she said.  "Lindsey Snow called twice.  And the FBI called four times.  But that’s because I keep hounding them about my computer."

"You called the FBI?"

"The evidence room at Quantico."

"Kim..."

"They need to give it back.  It has my stuff on it."

"These things take time.  They could hold onto it a year, maybe longer."

"What about my rights?  What about a person’s privacy?  Did all that just go to hell after
9/11
?"

She wasn’t going to let it drop.  "I’ll do whatever I can."

"Thank you."  She smiled.  "North wanted me to tell you he’s on his way here.  He tried your cell twice."

Clevenger nodded, walked into his office.

"Another thing," Moffett said.

He turned around.

"You have a smudge of pink lipstick on your jacket."

He looked down, saw the tiniest hint of Whitney’s light pink lipstick on the black leather.  "Why would you think that’s lipstick?"

She turned and started word processing.

He walked into his office, took off his jacket, wiped the smudge away.  He tossed it on a chair, sat down at his desk and called Lindsey Snow’s cell phone.

She answered.

"It’s Dr. Clevenger."

"Can I come see you?  It’s about my dad.  About him being shot."

Being shot
.  That was new.  Lindsey’s theory had been that she had pushed her father into suicide.  Did she believe now that he had been murdered?  "When can you come here?" Clevenger asked her.

"Less than an hour."

"That works."

"Thanks."  She hung up.

He tried to return John Haggerty’s calls, got his message machine.  "I’m not taking any new cases until the Snow case is wrapped up," he said.  "I’ll call you when that happens."

He put his feet up on his desk, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.  He pictured Whitney McCormick disappearing into the Public Garden.  He thought how he might have lost her for good, mixing business with pleasure.  And then his eyes flicked open with the answer to one of the questions he had been asking himself:  Why would John Snow go through with his surgery and leave his life if he had found the love of his life?

The answer was simple, so simple it had been hard to see until he mimicked the drama with McCormick.  Either Snow or Baxter had betrayed the other in some way.  Their love was no longer the pristine thing it had been.  Something had gone terribly wrong.

"Hey, stranger," Anderson said from the doorway.

Clevenger pulled his feet off the desk, turned to him.  "What’s up?"

"I’ll be reading George Reese’s personal banking and brokerage account statements by the end of the day.  Vania’s making good progress."

"He still working out of his house?  I worry about him."

Anderson shook his head.  "He’s at my place.  No one’s going to find him there, unless they spot the coffee cups piling up in my garbage.  I keep him supplied every couple hours.  Large, cream..."

"Four sugars."

"He’s got everyone trained."

"Anything else up?"

"I haven’t found anyone at MGH able to put Heller inside the hospital when Snow was shot.  Not yet, anyhow.  Not that that proves anything."

"Not that it does."

"How’s Billy doing, by the way?"

Clevenger looked at his watch.  2:15
P.M.
   Billy was still in school — or should be.  "He’s working out a couple problems right now," he said, and left it at that.

"Anything I can do?"

"I’m not sure how much anyone can do, myself included.  But I’ll let you know."

"Fair enough."

"Lindsey Snow’s on her way over here."

"And the beat goes on."

*            *            *

Lindsey sat in the chair she had sat in the last time she visited Clevenger’s office.  She was wearing a short, lime green skirt and a ribbed, off-white turtleneck sweater.  When she crossed her legs, Clevenger could see she was wearing tiny, black satin panties.  "If I tell you something," she said.  "You have to promise me you’ll never say you heard it from me."

"I can keep a secret," Clevenger said, deliberately keeping his eyes focused on hers.

"I’m telling you because I feel close to you."

If she did feel close to him, he knew it had nothing to do with him and everything to do with the missing John Snow.  Lindsey was like an atom of Oxygen, exquisitely unstable, desperately trying to bond.  And part of Clevenger wanted to tell her so, to explain that her attraction to him was only due to the sudden loss of balance she felt losing her father.  But she wasn’t his patient.  She was a suspect.  He didn’t owe her a psychotherapeutic relationship, or anything else.  He was free to trade on her needs, seduce her into opening up.  That’s what it could take to break open a murder case.  White lies of the heart, in service to the truth.  It was a fragrant business, but it was his business.  He dropped his eyes to her thighs, just long enough for her to notice his gaze.  "Go ahead," he said.  "I want you to tell me."  He knew she would hear only the first three words: 
I want you
.

She blushed, caught her lower lip between her teeth.  "The last week or so my dad was alive, he was pretty down.  It was like all the energy that had flowed into him was leaving him.  He stopped talking to everyone.  Including me."

Clevenger nodded.  He wondered whether Lindsey was still stuck on her suicide theory.

"So Kyle decided to take Dad’s gun.  So he wouldn’t hurt himself.  At least, that’s what he said."

Clevenger tried not to show any emotion, even though he felt like the case might be taking a final turn on its long, twisted path.  "How did he get the gun?"

"Dad always kept it in the same place — the top shelf of the shirt rack in his closet.  We’ve both seen him take it from there when he was going to work and put it back there when he got home.  He hid the bullets somewhere else."

"Didn’t your father wonder what happened to his gun?"

"Kyle told him.  He told him he’d taken it — and why."

"And your mother knew?"

Lindsey nodded.

That might explain Theresa Snow’s attempt to block Clevenger from talking with Kyle.  "How does Kyle explain your father being shot with that gun?"

"He says he only kept it unit the night before.  He told me Dad wanted it back, that he threatened to turn him in for violating his probation.  So he got pissed and gave it to him."  Her eyes filled up.  "He says he told him to go ahead and shoot himself, if that’s what he wanted."

"Do you believe him?  Do you think he gave the gun back?"

She uncrossed, then recrossed her legs in a way that drew Clevenger’s gaze, again.  "All I know is he’s been happier over the past few days than I’ve ever seen him," she said.  "And he says he can’t go to Dad’s funeral.  He says it wouldn’t be ‘honest.’"

Was Lindsey telling the truth, or was she trying to finish off her brother, punish him for siphoning off her father’s adoration?  If Clevenger was just a stand-in for Snow, Lindsey might want him to jail Kyle, the equivalent of banishing him to another state the way Snow had.  "Do you think your brother shot your father?" Clevenger asked her.

"I don’t want to, but..."  She looked away.

He let a few moments pass.  "Thank you for telling me, Lindsey," he said.

She looked back at him, tilted her head, bringing her silky hair cascading down over half her face.  "So, it that it?"

"I’ll follow up with your brother and see where we go from here."

"Where
do
we go from here?" she asked pointedly.

Clevenger wanted to avoid injuring her.  That didn’t need to be part of the job.  "As pretty as you are, Lindsey," he said, as gently as he could, "and as much as I might want to spend time with you outside the office, I can’t do that."

"Ever?"

That question made it clear Lindsey was willing to wait a long, long time for him.  Maybe even forever.  And that helped Clevenger see again that her drug wasn’t sex with her father, but the potential for sexual union with him.  Snow had kept her tethered to him by adoring her beyond all others, without ever actually touching her.  She was looking for her next supplier of that adoration, not her next lover.  "You’re much too beautiful for me to say never," he told her.

She glowed.  "You’re not with..."  She nodded in the direction of Kim Moffett’s desk.

He shook his head.

She took a deep breath, let it out.  "Cool.  So, just give you time?"

"Give me some time."

"I understand."  She stood, started to put on her jacket.

He stood up, watched her.  She was a beautiful young woman.  There wasn’t even a white lie in that.  "You’re extraordinary, you know," he told her.

For the first time, she looked taken aback.

"And not just because your father thought so, or because I think so."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean..."  He realized he was speaking a language she couldn’t understand.  Telling her that other men would not only find her desirable, but act on it, that they would be
honest
with her in every way, wouldn’t register with her.  Her self-worth had always come from her reflection in John Snow’s eyes.  "It’s not important right now," he said.

She seemed happy to let it go at that.  "See you."

"Take care."

She walked out.

Kim Moffett walked in ten seconds later.  "Whitney McCormick’s holding for you," she said.

Hearing her name was enough to make Clevenger smell her perfume, imagine her fingers moving through his hair.  Amorous hallucinations.  "Thanks."  He waited for Moffett to leave, picked up the phone.  "Whitney."

"I talked to my dad," McCormick said.

He stayed silent.

"Two patents were filed for a flight stabilization system, registered jointly to Snow-Coroway, InterState Commerce and Lockheed Martin."

"Coroway lied to me in D.C.," Clevenger said.  "He and Reese got Vortek.  Snow delivered.  They didn’t need him anymore."

"I know the feeling.  Must be going around."

"Listen," Clevenger said, "I was wrong bringing up the case the way I did earlier.  I..."

"You could just say ‘nice doing business,’" she said, coldly.

"When can I see you?"

She hung up.

The Four Seasons

Just Twenty Days Before

1:45 P.M.

He could hardly wait to see her, to tell her.  He was wearing a light blue Armani shirt and a deep blue Armani shit he had bought on Newbury Street the prior day.  A black crocodile belt.  Shiny, black slip-ons.  He was freshly shaven, his hair neatly trimmed.  He stood at the window overlooking the Public Garden and watched her step out of a cab at the curb, her auburn hair caught by the cold wind.

She walked toward the hotel entrance.

Two weeks had changed everything.  Two weeks ago he had told her they needed to stop seeing one another, that the magic she had worked on him months before, holding him after his seizure, was for naught.  He had been at the bottom of his existence, unable to take the final step to create the invention that had eluded him for so long.  Vortek really was an illusion.  He was a fraud.

His daughter had learned of his affair and shunned him.

His son had withdrawn from him.

Even his own imagination had forsaken him.

He had never felt more alone, more unworthy of love.

But then Grace had told him that she would rather die than live without him, that she was carrying their child.

She loved him.  More than life itself.  And that made the difference.  Her love turned a key inside him — again.

The ice began to melt.  The gears of his mind began to catch.  Wheels turned.  He had dreams in which whole equations worked themselves out, bringing together more pieces of the puzzle he was solving.

There was a knock at the door to the suite.

He walked to it, opened it.

At first she looked exhausted and worried.  But her face lit up at the sight of him.  "You look brand new," she said.

"I feel brand new."

She walked into the suite, turned to face him.

He shut the door, held out his journal, open to a portrait of her he had drawn out of numbers and letters and mathematical symbols.

"What’s this?" she asked with a smile.  She took it from him.

"Vortek," he said.

She looked up at him for an explanation.

"Whenever I ran into a roadblock, I thought of you.  I pictured your face."  He reached out, lightly touched her cheek.  "That worked, every time.  So when it came time to take the final step and write out the complete solution I decided to keep you at the very front of my mind.  And all the dominos fell."  He nodded at the drawing.  "Straighten out the curves, separate the lines, and you have twenty-nine equations, the blueprint for flying through radar undetected — like a ghost."

"You did it," she said, with amazement."

"We did it."

"No."  She shook her head.

"This was a joint venture."

She looked worried, again.

"What?" he asked.  "There’s nothing in our way now."