Only Ever You (31 page)

LYN GALPIN CHARGED WITH DUI MANSLAUGHTER

LOCAL ATTORNEY CHARGED IN DEATHS OF FOUR

NO TRIAL FOR GALPIN ANYTIME SOON

“What the hell?” Jill clicked on link after link, scanning articles. Could this really be the same Lyn Galpin who Paige had told her about? Yes, there it was, buried in one of the first articles, a mention that she’d started her career at Adams Kendrick. Only she hadn’t stayed there; she’d left the firm for reasons unknown and ended up at a small firm in Butler County. Later had come this terrible accident. December, two years ago. Jill remembered it vaguely, there’d been lots of news coverage, but she’d been busy with work and the upcoming holidays. It had been only their second Christmas with Sophia, the first one where she was walking and really engaged with what was happening. Jill remembered the happiness of that year, but also the bittersweet feeling that came with every milestone. The joy in watching Sophia grow sometimes made her miss Ethan even more. How had David been around that time? Had he acted any differently? He had to have known about this; he had to remember this woman. Unless Leslie Monroe was right and Lyn Galpin had been just one in a string of women and none of them meant anything at all.

Jill fought another wave of nausea. How could she have missed the signs? She thought of the times she’d come upon David texting and how he’d hurriedly hide his phone and how there’d been so many days when he’d call last-minute to say he had to work late. Everything seemed suspect now. She googled images of Lyn Galpin and pictures flooded the screen—a sweet face, pretty in an ordinary sort of way. Her long blonde hair was her best feature. Is that what had attracted David? Leslie Monroe also had blonde hair. Was that the look he preferred? In which case, why had he married a brunette? She flicked through page after page, looking at static images and then footage of the accident caused by this second woman who’d had sex with her husband. Eyewitnesses and at least one member of the media had taped the accident—there were multiple variations on YouTube. A real winner, Lyn Galpin—obviously driving drunk, her car weaving in and out of traffic.

Many of the articles speculated about her alcoholism, and how that had played a part in her professional slide. They bordered on libel, as did the tabloid headlines:
DRUNK DOPE RUINS CHRISTMAS
and
LONELY LAWYER’S SELFISH DECISION
. The tragedy had been picked up by the national news—a good-looking woman accused of killing five people. Jill jumped as the doorbell pealed, then pealed again, and someone pounded loudly with the knocker. The patrolman stood huffing on the front step, doughy face creased with concern.

“Is it Sophia?” she demanded. “Have they found her?”

He shook his head. “It’s your husband. There’s been an accident.”

*   *   *

Bea slowed just a fraction as she exited the parking garage, afraid of getting pulled over for speeding. Her adrenaline was still high, pushing her heart into overdrive. Stupid! Stupid! She banged the steering wheel, furious at herself for getting caught. He’d seen her and, worse, he’d probably taken her picture. But she was disguised. Bea touched her wig for reassurance. His phone had probably been crushed along with him anyway, so it didn’t matter.

She headed back home through the crowded streets of the Strip District, filled with Saturday shoppers visiting wholesale fishmongers and old-school butchers and stocking up on imported pasta and cheese at Pennsylvania Macaroni. Beyond these streets, the crowds thinned, gave way to businesses deserted on the weekends. When she spotted what had to be one of the city’s last remaining phone booths, she pulled over, struck by an idea. As she stepped out of the car, her heart rate suddenly surged and her legs turned to jelly beneath her. She plopped back down in the seat, coins dropping from her hand onto the dirty ground. Her pulse was more erratic than she thought. Despite the cold air rushing at her, she felt hot, her scalp prickling under the wig, her body sweaty. For a moment it was as if all she could hear was the thud of her own heart fighting to find a steady beat. She struggled to pull off the wig and then she leaned back in the seat, fumbling to reach the glove compartment and her pills. The tablets rattled as she struggled to get the cap off. There weren’t too many left; she’d have to get more. She stuck one under her tongue and waited for it to dissolve, waiting for the subsequent steadying of her heart rate while breathing like a drug addict waiting for a fix. Police sirens increased in the distance.

A minute slid by, then two. Impatient, she leaned down to scoop up the coins, and white spots exploded in front of her eyes. She clutched the door handle until the worst of the dizziness passed and then staggered over to the phone booth. Just before dropping the coins in the slot, she stopped and went back to the car to put on gloves. She wiped down the coins and what she’d touched of the booth before making the call.

“Police tip line.” A bored, metallic voice.

“I saw David Lassiter—”

“Who?”

“David Lassiter. The one with the missing little girl. I saw him hiding something in his car in a garage—”

“Slow down, ma’am, I’m having trouble understanding you.”

The Plexiglas walls were scratched and covered with graffiti. Bea’s breath fogged the
FUCK YOU FUCKER!
scrawled in purple Sharpie. “David Lassiter hid something in the trunk of his car—I saw him in a parking garage near Sixth Street and Penn Avenue.”

“Did you see the make of the car?”

“Yes, it’s a BMW. I didn’t get all of the license, but I think the first letters are J, B, and C.”

“Okay, got it. We’ll pass it along. Can I have your name?”

Bea hung up the phone and crossed back to her car. She’d parked in a tow-away zone in front of an empty storefront with large
FOR SALE
signs yellowing in the window. Had anyone seen her? Would they remember if they had? Not that it mattered. No one would remember an older woman in a brown wig and shapeless, gray wool coat. People were attracted to shiny, pretty things; they ignored the ugly.

A police car lurched around a corner onto the road, lights flashing. Bea looked straight ahead, hands gripping the wheel as the siren wailed, but it screamed past without the driver so much as glancing in her direction. She smiled as she pulled the car back onto the empty road and sped away.

chapter thirty-five

DAY TWENTY-THREE

The older patrolman became a maniac behind the wheel of the patrol car, his siren parting traffic like Moses at the Red Sea. Jill jumped out when he screeched to a stop in front of the emergency-room doors at Mercy Hospital, running inside and into chaos. Police officers milled around a waiting room crowded with patients, among them a man with a blood-soaked towel wrapped around his hand, a woman trying to soothe a screaming child, and an elderly man holding a leaking bag of ice to his leg while arguing with an obese young woman trying to help him into a wheelchair. Jill pushed through the crowd to the front desk.

“My husband was just brought in by ambulance. Lassiter, David Lassiter.”

The harried-looking nurse shuffled through papers. “He’s in surgery right now; they just took him back.”

“Surgery? For what?”

“Mrs. Lassiter.” A police officer she didn’t recognize materialized at her elbow. “Your husband was hit by a car.”

“Where? How did it happen? Is he going to be okay?”

“All I can tell you is that he sustained some pretty serious injuries,” he said.

The nurse interrupted. “You can go to the waiting room, Mrs. Lassiter. Go out that door, take a left to go into the main entrance, then take the green elevators to three and follow the signs.”

The hospital was confusing. She took two wrong turns before finding the waiting room. It was at least quieter than the emergency room, if only slightly less congested. The people waiting looked anxious or resigned. Some people stared blankly at the television monitor playing a talk show where an anorexic female host promoted a new book on weight loss. Others flipped through old issues of
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Sports Illustrated
.

Jill couldn’t sit. She paced the room, looking from the clock to the large closed doors stamped
HOSPITAL PERSONNEL ONLY
. The patrolman who’d brought her appeared, sinking into a seat nearby. Jill got a cup of coffee from the high-tech machine in the corner, but couldn’t take more than a few sips.

Thirty minutes passed, then an hour. People passed in and out of the doors, but no one for her. Had David died and they weren’t telling her? The thought made her sick—she had to swallow hard a few times—and that feeling, in turn, gave her pause. She was so angry with him, so full of rage. If he’d been in front of her earlier in the day
she
could have run him over. She didn’t want to care about him, her rational mind told her most definitely not to care, that he’d betrayed her and their marriage, but she couldn’t ignore the fear that washed over her at the thought of losing him. No matter what he’d done, she couldn’t simply stop loving him.

Just before the two-hour mark a woman in scrubs came through the doors from the inner sanctum, searching the room. “Mrs. Lassiter?”

Jill stepped forward. “How is he? Is he okay?”

The woman gave her a grim smile. “Your husband was hit full-on by a car. The trauma caused a pneumothorax—a collapsed lung, which we’ve repaired; and a severely fractured left arm and leg. He’s also suffered a concussion, several cracked ribs, and some lacerations. He’s critical, but stable.”

Jill staggered and the doctor grabbed her arm to steady her. “Can I see him?”

“He’s in recovery,” the doctor said. “You can see him once we’ve moved him into a room.”

When they finally gave her the room number, Jill practically ran to the elevators. She was surprised when a few police officers, including the patrolman who’d driven her, got on with her. She was even more surprised to see Detective Ottilo on the fifth floor. He flashed one of his enigmatic smiles. “Hello, Mrs. Lassiter.”

She brushed past him into David’s room, ignoring the patrolman stationed at the door. The shades were drawn and a doctor and several nurses surrounded the bedside. When one of them moved she saw David lying still and white against the bleached hospital sheets. For a moment she flashed to Ethan lying in his crib. But there were oxygen tubes protruding from David’s nose, an IV attached to a vein in his hand, and a heart-rate monitor registering with steady beeps. He wasn’t dead; he hadn’t left her. She dropped her purse and coat on a chair, and a nurse moved aside so Jill could stand next to the bed.

David’s skin looked unbelievably pale, except for the places where it was scratched and bruised, Rorschach inkblots of dark purple around his temple, left eye, and chin. His shirt had been removed, his chest was bandaged, and his left arm was in a cast. His left leg was in a longer cast and there were steel pins protruding from it. “Oh, David,” Jill whispered, eyes watering.

“I’m sorry, but I need to check his vitals,” the nurse said, touching her arm gently. Jill brushed a soft kiss on the only uninjured spot she could find on David’s forehead and stepped out of the way. The nurse picked up a plastic bag on the tray table next to the bed and handed it to her. “Here are his things; you should hold on to them so they don’t disappear.” Jill looked in the bag and saw David’s keys, cell phone, and wallet. His iPhone screen was cracked and the brown leather wallet was stained with what looked like blood.

“Mrs. Lassiter, if I could have a word.” Detective Ottilo took her by the arm and steered her back into the hall.

Jill pulled free. “What is it? Can’t you leave us alone for five minutes?” She looked away from his probing eyes back into the room, but the attention of the guard and other police officers was on her, and the nurses standing at their station several feet away were also watching, and she could see the suspicion in their eyes and something else—excitement?

“Where were you this morning?”

“Out.” Jill looked back at the detective who continued to stand there, his calm just increasing her frustration. She added, “Visiting friends.”

“Did you see your husband this morning?”

“No.” Didn’t he know that David wasn’t living at home? Of course, he must. They had to have seen David carting his clothes out of the house. Jill wondered if there were police officers taking turns patrolling her in-laws’ house.

“So you didn’t make an arrangement with your husband to hide the knife?”

The question took her completely by surprise. “Knife? What knife? What are you talking about?”

“Mrs. Lassiter, your husband was hit by a car in the parking garage next to Adams Kendrick. He was seen hiding something in the trunk of his car. That something turned out to be a knife.”

“What knife? I don’t understand.”

“It had your fingerprints on it,” Ottilo continued. “As well as traces of blood.”

“This is crazy. I don’t know anything about a knife.”

“Analysis indicates that the blood type matches your daughter’s.”

She gaped at him. “Sophia’s blood? Are you sure?”

“Jill Lassiter, at this time I’m arresting you for the murder of Sophia Lassiter,” Ottilo said, and as if he’d been waiting for this moment, the uniformed cop on the chair behind him stood up, producing handcuffs.

“This is crazy.” Jill looked from one to the other. “I don’t know anything about a knife.”

The patrolman reached for her arm and she stepped back just as an alarm began shrieking in David’s room and a woman’s calm, disembodied voice came over the paging system: “Code Blue, five, two eleven. Code Blue, five, two eleven.”

Medical personnel came racing down the hall, one of them pushing a crash cart. Jill stepped to one side, Ottilo and the patrolman to the other. Jill couldn’t see past the crowd around David’s bed. A doctor barked orders that Jill couldn’t understand. Someone shifted and she thought she caught a glimpse of a flat line across the heart-rate monitor.

“What’s going on? Is it his heart?” Jill yelled at the nurse, but she didn’t answer. Ottilo and the patrolman’s focus had shifted to what was happening in the room, not Jill. In a split second, several thoughts raced rapid-fire through her mind: David could die, she would be arrested, and if those two things happened Sophia would never be found. At the same moment she saw a red exit sign glowing above the door to the stairwell at the end of the hall. Jill hadn’t fully processed the final thought before she took off running.