Sasha McCandless 03 - Irretrievably Broken (17 page)

What she said was, “Nick, there had to be
something
. Clarissa didn’t file for divorce because she was perfectly content in your marriage. That didn’t happen. When you’re getting cleaned up, I need you to really think about what could have precipitated that.”

Nick started to object, but she fixed him with the look she reserved for small children and idiots. She assumed he’d realize he wasn’t a small child.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll think about it, but we were happy. At least, I thought we were.”

“So, you think she may have told Ellen,” Sasha prompted him. “What about Martine?”

Nick shrugged.

Greg pushed the sausage around in a pan until it sizzled, then rested the spatula on a trivet, and joined them at the table.

“I doubt it,” he said, gesturing with his coffee cup like it was a conductor’s wand.

“Why?” Sasha asked.

“Well, I know Ellen didn’t tell Martine about our, uh, problems,” he explained.

“She didn’t?”

“No. I ran into Tanner, maybe two weeks ago, at the squash club, and he was talking about having us over for dinner. So, either Ellen didn’t tell Martine, or she did and Martine didn’t mention it to Tanner. Unlikely.”

“That’s the sort of news a person would generally share with her husband,” Sasha agreed.

The water on the stove bubbled over the edge of its pot, shooting white foam down the side and causing the flame to rise.

Greg hustled back to his dinner preparations and covered the pot with a lid. He lowered the flame.

“Why wouldn’t Ellen tell Martine?” she asked. “I thought they were tight.”

Greg dumped some ziti into the boiling water and stirred it.

Then he turned back to her and said, “The girls were close, but after Martine left Prescott & Talbott, there was a bit of a divide. Ellen and Clarissa were still in the belly of the beast, you know. And Martine’s focus was different. She had all those kids, and she dabbled in teaching and consulting, but she wasn’t the hard-charging ballbuster that she’d once been. The three of them would get together for drinks or a spa day pretty regularly, but it was just ... different.”

At the table, Nick nodded his agreement.

“Okay. How long until that’s done?” Sasha asked.

Greg checked the timer. “Twelve minutes.”

Sasha turned to Nick. “Go make yourself presentable. Can you do it in twelve minutes?”

A hint of the old, creepy Nick broke through his morose drunken fog, and he winked at her. “I’ll be looking good in no time.”

He stood, steadied himself, and headed for the stairs.

Sasha watched him leave and then told Greg, “Clarissa had retained Ellen’s divorce attorney.”

“That cretin Pulaski?”

“One and the same.”

Greg shook his head. “That guy. I truly believe Ellen and I could have worked things out if he hadn’t been whispering in her ear. He was so vicious.”

The description squared with what Greg’s attorney had said.

“How so?”

“He just had this scorched earth approach. For instance, Erika suggested the four of us meet, informally and off the record, to at least discuss the possibility of a collaborative divorce. Ellen and Pulaski agreed to the meeting, but then they walked into the conference room, and he literally threw a set of the pictures of me at the casino at Erika. He tossed them right in her face and started screaming, red-faced. He was ranting about how, when he was through with me, I’d be a shell of a man.”

“What did Ellen do while this was going on?” she asked.

Greg’s entire face drooped and he said, “She just stood behind him and looked at me with this satisfied little smile.”

“Do you know how Ellen found him? Erika said he typically didn’t represent women.”

Sasha didn’t expect him to know; but she hoped the question would distract him from the memory.

“I don’t know,” he said in vague voice, “I assume one of the bloodsuckers at the firm referred her to him.” He turned his attention back to his pasta.

Sasha listened to confirm that the water was running upstairs and then tackled the next delicate subject.

“There’s something else we need to talk about,” she said to Greg’s back.

“What is it?” he asked without looking at her.

There was no point in sugarcoating it.

“Nick’s going to be arrested for Clarissa’s murder.”

“I know,” he said.

“You’re his alibi, to the extent he has one,” she told him.

Greg turned away from his dinner preparations.

“I know that, too,” he said, a hint of irritation in his voice.

“Do you also know that having your name dragged into yet another murder investigation isn’t exactly going to help your own case?” Sasha said.

Greg exhaled, blowing his hair off his forehead. Then he said, “Yes, I do.”

“I’m in a delicate spot here,” Sasha said. “As your attorney, I must advise you not to get involved.”

“But, as Nick’s attorney?”

“As Nick’s attorney, I’m inclined to think he needs all the help he can get. And being alibied by another accused wife killer is perhaps marginally better than having no alibi at all.”  Sasha kept her tone neutral and added, “But, that has to be your decision, Greg.”

Greg was silent for a long moment.

Finally he said, “Can’t the guys at Nick’s club alibi him?”

Sasha shook her head. “That won’t work. What can they say?  A stranger came into the club, served Nick with divorce papers, and Nick proceeded to get hammered. They don’t know where he went after he left the club. And then it gets worse. I’m sure the police will beat the bushes, if they haven’t already, until they find some neighbor who either saw Nick go to the house last night or heard him shouting for Clarissa to let him in.”

Greg rubbed his temples. “But, I could say he called me and told me she locked him out and I invited him to come here. And he was here all night and all morning.”

“Yes, you could. But, if you do that, the police will view it as an invitation to look at your life even more closely than they already have. They’ll be all over you,” Sasha said.

“So will the press,” Greg added, “don’t forget those vultures.”

“That’s true.”

She couldn’t lead him to a decision. She was maintaining a precarious balance as it was.

He stirred the ziti with a wooden spoon. He tapped the spoon against the side of the pot and watched the water drip off it, then looked back at Sasha and said, “I want to do it. I know I didn’t kill Ellen. And I know Nick didn’t kill Clarissa. I want to help him prove it if I can.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” he said, setting his mouth in a firm, grim slash.

Upstairs, the water shut off. Greg went back to the pasta.

CHAPTER 31

Caroline stood at the kitchen window and stared out in to the backyard; she was looking toward her garden, although she couldn’t see it in the darkness. She knew the wild roses were making their last display of the year and the earliest mums were just budding.

But she wasn’t thinking about her flowers. She was thinking about the files she’d shoved under the passenger seat of her car. When she’d pulled into the driveway after work and lifted her bag from the seat next to her, she’d balked at bringing those gruesome pictures into her home. She knew she was being silly, but she had arranged the house according to feng shui principles, and the thought of bringing such negative energy into her sanctuary bothered her. So, under the seat the files went.

She fetched a teacup from the cabinet beside the stove and packed the teaball with chamomile leaves and dried lavender from her garden. While she waited for the kettle to whistle, she moved back to the window and peered out at the car. She’d parked in the driveway, because the detached garage was filled with her gardening equipment and Ken’s fishing gear.

She stared out the window, lost in thought, until the tea kettle chirped its shrill, steamy whistle.

Caroline turned away from the window again and fixed her cup of herbal tea. She focused on the ritual of making the tea and letting it steep.  Then she took her teacup into the sunroom and sat in the quiet darkness, sipping it slowly, while she considered the files she’d taken.

She returned to the kitchen and retrieved her purse from the window bench. She rifled through it and unearthed the pocket-sized directory of home phone numbers for the various members of firm administration and management.

She punched Samantha Davis’s number into her phone.

As the phone rang, Caroline tried to form the words she wanted to say to the chief security officer.
I stole some photographs that Mr. Prescott wanted me to shred. I think Ellen and Clarissa’s murderer sent them.

“Hello. Davis residence,” Samantha’s silvery voice said on the other end of the line.

Caroline stared at the receiver in her hand.

“Hello?” Samantha said, more sharply this time.

Caroline clicked off and slammed the cordless phone down hard on the base.

She picked up her teacup, and her trembling hands sent the hot liquid splashing over the side. With tears of frustration pricking at her eyes, she ran to the sink and dumped the tea down the drain.

CHAPTER 32

Rich pounded the ground with a gloved fist. His legs were cramping, his stomach was rumbling, and his entire body was chilled through. He’d been crouching in the bushes outside the Landrys’ house for over an hour, squinting into the brightly lit den.

And what did he have to show for it?

A fat lot of nothing, that’s what
, he thought.

The two older kids, whom he judged to be in their early teens, had been busy working on one of those giant jigsaw puzzles—from his vantage point it looked like a picture of a mountain range. The youngest, who looked to be about nine or ten, was sprawled on his stomach on the floor creating a complicated Legos structure.

Honey, the family’s idiotic golden retriever, who lacked the sense to even sniff out Rich’s presence, was curled into a blob of fur in front of the couch. Every so often, it would whimper and its legs would twitch, like it was dreaming of chasing a rabbit.

Martine had curled herself into a similar whimpering ball, with a soft-looking little brown blanket over her shoulders, snuggled into Tanner’s side. She was crying softly, and Tanner was stroking her hair and murmuring into her ear words that Rich couldn’t hear but assumed were comforting.

Rich did derive some satisfaction from the thought that she was sobbing over her dead friends, but it didn’t outweigh his frustration.

He been tailing Tanner for weeks now and hadn’t gotten so much of a glimpse of a vice. The worst Rich could say about the man was that he was sometimes absent-minded. But for the most part, Tanner seemed like a decent man, a good father, and a loving husband.

He hadn’t expected it to be this hard. The other two had been a breeze.

Rich had been keeping tabs on the three chick lawyers for a while—just casually, not with any real purpose. But, when Ellen and Greg had jetted off on their European vacation, their empty mansion had proved irresistible. He’d broken in easily, just slipped a credit card through the side door leading from the garden. Poking around, he noted with interest Greg’s straight razor and the assorted Gamblers Anonymous pamphlets in his sock drawer.

Once the idea had taken root in his mind, figuring out a way to get at Costopolous hadn’t been difficult either. Rich had known, just from watching Nick’s comings and goings and the way he stopped to check himself out at every reflective surface, that he was a ladies’ man. His second stepfather had had the same weakness for women and his own reflection.

But Tanner was different, steady and responsible. In fact, he reminded Rich of his old man. He allowed his kids do their own thing but stuck nearby in case they needed a hand.

Take this puzzle they were working on. Every so often, one of the kids would look up and ask for help, and he’d pat Martine on the head, then unfold his long legs and stride over to the table. He’d point out a few pieces they might want to focus on, watch for a few seconds to be sure they got it right, and then return to comforting his weepy wife.

And when the little one had said he wanted a snack, Tanner had popped to his feet and hurried to the kitchen. He’d returned several minutes later and handed individual bowls of popcorn to all three children. All the while Martine had sat on the couch like a stupid, crying statue.

Watching the Landrys at home made Rich feel like someone was squeezing his head in a vise. He didn’t want to sit through any more family nights in the bushes. He wanted to find Tanner’s weakness, exploit it, and then mail some incriminating pictures to Martine and get the ball rolling.

But Tanner didn’t gamble. He didn’t drink. Or chase skirts. He didn’t even seem to golf or have any hobbies or interests that Rich could see outside of his wife and kids.

The thing that really made Rich’s head ache was that he did know how to get at them, but he didn’t want to have to do it. He’d told himself at the beginning of his plan that he wouldn’t involve any children. He’d promised himself in his father’s name that he wouldn’t.

But if he didn’t come up with something else soon, he wasn’t going to have a choice; he’d have to get to them through one of their kids. It had been one thing to let the Landry piece of the plan proceed at a slower pace; it had lacked the elegance that all three women receiving their pictures on the same day would have delivered, but the plan had still be doable. Now, though, time was running out. Especially because Nick had gotten that attorney involved.

Martine let out a shrill wail and started to sob harder. All three kids rushed to her and huddled around, trying to help Tanner comfort her. He could hear them, through the windows, telling her how much they loved her.

CHAPTER 33

Sasha and Nick walked into police headquarters ten minutes after Detective Gilbert’s deadline had passed. Nick was, if not sober, at least faking it well.