Tell Me You're Sorry (18 page)

“Damn,” he said under his breath.

In the second yearbook, he checked the pages for both his father and Dick Ingalls to see what they'd been up to in 1987. He definitely saw a resemblance between himself and his dad at this age. In his portrait, Ingalls had his blond hair combed and parted down the middle. He looked like a handsome cocky creep, very full of himself.

Ryan noticed his father and Ingalls were no longer next to each other in their football and track team photos. He flipped to the inside covers of the book and scanned the inscriptions and signatures. He didn't find one from Dick Ingalls.

Had something happened between them during their senior year that had soured the friendship?

Ryan began to collect the photos and clippings that had fallen from inside the yearbook. The clippings were from
The Winnetka Talk
, with reports on various football games or track meets in which Brent Farrell had shone. Among the photos, he found a photo booth series of his dad and some brunette mugging for the camera. She had kinky-looking hair, raccoon eye makeup, and what looked like shoulder pads beneath her blouse. Ryan wondered if she'd been one of his dad's first girlfriends.

There were a few more snapshots, but the one that really caught his eye showed his dad as a teenager—with three other guys. Their arms slung over each other's shoulders, they stood in front of a chain-link fence that had a green tarp on the other side of it. His dad was at the far right, and the kid beside him was unmistakably Dick Ingalls. Next to Dick stood a skinny guy in a dorky-looking, ill-fitting white short-sleeve shirt. Beside him on the far left was a dark-haired guy in a red Izod shirt, flexing his arm to make a muscle.

Ryan took the picture over to his grandmother's desk. The Croton murder story was still on the monitor. With the mouse, he scrolled down the newspaper article until he found three photos. Two were school portraits of the kids, Celia “CC” and Ernest Hamner. The third picture was of a blonde in a purple dress nestled against a guy with a healthy tan and a Jason Statham buzz-cut. This was Halle and Scott Hamner.

Just take away the shaggy dark hair, and that kid flexing his arm muscle in the foursome shot bore a strong resemblance to the dead man.

Ryan studied the old snapshot again. If that was indeed Scott Hamner on the far left, then three of those four young men were now dead. And their families were killed along with them.

What were the odds?

Maybe that Stephanie woman from Portland wasn't so crazy after all.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN

S
itting at her desk in the study niche off her living room, Stephanie stared at the computer monitor. At least this e-mail was more articulate than most of the others. She was tempted to answer it. She would have explained to Dorothy that she'd been set up, and told her she was very sorry about her daughter-in-law.

But Stephanie had learned that it only made matters worse if she tried to explain her innocence. How so many people had gotten her e-mail address after the story broke was a mystery to her. But for the first couple of days, she'd averaged about twenty e-mails a day.

That was nothing. The first week, someone had spray-painted “BITCH” on her front door. On two occasions, rocks were thrown through the French doors in the living room. People threw trash and bottles out of their car windows onto her lawn. They yelled out hateful things as they drove by. At least that had subsided. But the e-mails were still trickling in—about two or three daily now.

“If you answer them, you just end up getting into a pissing contest with them,” Jim had told her, after the first wave of e-mails. As a congressman, he knew what it was like to receive hate mail. “I have it down to a system. The absolute crazies don't get anything back. The other complaints get a boilerplate response from me.”

That was the last bit of advice she'd received from Jim, who felt they should “cool it” for a while after the news story hit the local papers:

How could she blame him for wanting to distance himself? It would be political suicide if it got out that he'd been involved with this negligent, drugged-up, “lady pilot”—as several of the e-mails referred to her. But Jim knew she was innocent. So—yes, she did blame the son of a bitch. He should have stuck by her.

He knew she'd been set up. Worse than set up, someone or some group was trying to kill her—and it didn't matter to them that they also might have killed her sixty-six passengers and the three people on the flight crew. To whoever was behind all this, those sixty-nine innocent lives were just collateral damage.

She'd tried to tell this to the doctors who had examined her that day. They thought she was paranoid, a side effect of the drugs in her system. She also told it to the lawyer the airline had assigned to her case. She was certain the man sitting at the next table in the café that morning had drugged her coffee. Or perhaps it was the woman. Maybe they were both in on the scheme. And it was no coincidence, happening just two weeks after that man had tried to break into her hotel room in Lake Forest. Someone wanted her dead. Stephanie was sure this was connected to the murder of her sister's family.

The airline's lawyer wanted to use that tragedy to gain sympathy for her, but he didn't think there was a chance in hell FAA investigators would buy her conspiracy theories. The police in New York considered her a pain-in-the-ass nutcase, and the lawyer didn't want the aviation review board thinking the same thing about her. He hoped her impeccable record up until now—along with her claim that someone had laced her morning coffee with windowpane—might be her best defense when the FAA hearing came up in July. Until then, she was on suspension with reduced pay.

The last two weeks had been stagnant and incredibly frustrating—without one good lead in her investigation into the deaths of Scott and the kids. She'd phoned Ryan Farrell twice, but had hung up when the calls went to voice mail. She'd managed to get in touch with the mothers of the accused killers, Ronald Mady and Calvin Davis. Stephanie thought they could help prove their teenage sons had been coerced into confessing to the Thanksgiving night slayings. Maybe she could get the press on their side, and they could persuade the police to reopen their investigation into the murders. Ronald's mother was unresponsive. She'd obviously given up on her son a long time ago. But Stephanie thought she'd been getting through to Mrs. Davis.

The latest e-mail from Calvin's mother had come earlier today. Stephanie hadn't known how to respond to it. She'd been reading it again when she'd noticed the new e-mail in her box—Dorothy Bochner's diatribe.

Staring at Dorothy's denunciation on the monitor, Stephanie hit the Delete option. Then she finished off the last gulp of Cabernet in her glass. She wasn't much of a drinker, but she'd gone through a few bottles of wine during this leave of absence.

She sat back and clicked on Mrs. Davis's e-mail again:

Stephanie jotted down the attorney's e-mail and phone number. Obviously, Calvin's mother was in deep denial about her son, and it would end up hurting him if they went with Mrs. Davis's strategy. Stephanie had read every police report she could get her hands on regarding the case. Calvin's culpability in the commuter town robberies was a slam dunk. He'd been caught with some of the stolen property and the gun that was used. One robbery victim identified his voice and another remembered his jacket and sneakers. But the police didn't have anything implicating Calvin in the murder of Rebecca's family. That was where the “guilt by association” came in. Without Calvin and his friend confessing to those killings the police wouldn't have had a murder case.

Hunched over her desk, Stephanie wanted to explain all this to Calvin Davis's mother and the lawyer. But suddenly, it all seemed so pointless.

Getting to her feet, she took her wineglass into the kitchen. She refilled it, and then checked the refrigerator and freezer. She still hadn't eaten dinner yet. She decided to order Chinese. With the wineglass in her hand, she treaded back to her computer to look up the number for Fu Jin. Maybe they delivered.

As she sat down, Stephanie noticed a new e-mail—with an attachment. “Oh, goody, another fan letter,” she mumbled. “Somebody else wants to tell me what a terrible person I am.” She didn't recognize the sender:

She clicked on it. The warning came up about whether or not she knew the sender. Because of the attachment, Stephanie hesitated. But then she figured, she had virus protection. She went ahead and clicked on it once more:

Holding her breath, Stephanie clicked on the attachment and then downloaded it.

The color photo emerged one section at a time— until she saw the full image. It showed four high-school boys with their arms slung over each other's shoulders. Squinting in the sun and smiling, they stood in front of a chain-link fence.

The first person she recognized was Scott. It was him—back when he had hair. He and Rebecca had married right out of college. So this photo must have been taken just five or six years before then. Stephanie remembered when he looked like that shaggy-haired boy in the red shirt, mugging for the camera.

From studying photos of them as adults—which ran alongside the news articles about their untimely deaths—Stephanie figured the boy on the far right was Brent Farrell and the handsome blond one next to him was Scott's friend, Dick Ingalls. The photo must have been taken somewhere in the north suburbs of Chicago when Scott was in town visiting for the summer.

Stephanie had no idea who the fourth young man was.

It was 10:20 in Chicago, but she knew Ryan Farrell was still awake. She grabbed the phone and dialed his number. It rang once, and then he picked up.

“I was hoping this was you,” he said. “Is that your brother-in-law in the picture?”

“Yes,” she said, a little breathless.

“Do you know who the fourth guy is?”

“No. But you realize—”

“At least three of the four guys in that picture are dead,” he cut in.

“That's exactly what I was thinking. All three knew each other. They were all widowers. And shortly after they got remarried, they were killed—along with their families.”

“So—what do we do now?” he asked. “Should we go to the police?”

“I'm not sure,” Stephanie sighed. “I talked over that possibility with a private detective. He pointed out that we're dealing with three different states, three different jurisdictions, and three cases that the police consider closed. For my sister's family, they've even got a couple of confessed killers. Which you pointed out yourself, remember?”

“I'm sorry about that,” he muttered.

“Forget it. I picked a lousy time to approach you. Anyway, I think it'll be tough convincing the police they're wrong about these deaths—especially if we don't have any proof. All we can give them right now is that photo, and the fact that three out of four of them are dead. After that, it's just a lot of conjecture.”

“So what's your—your
conjecture
about all this?”

“I'm almost positive it has something to do with the new wife. The deaths of the families seem to have been set up—made to look like a robbery gone haywire . . . or a man who killed his family . . . or a house fire. I think it's quite possible that my sister didn't kill herself—and neither did your mother.”

“Jesus,” Ryan whispered.

“You said in your e-mail that you didn't see anyone in your father's yearbook who looked like the fourth young man in the photo. We need to find out who he is. If he isn't already dead, he could be next. Maybe his wife just committed suicide. Plans could already be in motion to murder him and his family. Or who knows? He could be the person behind everything that's happening. Whatever, right now, he's all we have to go on.” She paused. “Listen, Ryan, do you want to work on this with me?”

“Yes, of course,” he said.

“Well, I'll be up front with you. I have a feeling whoever is behind these killings—well, they're on to me. The night of your family's funeral, someone tried to break into my hotel room there in Lake Forest. And two weeks ago, somebody drugged me. I'm an airline pilot. At the airport, they slipped LSD into my coffee just minutes before I climbed into the cockpit of a passenger plane. I started to—hallucinate on the runway. But I still had enough sense to abort the takeoff. Anyway, it was national news. Maybe you've read about it . . .”

“No,” he murmured. “No, I haven't.”

“Well, it's one more reason I'm not sure we should go to the police yet. I don't have a lot of credibility right now. In fact, most people think I'm a horrible person. I'm considered a drug addict or paranoid or crazy—or all of the above. So do you still want to work with me?”