The Second Time Around (14 page)

She stood up, and from the immediate grimace she unconsciously made, I could tell that being on her feet was painful.

It was obvious that she was exhausted, but at her urging I stayed long enough to have a Bloody Mary with her. We fell back on our tenuous family relationship as a subject of conversation. I told her I'd spoken to her father on Tuesday when I returned from the hospital to report on her condition and that I called my mother Wednesday to tell her about my new job.

“I spoke to Dad the day I went into the hospital and again the next morning,” Lynn said. “Then I told him I was going to leave the phone off so I could rest, and I'd call him over the weekend. I'll do it this afternoon, after I put my feet up for a while.”

I stood up and put down the empty glass. “We'll stay in touch.”

*   *   *

It was such a beautiful day that I decided to walk the two miles home. Walking clears my head, and it seemed to me I had a lot going on in it. The last two minutes with Lynn were getting special attention. When I went to visit her in the hospital the second time, she'd been on the phone. As she was hanging up she said, “I love
you, too.” Then she saw me and volunteered that she'd been speaking to her father.

Was she mistaken about the day she talked to him? Or was there someone else on the phone? It could have been a girlfriend. I think nothing of saying “Love you” when I'm talking with some of my pals. But there are a lot of ways to say, “I love you, too,” and Lynn's voice had sounded mighty warm in a sexy way.

I was shocked at the next possibility that ran through my mind: Had Mrs. Nicholas Spencer been having a cozy chat with her missing husband?

C
arley DeCarlo. He
had
to find out where she lived. She was Lynn Spencer's stepsister, but that was all he knew about her. Even so, Ned felt as though he recognized her name, that Annie had talked about her. But why? And how would Annie ever have met her? Maybe she'd been a patient in the hospital. That was possible, he decided.

Now that he had his plan and he'd cleaned and loaded his rifle, Ned was feeling calmer. Mrs. Morgan would be first. She would be easy—she always locked her door, but he'd go upstairs and say he had a present for her. He would do it soon. Before he shot her, he wanted to tell her face-to-face that she shouldn't have lied to him about wanting his apartment for her son.

He'd drive to Greenwood Lake while it was still dark. There he'd visit Mrs. Schafley and the Harniks. It would be easier than shooting squirrels, because they'd
all be in bed. The Harniks always left their bedroom window open. He could push it up and lean over the windowsill before they even knew what was happening. And he wouldn't have to go inside Mrs. Schafley's house. He could just stand at the bedroom window and shine a flashlight on her face. When she woke up, he'd shine it on his face so she could see him and know what he was going to do. Then he'd shoot her.

He was sure that when the police started to investigate, they would come looking for him. Mrs. Schafley had probably told everyone in Greenwood Lake about his wanting to rent a room from her. “Can you imagine the nerve of him?” That was the way she would put it. That was the way she always started when she was complaining about someone. “Can you imagine the nerve of him?” she'd asked Annie when the kid who mowed her lawn tried to raise his price. “Can you imagine the nerve of him?” when the guy who delivered her newspaper asked if she'd forgotten to give him a tip at Christmas.

Was that what she would be thinking in that second before he killed her? Can you imagine the nerve of him, killing me?

He knew where Lynn Spencer lived. But he'd have to find out where her stepsister lived. Carley DeCarlo. Why did that name sound so familiar? Had he heard Annie talk about her? Or did she read about her? “That's it,” Ned whispered. “Carley DeCarlo had a column in that part of the Sunday paper Annie loved to read.”

Today was Sunday.

He went into the bedroom. The candlewick spread that Annie had liked so much was still on the bed. He hadn't touched it. He could still see her as she was that last morning, her hands tugging so that both sides of the spread were exactly even, then tucking the extra material at the top under the pillows.

He spotted the Sunday supplement that Annie had left folded on her night table. He picked it up and opened it. Slowly he turned the pages. Then he saw her name and picture: Carley DeCarlo. She wrote an advice column about money. Annie had sent a question to her once, and for a long time afterwards looked to see if it was used in the column. It wasn't, but she still liked the column and sometimes would read it to him. “Ned, she agrees with me. She says you waste a lot of money if you put charges on your credit card and pay only the minimum every month.”

Last year Annie had been mad at him for charging a new set of tools. He'd bought an old car at the junkyard and wanted to fix it up. He had told her it didn't matter that the tools cost a lot of money, he could take a long time to pay them off. Then she read him that column.

Ned stared at Carley DeCarlo's picture. A thought came to him. He'd like to upset her and make her nervous. From the time in February when she found out that the house in Greenwood Lake was gone until the day when the truck hit her car, Annie had been worried and nervous. The whole time, she also cried a lot. “If the vaccine is no good, we have nothing, Ned, nothing,” she'd said over and over again.

In the weeks before she died, Annie had been suffering.
Ned wanted Carley DeCarlo to suffer, too, to be worried and upset. And he knew just how to do it. He would e-mail a warning to her: “Prepare yourself for Judgment Day.”

*   *   *

He had to get out of the house. He'd take the bus downtown, he decided, and walk past Lynn Spencer's apartment house, the fancy one on Fifth Avenue. Just knowing that she might be inside made him feel almost as if he already had her in his sights.

An hour later Ned was standing across the street from the entrance to Lynn Spencer's building. He'd been there less than a minute when the doorman opened the door and Carley DeCarlo came out. At first he thought that he was dreaming, just as he had dreamed about the man coming out of the house in Bedford before he set the fire.

Even so, he started to follow her. She walked a long way, all the way to 37th Street, and then crossed east. Finally she walked up the steps of one of those town houses, and he was sure that meant she was home.

Now I know where she lives, Ned thought, and when I decide it's time, it will be just like the Harniks and Mrs. Schafley. Shooting her won't be any harder than shooting squirrels.

“I
t was scary to see how on target Adrian Garner was yesterday,” I told Don and Ken the next morning. The three of us had been at our desks early, and by a quarter of nine were gathered in Ken's office with our second cups of coffee.

Garner's prediction that people would immediately conclude the piece of charred and bloodstained shirt was merely part of Spencer's elaborate escape plan had come true. The tabloids were having a field day with the story.

Lynn's picture was on the front page of the
New York Post,
and on page three of
The Daily News.
They looked as if they had been taken at the door of her building last evening. In both she managed to look simultaneously stunning and vulnerable. There were tears in her eyes. Her left hand was open, showing the medical padding on her burned palm. The other hand
was clasping the arm of her housekeeper. The
Post
's headline was wife not sure if spencer sank or swam, while
The News
had
WIFE SOBS, “I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO THINK
.”

Earlier, I had checked with the hospital and learned that Dr. Broderick's condition remained critical. I decided to tell Ken and Don about him now, and about my suspicions as well.

“You think Broderick's accident may have had something to do with your talking to him about those records?” Ken asked. In the few days I'd known him, I'd come to realize that when Ken was weighing the pros and cons of a situation, he sometimes took off his glasses and dangled them from his right hand. He was doing that now. The stubble on his chin and cheeks indicated that he had decided to start growing a beard or that he had been in a rush this morning. He was wearing a red shirt, but somehow when I looked at him, the mental picture I got was of him in a white doctor's coat with a prescription pad protruding from his pocket and a stethoscope around his neck. No matter what he wears, and with or without stubble on his face, Ken has the look of the doctor about him.

“You could be right,” he continued. “We all know that the pharmaceutical business is as competitive as it gets. The company that's the first to market a drug to prevent or cure cancer will be worth billions.”

“Ken, why bother to steal the early records of a guy who wasn't even a biologist?” Don objected.

“Nicholas Spencer always credited his father's later research with being the basis for the vaccine he was developing.
Maybe somebody got the idea that there might be something valuable in the early records,” Ken theorized.

That made sense to me. “Dr. Broderick was the direct link between the records and the man who picked them up,” I said. “Could those records possibly be valuable enough that someone would kill him, rather than risk his being able to identify the man with reddish brown hair? Wouldn't that suggest that whoever he is, that guy's someone who might be traceable. He might even be from Gen-stone, or at least know someone from Gen-stone who was close enough to Nick Spencer to be aware of Broderick and the records.”

“Something we may be missing is that Nick Spencer may have sent someone to collect those records himself and then pretended to be surprised that they were gone,” Don said slowly.

I stared at him. “Why would he do that?” I asked.

“Carley, Spencer is—or was—a con man with just enough knowledge of microbiology to raise start-up money, make a guy like Wallingford—who managed to run his own family company into the toilet—chairman, let him fill a board of directors with guys who couldn't manage their way out of a turnstile, and then claim he's on the verge of proving he has the definitive cure for cancer. He got away with it for eight years. He's lived relatively modestly for a guy in his position. You know why? Because he knew it wouldn't work, and he was stashing away a fortune for his retirement when his pyramid club collapsed. But an added bonus would be for Spencer to create the illusion that somebody stole
valuable data and that he was the victim of some kind of scheme. I say that his claiming he didn't know about the records having been taken was done for the benefit of people like us who'll be writing about him.”

“And almost killing Dr. Broderick is part of that scenario?” I asked.

“I bet it will turn out to be a coincidence. I'm sure all the service stations and repair shops in that area in Connecticut have been alerted to report any suspiciously damaged cars to the police. They'll find some guy who was on his way home from an all-night bender or some kid with a lead foot on the gas pedal.”

“That may happen if whoever ran down Dr. Broderick was from that area,” I said. “Somehow, though, I don't think he was.” I got up. “And now I'm going to see if I can't get Nick Spencer's secretary to agree to talk to me, and then I'm going to visit the hospice where Spencer was a volunteer.”

*   *   *

I was told that Vivian Powers had taken the day off again. I called her home, and when she heard who I was, she said, “I don't want to talk about Nicholas Spencer,” and hung up. There was only one course left to me—I had to ring her doorbell.

Before I left the office, I checked my e-mail. There were at least one hundred questions for my column, all fairly routine, but then there were two other e-mails that jolted me. The first one read,
“Prepare yourself for Judgment Day.”