The Wrong Man (41 page)

I suppose, like most people, I’ve had my sense of fear mostly defined by Hollywood, which likes to provide a steady diet of aliens, ghosts, vampires, monsters, and serial killers; or those electric, unforeseen moments in life when the other car runs a red light and you pound on the brakes in panic. But real, debilitating fear comes from uncertainty. It gnaws away at one’s defenses, never fading, and never far from the heart. As I sat across from the young woman, I could see every line fear had carved on her face, aging her far too fast, every tic it had delivered, to her hands, which she rubbed nervously, to the corner of her eyelid, which twitched uncontrollably, to the tremors in her voice, clearer than the words she whispered.

“I shouldn’t have agreed to meet with you,” she said.

Sometimes, it’s not so much a fear of dying as it is a fear of going on living.

She wrapped both hands around a cup of hot tea and slowly lifted it to her lips. It was brutally hot outdoors, and everyone else in the mall coffee shop was drinking iced drinks, but she seemed unaware of the heat.

“I appreciate it,” I replied. “I won’t take much of your time. I just want to confirm something.”

“I have to go. I can’t stay. I can’t be seen speaking with you. My sister has the kids, and I can’t leave them with her for too long. We’re moving. Next week, going to…” She stopped, shook her head. “No, I’m not saying where we’re going. You understand, of course?”

She bent forward slightly and I could see a thin, long white scar up near her hairline. “Of course. Let me make this really quick,” I said. “Your husband, he was a police captain, and you hired Matthew Murphy during divorce proceedings, right?”

“Yes. My ex-husband was hiding income and stiffing me and the three kids. I wanted Murphy to find out where he was putting the money. My attorney said Murphy was good at that sort of thing.”

“Your ex, he was a suspect in Murphy’s murder, correct?”

“Yes. State police detectives questioned him several times. They spoke with me, too.”

She shook her head, then added, “I was his alibi.”

“How so?”

“The night Murphy was killed, my ex-husband showed up at my house nice and early. He’d been drinking. He was morose, suicidal. Insisted on coming in, seeing the kids. I couldn’t get him to leave.”

“Didn’t you have a court order?”

“Yes. Keeping him away. One hundred yards at all times. That’s what the judge’s order said. Lot of good that did. He’s six four and two hundred forty pounds and he knows every cop in the Valley. They’re all buddies. What was I supposed to do? Fight him? Call for help? He did what he wanted to do.”

“I’m sorry. The alibi…”

“So, he started drinking. Then he started beating on me. Kept it up for hours. Until he passed out. Woke up in the morning and apologized. Said it would never happen again. And it didn’t, for a whole other week.”

“You told this to the state police detectives?”

“I didn’t want to. I wish I’d had the guts to say to them, ‘Sure, he did it. He told me he did it,’ and maybe get him out of my life that way. But I wasn’t able to.”

I hesitated. “The thing I’m interested in is—”

“I know what you’re interested in.” She reached up and touched her forehead, running her finger along the small ridge of the scar. “When he punched me, his class ring from Fitchburg State—that’s where we met—cut me pretty badly. Gave me this to remember him by. You want to know how he knew about Murphy. Right?”

I nodded.

“He threw it in my face during an argument. Screamed at me, ‘So you figured I wouldn’t find out about the private eye you hired?’ ”

I could see tears in the corners of her eyes.

“He got an anonymous letter. A plain manila envelope. It had a copy of everything Murphy had uncovered about him. All the confidential stuff that was supposed to just go to me and my attorney. Postmarked from some place in Worcester. I don’t even know anybody in that city. So, who would send this to my ex? It cost me two teeth when he knocked them out. It should have cost Murphy his life, if only I’d been lucky enough to have it be my ex-husband who got so enraged that he went after him with a gun instead of someone else. Maybe it did cost Murphy his life. Maybe somebody else got the same envelope. I don’t know. I wanted it to be my ex who did it. It would have made things so much easier.”

She pushed back from the table. “I have to go.” She glanced around nervously, then turned, head down, shoulders scrunched forward. She pushed through the coffee shop doors and raced through the mall, dodging shoppers as if fear itself hovered in some black cloud, right behind her ear, whispering dangers.

I watched her and wondered whether I had just seen what Ashley’s future might have been.

28

A Fast Drive

H
ope was standing on the short redbrick pathway up to their front door when the headlights from Sally’s car swept across the lawn. She waited, a little unsure what to do. Once she would have walked back to Sally’s car to give her an end-of-the-workday hug, but now she was uncertain whether she should even hesitate so they could enter together. She shuffled her feet and stared down the neighborhood into the darkness. It seemed to Hope that the two of them had quietly taken to coming home later and later in the day, so that the silences that awaited them through the evening had less time to weigh on them.

“Hey,” she said as she heard Sally’s car door slam shut.

“Hey,” Sally said back, her voice exhausted.

“Tough day?”

Sally walked slowly across the lawn toward her. “Yes,” she said cryptically. “Let me tell you about it inside.”

Hope nodded and stepped up to the front door. She stuck her key in the lock and opened the door wide. It was black inside, and it seemed that the night flowed right past her into the house, like a dark and dangerous current. Hope stopped right inside the entrance vestibule and instantly knew something was terribly out of place. She inhaled sharply.

“Nameless!” she called out.

The overhead lamp flicked on, and Sally stood beside her.

“Nameless!” Hope called out again.

Then: “Oh my God…”

Hope dropped her backpack to the floor and stepped forward. Fear had outstripped all other emotions, filling her with ricocheting sensations: a burst of cold, a flash of heat, a wash of damp. “Nameless!” she cried out again. She could hear the panic in her voice. Behind her, Sally was turning the lights on, throwing illumination into the living room, the hallway, the downstairs television room. And finally the kitchen.

The dog was spread out on the floor, motionless.

Hope groaned, something deep, from some place within her that she had never felt before and threw herself onto Nameless’s body. She sank her hands into his fur, trying to feel for some warmth, then pressed her ear up against his chest, listening for a heartbeat. Behind her, Sally stood, frozen, in the doorway. “Is he…”

Hope let out another moan, her eyes already blinded with tears. But in the same moment, she reached beneath the dog’s body and, in a single motion, lifted him up in her arms. She turned to Sally, and without speaking the two of them raced back out into the darkness.

Sally drove fast, faster than she could ever remember, as they headed south on the interstate, driving toward the animal hospital in Springfield. As she wove between cars, the speedometer touching 100 mph, she heard Hope say, “It’s okay, Sally. You can slow down.”

Hope might have said something else, but Sally understood only that Hope had lowered her head into the dog’s muzzle, which muffled what she said. It only took them a few more minutes to make the final miles, and as they cut through the sullen city streets, Sally found herself unable to say anything, but listening to each ravaged sob coming from Hope in the backseat was a little like being sliced by a knife.

She saw the red-and-white
EMERGENCY ENTRANCE
sign and swerved the car to a stop in front. The sound of the car tires got the attention of the nurse attendant at the triage desk right inside the sliding glass doors. Before Hope had carried Nameless more than a couple of feet, the attendant had helped her to put the dog’s limp form on a stretcher.

By the time Sally had parked the car and come inside, Hope was already huddled in the waiting room, her head in her hands. She barely looked up when Sally sat beside her.

“Hope it’s…,” Sally started, then stopped.

“He’s dead. I know it,” Hope said. “I couldn’t hear a heartbeat. Feel a pulse. Couldn’t feel him take a breath. He was old, but…We shouldn’t have rushed down here. It just happens, you know, you get old and it happens.”

Sally sat and glanced up at the clock. She did not think it would take long for the veterinarian on duty to emerge and tell Hope what she already knew. But to Sally’s surprise, five minutes passed, then ten. At twenty, they were still waiting. At the half-hour mark, a tall young man, wearing a white laboratory jacket over pale green hospital scrubs, emerged. “Miss Frazier?” he said in a quiet, well-modulated voice that Sally knew instantly came from experience at handling bad news. He looked at Hope.

“Yes.” Her voice quivered.

“I am sorry,” he said slowly. “We tried to revive him, but he was already gone by the time you arrived.”

“I know,” Hope said. “I just had to try….”

“There was nothing else you could have done,” the vet said. “And we did our best.”

“Yes. I know that. Thank you.” It was as if each word she spoke had to be pulled out of an icy region deep within her.

“He was not a young dog,” the vet said slowly.

“Fifteen years,” Hope said.

The vet nodded. He seemed to hesitate momentarily, before asking, “And how did you find him tonight?”

“When we came home, he was in the kitchen. On the floor.”

The vet took a deep breath. “Would you care to come in, say a final good-bye? And there’s something I’d like to show you.”

“Yes,” Hope said, trying unsuccessfully to hold back her tears. “I’d like that. I’d like to see him one more time.” She followed the vet through a pair of swinging doors, while Sally trailed a couple of feet behind her.

The exam room was bathed in bright white light from an overhead fixture. It was like any typical emergency room, with ventilators on the wall, blood-pressure monitors, equipment cabinets. In the center of a shiny steel table that remorselessly reflected the light, Nameless was stretched out, his light fur matted. Hope reached out and stroked his side. His eyes were closed, and Hope thought he looked peaceful and merely asleep.

The vet remained silent for a moment, letting Hope run her hands over her dog’s fur. Then he cautiously said, “Was there anything unusual in the house tonight, when you got home?”

Hope turned. “I’m sorry? Unusual?”

“What do you mean?” Sally said.

“Were there any signs of a break-in?”

Hope looked confused. “I’m not sure that I follow.”

The vet stepped to her side. “I’m sorry if this is hard, but when we were examining Nameless, a few things seemed out of place.”

“What are you saying?” Hope asked.

The vet reached down and pulled back the fur around Nameless’s throat. “See the red striations? Bruising marks. We would typically see those from choking. And here, look.” He gently lifted Nameless’s lips, exposing his teeth. “This appears to be flesh. And some blood, as well. We also found what appears to be some cloth strands and blood on his paws. Near the nails.”

Hope looked up at the vet as if she could not quite see what he was driving at.

“When you get home, check your doors and windows for signs of forced entry.” The vet looked over at Sally, then at Hope, and smiled, in a wry, offset manner. “It’s pretty obvious who he thought he needed to protect, no matter how old he was,” the vet said slowly. “I can’t be certain, not without an autopsy, of course, but it seems to me that Nameless died fighting.”

“Who murdered Murphy?” I asked. “Do you believe Michael O’Connell shot him?”

She looked at me oddly, as if the question were somehow out of place. We were at her home, and as she hesitated, I found myself distracted, my eyes sweeping the living room. I realized suddenly that there were no photographs.