Murder Suicide (13 page)

"About...?"

"Everything," she said, a hint of rage creeping into her voice.

Did Lindsey Snow know of Snow’s love affair with Grace Baxter?  Or did she know her father was preparing to leave everyone — including her?  And who might she have told?  Her mother?  Her brother?  "Which lie made you the most angry?" Clevenger asked.

She shook her head.

"You can tell me."

She reached for her door handle.

"Lindsey, wait."

She pulled open the door, jumped out and started jogging back toward the house.

Clevenger watched her slow to a walk as she came within view of the cruisers in front of the house.  As she passed them, her mother walked out the front door.  And getting a glimpse of the two of them together made Clevenger realize they were opposites in many ways — one reserved, one highly emotional; one beautiful, one much less so; one very forgiving of John Snow’s foibles, one enraged by them.

Lindsey hung her head, walked straight past her mother and disappeared inside the house.  Her mother followed her.  The door closed.

Clevenger started the car and began the twenty-minute drive back to his office in Chelsea.  He thought again of Mike Coady’s caution that the list of viable suspects in a case like Snow’s could be long, even if Snow had actually committed suicide.  He wondered whether North Anderson had gotten anywhere ruling out Collin Coroway.  He dialed him up.

"Hey, Frank," Anderson answered.

"Anything on Coroway?"

"Plenty.  He took a US Air shuttle to DC at 6:30
A.M.
yesterday," Anderson said.  "No reservation, got to the ticket counter at 5:50
A.M.
   And he hasn’t made the return trip."

"Snow was getting shipped to the morgue, and he was on a flight out of state," Clevenger said.

"And didn’t rush back to comfort Snow’s wife or rally the troops at Snow-Coroway.  He’s still checked into the Hyatt."

"He’s got motive.  I found out Coroway inherits control of all the intellectual property of the company.  He used to need Snow’s signature to make a move.  They had a very hot invention in the pipeline that Snow wanted to bury, and Coroway wanted to sell to the military.  It was key to Coroway pulling the trigger on taking Snow-Coroway public."

"Now Snow’s getting buried," Anderson said.  "But if we’re thinking double homicide, he isn’t our man.  He was already in D.C. when Grace Baxter died."

"Unless we’re dealing with two killers," Clevenger said, automatically.  He didn’t much like hearing his own words.

"Less likely," Anderson said.  "Snow and Baxter were lovers.  All in all, I still like George Reese for both murders.  A jealous husband is an ugly thing."

"Just the same," Clevenger said, "maybe I make the trip down to D.C., catch Coroway a little bit off balance."

"Good luck.  I hear he’s a very cool customer."

"Did he take a limo to the airport?"

"Don’t know," Anderson said.  "You’re thinking his driver could tell us if he looked rough?"

"Or let us check for blood on the back seat."

"If he took a limo, I’ll make that happen.  If he left his own car in the airport garage, I’ll wander by.  I’m sure Coady can pull a search warrant if there’s anything worth taking a close look at."

"I just came from talking with Theresa and Lindsey Snow," Clevenger said.

"Anything I should know about?"

"Snow had both of them wrapped up, in different ways.  They worshiped him.  The thought of losing him could have made either of them feel like she was losing everything."

"The thought of losing him to another woman or to the neurosurgery?" Anderson asked.

"Either way."  Clevenger remembered the portrait over the mantel.  "Snow had a painting of Grace Baxter on the wall of his living room."

"What?"

"An artist by the name of Kullaway.  I couldn’t tell whether his wife knew it was of Baxter or not.  She didn’t let on whether she’d gotten wind of the affair."

"A portrait of your lover in plain view of your wife and kids?  Kind of sick.  What’s that all about?"

"I’m not sure.  If I had to guess, I’d say it’s about how little John Snow was able to relate to his family as real people."

"What do you mean?"

"He expected them to be perfect.  The flip side of that is that he didn’t see them as human, with both strengths and weaknesses — and
feelings
.  He wanted to be close to Baxter, so he brought her home.  Period.  I picked up his journal from Coady.  It’s mostly sketches and calculations, some of his thoughts about the surgery.  But he’d sketched Baxter in there, too.  Real detail, real emotion to the way he drew her.  It’s almost like she had a way of breaking through defenses he used to keep everyone else at a distance.  I think he might have loved her in a very different way than he loved his work or his wife or even his daughter.  A deeper way."

"You didn’t mention the son."

"I didn’t see him," Clevenger said.  "His mother talked about him a bit.  He has a learning disorder.  Snow couldn’t relate to him at all.  Sounds like he pretty much ignored him all his life."

"Snow was no prince.  I mean, nobody deserves what he got, but he wasn’t the nicest guy in the world."

"No," Clevenger agreed.  He thought again of Billy, how devastating it had been for him to have a father who dismissed him as damaged goods.  "It looks like Snow was much more comfortable with things that were predictable and hardwired than he was with relationships.  When you have seizures as a kid, when you know you can lose consciousness at any moment and land on the floor in convulsions, you can get obsessed with keeping things under control, working just right.  He could do that with a missile or a radar system.  It’s a lot tougher with a son or a daughter — or a lover."

"But he had the emotional bandwidth to deal with more than one woman."

"
Deal with
, sure.  But
love
, I don’t know.  I really wonder whether the only one who tapped his passion was Baxter."

"The guy was fifty years old.  You’re telling me nobody else ever really got to him?"

"It’s possible," Clevenger said.

"But why Baxter?  Snow was famous.  He was rich.  Good looking.  He had to have attracted plenty of women."

"Maybe she was his
lovemap
."

"His what?"

"
Lovemap
.  I had this professor in med school named Money.  John Money.  He interviewed kids in first and second grade, showed them photographs of little boys and girls, asked them who they thought was cute — and why.  If one of the little girls said she liked a particular photo of a boy, Money would ask her
what
she liked about it.  Maybe she’d say it was the way the kid was smiling, the left side of his mouth a little higher than the right.  So Money would put all her responses, all the little quirks she liked, on a database.  Hers, and a thousand other kids.  Then he followed up with the same kids thirty years later.  Turns out what they liked at seven and eight — their ideals of beauty — hadn’t changed much.  The little girl who liked the little boy with the crooked smile married a man with that smile — a little higher on the left than the right.  Some of the kids never found what they were looking for and were just never very happy in their relationships."

"So there really is a perfect love out there for each of us."

"According to Money, there is.  He thinks you’re born with a
lovemap
— a set of physical characteristics encoded in your brain that represents your ideal mate.  If you ever get the physical part right, and someone connects with you psychologically, you have a lock-and-key fit.  True love, forever.  Maybe only one person in a million can really do that for any other person.  Maybe Baxter did it for Snow."

"Think you’ll ever find yours?" Anderson asked.

"My
lovemap
? Clevenger asked.  He laughed.

"Do you?"

"The image of Whitney McCormick, the FBI forensic psychiatrist who had helped Clevenger solve the Highway Killer case, came to his mind.  The relationship had gotten personal, then gotten complicated, then faded away into the background as Clevenger tried to be a decent father to Billy, before anything else.  It had been a year since he’d seen her.  "I don't know," he told Anderson.  "Getting the physical part right would be a hell of a lot easier than the psychological part.  I’ve got some strange curves to my psyche that would be pretty hard to match up."

Anderson laughed.  "Same here, my friend.  I love my wife, don’t get me wrong.  But I guess it’s possible I could get hit by a Mack truck with my
lovemap
on it one day."

"What do you figure you’d do?"

"Not shoot myself, I can tell you that."

Clevenger smiled.  "Call me if you get anything on Coroway’s car, huh?  I’ll let you know what I come up with in D.C."

*            *            *

Clevenger caught the 12:30
P.M.
US Air shuttle to D.C.   He’d called Billy on his cell and arranged for him to wait at the Somerville Boxing Club until he made it home, probably around 6:30.  That got a ‘no problem’ from Billy.  If it were up to him, he’d hang at the gym
24/7
.

Once the plane had taken off, Clevenger opened John Snow’s journal and began reading the next entry:

Does a man have the right to begin life anew?  Is he the full owner of his existence, or is he merely a limited partner?

A man is born to parents.  He is
their son
, and their life stories unfold alongside his own, mingling with it, so that the plot of each is partly dependent on the others.  They change his diapers, hold his hand as he goes to school the very first day.  They worry endlessly with him and about him for decades, celebrate his victories, suffer his defeats.  But what if their vision of him has little to do with his true nature?  What if they do not know
the real him
?  Would it be fair for him, their son, to pull the thread of his identity loose from the pattern of
family life
, to find himself by losing them?  Is a man at liberty to forget from whence he has come, so that he can proceed unfettered to the place his soul tells him he must go?

Another example.  A woman married twenty years with teenage children and a husband.  A home.  Pets.  Photo albums and scrapbooks brimming with memories.  What happens when such a woman no longer feels any passion for a shared future with her husband and children?  What if she feels nonexistent?

Is she depressed?  Does she need Zoloft?  A higher dose?  Two medicines?  Or is it possible her life has carried her so far from her internal truth that she is, for all sake and purposes, a zombie — one of the living dead?

Is that woman within her rights — morally and ethically — to leave her home and family and friends, leave them so completely that she has no memory of them?  Having brought her children into the world, does she owe them the rest of her days or is she free to celebrate the past and move on to create a new future without them?

The answer must be a resounding ‘yes.’

A person can be spiritually deceased, the carcass of his or her soul adrift inside a cage of skin and bone that has outlived him.  What sort of mother or father, sister or brother, husband or wife would put his or her attachment to a shared past above that person’s future — his or her rebirth?

True love would never exact such suffering.

Clevenger put the journal down.  He realized the difference between John Snow’s view of the world and his own.  Clevenger believed people could change and grow, no matter what circumstances conspired to limit them.  Given the right motivation and the right guidance, and, yes, even sometimes the right medicine, they could reinvent themselves and overcome the past.  That was what living a successful life was all about.  It could be painful, sometimes excruciating, but it was their pain to deal with.  Passing that suffering along to others by surgically removing themselves from one drama to start another did seem immoral.  It might restore the blood volume of a person’s soul, but it would leave a dozen others hemorrhaging from the procedure.

He thought of Theresa Snow’s assessment of her husband as a narcissist, unable to balance the needs of others against his own.  And maybe that was the heart of the matter.  But the question still had to be asked:  What had brought John Snow to the point of believing he was a dead person inside a living body, that his story was at an end?

Something had killed John Snow before he took a bullet in that alleyway.

Clevenger flipped through more of the journal.  The next ten or so pages were full of calculations and drawings obviously related to Vortek, Snow’s last invention, now in the hands of Collin Coroway.  Clevenger looked at the missile, drawn larger in some places, smaller in others, sometimes with wings, sometimes without.  In a few of the drawings it was splayed open, and Snow had sketched coils inside it.

Clevenger turned another page and found himself staring at a page filled with a chaos of letters, numbers and mathematical symbols.  The characters were even tinier than Snow’s usual hand, clustering together into dashed lines here, curves there, even amorphous clouds of letters and numbers.  He held the page farther away, kept staring at it.  And then what seemed like chaos slowly began to take form.  Hair.  Eyes.  A nose.  Lips.  He looked longer and harder.  And then he realized with amazement that he was looking at Grace Baxter’s face.

The Four Seasons