Murder Suicide (6 page)

A knock at the door.  He froze, gripped by the fear that his wife had followed him, or worse, his daughter or son.  But the fear was irrational; there was no way they could know where he was.  Blazek would never violate his trust.  At that moment, inside those four walls, he was free.  He breathed deeply with that thought and headed to the door.

As an act of faith, he didn’t look through the peephole before reaching out and opening the door.

Grace Baxter stood there in what he had asked her to wear — the simple black dress she had been wearing when he first saw her.

He felt his heart race.  A new feeling.  A feeling he liked.

She held out her hand.  He took both of hers and walked backwards as she followed him into the sitting room.  She looked around.  "I guess this will have to do," she joked, taking in the expanse of the place, nearly a thousand square feet, with Asian wall hangings, recessed panel walls, tray ceilings, crown moldings, crystal light fixtures.  She glanced through a set of French doors into the bedroom, saw the king-sized bed with its pristine, white pillows and sheets and comforter.  She gently let go of his hands and walked over to the window that looked onto the Garden.  Then she gracefully stepped out of her shoes and leaned against the window frame, just behind the sheer curtains.

He felt almost as though he were with her behind the lace curtains of her townhouse, when Kullaway painted her naked.  And just as he was imagining it, she reached behind her neck, unhooked her dress and let it drop to the floor.  She leaned against the window frame.  She was naked and perfect, her auburn hair cascading over her delicate shoulders, her back tapering to a slim waist, then arching just slightly above the parts of her he wanted to touch so badly.  Her legs were toned, but not muscular.  She was everything he had imagined.  Perfect.  He walked toward her, half thinking she would disappear when he reached out for her.  But when he did, she turned around, wrapped her arms around him and kissed him.  And then he felt himself losing his sense of time and place and gaining something greater, something asleep in him that was now stirring — passion for another person.  He pressed against her, kissed her even more deeply.

She pulled back, breathless.  "Undress for me," she said.

Snow’s wife had never seen him undress, scarcely seen him naked.  Their sex was something stolen from one another under the covers by night.  He slowly unbuttoned his shirt, took it off, dropped it to the floor.  He unfastened his belt, unbuttoned his pants, hesitated, then unzipped them.  He took a step toward her.

She held up a hand.  "Finish."

He felt embarrassed, and it must have shown.

"It’s all right," she said.  "I just want to see all of you."

He stepped out of his pants, took off his socks and underwear, stood naked in front of her.

"You really don’t have any idea how magnificent you are, do you?" she asked, coming to him.  She kissed his neck, his ears, his chest, then sunk to her knees.  "In here," she said, "we do anything we want to do."

Chapter 5

3:40
P.M.

Clevenger had to struggle to concentrate on the road as he drove out of the Mass General garage, headed to pick up Billy at the Somerville Boxing Club.

He thought back to his session with Grace that morning — her trembling, her guilt, how he had worried she might be on the verge of killing herself or someone else.  He pictured her rocking back and forth in her seat, hugging herself.  And he thought of what she had said: 
I don’t want to hurt anyone ever again
.

Was she fresh from the kill?  Is that why she was falling apart?  Had she just shot the man she loved through the heart, leaving herself alone in a marriage that felt like death?

Or hadn’t she hurt anyone?  Even if she had found out about Snow’s impending amnesia, maybe she simply planned to start psychotherapy not he day he went under the knife.  Maybe his decision to remake his life had inspired her to remake her own.

Clevenger grabbed his cell phone and dialed his office to see if Baxter had tried to reach him.  Boston Forensics’ office manager, Kim Moffett, a twenty-nine-year-old with the wisdom of an eighty-year-old, answered.

"Any calls?" Clevenger asked.

"I’ve been trying to get you for the past hour," she said.

He glanced at his cell, saw he had one voice mail.  He had turned off the ringer before dropping in on Heller.  "What’s up?"

"Most of it can wait.  But you’ve gotten five calls from Grace Baxter."

"She alright?"

"She says it’s no emergency, but she keeps calling.  She wants an appointment for tomorrow morning.  I’ve got you out of the office all day at MCI Concord — that competency-to-stand-trial evaluation.  But I told her I’d check with you."

Clevenger was scheduled to visit the state prison at Concord to determine whether a schizophrenic man who had killed his father was sane enough to stand trial.  The trial wasn’t slated to begin until winter.  "Tell her I’ll see her at eight o’clock tomorrow morning," he said.  "And call Concord and reschedule for me, if you would."

"No problem.  Where are you?  You’re supposed to be in Somerville in fifteen minutes."

"On my way."

"North wanted me to tell you he has some information on someone named Collin Coroway."

"Is he in?"

"No, but I can get him.  Hold on."

Moffett patched Anderson through.

"Frank?" Anderson said.

"Right here."

"I started checking out Snow’s business partner, Coroway."

"And?"

"No one to take lightly.  Former Green Beret, active duty in Vietnam, wired to the intelligence community.  He’s been written up a bunch of times in the industry trades that cover military contractors.  It looks like Snow-Coroway Engineering runs on Snow’s ingenuity and Coroway’s connections.  Eighty-five percent of their business is government-related.  Radar systems, sonar, missile technology."

"And the two of them were arguing over whether to go public."

"The were at war over it.  Classic confrontation.  The guy with a head for business versus the guy with his head in the clouds.  Coroway was the numbers man.  Snow was the dreamer.  You got to wonder just how hot the battle got."

"I’m with you," Clevenger said.  "The list of people who might have wanted Snow dead was already starting to grow.  If Collin Coroway had learned of Snow’s plan to sever the personal connection between them, potentially evolving into a direct competitor, he might have decided to end their partnership with a bullet.  "He’s not the only one who’s got to be checked out," Clevenger said.  "I just left Jet Heller’s office.  He let me in on a secret:  Snow was having an affair — with my patient this morning, Grace Baxter."

"Who just happened to look like death," Anderson said.

"You’re reading my mind."

"That’s a frightening thought.  You seeing her again?"

"Tomorrow, first thing.  In the meantime, it would be nice to nail down where Collin Coroway was at about 5:00
A.M.
today."

"Would that be stepping on Detective Coady’s toes?"

"Certainly."

"Apologize for me," Anderson said.  "I never learned to dance."

"Consider the apology accepted."

"I’ll check in later."  He hung up.

Clevenger took the Hanover Street Bridge out of Boston, got to the Somerville Boxing Club a few minutes early.

Billy was sparring in the Spartan ring that took up half the place.  Exposed light bulbs burned overhead.  Fifteen or twenty other teenagers were hitting heavy bags, lifting weights and skipping rope at stations surrounding the ring.  The room had to be close to ninety degrees and smelled like it had absorbed the sweat of the hundreds of boxers who had trained there, some of them making Golden Gloves like Billy, one of them, Johnny Ruiz, ending up Heavyweight Champion of the World.

Clevenger walked to the far corner of the room, leaned against the cinder block wall and watched Billy throwing jabs at his opponent, a shorter boy with massive shoulders who was backing away, covering up.

"Measure him," trainer Buddy Donovan, sixty-something, with a right hook that could still snap a man’s neck, called to him from the side of the ring.  He was wearing a no-nonsense set of gray sweats with S.B.C. stenciled across the top.  "Pick your shots."  He spotted Clevenger, nodded at him.

Clevenger nodded back, then watched Billy land a stiff right to his opponent’s jaw.  The kid looked like he was about to fall into the ropes, but caught himself at the last moment.

No question, Billy could fight.  He was strong and lightning fast, with real reach.  He had worked his body until his torso looked like a suit of armor.  But he had more than muscle and reflexes.  He had a fighter’s instincts.  He could sense his opponent’s strategy and adjust, sense his weaknesses and exploit them.  He had studied the sport, read books on it, watched videos of the greats, again and again:  Marciano.  Liston.  Ali.  Frazier.  Foreman.  Leonard.

It had been Billy’s idea to take up boxing, but Clevenger had encouraged him.  He figured it would be a good way for Billy to release some of his anger, so it wouldn’t spill out on the streets of Chelsea.

He had adopted Billy two years before, after solving the murder of Billy’s infant sister on Nantucket.  With Billy’s history of drug abuse and assault, the police had focused on him as the lead suspect.  But Clevenger had proved them wrong.  By the time he finished working the case, Billy’s name had been cleared, and his father had been jailed.  His mother had been deemed an unfit parent.

That left Billy free, and headed for foster care, until Clevenger stepped in.

Clevenger watched Billy take a hard left to his forehead.  He shook it off, started to dance.  The bell rang, ending the round.

"Don’t let him back you up, Nicky," Buddy Donovan called out to Billy’s opponent.  "You come in low, you keep coming."

Billy spotted Clevenger.  "The doctor is in," he called out, walking to his corner.

"Looking good," Clevenger said.

Billy winked.

The truth was Billy looked dangerous.  His long, dirty blond hair was done up in dreadlocks.  A tattoo across his back read, “Let It Bleed,” each green and black letter two inches high, the words inked across scars from the beatings he had taken from his father.

Parenting Billy felt like holding his hand as he walked a tightrope over the flames of his tortured past.  Sometimes it seemed like he was pretty steady on his feet and making good progress.  Other times it seemed like he was destined to plummet into that hell, become part of it.

The most worrisome thing was that he had no fear.  It had done him no good as a child to be scared; he got beaten, anyway.  And the capacity to be afraid is one of the main ingredients to being empathetic.  You have to be able to let yourself suffer, in order to imagine the pain of others.

Donovan rang the bell for the next round.  Billy jogged to the center of the ring.  His opponent came toward him, hunched over, stalking.  Billy bounced foot-to-foot.  He waited until the boy was within reach, then delivered three quick left jabs that skipped off his headgear.

The boy took one step closer and fired a right that landed squarely on Billy’s shoulder, knocking him sideways.

"He’s stronger than you are," Donovan called out to Billy.  "Keep moving."

Billy glanced at Donovan and started dancing again.  But he couldn’t tolerate being called weak, much less thinking of himself that way.  He stopped, took a step toward his opponent and planted his feet.  Just as he did, he got hit with a left hook to his nose.  Blood streamed down over his lips.

"I told you to move," Donovan said.  "You can’t go toe-to-toe with him."

Something new came into Billy’s eyes.  The strategic vision, the search for an opening, was gone, replaced by something that looked like pure hatred.  It was as though tasting blood had tapped something primitive and hardwired in him.  He held his gloves down by his waist and took another step toward his opponent.  The boy threw a straight right that would have ended the fight had it landed, but Billy leaned way back, and it brushed his chin.  Then Billy descended like a storm, firing rights and lefts with the ferocity of a street fighter.  Some of his punches were wild, but enough connected with the boy’s shoulders, head and neck to leave him wobbly.

"Back to your corners," Donovan yelled.  "We’re all done."  He climbed into the ring.

Clevenger started over.

Billy threw a left hook that missed and a powerful right cross that crushed into the boy’s left ear.

The kid stooped to one knee.

"I said stop!" Donovan yelled, louder this time.  He pushed Billy back toward the ropes.  "When I tell you we’re done, we’re done.  You got it?"

Billy rubbed his gloves into his eyes, like a little boy waking up from a dream.  "Sorry," he said.  He touched one glove to his nose, stared at his blood.

"Take a shower and cool off, for Christ’s sake," Donovan said.  He turned and headed over to the other boy, who was back on his feet, but still shaky.

Billy looked down at Clevenger, standing by the side of the ring.

"Get dressed," Clevenger said.  "I’ll take you home."

Donovan walked over to Clevenger as Billy headed to the locker room.  "He’s got the gift, Doc.  He could go pro some day, if he wants it bad enough.  He’s just got to learn to keep himself under control."

"Yes, he does."

"Because someone with more of an eye than Nicky would have laid him out when he started throwin’ wild in there."

Donovan seemed to worry about Billy’s loss of control for a very different reason than he was.  "He wasn’t able to back off when you told him to, either," he said.

"That, I wouldn’t pay much mind.  These kids work up a head of steam, they can’t turn it off.  That comes with age and experience."

"Let’s hope," Clevenger said.

"I’ve been at this game a long time," Donovan said.  He slapped Clevenger’s shoulder and walked off toward the locker room.

Clevenger started back toward the entrance, checking out the other kids sweating through their workouts.  He would have liked to believe Donovan was right, that Billy was no different than they were, that the brakes on his eighteen-year-old nervous system just slipped sometimes.  But Clevenger knew more about Billy than Donovan did.  He knew Billy’s history of violence outside the ring, the times he had left kids bleeding on the pavement, with broken jaws and concussions.