Murder Suicide (8 page)

The officers recognized him and stepped aside.

As he walked up to the door, it opened.  Anderson walked out, shut the door behind him.

Clevenger looked down Beacon.  "I didn’t see this coming."

"If you didn’t, no one could have."

Clevenger looked at him.  "I’m not sure."

Now Anderson looked away.  "The husband is more bent out of shape than Coady let on.  Maybe it’s better to let them take her body to the morgue.  You can learn what you need to from Wolfe."

Clevenger shook his head.  "Where is she?"

"I can be our eyes here."

Clevenger started to move past him.

Anderson caught his arm.  "Upstairs, in the master bedroom.  Coady’s there.  Her husband’s in the den to the right of the entryway."

Clevenger opened the door and walked into the house.

George Reese, Grace’s husband, stood up from a burgundy leather armchair, cocked his head and stared at Clevenger through storm gray, bloodshot eyes.  He was imperially slim, about six feet tall, and looked younger than his fifty-two years.  His white, wing tip shirt was covered with blood.  His the black hair, worn oiled back, had fallen over his forehead.

Clevenger walked over to him.  The palms of his hands and one of his cheeks were bloody, too.  "I’m very sorry about..." he started.

Red blotches appeared on Reese’s neck.  "You have real nerve setting foot in my home," he said, struggling to keep his voice down.

Anderson moved to Clevenger’s side.

Reese squinted at Clevenger.  "She told me she called you five times today.  And you never got back to her.  What did you put before my wife’s life?"

Clevenger smelled alcohol on Reese’s breath.  He glanced into the den, saw a bottle of Scotch open on the coffee table.  "She called for an appointment," Clevenger said.  "She got one for eight
A.M.
tomorrow morning."  He knew that didn’t sound like much of an answer.

"She didn’t make it until morning," Reese seethed.

"I wish I could have done more," Clevenger said.

Reese took another step forward.  Anderson started to move between them, but Clevenger signaled him to stay back.

"Five calls," Reese said.  "Do most of your patients call you half-a-dozen times in a few hours?"  He spoke through clenched teeth.  "Do you even know Grace’s history, Dr. Clevenger?  Did you bother to get her records before you saw her?  Did you talk to her last psychiatrist?"

Those questions brought Clevenger back to another uncomfortable memory of his session with Grace Baxter — the way her ‘contract for safety’ had rolled off her tongue, making him wonder how many times she had worried psychiatrists before.  But he hadn’t asked her.

"Three suicide attempts," Reese said.  "Nine admissions to locked units."

Clevenger dropped his gaze for an instant, then made himself look Reese in the eyes, again.

"You didn’t have an hour for her, maybe at the end of your busy day?  You had somewhere to be?"

"I’m sorry about your wife," Clevenger said.

Reese leaned to whisper in Clevenger’s ear.  His breath was 80 proof.  "You go up to our bedroom and take a look at her.  Go see what you’ve done."  He stepped aside.

Clevenger walked past him, up the sweeping staircase to the second floor, with Anderson close behind.  He heard Mike Coady’s voice down the hall and headed toward it.  He froze as he walked into the master bedroom.

Anderson put a hand on his shoulder.  "She must have been stumbling around trying to get to the bed."

The comforter had been folded away from Baxter, who lay naked on bedclothes drenched with blood.  The walls and carpet were speckled with it.  A section of the light blue velvet drapes that hung over the windows had been pulled to the ground and lay in a blood-stained heap on the floor.

Clevenger walked to the bed along a plastic pathway rolled out by the crime scene investigators.  He looked down at Baxter.  Ruby lacerations criss-crossed her neck — a real hack job.  Her wrists had each been cut once horizontally.  She was still wearing her wedding diamond bracelets and Rolex watch.  They were covered in blood.

Coady walked to the opposite side of the bed.  "Patient of yours?"

"She told me they felt like handcuffs," Clevenger said.

"Huh?"

"The bracelets," he said.  "The watch."

"Pretty fancy handcuffs."

"Yes, they were."

"She got both carotids," Coady said.  "The bathroom’s even more of a mess."

"What did she use?"

"Carpet knife.  They’re renovating the third floor.  Her husband says it must belong to one of the contractors."

Clevenger nodded.

"She left him a note," Coady said.  He held out a plastic bag with a piece of five-by-eight stationery inside.

Clevenger took the bag.  The stationery was blood-splattered, but legible.

My Love,

I cannot go on.  As I fall off to sleep each night and as I leave sleep each morning I have only precious moments when I feel alive, before I wake fully to what my life has become.  Imagine having only those few instants of happiness in an entire day and night, the sweetest and most fleeting illusion of freedom, and you may understand and even forgive what I have done.

I remember each of our kisses, every touch.  When you entered me, I entered you.  I escaped and left my pain behind.  I cannot face it alone.

I was wrong to rely on you for my happiness.  Your life is your own.  But the idea of you leaving me darkens my horizon so completely that I cannot see any future, nor bear one more step toward it.

Please forgive me, everything.

Forever,

Grace

"Husband says they were talking about splitting up," Coady said.  "He’d seen a lawyer."

Clevenger handed the bag back to him.  "Is there somewhere we can talk?"

"Follow me."

Clevenger followed Coady along another length of plastic, into the bathroom.  The walls were mirrored.  Everywhere Clevenger turned he saw himself covered in blood that had sprayed from Baxter’s carotids.  A cold sweat gripped him.

Coady used his gloved hand to close the door behind them.  "Carpet knife," Coady said, pointing to the sink.

Clevenger looked into the sink, saw the carpet knife, its blade bloodstained.  "She was Snow’s lover," he said, without looking up.

"What are you talking about?"

"Grace Baxter and Snow.  They were having an affair."

"She told you that?"

"No," Clevenger said, making eye contact with Coady.  "I met with J.T. Heller today.  Snow told him about it."

Coady looked like his mind was working to generate a simple solution to a complex problem.  "Maybe she hears her man offed himself, gets depressed herself, and..."

"Possible," Clevenger said.  He paused.  "How do you rule out the husband?"

"What?"

"The most common way women kill themselves is by overdose," Clevenger said.  "Sometimes they cut their wrists.  But her neck, and a single horizontal cut to each wrist?  That would be one for the psychiatry journals.  When someone goes for the carotids it’s in response to psychosis — a delusion the devil’s in your veins, that sort of thing.  I didn’t see any evidence of psychosis in Baxter."

"Let’s be honest," Coady said.  "You didn’t see any of this coming."

That line landed like a kick to Clevenger’s gut.  It took his a few seconds to recover.  "No," he said, finally.  "I didn’t.  But that’s important, too."

"Oh, I get it," Coady said.  "This can’t be happening because the all-seeing Frank Clevenger, M.D. missed it.  We can’t accept the obvious if it means you obviously fucked up."

"He is covered in her blood."

"He walked in, saw his wife of twelve years bleeding out in bed and tried to perform CPR.  When we got here the body was still warm.  No pulse, but still warm."

Clevenger didn’t respond.

"What’s his motive?" Coady asked.  "Jealousy?  Snow’s death was all over the news today.  He had to know he didn’t exactly have to compete with him anymore."  Hearing his own words seemed to jar him a bit.

"Agreed," Clevenger said. "Snow was out of the way."

"Oh, so now he’s guilty of a double homicide.  We got a banker, a pillar of the community, in a homicidal rage, killing his wife’s lover in the
A.M.
, then offing his wife in the early evening.  And it’s not like he walked in on them together, grabbed a gun and blew them away.  No irresistible impulse here.  He
planned
to off them both in the same day."  He paused.  "Now that would be one for the criminal science journals."

"Maybe he didn’t plan very well," Clevenger said.  He took a beat.  "Look, I’m not saying he’s necessarily involved.  But his wife was cheating on him.  She and her lover are dead.  And he managed to get her blood all over him."

"Okay," Coady said, dismissively.  "I won’t officially rule him out."

"Just unofficially?"

"How about I run my own investigation?  I had a single question for you:  Was John Snow psychologically capable of suicide?  If you want the case, that’s the scope of the work.  Whether or not we rule Baxter a suicide isn’t your concern."

"I hear you," Clevenger said.

Coady knew he was being brushed off.  "You should back off.  You have a vested interest in this not being a suicide.  Because if it is, it might also be a decent malpractice case."

"Which might be the only way to start getting the facts," Clevenger said.  He turned and walked out.

Chapter 7

8:40
P.M.

Clevenger left with Anderson.  They met up again at their offices in Chelsea.

"What are you thinking?" Anderson asked, taking the seat beside Clevenger’s desk — the one Grace Baxter had sat in.

"We have two people in love, or at least intimately involved, dead within hours of each other," Clevenger said.  "Their affair certainly feels like the place to start.  Someone couldn’t stomach what they had, or couldn’t stomach the fact that it was over."

"That could be Grace herself.  She could be the shooter."

"Possible," Clevenger said.  "But to inflict those wounds on herself, she had to be psychotic."  He shook his head.  "Maybe she was sicker than I could tell.  She talked about feeling guilty.  Maybe it was more than that.  Maybe she was convinced she was evil.  Maybe she believed bleeding out was the only way to purge herself of her sins."

"Could killing Snow put her in that frame of mind?" Anderson said.

Clevenger looked back at him.  "It could have."  Part of the element of performing forensic evaluations of killers was understanding that their mental states can throw a person into something that looks a lot like mania, or even paranoid schizophrenia — sometimes minutes, sometimes hours after the act.  He shook his head.  "She just didn’t feel like someone who was losing contact with reality."

"Until we have something else, we go with your gut.  If this was a murder-suicide, it’s all over.  Same thing if they each committed suicide.  But if there’s somebody out there guilty of a double homicide, we’re the only ones looking for that person."

Anderson was right.  The two of them were the only ones searching hard for the truth.  And if that truth included a killer brazen enough to murder a high profile inventor and his high society lover, it was time to start worrying about their own safety.  "We should start watching each other’s back," he said.

"You got it," Anderson said.

"I think my next stop is Snow’s wife, find out whether she knew about Grace Baxter.  I get Snow’s journal from Coady tomorrow morning.  I’ll take a look at it before I visit her."

"I still have Coroway to track down.  And somehow we’re going to have to get access to George Reese."

"Agreed."

"You realize we don’t exactly have a client here," Anderson said.  "You have a report on Snow’s mental state to generate for Coady, but he might even pull that back if we go full throttle on a double homicide theory."

Clevenger thought about that.  They were free to walk away form the case, and part of him would have liked to.  There were plenty of other cases simmering in the office, not to mention how much time and energy it took to keep Billy out of trouble.  But he knew that if someone had killed Grace Baxter and John Snow, that person would rest easier once he and Anderson quit.  And that would keep him up at night, and bring back the nightmares, too, the ones of his father drunk and raging through the night.  Having been murdered little by little by that man, he just couldn’t stomach giving a killer the right of way.  That’s how the broken pieces of his psyche had set, what he had become.  "The only client we ever really had was John Snow," he said.  "I figure he’s the one who can tell us off."

"If he does, let’s hope it’s long distance."

*            *            *

10:35
P.M.

Clevenger took the freight elevator to the fifth floor and started toward the steel door to his loft.  He heard voices and occasional laughter coming from inside.  He wondered whether Billy had invited a friend over, something he still had a habit of doing on school nights, despite Clevenger asking him to save it for weekends.  He tried to pry his mind free from the investigation, to get ready to deliver a fatherly
Let’s-call-it-a-night
speech — and something a little sterner once he and Billy were alone.  But when he opened the door he saw J.T. Heller sitting with Billy at the kitchen island, drinking Cokes, like old buddies.

Heller stood up, walked over to Clevenger.  He had a thick envelope in his hand.  "Sorry to make myself at home," he said.

"Not at all," Clevenger said, taken aback.