Obsessed (22 page)

“Could you look up when these patients had their last appointment at the MRI lab?”

“No problem. It would be in their files and—” Emily's voice died off. “What on earth?”

The parking lot below us was lit up like a stage set, the exits cordoned off. Pulsing lights reflected off the asphalt and surrounding tree branches.

“Maybe there's been an assault?” Emily said, hurrying over to the steps.

I followed her. Car accident seemed more likely. But there were too many emergency vehicles for a fender bender. An ambulance and a police cruiser were nose to nose in the parking lot. Between them, emergency personnel were huddled. A police officer moved aside and I could see what looked like a man in dark clothing lying on the ground.

Emily picked up a gym bag that had been left on the steps. “This is Kyle's,” she said, her voice catching in her throat. “And isn't that Kyle's car?” A black Range Rover was one of a handful of cars still in the parking lot.

Emily's knees buckled under her and she sank down on the step.

I sat beside her. She had her face pressed into the gym bag.

“You go. I can't,” she said. She looked so pale and she was shaking so hard I was afraid she was going to keel over. When I hesitated, she said, “Go! Please. Find out what happened.”

I got up and started down the steps. As I moved closer, I could see that the victim was lying on his stomach, legs splayed. He was a big man, broad back, dark hair, and his face was turned away from me. One of the men standing beside him looked up at me—it was MacRae.

“Stay back!” one of the officers barked in my direction.

MacRae came over to me.

“What happened?” I asked.

“If we'd been able to hold him longer, he'd still be alive,” MacRae said. “Poor bastard. Looks like he got hit.”

I looked for skid marks near the body but didn't see any. About twenty feet away, a police photographer was taking pictures of the pavement. “You think it happened over there?” I asked.

MacRae shrugged, his usual noncommittal self. Now Emily was standing at the base of the steps, still clutching Kyle's gym bag to her chest.

The camera flashed two more times. It was a long way from those skid marks to where Kyle was now. Would've had to have been hit at high speed to have been catapulted that far. There was no way to build up that kind of speed in the parking lot. More likely he crawled to where he was now.

One of the officers who'd been working over the body came over to us. He handed MacRae something small. MacRae held it in his palm.

“Recognize this?” he asked, but he wasn't talking to me. He was showing it to Emily, who'd come up behind me. She was still pale, like she was in shock. She gasped when she saw what looked like a small piece of gold jewelry. Before it had been run over, it might have been a tiny pin or a ring in the shape of a woman.

I put my hand on Emily's shoulder and hoped she was getting the message.
Don't say anything
.

“What's that?” MacRae asked Emily, indicating the gym bag.

“I think it's Kyle's,” Emily said. “I found it up there on one of the steps.”

“I'll take it,” MacRae said, and he took the bag from her. “I'd like you both to stick around, particularly you Dr. Ryan. I have some questions.”

Emily gave a mute nod. She was staring at where her car was parked in the far corner of the lot. A man in a uniform was running a flashlight carefully over the body of the Miata and taking notes.

I remembered what Emily had said happened to that stranger who'd stalked her when she was in college.
He died in a car accident.
Hit by a car in a parking lot? I wondered.

W
E WATCHED
from the steps as the investigators methodically worked their way across the parking lot. Emily alternately wept and cursed. Kyle was dead, and whoever did it had used her car. After a while, she just sat there staring off into space as the gravity of her situation seemed to settle over her. I put my arm around her, but I felt the distance between us growing as I sat there thinking.

I wondered when the medical examiner would place the time of death. While Emily was—and the word
supposedly
slipped into my head—waiting for a new patient who'd never showed?

Now she was trembling, suppressing the sobs. It felt completely genuine. Still, I found myself wondering exactly how long it had been since Kyle was run down. Emily had been out of breath when she reappeared in my office, as if she'd been running. Said she'd gone downstairs to see if the patient was waiting for her in the lobby. If Kyle was killed at around six, she'd have had time to get to the parking lot and back. Outpatient services were usually very careful about making appointments for new patients. Standard procedure would have been for them to check that contact information was genuine. Had they really scheduled Emily an appointment with a nonexistent patient, or had Emily made that up in order to buy herself time? It was something I could check in the morning.

If you took as a starting point that Kyle helped Emily kill Philbrick, it all made sense. Emily enlists Kyle's help to eliminate the stalker who's been making life miserable for her. After they kill him things start to heat up. Kyle gets taken in for questioning. Maybe he begins to crack under pressure. Emily's afraid he's about to spill the truth.

She arranges for him to meet her in the parking lot at the time when she's supposedly waiting for a new patient. When Kyle shows up, she runs him down. But it's a little car and he's a big man. The initial impact isn't enough. He crawls across the parking lot, trying to get away. So she runs over him again. How many times did it take? Then she parks her car off in the corner of the lot and races back through the tunnel and up to the third floor. When she shows up in my office she's still out of breath.

All of that fit together. But there were pieces that didn't make sense. Why run Kyle down with her own car and in so doing make herself seem guilty? Why leave her car not fifty feet from the body where the police could so easily see the damaged fender? Why not wait a few minutes so she wasn't so out of breath when she came to my office? And why show up in the parking lot afterward, right in the middle of the police investigation?

I knew what Emily would say. She was being set up. Someone had stolen her keys again. I'd been there, witnessed how the stalker let the air out of her tire, unlocked her car and helped himself to her belongings—intimate items that were hers…and an earring.

Now I realized what the bit of gold jewelry was that the police had found on the pavement—it was the ear clip that Emily sometimes wore hooked over the top of her ear. Was that the earring she'd claimed had been stolen by her stalker? Did the word
stalker
belong in quotation marks?

A pair of tow trucks arrived—I assumed one was for Emily's car and one was for Kyle's. MacRae strode over to us.

“You don't have to tell me,” Emily told me as she rose to meet him. She squared her shoulders and, before he could get a word out, announced, “I know you have questions, and I'd be happy to answer them. But first I'd like to call my attorney.”

MacRae already had his pad out. “I'm not arresting you, just trying to help you out here,” he said, giving us his I'm-just-a-poor-slob-trying-to-do-my-job look. “Just wondering when you last saw the victim?”

Emily shook her head.

MacRae gave me a cold look. “How about you, Dr. Zak? I'm sure you won't mind answering a few questions.”

He clicked open his pen and launched into his questions. Most of them established that I couldn't vouch for Emily's whereabouts for the better part of the last hour. When he was done, MacRae stood there clicking his pen rapidly open and shut.

“I want to see you tomorrow, first thing,” he told Emily. “With your attorney, of course.”

I didn't take Emily home. I phoned Annie and she helped me locate Chip at the Harvard Club, where he was in the middle of a squash match and not thrilled about having been tracked down. He met us at his office.

Still wearing shorts and a sweaty T-shirt, Chip looked rather incongruous in the well-appointed, skylighted office in the building where he and Annie had opened their practice after they left the public defender's office. With its exposed brick walls and oversized windows, the building had been a stable back in the 1800s when horses and buggies clopped along the cobblestone streets in this part of East Cambridge, Boston's first industrial center. Perfect location for a criminal law practice—the courthouse and jail were just a few blocks away.

He had a mahogany desk, leather-seated desk chair, an abstract oil painting on the wall. The only hint of Chip's dubious past was a 1976 Fillmore East Grateful Dead poster hanging on the back of his office door—a red, white, and blue skeleton.

After an hour spent talking to Emily, Chip had covered six pages of a yellow pad with notes scrawled in a hand that only he could read. He leaned back in his chair.

“I'll be honest with you, Dr. Ryan. I fully expect the DA will want to charge you with murder. We'll talk to the police first thing tomorrow, offer to help their investigation in any way we can. You should be prepared for the possibility that they may want to hold you.”

“Hold me? What about my jobs?” she asked. People did that, hung onto shreds of normal routine as a way of denying that the world was crumbling around them.

“It would probably be a good idea to request a leave of absence. Until this sorts itself out,” Chip said. Emily swallowed a sob. “And when we do talk with the police,” Chip went on, giving her his sternest voice, “you must do exactly what I tell you. Is that understood? My job is to protect you.”

Emily stood and went through the motions of shaking Chip's hand and thanking him. I walked her to my car. All the way back to her apartment, Emily stared listlessly out the window. It was nearly ten when we got there.

I walked her to her door. “Damn,” she said, punching the inside of her bag as she rummaged for her keys. There was a pool of light in the entryway. Her bag dropped and out spilled much of the contents, coins rolling every which way.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Emily shrieked, kicking and stomping, sending a tube of lipstick skittering into the grass. “Goddamn that fucking miserable sonofabitch!”

“Calm down,” I said, putting my hands on her shoulders.

She wrenched herself free and gave me an accusing look. “You think I did it, don't you. You think I killed Lenny and then ran down Kyle.” She placed her heel on a hand mirror and ground down on it until it shattered. “That's what everyone's going to think. Maybe I should just give up.”

She squatted and picked up one of the shards of mirror. Light glinted off the glass, sending a sliver of light into the darkness. She grew very still, her skin glowing pale in the evening light.

She sighed and tossed the piece of glass into the bushes. She wiped away tears and picked out her keys, then gathered up the rest of her belongings and stuffed them back into the bag.

I offered her a hand. She took it and pulled herself to her feet. Before I knew what was happening, she was in my arms, pressing herself against me. For an instant, it felt as if I were holding Kate—Kate was about the same size, with that same combination of physical vulnerability and strength. My breath caught as the smell of cinnamon and clove invaded my head. Kate's smell. I knew it was a memory. I gave a long, shuddering inhale, willing the sensation to last. Then we were kissing, all the alarm bells I was hearing muffled by the moment.

Slowly, with more reluctance than I would have admitted, I pulled away.

“I don't think this is a good idea,” I said.

She fiddled with her keys and stared down at them. “I suppose you're right.” She straightened her jacket collar. “I'm sorry.” Her mouth was pouting now, sulky.

I looked at her face, the long neck and delicate chin, dark lashes resting on flushed cheeks. Cinnamon and clove had vanished, replaced by a cold clarity as I wondered if I was looking into the face of a killer.

“Assholes are us,” I thought as I sat in the car outside my house. Why had I allowed it to happen? One minute I'm thinking Emily could be a cold-blooded murderer who was now on her third victim. The next minute I'm holding her in my arms and kissing her. Worse still, enjoying it. Maybe Lewy body dementia was already affecting my judgment. If not, then what the hell was going on? The one thing I knew was I didn't want to go home. I needed ballast and a strong dark beer.

I called Annie and asked her to meet me at the Inman Lounge. When I got there the place was half full, and a pair of TVs over either end of the bar had on
Seinfeld
reruns.

“It doesn't look good for her,” Annie said. “Woman takes matters into her own hands, gets her boyfriend to help her kill the man who stalked her, then kills her boyfriend before he can implicate her. That's how it's supposed to look, anyway.”

“
Supposed
to look?”

Annie skimmed the head off her beer with her finger and licked it off. “Your friend Emily is a flake, and I'm sure she hasn't got the world's best judgment in people, but she's not stupid. I think it's been made to look as if she did it.”

“Don't you think it's a bit of a coincidence that she says she had a stalker before, and he was killed in a car accident?”

“You think he got run over in a parking lot?”

“Well?”

“He didn't. I looked into that old stalking incident.” I must have looked surprised because Annie added, “It's my job. Of course I checked her out. She took out an injunction against the guy, a college student. He was killed six months later when his car hit a Greyhound bus that had rolled over on a highway in freezing rain. Doesn't seem like the kind of thing Emily could pull off, despite her many talents.”

“Just a coincidence,” I said, trying once again to adjust my mental image of Emily.

“Sometimes that's all it is.”

“You want this to be about those obituaries, don't you?” I said. Annie grinned and raised her eyebrows, allowing that I might have a point. “Okay. I can see where Philbrick's death might have had something to do with the lab and a rash of suspicious patient deaths. But Kyle's death? How does that fit in with dead patients?”

“He was there the morning Philbrick was killed. Maybe he saw something.”

“What?”

“I don't know. I haven't figured that part out.” Annie ran her finger slowly around the rim of her glass. “Too bad Emily will be in jail. Now she can't find out when all those patients had their last appointments at the MRI lab. We'll just have to find out for ourselves. Go to the families and ask. If they don't know, try to get at the lab records.”

I didn't like where this was heading.

“I already contacted Frank Mosticcio's daughter,” Annie said, rushing ahead full tilt.

“The guy who loved ballroom dancing?”

“No. Mosticcio's one of the obituaries that Uncle Jack snitched. Died a couple of months ago. Lived in Brookline. You and I have an appointment tomorrow to see his daughter.”

“We do?”

“Yeah. I said I'd come over with a psychologist who works with dementia patients and their families.” My jaw dropped. “Well you do, don't you? I told her the truth—sort of. That I was looking for families who'd gone through what I'd been going through. I hand-waved a little about why.”

“Hand-waved?”

“I may have suggested I'd be writing about it. I really didn't have to say much. She said she'd be glad to talk to us. Seemed eager to, in fact.”