The Second Time Around (34 page)

But that was different from now.

Without refrigeration the milk had gone sour, but he didn't mind eating the cereal dry. Ever since he shot Peg, his appetite had been coming back. It was as if a big stone inside him had started to dissolve. If he hadn't had the cereal and the bread and the peanut butter, he
would have gone over to the guest house and killed Lynn Spencer and taken food from her kitchen. He could even have driven her car out of here, and no one would have been the wiser.

But then if her boyfriend came back and found her, they'd know her car was missing. The cops would be on the lookout for it everywhere. It was flashy and cost a lot of money. It would be easy to spot.

“Wait, Ned,” Annie was saying to him. “Rest for a while. There's no hurry.”

“I know,” he whispered.

At three o'clock, after he'd been dozing on and off for a couple of hours, he decided to go outside. There was little room to walk around in the garage, and his legs and neck felt cramped. The garage had a door on the side next to the car. He opened it very slowly and listened for the sound of anyone outside. But it was all right. There was no one around this part of the property. He would have bet that Lynn Spencer never walked over here anyhow. But just in case he ran into any trouble, he carried his rifle with him.

He went around the back of the pool house as far as the trees that screened the pool from the guest cottage. Now that all the leaves were out, no one in the guest cottage could see him even if they were looking that way.

He could see the cottage, though, by looking through the branches. The shades in the guest house were up, and a couple of the windows were open. Spencer's silver convertible was in the driveway. The top was down. Ned sat on the ground with his legs crossed. It felt a little damp, but he didn't mind.

Because time didn't mean anything to him, he wasn't sure how long he had been there when the door to the house opened and Lynn Spencer came out. As Ned watched, she pulled the door closed and walked to the car. She was wearing black slacks and a black and white blouse. She looked dressed up. Maybe she was meeting someone for a drink and dinner. She got into the car and started the engine. The car was so quiet that it hardly made a sound as it started, then went around the side of what was left of the mansion.

Ned waited three or four minutes until he was sure she was gone, then he moved quickly across the open space and to the side of the house. He walked from window to window. All the shades were up, and as far as he could see, the house was empty. He tried to open the windows on the side, but they were locked. If he was going inside, he had to take a chance and go in through a front window where anyone who happened to come up the driveway would see him.

He took time to rub the bottom of his shoes back and forth on the driveway so he wouldn't leave any dirt on the windowsill or inside the house. Then, in one quick move, he shoved up the left front window and, propping his rifle against the house, hoisted himself up. When he got one leg over the sill, he reached for his rifle and, once inside, lowered the window back to just the spot it had been when he opened it.

He checked to make sure there was no dirt on the
windowsill or that his shoes didn't make any marks on the floor or carpets. He did a quick search of the house. The two bedrooms upstairs were empty. He was definitely alone, but he knew he couldn't count on Lynn Spencer staying out long even though she was dressed up when she left. She could even have forgotten something and come back in a minute.

He was in the kitchen when the sharp peal of the phone made him clutch the rifle and press his finger on the trigger. The phone rang three times before the answering machine on the counter picked it up. Ned opened and closed cabinet drawers as he heard the recorded message. Then he heard a woman's voice saying, “Lynn, this is Carley. I'll be doing a draft of the story tonight and wanted to ask you a quick question. I'll try you again later. If I don't reach you, I'll see you tomorrow at three in Bedford. If you've changed your plans and are coming back to New York early, give me a call. My cell phone number is 917-555-8420.”

Carley DeCarlo was coming here tomorrow, Ned thought. That was why Annie had told him to wait and to rest today. Tomorrow it would be all over. “Thank you, Annie,” Ned said. He decided he should get back to the garage, but first there was something he had to find.

Most people kept an extra set of keys around the house, he thought.

Finally he found them, in almost the last drawer he opened. They were in an envelope. He knew they'd be
there somewhere. Each of the housekeepers probably had a key to this house. There were two sets of keys in two different envelopes. One envelope was marked “Guest House,” the other, “Pool House.” He didn't care about the pool house, so he left that, taking just one set of the house keys.

He opened the back door and made sure that one of the keys fit into the lock. There were only a couple of things more that he wanted before he went back to the garage. There were six cans of Coca-Cola and club soda, and six bottles of water in the refrigerator, lined up two by two. He wanted to take those, but he knew the Spencer woman would notice if any were missing. But he found that one of the overhead cabinets had boxes of crackers, bags of potato chips and pretzels, and cans of nuts—he didn't think she'd miss one of those.

The liquor cabinet was full as well. There were four bottles of unopened scotch alone. Ned took one of them from the back. You couldn't even tell it was missing unless you pulled the drawer out all the way. They were all the same brand, too.

By then he felt as if he'd been inside the house a long time, even though it really had been only a few minutes. Still, he took the time to do one more thing. Just in case there was anyone in the kitchen when he came back, he'd leave a side window unlocked in the room with the television.

As he hurried down the hall, Ned's eyes darted from the floor to the staircase to be sure there wasn't a single mark from his shoes anywhere. As Annie used to say, “You can be neat when you want to be, Ned.”

When the window in the study was unlocked, he took long strides to the kitchen, then with the bottle of scotch and box of crackers under his arm, he opened the back door. Before he closed it behind him, he looked back. The blinking red light of the answering machine caught his eye. “I'll see you tomorrow, Carley,” he said quietly.

I
kept the volume on the television on low all morning, turning it up only when I heard new information about Ned Cooper or his victims. There was a particularly poignant segment about his wife, Annie. Several of her coworkers at the hospital spoke about how they remembered her energy, her sweetness with the patients, her willingness to work overtime when she was needed.

With increasing pity I watched as her story evolved. She had carried trays all day, five or six days a week, and then went home to a rented apartment in a shabby neighborhood where she lived with an emotionally disturbed husband. The one great joy in her life seems to have been her home in Greenwood Lake. One nurse talked about that. “Annie couldn't wait to get to start her garden in the spring,” she said. “She'd bring in pictures of it, and every year it was different and beautiful. We used to tease her that she was wasting her time here.
We told her she should be working in a greenhouse.”

She had never told anyone at the hospital that Ned sold the house. But a neighbor who was interviewed said that Ned had bragged about owning Gen-stone stock and had said that he was going to be able to buy Annie a mansion like the one the Gen-stone boss had in Bedford.

That comment sent me scurrying to the phone to call Judy again and ask her to send me a copy of that interview, as well as one of my own. It provided one more direct link between Ned Cooper and the Bedford fire.

I kept thinking of Annie as I e-mailed my column to the magazine. I was certain that the police were checking the libraries, showing Ned Cooper's picture, to see if he was the one who had sent me the e-mails. If so, he had placed himself at the scene of the fire. I decided to call Detective Clifford at the Bedford police station. He was the one I had spoken to last week about the e-mails.

“I was just about to call you, Miss DeCarlo,” he said. “The librarians have confirmed that Ned Cooper was the man who used their computers, and we're taking very seriously the message he sent you about preparing yourself for judgment day. In one of the other two he said something about your not answering his wife's question in your column, so we think he might be getting fixated on you.”

Needless to say, it wasn't a pleasant thought.

“Maybe you should request police protection until we get this guy,” Detective Clifford suggested, “although I can tell you that a black Toyota with a man
who might have been Cooper was seen an hour ago by a truck driver at a rest stop in Massachusetts. He's sure the car had a New York plate even though he couldn't get the numbers, so it may turn out to be a good lead.”

“I don't need protection,” I said quickly. “Ned Cooper doesn't know where I live, and anyhow, I'm going to be out most of the day today and tomorrow.”

“Just to be on the safe side, we phoned Mrs. Spencer in New York, and she called back. She's staying up here in the guest house until we catch him. We told her that it's unlikely that Cooper would come back here, but nonetheless we're keeping an eye on the roads near her property.”

He promised to call me if he heard any further definite news about Cooper.

I had brought my thick file on Nick Spencer home from the office for the weekend, and as soon as I was off the phone, I got it out. What I was interested in this time were the reports about the plane crash, ranging from the first headlines to the brief follow-up references in the articles about the stock and the vaccine.

I highlighted as I read. The accounts were straightforward. On Friday, April 4, at 2
P.M.,
Nicholas Spencer, a seasoned pilot, had taken off in his private plane from Westchester County Airport, destined for San Juan, Puerto Rico. He planned to attend a weekend business seminar there, returning late Sunday afternoon. The weather forecast was for moderate rainfall in the San Juan area. His wife had dropped him off at the airport

Fifteen minutes before he was to land in San Juan, Spencer's plane disappeared from the radar screen.
There had been no indication that he was having a problem, but the rainfall had developed into a heavy storm, with considerable lightning in the area. The speculation was that the plane had been hit by lightning. The next day, bits of wreckage from his plane began to wash ashore.

The name of the mechanic who had serviced the plane just before takeoff was Dominick Salvio. After the accident he said that Nicholas Spencer was a skillful pilot who had flown under severe weather conditions before but that a direct lightning strike could have sent the plane into a spin.

After the scandal broke, questions about the flight began to surface in the newspaper accounts. Why hadn't Spencer used the Gen-stone company plane, which he normally did on company-related trips? Why had the number of calls made and received on his cell phone decreased so drastically in the weeks before the crash? Then, when his body was not recovered, the questions changed. Had the crash been staged? Had he actually been on the plane when it went down? He always drove his own car to the airport. On the day he left for Puerto Rico, he had asked his wife to drop him off at the airport. Why?

I called the Westchester airport. Dominick Salvio was at work, and I was put through to him and learned that he would be finished work at two o'clock. He reluctantly agreed to meet me for fifteen minutes in the terminal.

“Fifteen minutes only, Miss DeCarlo,” he said. “My kid has a little league game today, and I want to see it.”

I looked at the clock. It was eleven forty-five, and I was still in my robe. One of the great luxuries to me on Saturday mornings, even if I'm working at my desk, is not having to rush to shower and dress. But now it was time to get moving. I had no idea how much traffic I might encounter and wanted to leave myself a full hour and a half to get to the Westchester airport.

Fifteen minutes later, thanks to the noise of the blow-dryer, I almost didn't hear the phone, but then I ran to get it. It was Ken Page. “I found our cancer patient, Carley,” he said.

“Who is he?”

“Dennis Holden, a thirty-eight-year-old engineer who lives in Armonk.”

“How is he doing?”

“He wouldn't say over the phone. He was very reluctant to even talk to me, but I persuaded him, and he finally invited me to come to his house.”

“What about me?” I asked. “Ken, you promised—”

“Hold it. It took a bit of doing, but you're in. He's willing to see you, too. We have our choice: today or tomorrow at three o'clock. That's not much notice, so does either work for you? I can make whichever works best for you. I have to call him right back.”