Through the Darkness (27 page)

“I'm saying it's a possibility.”

“What makes you think it wasn't a suicide, Eva?” My friend was in serious denial.

Eva indicated the garden bench, and we sat down on it. Once we were settled, she continued. “Roger had recently taken out a sizable life insurance policy. If he killed himself the policy would be worthless.”

“That may well be true,” I said. “But perhaps Roger wasn't thinking very clearly.”

“It wasn't suicide, Hannah. I'm quite sure of that. Roger wouldn't do that to me. As screwed up as he was, that man still loved me.”

Butterflies flitted around us, touching down with delicate feet on marigold after marigold. “But the paper said that the police had found a suicide note.”

Eva sniffed. “That's true. Cassandra had asked Roger to come over to EYS and collect his things, and the note was found there.” Eva rolled her eyes. “They tell me it was a printout, for heaven's sake! If Roger had killed himself, he'd at least have had the decency to write me a note. By hand.”

“What did the note say, Eva?”

She wrapped her arms around herself, and in spite of the heat in the garden, Eva shivered. “I don't know. The police haven't shared it with me.”

I reached out for Eva's hand. “Roger was under tremendous pressure, Eva.”

She wagged her head vehemently. “Doubtless. But suicide wasn't the answer.”

As if to end discussion on the matter, Eva abruptly changed the subject. “What's happening to the woman who kidnapped Timmy?”

“She'll be arraigned sometime this afternoon.” I shuddered. I remembered how it felt to be hauled off by the FBI, turned over to a pair of humorless U.S. Marshals, and arraigned at the Federal Courthouse in Baltimore. But I had been innocent. Joanna Barnhorst, in my opinion, deserved every hour in that cold, cold cell, and every rotten box lunch.

“Do you think the Barnhorst woman is sick, like Roger was?”

“I don't think she's playing with a full deck,” I answered cautiously, “but, no, I don't think she's mentally ill, at least not in the legal sense.”

I offered to buy Eva lunch. We walked the short two blocks to Regina's Deli, where I bought a club sandwich for us to split, then we walked back to the parsonage and ate it in her sunny kitchen.

We had just slotted our plates into the dishwasher, and I had returned to full reversal mode, comforting my pastor and friend instead of vice versa, when the police called Eva with the medical examiner's report.

Her ear to the receiver, Eva listened for a while, incomprehension written all over her face. “My attorney's here,” she fibbed, with a sideways glance at me. “Do you mind if I put you on the speakerphone?”

Eva punched a button, and everything the officer was saying suddenly poured into the kitchen, as if through a child's tin megaphone. I recognized the voice. Officer Ron Powers. “We first thought it was suicide, Mrs. Haberman, but evidence found at the scene is suggesting otherwise.”

“What evidence?” Eva demanded to know.

“A search of your husband's former office, near where his body was found, has uncovered a bottle of Jim Beam, laced with Prozac.”

“But Roger didn't drink,” Eva insisted.

“Maybe he didn't normally drink, Mrs. Haberman, but his bloodstream was full of antidepressants and alcohol.”

“He died of an overdose?”

“We found water in his lungs. Your husband drowned, Mrs. Haberman.”

Eva plucked a tissue out of the box she kept next to the telephone and dabbed at her eyes. “But you told me there was a suicide note,” she continued.

“There was. When we searched your husband's office, we found the note still up on his computer screen, but he'd printed out a copy, too. The office has networked their printer. Your husband's note was in the printer tray near the photocopying machine.”

“So, what makes you think it wasn't suicide, then,” Eva whispered. She sounded exhausted and drained.

“I can't go into any details, of course,” Powers continued, but we've arrested your husband's boss, Cassandra Matthews, and charged her with his murder.”

“Cassandra?”
Eva's face told the whole story. She didn't believe in Cassandra's guilt, not for a single minute.

But apparently there was enough evidence to satisfy the police, and that was the end of that.

Eva prodded Powers for details, but none were forthcoming.

“Don't worry, Eva,” I said after she hung up the phone. “My brother-in-law is a cop. Maybe I can find out something from him.”

That's how we found out sometime later that only two sets of fingerprints had been found on the whiskey bottle—Roger's and those of his former boss, Cassandra Matthews.

And to put the icing on the cake, Cassandra's were the only fingerprints on Roger Haberman's keyboard.

Several days later I was sitting in my living room
, catching up on some knitting I'd neglected since the winter Olympic Games—the ones in Nagano, not Salt Lake City—when somebody knocked at my door.

With a sigh, I laid down my knitting, and peeked out through the curtains. Eva Haberman stood on my porch. Incredibly, Cassandra Matthews was with her.

“Hannah,” Eva said after I'd opened the door and ushered the women into my entrance hall. “You remember Cassandra Matthews.”

“Roger's boss?” I said cautiously, extending my hand. “We met at St. Cat's, as I recall.”

“Former boss,” Cassandra corrected.

“I bailed her out,” Eva explained.

Normally, I trusted Eva's judgment, but bailing out the woman who may have murdered her husband was a bit too forward-thinking, even for me.

Nevertheless, I invited them in.

It was a beautiful spring day, so I seated the women out on the patio, leaving them to commune with nature and make small talk while I brewed a fresh pot of coffee and wondered why they'd come to see me. While water gurgled through the Mr. Coffee machine, I hauled some sugar cookies out of the freezer and arranged them on a plate to thaw, thinking how appalled François Lesperance would be if he caught me doing it.

“What I don't understand, Cassandra,” I said as I emerged from the kitchen with the coffeepot in one hand and three empty mugs in the other, “is what motive you had for killing Roger.” I raised a finger. “Hold that thought.”

I popped back into the kitchen for the cream, sugar, and cookies, then continued our conversation. “Seems to me that Roger had a much stronger motive to murder
you
, and not the other way around. You fired him, after all.”

Cassandra blushed to the tips of her multi-blond roots. “Apparently you've been missing the evening news for the past several days, Hannah.”

“I guess I have.”

“That was me, front and center, on one of Erika Rose's picket lines. I was the blonde holding the sign that said, ‘The Only Good Pedophile Is a Dead Pedophile.' ”

In spite of the seriousness of the situation, I grinned. “Do you actually believe that, or did you simply glom on to the first sign Erika handed you?”

“No, it was my sign, my sentiment. I truly believe that pedophilia is incurable, but I'm certainly not glad that
Roger
is dead.”

She sipped at her coffee. “Roger Haberman was a generous guy, and a hard worker. I never had any complaints—
ever
—that he was messing with the children at the sailing school. But after the news broke, I just had to let him go.”

“Roger managed to control one thing, it seems,” his widow muttered. “He was able to keep his addictions out of the workplace.”

“True,” Cassandra agreed.

“You're probably wondering why we're here today,” Eva continued, dramatically shifting gears.

“My reputation for excellent coffee?”

“That, too.” She'd been holding her coffee mug in both hands, but she set it down on the table. “We're hoping that you can help, that by putting three heads together, rather than two, we can sort this thing out.”

I was wondering what thing they wanted sorted when Cassandra spoke, clearing up any confusion. “I didn't kill Roger.”

“And I believe her,” Eva said. “The police are basing the case against Cassandra on the most circumstantial of evidence,” she continued. “The suicide note, which appears to have been written in her style, and her fingerprints on the bottle.”

“It's circumstantial evidence like that that can do you in,” I commented, remembering my own sorry plight when the hammer that had been used to bash in Jennifer Goodall's skull had turned up with my ridges and whorls all over the handle. “Was the Jim Beam bottle yours?”

“Oh, yes. I kept it in my desk drawer. For medicinal purposes.” She blushed again. “I know it sounds lame, but every once in a while I'd have one of those days, and it'd come in handy. It wasn't the kids so much,” she explained, “but their parents can certainly drive you to drink.”

“Everyone knew where she kept the bottle,” Eva added.

“And the Prozac?” I wondered.

Cassandra shrugged. “There must be half a dozen people to-ing and fro-ing in our office every day, exhibiting every sort of phobia and anxiety you can imagine. Any one of them could have had access to Prozac.”

Thinking about the contents of my own daughter's medicine cabinet, I had to agree. “If the police think
you
murdered Roger,” I continued with unrelenting logic, “they must believe that you faked his suicide note, too.”

“I haven't seen it yet,” Cassandra complained. “It was on Roger's computer.”

Eva smiled at Cassandra sympathetically. “They took his CPU, didn't they? Looking for evidence? They've still got the PC Roger used at home.”

Cassandra nodded.

Eva frowned. “Then that's it, then.”

I raised a cautionary finger. “But wait! Cassandra, all your files are backed up every night to the mainframe computer, right?”

Cassandra nodded, comprehension dawning. “We should be able to find a copy of Roger's note if we restore it from backup!”

I shoved my coffee mug aside. “Brilliant! Well, what are we waiting for?”

Eva drove the three of us to the Eastport Yacht Sales offices near the intersection of Second and Severn in Eastport. We parked next to the sailmaker's shop.

It was still early, so the office was locked, but Cassandra let us in with her key.

The reception area of EYS looked like a photo layout for
Yachting
magazine. Comfortably upholstered chairs were arranged in a neat square around a glass-topped table, where back issues of
Yachting, Sail
, and
Cruising World
were arranged in neat cascades.

Roger's office, too, seemed ready for the photographers. Except for the dust bunnies marking the empty spot under his desk where Roger's CPU had so recently sat, the room was immaculate. The police had done a careful job, it seemed. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed—the papers in his outbox, his telephone, his monitor, his keyboard, mouse, and mouse pad. A customized mouse pad, I noticed with a twinge, with a picture of Roger and Eva smiling out from it, standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

Because Roger's access to the mainframe had disappeared along with his hard drive, Cassandra escorted us to her office, stopping along the way to turn the printer on in the photocopying room and to remove a laptop from a locked cabinet.

The state of Cassandra's office would have sent Mr. Monk, the obsessive-compulsive TV detective, into cardiac arrest. The rampant disorder made even me catch my breath. Catalogs, brochures, and business papers of all kinds littered every available surface. Sailing posters hung crookedly on the walls. The cord on the venetian blinds was a tangled mess, three slats in it were broken, and a sticky puddle marked the spot where coffee had recently spilled on Cassandra's desk. Either the Annapolis police had different searching standards from the FBI, or Cassandra was, quite simply, a slob.

“Sorry for the mess,” she apologized, confirming my slob theory.

With a broad sweep of her arm she reclaimed the work space, sending a stack of papers cascading onto the floor. She set the laptop down and plugged in the ISDN cable that snaked out of the wall. “They took my CPU for evidence, too,” she explained. “But they didn't think about the company laptop. We use it mostly for boat shows.”

I watched as Cassandra powered up the laptop and prepared to access the centralized office files. She tapped away with confidence, while Eva and I looked over her shoulder, bristling with nervous tension.

“Files, backup, restore,” Cassandra was saying. The light on the front of the laptop blinked, and the hard drive whirred. “Word, file, open…”
Tap tap tap
. “Print!” she exclaimed at last, stabbing at the Enter key with a flourish.