Trace of Doubt (12 page)

Chapter 21

I
was exhausted. I spent my days at the lab and my evenings with Ben Sato interviewing people exhaustively. We couldn’t find any Andrew connected to my mother in any way. Not through her Sunday school class, though we combed through the church registration lists that one
very
organized and anal-retentive church secretary kept as far back as 1972.

We interviewed our neighbors. No one knew an Andrew, remembered an Andrew or was related to an Andrew.

We hunted down people who had moved away.

I tried to talk to my father when we were in Quinn’s one night.

“I have a lead, Dad. Into her murder. A name. It’s the guy, Dad. The guy who left me the lock of hair. It’s him.”

We were sitting at a table while around us the typical bar crowd was noisy and laughing. He stood up abruptly. “I can’t, Billie.” His voice was hoarse.

“But, Dad…”

“Look, I know you want to catch him. And that way you can put her to rest. But I had to put her to rest a long time ago or I would have crawled into that grave with her and left you and your brother orphans. I can’t. I can’t relive it another second. And I can’t stand the thought of this bastard knowing who you are and where you live.”

“So help me get him.”

“I can’t.” He lifted the shot glass of bourbon on the table and downed it in one swift gulp. Then he shook his head, wiped at his eyes and went to the back room of Quinn’s. The rest of the night he avoided me. But Mikey found me. And my brother was pissed off.

“Look, Billie…you know Dad loves you, right?”

“Of course.”

“Have you taken a hard look in the mirror lately?”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You look like total shit. How long are you supposed to keep going like this? No sleep. Crappy food. Tommy Salami says some nights you go home at 1:00 a.m. and you’re up by 4:45. You’re killin’ the poor Salami.”

“He can stop babysitting me. No one’s forcing him to keep the hours I do.”

“Come off it, Billie. It’s not just the lack of sleep. It’s your life.”

I looked at my brother. We could pass as twins. Both of us were black Irish—blue eyes, black hair. He had the girls chasing him for as long as I can remember—and for as long as I can remember, he only loved Marybeth, his childhood sweetheart. He was a one-woman man, no matter how many others threw themselves at him. But as close as Mikey and I were, right about now, I wanted to deck him.

“My life?” I screeched. Some people at the next table looked over their shoulders at us. “My life?” I said in as loud a whisper as I could muster.

“Yes. You’re spending all your time with that detective. David’s worried sick. Lewis is a mess.”

“Lewis is a mess because C.C. hasn’t come back yet and because Hollywood is dangling so much money he would never be able to spend it all,” I countered.

“And what if you can’t solve it, Billie? What if all this just gets you killed? You’d do that to Dad and me? I couldn’t take it. That would be it. I’d just want to check out.”

“It’s not like I’m doing this
to
anyone. Least of all you and Dad. I’m doing it
for
you. For us. So we know once and for all what happened that night.”

“Billie…I’m glad you do what you do. But your obsession is hurting everyone around you.”

“Don’t you want him caught?”

“Not if it means this. Not if I lose you, Billie.”

“You know, Mikey…you’ve called me to post bail for you at 3:00 a.m. more times than I can count on one hand. More times than I can count on
two
hands. I have to go to
toes
to count ’em. And I was always there for you.”

With that I stood up and walked out of Quinn’s. I was emotionally spent and tired and had nothing to show for my weariness but hurt relationships. Even Bo seemed sulky. I needed a break. Luck. A miracle.

Or a piece of DNA.

Chapter 22

M
aybe my mother was watching out for me. Maybe, as Lewis often told me, murder victims linger near the living until they get justice.

We had a match.

While we were processing rape kits, we had three matches actually. Two rapes from the last twenty years. One match was made from two tiny drops of semen. But it was enough.

And when the saliva from the envelope was processed, along with the pant leg specimen, my mother’s murderer was suddenly a serial rapist, at the very least—because that was the third match.

Lewis looked with amazement at the results. “Is Ben pulling the old case files?”

“Yeah. We have to find the common thread. Find the link, and we find the killer.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

I looked at him across the desk. “Not easy, but the little spirals of DNA are starting to come back to haunt him. Two more lives to look at. Two more chances to find a slip-up. To figure out who he is. We find an Andrew in either of their lives and we have him, Lewis.”

I was elated at this break. Lewis’s phone then buzzed. I listened to his half of the conversation. Saw him cock his eyebrow. Nod. Look puzzled. Nod again. Say “Hmmm.” Then he said, “Yes, she’s here.” Now it was really driving me nuts. Finally, he hung up.

“Well?”

“That was Joe. He wants us to meet with him at seven at his house. Ben Sato will be there.”

“Ben?” I was puzzled. “What do the Justice Foundation and Joe have to do with my mother’s case?” I wasn’t even aware Ben knew Joe.

“That, Wilhelmina, I have no idea. But like you, I’m dyin’ to find out.”

At seven o’clock, having sent Tommy Salami home, Lewis and I arrived at Joe’s mansion in Alpine, New Jersey. It had a long, sweeping driveway, and Japanese lanterns illuminated the walkway to the ten-foot-high double front door, which was carved from wood and inlaid with a dragon. We rang the bell.

And C.C. answered.

My eyes welled, and I immediately looked to my left at Lewis. As God is my witness, he grabbed me I think to keep his knees from buckling.

Sister Catherine Christine was as beautiful as when she left for her retreat months before, with long strawberry-blond hair so curly it looked as if it was set in ringlets, porcelain skin and an elegant bone structure. “Hello, Lewis,” she whispered. “Hello, Billie.”

Lewis was still holding my arm. In all the time I’ve known him, he’d never fallen for any woman. I think he purposely kept women at bay—they never would live up to his high ideals and intellect. His morbid sense of humor, garnered through working with death on a regular basis, meant he was frankly an odd choice for a date. But the minute he laid eyes on C.C. he had loved her, pure and simple, yet he had never so much as kissed her.

He understood she was unhappy with her order before she ever met him, but he certainly didn’t intend to confuse her or add to her spiritual burden. Their intellectual connection just happened. Maybe he was right. Maybe they were two halves of one whole. Maybe they were Jungian soul mates. If, according to Lewis, Ben was the warrior and I was the intellect to make one whole, then in the other pairing Lewis was the intellect and C.C. was the spiritual and intuitive.

Their eyes were locked on each other, and I felt a palpable connection between them—not so much sexual as of the soul and spirit. I held my breath.

“I’m sorry to surprise you like this, Lewis. I…left my order. Not because of you—entirely. Because my work was never really approved of. Too activist. Giving spiritual counsel to prisoners is one thing, actively seeking their release is another. But I’m here with no expecta—”

She didn’t even get the word out. He rushed to her and grabbed her in a fierce embrace that made my stomach dip just witnessing it. He didn’t kiss her—not Lewis’s style. They had so much to talk about. But I knew it would all be okay.

Finally they released each other and held hands. My face was wet—had I cried just seeing this scene? Lewis’s eyes were shining and wet, and C.C. had tears blatantly streaming down her cheeks. I ran to her and hugged her. “We’ve needed you.” I leaned closer to her and whispered in her ear, “Joe, Lewis…we’re all falling apart. You’re our glue.”

She kissed my cheek. “I’m back for good.”

Feeling a surge of hope, I followed C.C. and Lewis into Joe’s kitchen, which was cavernous and would make a Michelin-starred chef salivate with envy. Ben was waiting with Joe.

“Well, the gang’s all here,” Joe smiled. “And we have a new case.”

Ben opened up a file folder on the table and spread out photos of a particularly brutal crime scene. “One more match turned up.”

“A murder?” I asked.

Ben nodded grimly. “And I think an innocent man is in jail for it. Which is why I came to Joe. I’m looking at all this on my own clock. No one in the force likes a cop who thinks another cop made a big mistake. I don’t want to accuse anyone of dishonor. But this looks very bad.”

“So map it out for us,” C.C. said. I smiled as soon as she spoke. It was so good just having her there, her energy, her friendship. Lewis was stroking her hand.

“Billie’s mother was his first, which was Billie’s feeling, too.” Ben said. “Billie thinks he was an adolescent, judging by his handwriting. Claire Quinn was murdered. Her case wasn’t even pursued for some time—you all know the story there. Then we have these two rapes. In both cases, the women were mothers, early thirties, each with a son and daughter almost identical in age to Billie and her brother—and in both cases, looking very much like them—dark-haired, pale eyes. The women were brutalized by a man wearing a mask. But the crimes were years and towns apart. In one case the woman survived because a car pulled into the driveway—it actually was someone turning around—lost. A simple stroke of fate saved her life.”

“And the other?”

“She was raped while her children slept. But she had a restraining order out on an ex-boyfriend and the cops thought that’s who it was. The relationship was volatile—reconciling, breaking up, reconciling again. So when she said she was positive it wasn’t her boyfriend, I’m thinking they didn’t believe her.”

“Why do you think she wasn’t killed?”

“Apparently, our serial killer was staging things. He took a lock of her hair. He made her dress in a nightgown. He put a set of pearls on her. The little boy woke up, walking into the bedroom all sleepy, wanting to stay in Mommy’s bed because of a nightmare, and the rapist freaked out. I think our killer is reenacting a traumatic event. And the boy is
him.
”

“So when the little boy got upset,” C.C. posited, “he couldn’t go through with it.”

“Exactly. Which leads us to this murder. It happened four years ago down in Wayne. Mother killed while her two kids are home—boy and a girl, black hair, blue eyes. Dad was home but says he was hit on the head while he was sleeping. Has a major welt to show for it. He says he blacked out. When he woke up his wife was dead.”

“Wait,” Lewis said. “The Colton murder. It was all over the papers.”

I remembered, now, too. The father was a surgeon, and the chilliest bastard you ever saw on the witness stand. Even though other scant evidence existed—a drop of semen, a lone pubic hair not belonging to the victim or her husband—his wildly improbable story, coupled with the fact that he was having an affair, that
she
was having an affair—though her lover had an airtight alibi—and that the doctor was smug, condescending and showed not an ounce of grief on the stand convicted him. He proclaimed his innocence, but he was convicted on personality, not science. Wouldn’t be the first time. After all, OJ walked with plenty of science to back up a conviction. Happens all the time.

Ben said, “In rapes, in serial murders, you are usually, in terms of profiling, looking for a connection between the women. Maybe they’re all blond or brunette, or have some similar physicality. But when I saw these children in these cases, and I thought of the Colton kids, I looked at the match for what was left at the crime scene with these new matches and we had one.”

“So now we go and interview Dr. Colton in jail…see if our C.C. lie detector picks up anything,” said Joe. “And we look for a common link in the kids.”

Ben nodded, but looked puzzled. “C.C. lie detector?”

Joe beamed at his partner. “C.C. here is better than anything you detectives could possibly rig up as far as telling who’s a liar…or who’s guilty or innocent. Her instincts are perfect.”

“That and a little divine guidance,” she said. She had always considered her prison ministry to be like tending modernday lepers. This beautiful woman walked fearlessly into prisons to face down men convicted of the most heinous crimes imaginable. She would, she told me once, murmur the Twenty-Third Psalm as she walked.

“The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”

God was always her shepherd. And God also seemed to give her some sort of divination. Every prisoner she met said he was innocent. So we had to choose our cases based on some intuitive faith in the person’s story. C.C. was our intuition. She was our faith. She was the staff of Moses. Then we had to hope that DNA could clear them. That science would provide the evidence we needed.

“Well, we have our work cut out for us, don’t we?” C.C. said. “Now, instead of one case, we’ve got four.”

I nodded. I stared down at the folders. The little girls
did
look remarkably like me, the boys like Mikey.

“Wait a minute!”

“What?” Lewis asked me.

“If Ben is right in his hypothesis that he’s reenacting a crime, then there’s an original crime. Look…” I spread out photos. “Get me pictures of the kids.”

We lined them all up, including, eerily, snapshots of Mikey and me in our pj’s the night of my mother’s murder.

“Look. All these kids have black hair, blue eyes. Same ages. Now, what if our killer witnessed his mother being murdered when he was little, and for some reason, over and over again he’s reenacting the crime. The little boy is him. The little girl his sister. The victims are the mother. But why? Why reenact a horrible crime in his own family?”

“To control the outcome,” Lewis said. “Ben stated one of the women thought he was staging the scene. He is working through something…But why kill the mother? You’d think he’d want to save her.”

Ben stared down, concentrating. “Billie, if he was an adolescent when he killed your mother, let’s place his age at eighteen. Strong enough to be able to harm her. Young enough that he was still new at it. How old was Mikey?”

“Nine.”

“So let’s look at similar crimes ten years
before
your mother’s murder.”

“But these murders aren’t concentrated in one town.”

“I’ll make some calls,” Ben said.

“Oh, and C.C.?” I said.

“Hmm?”

“When you interview Dr. Colton, drop the name Andrew and see what his reaction is.”

“Okay. The Justice Foundation is back in full swing,” she said.

I grinned to myself. Mikey liked to call us the Scooby-do Gang. Either way, the power of four—and with Ben, now five—was greater than our power as individuals. If we could keep the foundation from falling apart, we could finally let my mother rest in peace.