by Greg Iles
“That was Penn?” Lily asked from behind him. “What did he say?”
She had wiped away her tears, but she looked as though she might collapse at any moment. He wished he could spare her the truth, but she had to know.
“The police are going to search this house in four hours.”
Lily’s head began shaking like she had Parkinson’s disease. “What are we going to do?”
“They won’t find anything. I’ll—”
“What are we going to do about Mallory?”
He started to go to her, but then he realized that the fear in her eyes had been replaced by fury.
“How could you do this to us?” she whispered. “How did we get here?”
“Lily—”
“You still love her, don’t you?”
“What?”
Lily was nodding, her eyes flicking back and forth, focusing on nothing. “You still love Mallory. You always have.”
“You know that’s not true.”
Her face was so white that he feared she might faint. “How could Mallory have done any of this if you didn’t still love her? That’s what’s kept her alive all these years!”
Waters stepped forward, his hands held out to calm her, but Lily backed away as though afraid he would strike her.
“What kind of husband are you?” she cried. “What kind of father are you?”
“Lily, please. Listen to me.”
“She told me about you getting her pregnant! While you were in Sybil’s apartment. She told me about the abortions. She thinks my miscarriages happened because of what you made her do.”
“That’s impossible.”
Lily’s eyes were wild. “When I lost those babies, I knew there was a reason. I searched for some mistake I’d made…some sin I had to pay for. But it wasn’t my sin, was it? It was yours.”
Before he could reply, she turned and fled the den.
He stood alone in the roaring silence, his options exhausted, his hope all but gone. The second hand on his watch seemed to be flying.
chapter 19
Lily stood on the porch of Linton Hill and watched the police pull out of her driveway. Two squad cars, then a van from the crime lab. Each of her hands held a fragment of a Wedgwood coffeepot shattered by a careless policewoman. A family heirloom, Princeton pattern. Her husband’s hushed voice sounded from the foyer behind her. He was talking to his attorney. The police had demanded John’s presence at the station for questioning. In fourteen years of marriage, she had never heard her husband sound afraid, except during the worst of her depression, when for a week she had actually considered suicide.
He sounded afraid now.
As the police vehicles rolled up State Street, Lily felt the tears she had suppressed throughout the search. In addition to manhandling her family’s most precious belongings, the searchers had also taken away several boxes of photographs, all three home computers—Annelise’s Apple notebook included—and an assortment of clothes from John’s closet. The clothes had been unceremoniously dumped into plastic bags and thrown in the back of the van. The only mercy of the morning was Penn Cage’s warning. An hour before the search, John had driven Annelise to Lily’s mother’s house, so that she would not have to witness the event.
“Lily?”
She turned. Even in his black cashmere sweater, John already looked like a man on the run. His face was drawn, almost haggard, and his bloodshot eyes had dark bags beneath them. He had spent the remainder of last night dumping the stolen truck and walking home while Lily slept with Annelise.
“I’ve got to go to police headquarters,” he told her.
“They broke my grandmother’s coffeepot.”
He took the fragments from her hand. “I’ll have it repaired. I’ll send it back to England and have the factory do it.”
“It won’t ever be the same.”
“No.” He touched her arm. “But it will be all right.”
“I’ll go with you.”
He set the fragments inside the foyer, then came out and hugged her. “Penn’s going to meet me there. I don’t want you exposed to any of that. You should go check on Ana.”
“When do you have to leave?”
“Now.”
A surge of panic went through her, but she steadied herself so that he wouldn’t worry more than he already was.
“I’ll call you and let you know what’s going on,” he promised. “Keep your cell phone on.”
“I will.”
John’s face became as serious as she had ever seen it. “Depending on how the questioning goes, Penn thinks I could be arrested this morning.”
She closed her eyes and reached for his hand.
“If that happens, Penn will contact you about bail. You should follow his instructions to the letter.”
She wanted to speak, but all she could manage was a nod.
John hugged her once more, then went down the steps to his Land Cruiser. As he drove down the lane leading to State Street, Lily felt something deep within her give way. Last night’s hysterical anger had withered into ashes during the search, leaving only terror at the impending destruction of her family. Her terror made her ashamed. Fear could not help her. Nor could it help John or Annelise. She had to overpower her fear and use the only weapon she had ever really had: her mind. The shattered china coffeepot in the foyer could never be made right again, but her family could. People were different from objects. After bones healed, they were stronger in the broken places. A family could be like that.
She could do nothing about the murder case. That was Penn Cage’s job. But the other threat was something else. She allowed an image of Cole holding his pistol to Annelise’s sleeping head to fill her mind, but instead of fear, she felt cold, implacable rage, all of it focused on the woman who had wrecked her life. Her hands shook with the power of her hatred for Mallory. As she stood on the porch of her violated home, she heard a voice that seemed the voice of a stranger, but it came from her own lips.
“You can’t do this,” it said. “Not to my family. I will not let you do this.”
She turned and hurried into the house. In the kitchen, she drew an eight-inch carving knife from the butcher’s block and ran her finger along its serrated blade. Then she grabbed her cell phone and her keys and ran for her car.
Waters sat in a plastic chair on one side of an aluminum table bolted to the floor, Penn Cage to his left. Detective Tom Jackson sat across from them, and Jackson’s partner, the short, pockmarked officer named Barlow, paced the tile floor in the space behind Jackson.
An audiotape recorder sat on the table, the tape spooling slowly through the machine, but this was only for backup. A large video camera stood in the corner of the room, recording Waters’s every nervous tic as he faced the detectives.
Tom Jackson treated the questioning as he had the whole business, with the regretful firmness of a friend forced by circumstance to carry out an unpleasant task. He acted as though Eve’s brutal murder were a crime any man might have committed in the heat of passion.
“We’re not arresting you yet,” he said. “But things don’t look good, John. We have a lot more evidence than you and your attorney are aware of, and I want to be straight with you about that.”
Penn’s skeptical look told Waters that his lawyer doubted the police would be straight about anything.
“You know that we have a videotape of your vehicle near the hotel within one hour of the murder,” Jackson said. “You know you were twice seen going into Bienville with the murder victim. You don’t know that for the last two nights, FBI forensic technicians have been going through that mansion with special lights and chemicals, and they’ve found biological evidence of considerable sexual activity.”
At the mention of FBI involvement, Penn shifted in his chair.
“That evidence is now being sent to the FBI lab in Washington. It will be compared with the semen sample taken from Eve Sumner’s body, and also with the blood you gave yesterday.”
“We also have your cell phone records. Those records show that for a period of two weeks prior to the murder, you received daily calls from three different pay phones. The bulk of those calls originated from one less than a quarter mile from Eve Sumner’s real estate office.”
Waters struggled to keep his face expressionless. So far, all they were talking about was evidence of an extramarital affair.
Jackson looked down at a file before him. “The DNA testing will take weeks, but we already know your blood type matches that of the perpetrator. AB negative. That’s fairly rare. You’re also what’s known as a secretor. So is the perpetrator.”
“You seem to be assuming,” Penn interrupted, “that whoever last had sex with the victim also murdered her.”
Jackson seemed surprised by this objection. “I am assuming that. I realize it’s not necessarily true, but I’ll be surprised if it’s not.”
“I urge you to keep an open mind,” Penn said. “Assumptions of any kind are always dangerous in murder cases.”
For the first time, Jackson showed signs of irritation. “Let’s get down to it,” he said, looking at Waters. “You were having an affair with this woman. All the signs point to it. And if the DNA is going to come back and prove it, what’s the point in lying to us about it?”
Waters looked at Penn, but his lawyer’s face revealed nothing. He had a distinct feeling that if he did not give Tom Jackson something today, he was not going to be allowed to leave this building. And with Mallory on the loose, that was simply not acceptable. He’d given some thought to a plausible story before the morning’s search, and he was about to try it out when a uniformed cop came in and whispered something in Detective Jackson’s ear.
Jackson got up and left the interrogation room without a word.
Penn reached out and squeezed Waters’s shoulder.
“Ain’t that cute?” said Jackson’s partner. “You two ought to share a cell.”
Lily Waters sat in her mother’s formal living room, a pristine space that was hardly ever used. Like most Southern women of her generation, Evelyn Anderson viewed her living room as a showplace, a silent testament to her taste and decorum. Evelyn herself perched on the edge of a wing chair with her hands folded in her lap, her silver hair perfectly coiffed, her face lined with worry.
“Lily Ann,” she said in a genteel voice. “What in heaven’s name is going on at your house? A friend of mine called and told me she’d seen police cars there.”
Lily got up and went to the door to make sure Annelise was still watching television in the den.
“Mom, I need to ask you something.”
“All right.”
“You know our wills state that you would get custody of Annelise if anything happened to John and me.”
Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “I know that. But what—”
“I don’t think anything is going to happen to us. But if something did…do you think you would have any problem fulfilling that obligation?”
Evelyn’s hand rose slowly to her mouth as the gravity of her daughter’s question hit home. “Honey, I’ve never seen you like this. Has John done something illegal with his company? Has the EPA investigation gone against him? Oh God, are you losing your house? Is that why the police were there?”
“It’s nothing like that.”
“Lily, please. Maybe I can help.”
“You can’t help, except by answering my question.”
Her mother sighed and shook her head. “Honey, if something happened to you and John, I’d make it my life’s work to raise that little girl just the way I think you would have.”
Lily’s hands began to shake.
“Baby, please—” Evelyn was rising from the chair, but Lily held up a hand.
“Is there anything you haven’t told me about your health? I know you keep things to yourself, like Dad did. You’re not ill or anything, are you?”
Evelyn shook her head. “I had a physical just last month. Dr. Cage says I’ll outlive him and all his nurses.”
In spite of her desperation, Lily laughed.
“Honey, has John treated you badly?”
“No. Don’t ever think that, Mom. Whatever happens. John is a good man. And I haven’t always been the best wife to him in some ways.”
“Don’t say that.”
Lily sat on the sofa, propped her elbows on her knees, and began to rub her throbbing temples. “Losing those babies took something out of me. It was something I couldn’t control, and it was very hard on John.”
Evelyn gave a prim nod. “I know that, dear. I see more than you think. But you’re still with us, and that’s all I care about. That and Annelise.”
Lily knew that if she stayed in this room much longer, she would never summon the nerve to do what she had to do. She stood and folded her arms across her chest.
“I’m going, Mom.”
“Lily! You must tell me what’s happening.”
“I can’t. Not yet. Just please keep Annelise here. I’ll call you with any news.”
Evelyn shook her head in frustration, but she stood and followed her daughter to the front door. “Aren’t you going to say good-bye to Annelise?”
Lily fought back tears. “I can’t. I don’t want her to see me this way.”
Evelyn reached out and squeezed her daughter’s arm. “You go do whatever you have to. I know you’ll do the right thing. And remember…your father’s looking down on you. He’ll help you if he can.”
Lily sobbed openly then. Before it could get worse, she slipped through the door and ran out to her car.
Tom Jackson walked back into the interrogation room and sat down opposite Waters.
“Our crime lab tech has just completed a preliminary examination of several hairs taken from your hairbrush at home. He matched those to hairs found inside suite three twenty-four at the Eola Hotel the morning after the murder.”
Waters said nothing.
“We’ve also learned that Eve Sumner had a safe deposit box we knew nothing about. That box is being opened now.” Jackson laid his big hands on the metal table, reminding Waters of Cole. “Now, I don’t know what we might find in that box. But I have a feeling it’s the kind of stuff Eve didn’t want anyone knowing anything about. The way she didn’t want anyone knowing about you.”
Waters looked at the table and wondered where Lily and Annelise were. And Cole? What was Mallory driving him to do now?
“Are you listening, John?” Jackson asked. “This is murder we’re talking about. If you don’t give me something, you’re going to find yourself in a cell with Danny Buckles, and the reputation you’ve spent twenty years building will be ruined in a day.”
“Stop right there,” Penn interjected. “Detective, all you have done this morning is tell us that you have evidence of an extramarital affair. You’ve shown us nothing. But let’s say that evidence exists. Do you arrest people for having affairs?”
“When one of the parties is murdered,” Jackson said, “we often do.”
“Damn straight we do,” Barlow growled from behind his partner. “I say lock him up right now. He’ll get tired of jail real quick. The rich ones always do.”
The look in Tom Jackson’s eye told Waters the detective remembered his old schoolmate better than that. “Okay,” Jackson said. “If it was just an affair, why lie about it? Tell us the truth and help us get to the bottom of this.”
You don’t want to know the bottom of this, Waters thought. “All right, Tom,” he said in a tone of surrender. “I had an affair with her.”
Detective Barlow slapped his leg as though this admission sewed up the case.
Penn stiffened but said nothing, recognizing that Waters was following a strategy Penn himself had laid out days ago. Only Waters intended to go a little further.
“How many times did you see her?” Jackson asked.
“The whole two weeks before the murder. Every day but the day she died. Or the night, actually.”
“What do you mean? You were with her the day she died?”
“Yes.” Waters looked Jackson in the eye. “But I never went up to the suite that night. And I didn’t kill her.”
Barlow barked a derisive laugh.
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?”
“Because I knew it would break up my marriage. I don’t want to lose my wife, Tom. I knew I hadn’t killed Eve, and I figured you’d catch whoever did it long before the DNA came back.”
“Bullshit,” said Barlow. “You did her, man. The only question is why.”
Jackson looked thoughtful. “Who do you think killed her, John?”
Waters sensed Penn’s anxiety without even looking at him.
“I honestly have no idea. I know she saw other men besides me. She didn’t try to hide that. But I don’t know who they were.”
Barlow guffawed at this.
Penn leaned toward Jackson and said, “Eve Sumner was known to sleep with a lot of men. She previously had relations with Mr. Waters’s partner, for example. And I’m sure you’ve turned up many other paramours over the past few years.”
“That’s true,” Jackson admitted. “The lady got around. But not so much in the past year, it turns out. For the first few years she was back here, you couldn’t hardly keep score of all her guys. But for the last year, she didn’t do much in that line. Stayed at home a lot, mostly kept to herself.”
Waters knew why, but Tom Jackson would never believe it.
“Tell me about seeing her the day of the murder,” Jackson said.
Here was the tricky part. The best lies were always interwoven with bits of truth, and Waters’s memory had not been reliable lately. “Two nights before she died was the last time I saw her in the Eola. That night, I tried to break it off with her.”
“Why?”
“She was becoming obsessive. She thought she was in love with me.”
“You just told us she was seeing other men while she saw you.”
“She told me she was. I don’t know. But I do know she wanted love more than sex. And…” Waters trailed off, so that Jackson would have to pull part of the story out of him. The detective would value the lie more if he had to work for it.
