A Good Marriage

by Kimberly McCreight

  Lizzie

  JULY 10, FRIDAY

  The building that housed Millie’s company, Evidentiary Analytics, was tall and wrapped in mirrored glass like so many others in that stretch of Midtown East, north of the UN. The vast lobby was floor-to-ceiling marble with three different reception desks, the two most imposing reserved for Sony and Credit Suisse. The third, smaller desk was the catch-all for the remaining tenants. Millie had mentioned that she’d expanded her company into a partnership with a forensic expert. But this was already more impressive than I’d expected, which was encouraging. And after that meeting with Wendy Wallace, I was badly in need of encouragement.

  On the thirty-sixth floor, I made my way down a long, fancy hallway—expensive-looking textured wallpaper, exceptionally clean carpets—and rang the bell under the polished sign for Evidentiary Analytics. A second later Millie, in a sensible if not exactly fashionable navy-blue suit, opened the door. Under the glare of the office lights, her skin had a distinct grayish tinge.

  “Hi, sweetheart,” she said, reaching forward and pulling me into a hug.

  This time, hugging Millie was like squeezing a pile of twigs. “Okay, why are you so thin?”

  “Why, thank you, dear,” she said cheerfully, though it was obvious I hadn’t meant it as a compliment. She waved me inside. “Come on, come on. We’ve got some good stuff for you here. Real good.”

  I’d called Millie right after I’d left Wendy Wallace’s office. I told her that Zach had been indicted and that I urgently needed some actual proof that someone else had been at the scene. This was all true, though I’d notably left out that the real urgency was that I was being blackmailed by my client. I was too ashamed. Also, Millie wouldn’t believe in caving to Zach’s demands, and I couldn’t risk her refusing to help because of it. Finding a new investigator would just mean more time on Zach’s case.

  Inside the sleek, open-plan Evidentiary Analytics office, there was a small man with a thick, dark mustache and a mane of jet-black hair standing alongside the reception desk. Behind him a petite blond, curly-haired receptionist sat answering the phone. The man had droopy but kind eyes, which I tried to focus on instead of his hair, which was so unnatural in its blackness that it had to be a wig, a very bad one. Given how nice the office was, it seemed strange he hadn’t considered an upgrade.

  “This is my partner, Vinnie,” Millie said. “Vinnie, this is Lizzie. She’s an old friend, so be friendly. It isn’t easy for Vinnie. Forensic guys aren’t known for their people skills.”

  The droopy-eyed man scowled at Millie, then advanced toward me with an outstretched hand. His grip was surprisingly soft and puffy, like he was wearing a mitten.

  “Lizzie Kitsakis,” I said. “Thank you so much for your help.”

  “Don’t worry. It’ll cost you.” If this was meant as a joke, it wasn’t accompanied by even a hint of a smile.

  Millie motioned to a low black leather and walnut seating area in the far corner. “Come, sit.”

  “This is so nice,” I said as we made our way across the room.

  There were huge windows on one side, with decent peek-a-boo views of the East River. The half-dozen desks, artfully arranged, were occupied only by men, presumably other investigators, all but one talking on the phone. At the back there were three large private offices, glass-fronted, but each with a door.

  “We’re making a decent go of it here,” Millie said, looking around with a satisfied nod as we sat on the couches. “Don’t have an actual lab of our own yet, so we have to outsource the testing—print analyses, blood typing. But someday, I’m hoping. Vinnie makes the initial strategic assessment, figures out the right tests, the approach, while I run down witnesses and other investigative leads. Vinnie also has the connections at the medical examiner’s office.”

  “Yeah, Vinnie has the connections,” he grumbled, taking a seat on the couch farthest away. “And he likes to get paid for using them.”

  “Vinnie,” Millie snapped. “Stop with the money. She’s going to pay, for Christ’s sake.”

  “She’d better.”

  Millie rolled her eyes. “I explained to him that we couldn’t wait for a retainer, given that time is of the essence and your client is locked up at Rikers.” She shot a scathing look Vinnie’s way and then turned back to me. “We got burned a couple times when we first started. In Vinnie’s defense, it was on my say-so each time.”

  “I can get Zach’s accountant to wire money today,” I said, turning to Vinnie. “I need to call him, anyway.”

  He nodded, though he looked unconvinced. “Well, from what I hear from my contacts at the ME, this is a blood case, no doubt.”

  “That could be good news, right?” I asked tentatively. “At least they’re planning to rely on actual evidence. And blood evidence has got to be more reliable than eyewitnesses, or something, right?”

  I was wading into unfamiliar waters now. Fraud cases were data and document cases. They didn’t involve blood, sometimes not even eyewitnesses. They were all about numbers, emails, invoices, and accounting ledgers. Over the years, I’d intentionally avoided learning much about violent crime scene forensics. But here I was. No more looking away. I’d have no choice but to suck it up and educate myself.

  “Fuck, no. Blood spatter analysis is completely unreliable,” Vinnie grumbled. “In New York City, at least the people doing the analysis have some actual training. A lot of places send some regular old cops to a six-hour seminar before they get to start pretending they got the lead on CSI Fucking Fresno. Regardless, blood spatter in and of itself is more art than science, always.”

  “That sounds bad,” I said. Sweat was trickling down my lower back. This was all getting to be too much.

  “Look at this case—there’s so much blood spatter, in so many different variations. They can use it to prove anything they want. For sure, the DA will get some lab tech to walk the jury through every step of this crime like he watched it happen. Meanwhile, he might as well be reading his own fucking palm. In a case like this, I could find you three different blood guys who’d come to three totally different conclusions about the sequence of events on that staircase. That would say to me that they shouldn’t be using blood spatter, period, in a case like this. But I’m not the prosecutor, so fuck me.”

  That sounded very, very bad. Hadn’t Millie said there was good news?

  “And you heard all this from the medical examiner’s office?” I asked.

  Vinnie nodded. “Apparently they’ve got the golf club with our guy’s prints on it, and rumor is the victim’s injuries are ‘consistent with’ a golf club, but there’s too much damage to get an exact match. My guess is all of that sounded a lot more definitive in front of the grand jury. That’s easy to do with no cross. For sure, they’ll spend hours crowing about their bullshit ‘airtight blood spatter’ at trial. And we’ll do the best we can to knock it down. But you ask me: we shouldn’t have to.”

  We. Our guy. I tried to focus on the way Vinnie had said that, and not the rest of it. It was a relief to share the burden of Zach’s awfulness with somebody—if only for a second and somewhat begrudgingly. Vinnie was certainly right about the way grand juries worked, though. With no defense attorney present to point out the holes, testimony ended up being entirely one-sided. Witnesses weren’t encouraged to outright lie—after all, if they testified at trial, they could be confronted then by the defense—but there was an ocean of distance between a lie and a carefully asked series of questions.

  “Which is why it was good that you called me over to the house,” Millie said, trying to strike a more optimistic tone. “The prints are gonna help.”

  “You found something?”

  “Yeah, a fuckload of prints,” Vinnie said, holding up a folder and eyeing Millie. “That we already fronted a shitload of cash to get some rushed comparison results on.”

  “It’s nothing conclusive.” Millie tugged the folder out of Vinnie’s hands and handed it to me. Inside were twenty pages of ite
m numbers, percentage ratings, and descriptive language. It was all completely indecipherable. “But we did run comparisons between some prints in key locations.”

  “I’m sorry …,” I began. “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Here.” Vinnie flipped to a page toward the back of the stack. “See this? We found two sets of prints on the golf bag, Zach’s and an unknown.”

  “Amanda’s?”

  Vinnie shook his head. “We had a control set from Zach and the victim. The other prints on the golf bag aren’t hers.”

  But there had to be countless innocuous explanations for prints on the golf bag—housekeepers, movers, caddies, valets. Any number of people could have had a legitimate reason to touch it.

  “Who do they belong to?”

  Vinnie scowled. “How the fuck should I know?”

  “He means the unidentified print on the golf bag wasn’t in the system. We were able to pull some strings and get it run through at the NYPD.” Millie motioned for Vinnie to continue. “Get to the good part, Vin.”

  “We’ve got a partial of that same hand from the bag, here.” Vinnie indicated a place on the photograph of the staircase. “In Amanda Grayson’s blood.”

  My heart surged. “What?”

  “That palm and single fingerprint you spotted in the blood on the metal tread,” Millie said, “that same print is also on the golf bag. Lots of people might have had a legitimate reason to have their hands on that golf bag, but they sure as hell didn’t also have a legitimate reason to have their hands in Amanda’s blood the night she died.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Are you sure?”

  Millie smiled slyly. “We’re sure. And the print definitely doesn’t belong to an EMT or anyone at the NYPD. We had those checked, too. But somebody was there the night Amanda Grayson died. Somebody other than Zach Grayson.”

  Holy shit. Zach really hadn’t killed Amanda? He was just a sick fuck who was extorting me?

  “Now, we can have our lab run this print against everybody who was in the victim’s life, anybody you get us a sample on. It’ll be a hell of a lot faster than whatever the NYPD does, sure as hell more comprehensive. But we’re not doing that until we get paid,” Vinnie said. “Lucky for Millie, she’s got me to be sure we don’t get kicked out of this fancy office here for nonpayment of rent.”

  Millie frowned at Vinnie, then turned to me. “I pushed him as far as I could,” she said by way of explanation. “He’s right that running print comparisons can get expensive fast. It’s good for clients to be fully on board before we get too far ahead of ourselves.”

  “Zach is on board, definitely. I warned him the lab work could be expensive, too. Why don’t I call his accountant right now, from here?” I offered. And I actually did feel the tiniest bit better for the first time since Zach had threatened me. If Zach hadn’t done it, maybe I really could get him off with a clear conscience and save myself. Even Wendy Wallace would be hard-pressed to ignore bloody prints belonging to the real perpetrator. “I’ll get you guys paid, and then we can get on with this.”

  Millie shook her head. “Oh, you don’t have to call right now, that’s—”

  “Great,” Vinnie said. “A great idea. Call right now.”

  “Can I first ask—are the same person’s prints also on the golf club?”

  Millie and Vinnie glanced at each other, then back at me.

  “Um, the police have the golf club, hon,” Millie said, her tone polite but sharp. Like she was nicely reminding me to wake the fuck up. “So we’ve got no idea.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. It was the prosecutor in me, forgetting.

  Of course we didn’t have the golf club yet. Or Amanda’s all-important phone, which could contain God only knows how much further confirmation of her father’s stalking. That is, if the prosecution decided to go digging. Deleted messages, unknown numbers—those things weren’t looked into unless the prosecution needed to find a suspect. In Zach’s case, they were convinced they had their man, and they certainly didn’t need phone calls to prove a connection between him and Amanda. It was only thanks to very recent changes in New York law that we would soon even be privy to something like Amanda’s phone log. Up until now, all of the prosecution’s evidence would have been sprung on us right before trial, a procedure that had—of course—always seemed perfectly reasonable to me when I was on the other side of the equation. It did make me think about getting Zach’s phone. I was no expert on the specificity of cell phone pings in a place as densely populated as Brooklyn, but if we could locate Zach’s phone on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade at the time Amanda was killed, that would be extremely helpful.

  “Could be for the best we don’t have the club,” Vinnie offered. “You test that particular golf club, and it doesn’t have the same prints you’re hoping for? Then all the evidence you have becomes about all the evidence you don’t have. Because maybe this other guy, whoever he is, was smart enough to wear a glove on the one hand he used to hold the club, but not on the other. Maybe he only touched the bag and that one step with his nondominant hand because he lost his balance? Like this—” He imitated the motion. “Those scenarios sound ridiculous, but no more ridiculous than their blood spatter story. Weird, fucked-up shit happens during the commission of a crime.”

  “I think I might know who the prints belong to,” I said.

  “Care to fucking share?” Vinnie asked.

  “Amanda’s father. Her estranged father. He lives upstate. He was sexually abusive when she was young, and ever since they moved back to New York, she thought he was stalking her. That he had been, for months. She kept a log in her journal about it. There were phone calls, and he was following her. He even left some flowers.”

  “Really?” Millie asked, intrigued. “Well, that sure as hell sounds like a solid lead.”

  “I think I’ve got him tracked down, too. But I’ll need to go upstate, to a town called St. Colomb Falls, to talk to him to be—”

  “No, no, no,” Millie said. “Absolutely not. Rapists don’t love it when you show up out of nowhere, accusing them of murder.” I hadn’t wanted to ask Millie to go to St. Colomb Falls, not when she was already helping me so much. But I had brought up Xavier Lynch, hoping she might offer.

  “I’d go myself, but …” Millie looked down, uncomfortable. “I’ve got this thing I can’t miss, starting tomorrow. It’ll last a few days. And Vinnie’s no good in the field. Sending him would be worse than sending no one.”

  “Gee, thanks,” Vinnie said mildly.

  “I know a couple other guys I trust, though. I use them sometimes for canvassing. They’re not cheap, and they don’t always have time. But I can ask.”

  “I think someone needs to talk to him soon,” I said.

  “Okay, let me reach out and see what they say. Otherwise, we’ll just have to wait. It’s not like there’s some big rush anyway. We’ve got time until trial.”

  “If you don’t mind asking, that would be great,” I said, already knowing there was no way I was waiting. “Can I take that file with me? I’d like to look at the photos and the rest of it.”

  When Vinnie showed me the fingerprint analysis, I’d glimpsed some other documents in the file: what looked like maps of the neighborhood, printouts of internet search results, notes from interviews. I was partly hoping there might be something in there that made Zach look guilty. Maybe something I could use to reverse-extort him. It wasn’t exactly ethical to threaten to rat out your own client—especially when you suspected he was innocent—but Zach and I were well past ethical now.

  “Oh, sure, we’ll hand over all our work product. Just as soon as your client pays us,” Vinnie said, gripping the folder tighter. “Fifteen thousand for past fees and a twenty-thousand retainer for future costs should do it. I can provide an itemization, if needed.”

  “Jesus, Vinnie,” Millie groaned, but in a resigned way.

  “No, no, it’s okay,” I said. “Can I use an office phone for a minute? I’ll call Zach�
��s accountant right now and get it sorted out.”

  “Sure. Come this way.” Millie guided me toward an unoccupied office at the back. “I’m sorry about Vinnie,” she said as we walked. “He’s spent most of his life dealing with criminals. He doesn’t trust anybody. Worst part is that he’s been right most of the time.”

  “I understand,” I said as we stopped at the office door. “And it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  I reached for the doorknob.

  “I have cancer, Lizzie,” Millie said quietly from behind me.

  “What?” I spun around to face her.

  “That’s why I’m so thin,” she said. “And all the emails. It could have implications, you know, for our arrangement.”

  My mouth felt so dry. “God, I’m sorry, Millie. And I’m so sorry that I’ve been—that you even have to think about this right now … you’ve done so much for me. I’m sure when you first offered—I’m sure you didn’t think you’d still be on the hook, what, seventeen years later. Is there anything I can do for you?”

  Anything except talking about our whole entire situation. I’m sorry you have cancer. But I just can’t. Not right now.

  Millie smiled, but her eyes looked so sad. “I start chemo tomorrow. Mandatory. That’s why I can’t do your interview.”

  “Will you be … What do the doctors say?”

  “Um, well …” Her voice drifted. “It’s breast cancer, like Nancy. They were always ‘optimistic’ with her, and look how that turned out.” She smiled stiffly. “I’m gonna fight, though. Because I’m a fighter.” It was as forced as her expression.

  “Please let me do something.”

  “Pretend like I didn’t tell you. That’s what you can do for me,” she said. “And promise me you won’t go upstate yourself.”

  “Of course not,” I said, even though it was definitely an extra sin to lie to a sick person.