Cold Case

by Linda Barnes

  “Darling,” he said, “I’m so glad you’re back.”

  Alonso shot her a killing look. If he’d had a gun, she’d have been dead on the path. I was glad two policemen held him at bay.

  Marissa, now openly weeping, clutched her husband’s shoulder. Almost reluctantly, he squeezed back.

  With the voice of a man in command, Garnet said, “That backpack is my wife’s property. I insist on its immediate return.”

  “No way,” Alonso said. “No fuckin’ way!”

  “If it belongs to your wife, Mr. Cameron, we’ll return it in due course,” Mooney said, with full marks for politeness.

  “I don’t believe you have any reason to hold this young man,” he said, referring to Alonso. “I said I wouldn’t be bringing charges. I have my wife back. I don’t want to create a public—er, the campaign and all …”

  Mooney smiled. Then he formally arrested the young man. On a John Doe warrant issued in Marblehead. Patted him down and stuck him in the backseat of an unmarked unit, ordered the driver to take the suspect to Area D. The backpack traveled in the trunk.

  As soon as it disappeared, Garnet and Marissa hailed a cab. Neither said a word of thanks to me or Mooney or any other cop.

  “Mooney,” I said.

  “What?”

  “First, you might want to have somebody follow the cab, make sure it doesn’t head straight to the airport. If it does, be ready to hold them as material witnesses.”

  He gave hurried orders. Another unit screeched away from the curb into Storrow Drive traffic.

  “Material witnesses to what?”

  “I’m not sure. You can always say it was a bureaucratic snafu.”

  Mooney said, “Yeah, like I need the bad press.”

  “Mooney, think about it. Did Garnet look like a man deliriously happy to have his wife back, his campaign on track, his money saved?”

  “No on all counts.”

  “Did he look like he’d willingly trade his wife and his dough for Alonso’s backpack?”

  “Now that you mention it, yes. So what’s in the backpack?”

  “What I was hired to find in the first place,” I said. “Thea’s novel.”

  “A novel? This is about a novel?”

  “Moon, please, if there are notebooks in the backpack, may I read them?”

  “They’re police property,” he said automatically.

  “Yeah, but is someone going to read them right now? The minute they’re ticketed and placed in the property office?”

  “You know how it goes,” he said. Which meant no.

  “Let me sign them out. Please, Mooney.”

  “We’ll give them a look,” Moon said. “Together.”

  53

  Mooney and I sat shoulder to shoulder, baking in his overheated office. It was barely nine o’clock and I didn’t want to contemplate what new heights the temperature would reach by afternoon. Mooney had no office window and the station had no air conditioning; it wasn’t worth thinking about.

  It takes time to read. Just as it had taken time to book Alonso Gordon, run a records check on him—no previous convictions—print him, take him to a holding cell. He’d claimed indigency, so a public defender was currently sought.

  It takes time to remove notebooks from a backpack, sort through them, arrange them in order from two to thirty-eight.

  Takes time to digest dense poetry, prose. The story seemed to be Beryl’s, the daughter called “b,” the one who could perceive snakes twining under the dining room table, but couldn’t hear the hum of insects.

  I’d already given Mooney the gist of the first chapter, the one buried beneath kitty litter. He was not familiar with the “magical realist” school, and I could tell he felt that put him at a disadvantage. It made him read more closely, reluctantly removing his glasses from his desk drawer, perching them on his nose.

  I have to admit that what intrigued me most were not daughter “b” ’s searing nightmares. What I found most compelling were the errors—the places where Thea had written “i” instead of “her,” slipped into first person for a long narrative or a short poem, only to drag herself back to third person, to “b” ’s unusual world.

  The first chapter had been a much easier read. The second was choked with rewrites, cross-outs, changes. I wondered if Thea had written the first draft of this, her second novel, long ago, if something had recently occurred to make her start work on it again.

  I thought I might have found the trigger: a newspaper clipping from the Seattle Daily News, barely a column-inch long, stating that Garnet Cameron, son of the late Franklin Cameron, had announced for governor of Massachusetts.

  Was that small mention enough to drag Thea to her forbidden memory books? Was the tantalizing sight and smell of paper enough to send her to the store for fresh ink?

  During the revision process had she found her frequent slips into first person curious? Curious enough to ask a therapist about, a therapist who might have mentioned the possibility of recovered memory syndrome, of long-repressed memories coming home to roost?

  I reread a passage, glanced at Mooney to see if he’d completed it yet.

  “at night i emerge and merge, a butterfly jettisoned by her cocoon, uncontrollable, uncontrolled. passion while not fruit can bear fruit. the monitors stalk. monitors of aisles of bedrooms nile monitors would be more welcome than these aisle monitors, snapping at bare toes.

  “giggling in delight at unexpected hairy places, fuzzy animals delighting in passing fluids, warm and silky fluids, back and forth back and forth through the night.”

  That would seem to be Beryl’s story. Except for the initial “i.” Beryl spending the occasional night at Weston Psych, with “monitors.” Thea had been a day student at Avon Hill. But “monitors” seemed more a school word than a hospital word.

  The heavy knock at the office door startled both of us.

  “Maybe they found a PD,” Mooney said, as in public defender.

  They hadn’t. Gary Reedy had found us. He ignored my presence. If I’d been a cockroach crawling the floor, I’d have commanded more attention.

  “Lieutenant,” Reedy snapped, “any reason you chose to leave the FBI out in the cold this morning?”

  “Agent Reedy,” Mooney returned smartly, “considering the credibility level of our sole witness, I thought you’d prefer to have the Boston police handle it.” He applied his big cop shoe directly to the toe of my sandal. Just a little pressure, but a definite warning. The way he did it, I couldn’t even maneuver my other foot around to kick him. I could feel my cheeks redden. I stared hard at the table.

  Reedy said stubbornly, “It was Marissa Cameron’s hair in that box. We had it DNA typed, matched with strands from her hairbrush. And it was cut with a blunt knife. What kind of woman goes around chopping off her hair—”

  “Have you seen Marissa’s new hair-do?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t hacked off with a knife.”

  “You have a theory,” he said, looking at Mooney but talking to me, the “gangster’s moll.” It must have cost him in the pride department.

  “Newbury Street,” I said.

  “What?”

  “A cab left her at the corner of Newbury Street. Send agents out with her photo—a new one with short hair—and you’ll probably find that she rented or borrowed a condo from a Back Bay friend, lived there with Alonso. She must have used a dull kitchen knife to saw off a few locks of hair. I doubt Alonso approved; in my experience, men are long hair freaks. She conned him into delivering the box, then went to the nearest hairdresser with a tale of woe. Newbury Street is crawling with hairdressers. Some, you don’t even have to make an appointment. She could have told them anything—her nephew was playing with the scissors, her niece put chewing gum in her hair.”

  Gary Reedy leaned his back against the door and sighed. “But, the thing is, was she ever really kidnapped? Do I file charges against her? Against her husband?”

  Mo
oney asked, “What do they say?”

  “What do you think? That the Bureau made a hash of the whole thing, and thank God she’s home, and if I so much as open my mouth, I will find myself minding the store in—”

  “Butte,” Mooney and I chorused.

  “The Bureau doesn’t even have a substation there anymore,” Reedy said, “but you get the idea.”

  I said, “I think she was Garnet’s plant in the enemy camp at the start. I think it began as extortion, these notebooks for money. The kidnap might have been Marissa’s idea, so she could keep tabs on Alonso, make sure the notebooks didn’t wind up on some publisher’s desk. We may have all seriously underrated little Marissa’s desire to be governor’s lady.”

  “She was supposedly ready to divorce him. There was a rumor he’d be leaving the race.”

  “Got him some pretty decent coverage, didn’t it?” I said. “But maybe I’m just getting cynical in my old age.”

  “But have you talked to the suspect. He seems to genuinely feel that she—uh—cared for him. Certainly she slept with him. She doesn’t seem cast in the Mata Hari mold,” Reedy objected.

  “Neither did Mata Hari,” I said, “which is why she was so successful.”

  “Hmmm,” said the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge.

  “Want my opinion?” I asked. “I think Marissa fell for him, for Alonso. Not so hard she wasn’t looking out for number one—herself—at all times. I think she’d have gone with whoever made the big score. If it looked like Garnet was going to lose the race, and Alonso got lucky with money, I think she’d have stuck with him. She’s probably composing a tale for the National Enquirer even as we speak, and I guarantee, it will be genuine sob stuff, and she will come out quite a heroine. Expect to see her on Oprah within the week, whatever else happens.”

  Reedy frowned. “Thanks,” he said to Mooney as if I’d been entirely silent. “Anything I can do for you?”

  “Thanks,” Mooney said, “not at the—”

  This time I kicked him. “The exhumation,” I said.

  “Yes,” Mooney said. “You might be able to expedite an exhumation order—”

  “That would depend—”

  “It concerns a case that already involves the Bureau—”

  Mooney’s phone trilled. He gave it a sizzling glance—how dare you interrupt me?—then answered, giving his name and nothing more. He nodded at me.

  “Take it in the corridor, line two.”

  “Thanks.”

  I exited and took to the hall phone. “Hello, Carlyle here.”

  It was Roz, speaking quickly, whispering. “They’re going to kick me off this phone in a second. I’m with Thea—that’s who it is, right, the one I drew the pictures of?—and she’s at Weston Psych, threatening to batter the doors down. Can you get the hell over here?”

  “Why’d you let her out?” died on my lips. Thea was there. How and why no longer mattered.

  “It will take me half an hour,” I said, already plotting the quickest route. “Can you control the situation till then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Think we need a cop?”

  “No,” Roz said. “Gotta go.”

  Honestly, why do I ever believe her?

  54

  Since I’d already seen Beryl once, and Security recalled that I’d been duly approved by Garnet, my arrival was greeted with general relief. From a distance I could hear Thea’s voice, raised in shrill argument. No wonder Security regarded me fondly; can’t have guests shrieking in the looney bin. Distinctly lower class.

  Jannie, the aproned attendant, confided, “We must have called Mr. Cameron seven times, but no one’s answering his phone. We’ve left messages everywhere.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, calmly assuming an authority I didn’t have because it seemed no one else was willing to shoulder the burden. “Beryl Cameron’s sister has returned from an extended vacation and wishes to see Beryl. I’m certain that if Dr. Manley were here, he’d have no objection. Dr. Manley’s assistant could remain present during the entire visit, or if Thea finds that unacceptable, you might move Beryl to an observation lounge equipped with one-way glass. You have those, I assume? Both Beryl and Thea know me, and while I have no degrees in psychology, I’d be happy to monitor the meeting, so that nothing in any way violent or upsetting could occur. I’m sure the Cameron family, whom I represent, would agree that the institute would be behaving in an entirely responsible manner.”

  Well, I did still represent Tessa. It’s just that I sounded so unlike myself, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smirking.

  A security man in an impeccable suit frowned and said, “There’s a woman with Miss Cameron—”

  “Oh yes,” I agreed, pursing my mouth in distaste. “Dreadful, isn’t she?” No way to get chummy faster than to claim a common enemy; I knew Roz would do the same for me in similar circumstances. “The woman can wait in my car. Or if you’d prefer she leave the property entirely—”

  “I would,” he said, sounding relieved.

  I was glad Roz couldn’t hear his disapproving tone. If she had, she’d have practiced karate kicks on his ears, and he’d have fired his Taser, and God knows what kind of free-for-all would have erupted.

  As it happened, Roz listened amiably enough to my request; she ought to, I figured, after letting her charge get this far from the house! I told her, in no uncertain terms, to clear out. I also blinked my left eye twice in quick succession: an established signal. She’d wait in the car, on alert.

  Jannie once again played wardress. Thea—dressed in the same loose shift and khaki jacket of the night before—and I waited for Beryl in the ground-floor sunroom they’d tried to pawn off on me before. An ornate mirror covered most of the right-hand wall. One-way glass indeed. I wondered if the room was wired for sound. Plenty of space to lay wire under the thick carpet. Potted palms and sofas, thick with cushions, in which to hide microphones.

  Thea was keyed up; I couldn’t have kept her from talking if I’d tried.

  “Did you read my first book?” she asked, apropos of nothing, without saying hello, without seeming to notice Roz’s dismissal, the change in personnel or surroundings.

  “Nightmare’s Dawn!” I said. “Yes. Twice. I can’t say I enjoyed it. I admired it. It seemed very painful, very real.”

  “The new book doesn’t measure up,” she said in a half-swallowed whisper, as though she could hardly bring herself to mention a fear she’d clung to so tightly and so long.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “I tried,” she answered despairingly. “I wrote. But it was never the same after everyone knew who I was. I felt exposed, like film left in the sun, blank and empty, stunned by the light. I wrote, but I ripped every page to shreds. I made confetti, flushed it down the toilet, so no one would know I’d tried and failed. I panicked.”

  She stared at the plush carpet. One thumb and forefinger circled the other wrist, squeezing the flesh like a handcuff. I looked at Jannie. No sign of Beryl. I wondered if they were stalling, trying to neutralize us until Garnet Cameron answered his phone.

  Jannie indicated a central table, surrounded by four graceful chairs, inviting us to sit. If I were going to plant a bug in the room, I’d have used the underside of the table, or perhaps the huge cut-glass vase that served as a centerpiece.

  Thea didn’t give Jannie so much as a glance. She said, “I kept my notebooks wherever I went. I always wrote, but I could never show my work. It was as if that part of my life was over, covered with glass, dusty, locked away. The first notebook was filled, the first chapter written over twenty years ago. It was Beryl’s story. I was afraid to write my own.”

  “Everyone loved your writing,” I said soothingly, because she was starting to pace and frown, and I didn’t want to give the staff any reason to call in a major headshrinker, advise Garnet or Tessa that one more family member could do with an extended rest.

  Thea said, “That was the problem. Nightmare�
�s Dawn. They loved it, they loved me, they wanted me to keep writing the same book over and over. I was so young and everyone expected so much. Before I ran away, when I couldn’t write, I started to dream about killing myself.”

  Jannie stood straighter. She seemed to make eye contact with someone beyond the mirror.

  “Do you know the story of Thomas Chatterton?” Thea continued. Jannie relaxed.

  “No,” I said.

  “He was a poet, a prodigy. Today, he’s regarded by some as a precursor to the entire Romantic movement. Born in 1752.”

  “That’s a while back,” I said, because she seemed to expect comment.

  “His work was never appreciated, and in order to live he became desperate enough to attempt a literary fraud. He invented a fifteenth-century monk, Thomas Rowley, and wrote a series of Rowley’s poems that he then ‘discovered.’ The dead monk’s poems were all the rage of London and so was Chatterton. Until the deception was made public.”

  “What happened?”

  “Chatterton was banned from literary society. Two years later, living in squalor, he ate rat poison. A genius at fifteen, dead at seventeen.… There aren’t many tales of prodigies who live happily ever after. I couldn’t find any.”

  “Is that why you wrote a will?”

  “I had one thing of value, the book I’d written in a joyful spurt—a week, maybe a month at most. I gave it to Beryl. It seemed, at the time, like a whim, but it wasn’t. I wanted her to have it because … because I’d ruined her life.”

  I spoke softly. “Exactly how had you ruined Beryl’s life? Had you plagiarized her work? Is part of Nightmare’s Dawn really Beryl’s?”

  “Of course not! I ruined … I have to talk to Beryl first, to Beryl.”

  “Your will wasn’t valid,” I said after a brief pause. “You were underage.”

  “I didn’t really think I’d die,” she said.

  “You must have had money as well. A trust fund?”

  “Whatever, it was probably divided between Garnet and Beryl.”

  “You don’t seem to care.”

  “There was always a lot of money when I was growing up.”