Prodigal Son: A Novel

by Danielle Steel

  And as he walked into the county clerk’s office, he had a surprise. The clerk was the older brother of a boy he’d gone to school with, and he smiled as soon as Peter walked in. They chatted for a few minutes, and Peter was sorry to hear that the man he had gone to school with had died in an accident several years before. Bob, the county clerk, then offered his sympathy for the difficulties Michael was in. He had been as stunned as everyone else.

  And with that, Peter explained what he was searching for. He was wondering how many people Michael had inherited money from over the years. It might establish some kind of pattern that would confirm his guilt with his elderly patients, or even uncover new ones.

  “We wouldn’t have a record here of cash bequests he inherited,” Bob explained, “only if he inherited land or property, like a house. But I can certainly take a look and see what I find. And if you talk to the bank manager, he may remember some of the bequests Michael got from his patients. If you want, I’ll call him. He’s my wife’s uncle.” Peter smiled at the convenient incestuousness of a small town. He was taking full advantage of it.

  But he wasn’t prepared for the answer he got from Bob a few days later. As it turned out, the deeds to four houses had been left to Michael over the years, which was considerable, and he had sold them all. They were small and not of immense value. And Bob’s wife’s uncle at the bank remembered distinctly several bequests Michael had gotten, some larger, some smaller, but in his estimation, over the years, Michael had inherited between two and three hundred thousand dollars from elderly patients. It was a considerable sum of money, particularly added to the proceeds from the houses he got too, and it was certainly not proof of murder, but it was an area that merited looking into.

  Bob promised him an informal written summary, which Peter wanted to give Jack Nelson for the police investigation. Peter couldn’t help wondering how many of his geriatric patients Michael had killed, but it was clear to him now why he had done it. It was about money. Michael’s son Bill was right, his father had been trying to amass a fortune of ill-gotten gains. He had no idea what Michael was planning to do with it, but he had quite a lot of money put aside, and if he had succeeded in killing Maggie, he would have had a great deal more. But it really was all about greed and money, which seemed unlike Michael. Bob promised to do a full report on whatever he found and give a copy to Jack Nelson. But it was clear to Peter that Michael had been a stranger to them all. Peter was trying to absorb it and figure out just who Michael had been, and Bill was too, but Peter was shocked to realize that even after Maggie was out of the hospital, she was still in the grips of powerful denial about her husband and her marriage. Maggie just couldn’t accept that Michael had tried to kill her. She refused to believe it. It was shocking for all of them, and Maggie just denied it and found a thousand implausible excuses to explain what had happened. She could not accept the truth.

  And Lisa was not much better. She was still not speaking to her uncle or brother. She insisted that they had framed her father. And when Maggie wouldn’t take her to see her father in jail, Lisa took the matter into her own hands.

  She got a bus to Northampton one day after school, after checking on visiting days and hours. She left her mother a message that she was doing homework with a friend, and Maggie believed her. She was deeply worried about her, and worried about the trauma to her. And Maggie had wanted to be present for her. She had begun walking with her walker, and almost didn’t need it now for support. Her left leg still dragged a little, as it always had, but she felt steady on her feet now, and had regained her balance, which had been shaky for years. She was working with a physical therapist to strengthen her legs. She no longer took sleeping pills at night, tranquilizers for her nerves, or any of the mystery pills that Michael had fed her for years, assuring her that she needed them and she needed to entrust him with her care and treatment. But with each passing day that she felt stronger, she became more anxious about Michael. Without the medicines he had given her, she felt like a new person, or the old one she had been before they married. There was no remnant of her old head injury, only the stiff leg, which she could live with, and her limp was even less pronounced than it had been, thanks to the exercises she was doing, and she no longer felt so unsteady. And once she was ready, she had Bill put her wheelchair and her walker in the garage. She walked everywhere on her own two feet now. But she continued to insist that none of her improvement had anything to do with what Michael had been doing to her. She couldn’t bear knowing that the accusations were true about him, even though both her better health and his silence said it all.

  When Lisa went to see her father in jail, she showed her student ID card, wrote her name on a list, and sat in a waiting room full of scary-looking people. It was raucous and rowdy. Women with no teeth and men with tattoos were shouting obscenities at each other in a crowded waiting room that smelled bad with overflowing garbage cans, and she was shaking when they called her name. She was led into a cubicle, and for the first time in weeks she found herself face-to-face with her father. He was wearing dark blue pajamas that looked like a surgical suit. He was clean-shaven, looked immaculate, and his hair was perfectly combed. He could have been sitting in his office. They were separated by a thick wall of glass, and they had to communicate via a phone on either side of the glass. And the moment Lisa saw him and sat down, tears exploded from her eyes, and she choked on a sob. Michael smiled at her immediately, and the kindness and love in his eyes overwhelmed her. He pointed to the phone, and she picked it up, still crying as she looked adoringly at her father.

  “Don’t cry, baby,” he said soothingly, “everything’s going to be fine. This will all be cleared up soon, and I’ll be out of here in no time.” He looked totally convincing and unworried, and Lisa gazed into his eyes and found everything she had always loved there.

  “This is all nonsense,” he continued. “I’m sure it won’t even go to trial. How’s Mom?” His eyes clouded a little when he asked her, and she wasn’t sure why.

  “She’s okay. She looks good. She says you haven’t answered her letters. We miss you.”

  “I’ve been busy,” he said with a broad smile that reminded her of better times. When she looked at him, it was as though they weren’t in a jail. She could imagine herself sitting across from him in the kitchen, he looked that normal, which was a relief to Lisa. Being here at the jail was scary, with all the other visitors, who looked as bad as the people in jail, or worse. Her father certainly didn’t belong here. You could see that instantly. “I’ve been meeting with my lawyer to get this whole thing taken care of. It should get dismissed,” he said with an easy smile, to reassure his daughter. “I didn’t poison your mother, Lisa. You know that.”

  “I know, Daddy. The stuff in the newspapers is awful. It’s about some of your patients too.”

  “Don’t read it. It’s not true,” he said, and she nodded. “I think this is something your uncle Peter cooked up to get rid of me and go after your mother and get his hands on your grandfather’s money now that he’s lost his own. It’s a vicious thing to do. And very sick. He always was a bad apple, even when he was a kid. My parents knew it too. That’s why he hates me. This is his vengeance against me.”

  “I know. I hate him,” she said fervently, and she hated her brother too. They both believed her father guilty. But at least her mother still believed in his innocence.

  “Has he been around a lot?” Michael asked her casually.

  “Yeah. Kind of. He checks on us. Bill is home,” she volunteered, and something flitted across her father’s eyes again. She could see he didn’t like that.

  “He belongs in a psychiatric hospital, but your mother would never let me put him in one. I only agreed to let him go to London to get him away from you. I didn’t want him to hurt you.”

  “Do you think he would?” Lisa looked surprised. Even from jail, he was manipulating all of them, and pitting them against each other, and he had abandoned Maggie completely after trying t
o kill her. But he still had Lisa’s total loyalty and faith in him. And he intended to keep it that way, whatever it took. She was his, just as Maggie had once been, but now she had betrayed him. She no longer needed him. She was free, and would testify against him. But above all, she no longer trusted him blindly. He knew that Lisa would never do that to him. She would belong to him forever, she was his flesh and blood. He wasn’t even sure Bill was his, he looked too much like his uncle, although Maggie had always denied it.

  “I think your brother is capable of anything.” He planted the seed of terror in her, and dissent. Divide and conquer had always been his style, just as it had been in his youth. “And so is your uncle. Be careful of them, Lisa, don’t trust them. Or even your mother. She means well, but she’s a deeply disturbed woman, with serious psychiatric problems. That’s where Bill got them. You’re the only healthy one in the bunch.”

  “And you, Daddy,” she said devotedly. Anyone hearing their conversation would have retched. And her brother and uncle would have wanted to kill him for what he was doing. Now, using only his mind and his words, he was poisoning her, just as he had her mother. He had to control her, and make her his puppet, even from jail.

  “Just don’t worry, baby. I’ll be out of here soon. Will you come to see me again?” She nodded as tears sprang to her eyes. “Don’t tell Mommy. She’ll worry about you.” Lisa nodded and knew it was true.

  “I’ll come back soon. I promise.” A buzzer sounded then and the phone went dead in their hands. The visit was over. They mouthed “I love you” to each other, and Lisa stood up to leave. A door opened then behind her father, and a sheriff’s deputy escorted him from the cubicle as he waved at her, and Lisa left the jail. Her heart was singing. She had seen her father.

  She took a bus back to Ware then, and went straight to her room when she got home. She didn’t tell her mother she had seen him, and that night, when her mother, brother, and uncle had dinner in the kitchen, she refused to come downstairs. Maggie was having dinner in the kitchen every night now, and she had started cooking again. She was taking her rightful place that she had been robbed of for years. It made Lisa feel as though there was no room for her now, but she didn’t care. She had seen her father, and she believed him. Everything was going to be fine, because he said so. And she was totally convinced that he never lied to her.

  Chapter 17

  Jack Nelson sat looking at the autopsy reports on his desk in despair. Nine bodies had been exhumed. Each of them had a puncture mark on their upper buttocks that no one had seen before they were buried. Michael had examined each of them when they died—they were his patients, and he had signed the death certificates. The cause of death was listed as heart attack in all nine cases. And the coroner said that the puncture wound with a tiny needle was consistent with succinylcholine, a muscle-relaxing drug used to paralyze the respiratory muscles either in surgery or to insert a breathing tube. Only a competent anesthesiologist would know how to dose it, and Michael had been one in the early days of his career, before he joined his father in his practice in Ware. In overdoses of the drug, death results as the patient suffocates, but the cause of death presents as a heart attack. The drug was virtually untraceable, while the patient was alive, but the telltale giveaway was the injection site, which each of these bodies had in precisely the same location. And the drug the coroner tested for was present in the tissue of all nine victims. The evidence was conclusive, much to Jack Nelson’s horror.

  It was impossible to know now if Michael had euthanized them at their request, or had simply killed them. But every single one of them had left him money, in most cases everything they had. There was no way he could spare Michael now. The tide had turned irrevocably. No matter how innocent he seemed, or how much Jack had liked him, it was beginning to appear that he had committed wholesale murder in the geriatric community. And his poisoning of his wife had been even more vicious. She was a young woman, and he had made her an invalid, destroyed her life, and nearly killed her. Jack had begun to think that he had a sociopath on his hands. The evidence was overwhelming.

  Michael was arraigned again, this time on nine counts of murder. It would be a tough rap to beat, along with the attempted murder charges relating to Maggie. Jack felt sick about it, and he couldn’t look his friend in the eye at the arraignment. Michael appeared totally calm and undisturbed, and pleaded not guilty to all charges.

  Jack was sitting in his office feeling depressed, when his lieutenant told him that Peter McDowell wanted to see him, and escorted him in a minute later.

  Jack sighed deeply at his desk. “It looks like I owe you an apology,” he said unhappily. “I think there’s a side to your brother I never knew.” But sociopaths were deceitful and insidious, as he was well aware. He had never suspected Michael was one. They committed horrendous crimes without batting an eye, showing no guilt or any kind of remorse later. In some ways, they were subhuman, robots of some kind, humans gone awry.

  “I always knew that,” Peter said quietly. “Thank you. It’s a hard time for Maggie and Lisa.” Jack Nelson nodded, sorry for both of them.

  “Lisa’s been visiting her father at the jail twice a week,” Jack said sadly. “Does her mother know?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll tell her. I don’t think that’s a great place for her to be, and God knows what her father is telling her.” Jack only nodded. He agreed. He didn’t think it was a good idea, she was an innocent young girl, and Michael had proven himself to be a dangerous man, psychologically as well as physically.

  “What brings you here today?” Jack said with another sigh, and Peter matched it. It had taken him weeks to reach the decision. And now he believed his mother’s journals, and not Michael’s explanation of them. Nothing Michael said was true.

  “I want my parents exhumed,” Peter said unhappily. “I think he killed them.” It seemed more than likely now. And they had found vials of the incriminating succinylcholine in Michael’s office. He had felt so secure that he had hidden nothing, neither the drug he used to kill his geriatric patients, nor the paraquat he had used to poison Maggie. The evidence against him was overwhelming. And even Maggie was no longer claiming his innocence. She was having a hard time admitting to herself that the man she thought she had been married to had never existed. But she could no longer deny it. She knew that now.

  “Half the town wants their parents exhumed,” Jack said as he slid the forms across the desk. There was no reason to refuse, it was a reasonable request, and it was potential evidence against a man who was accused of nine murders, and an attempted one. Peter filled out the forms and slid them back across the desk, and then he left Jack’s office. They had never been friends when they went to school. Jack’s lifelong friendship with Michael had precluded it. And Peter felt sorry for him now. He had been duped like everyone else. Even Peter had been fooled in the last few months, although he knew better. Michael was a master of deceit and manipulation.

  After he saw Jack, Peter stopped in to see Maggie and told her what the police chief had told him, that Lisa had been visiting her father in jail. Maggie looked upset about it, especially that she hadn’t told her. It made her feel strange too that Lisa had been seeing Michael but she herself had heard nothing from him, and hadn’t seen him in the weeks since he’d been arrested.

  She confronted her daughter about it when she got home, not in a hostile way, but she asked her if she’d been visiting her father. Lisa immediately exploded—her secret had been exposed.

  “Yes, of course I have!” she shouted at her mother. “Do you think I’d let him sit there all alone? How could you do that? You haven’t been to see him once!” She was entirely overlooking the fact that her father was accused of trying to murder her mother, and he had made no contact with her since his arrest. It was awkward for Maggie, and she had waited for him to reassure her, and convince her of his innocence. He hadn’t. He had disappeared in silence and answered none of her letters. Nor had he called her. It was as though sh
e had never existed in his life. It was a frightening feeling for Maggie. She didn’t even know now who she had married, or even worse, who he had become. The man she had loved had disappeared.

  “I don’t think he wants to see me,” Maggie said, looking pained.

  “Of course not,” Lisa explained for him. She knew that she understood her father better than anyone else. He said so. “He’s accused of poisoning you and trying to kill you. Why should he want to see you? He’s in jail because of you.” Lisa was venomous as she said it, and Maggie looked stunned by her words.

  “This is my fault? What about the old people he supposedly killed? Is that their fault too?” Maggie realized now that Michael was twisting Lisa’s mind, he was using every opportunity to brainwash her, just as he had Maggie. But she was not going to let that happen to her daughter. “I don’t want you seeing him at the jail anymore,” Maggie said firmly. “You’re too young to go to a place like that. Someone could hurt you.” She didn’t want to say that her father was doing her more damage than any of the criminals she might be meeting, but it was obvious to Maggie what Michael was doing to their daughter, manipulating her. He was an incredibly evil man, and it was impossible to believe in his innocence anymore.

  “You can’t stop me!” Lisa shouted at her, then ran upstairs into her room and slammed the door.

  Maggie talked to Bill about it that night over dinner in the kitchen. Lisa never ate with them anymore. She helped herself to what she wanted out of the fridge and took it up to her room to eat alone. She was isolating herself, just as her father wanted her to do, filling her with distrust for her mother and brother and convincing her that they were deeply disturbed, when in fact he was. It was all a mind game, and Lisa was his victim, just as Maggie had been, and Bill, and Peter. It was the only relationship you could have with him, or any sociopath—that of victim.