“Don’t you think it’s a coincidence that her granddaughter was murdered around the same time she committed suicide?” Mary asked. “We checked the phone records and there was a phone call from the Sheppard residence to Beckworth’s the day before Lisa’s husband reported her missing. He’s unaccounted for as well. Can you see where I’m going with this?”
“I can see that you’re reaching,” the detective said. “Do you really believe that the same person who murdered the Sheppard woman in San Diego flew up here and killed her grandmother, then staged it to look like a suicide? A husband getting rid of his wife is fairly common. What reason would he have to kill her grandmother in another state? The woman wasn’t a witness. Older women aren’t normally much of a threat, Stevens.”
“I don’t know,” Mary said, having arrived at the same reasoning. “Maybe the grandmother knew something incriminating about him. He could have beaten Lisa, and she was threatening to go to the police. Once he killed her, he had to get rid of the grandmother for fear she could testify against him if he was apprehended.”
“Look,” Parker said impatiently, “we’ll cooperate any way we can. Right now, I just don’t know what else we can do for you. The case is closed, the woman’s buried, and the house where the crime took place has been sold.”
“Who buried her? I know it wasn’t the granddaughter, because she was dead.”
“The handyman.” He laughed. “I don’t mean he went out and dug the grave—he paid for all the expenses. Mrs. Beckworth was good to him and his family. He told us he wanted her to have a decent funeral. And don’t try to convince me he did it out of guilt, Stevens. Mitch Tidwell is a decent man. Dozens of people vouched for him. Seems he didn’t charge for half the work he did, particularly with the seniors. As soon as Beckworth’s estate is settled, he’ll be reimbursed, but you have to admit it was a nice gesture.” He paused, then added, “Are you still considering exhuming the body?”
“We don’t need the grandmother’s DNA after all. We were able to identify Sheppard from a leg fracture.”
“Great,” he said. “I hate to exhume bodies.”
“Not as much as I hate to see homicides passed off as suicides,” Mary told him, slamming the phone down.
Staring at the white ceiling in her hospital room, Kathleen Masters tried to remember the good times she and Dean had shared. Then her mind flashed in a different direction. Images of Dean standing over her with a knife. She tightened her fists and closed her eyes, trying to make the terrible visions go away. Her shrink said that her mind had intertwined her husband with the loathsome events that had occurred, more than likely due to misdirected anger, because the man who had attacked her was dead.
Her face, head, and abdomen were disfigured, and the doctor said her hair might not grow back in the spot where she’d been struck over the head with the bottle. She looked so awful, she’d ordered the hospital room to cover or remove all the mirrors. A plastic surgeon said he could improve things, but only after she’d fully recovered, both emotionally as well as physically. How could anyone recover from such an ordeal?
Arnold Layman had been a professional burglar until his last stint in prison. The police had studied his records all the way back to Juvenile Hall, and he’d never once committed an act of violence, nor was there any evidence that he belonged to any type of satanic cult. Sure, he’d been wearing a Charlie Manson T-shirt. He could have found it in the trash can.
Something wasn’t right.
When she had first experienced the flashbacks, Kathleen discounted them as nightmares. As the hospital reduced her pain medication, however, they became even more vivid. Dean had disappeared shortly after the crime. The fact that the police weren’t concerned was appalling. What kind of man would walk out on his wife when she was fighting for her life?
Kathleen didn’t understand why their world had come crashing down on them. Everything seemed to be coming together. Dean had balked at first, then acted willing and even happy to accept her decision to travel with him. Not being apart all the time would have strengthened their relationship.
Her feelings of insecurity slapped her back to reality. In her career, she was strong and assertive. It had all been an act. The successful, confident real estate agent didn’t exist. She was a fictional creation, an actor in a play written by Dean Masters.
At sixteen, Kathleen had fallen in love with George Dupont. He’d been almost twenty years older, but she didn’t care. A handsome and charming man, he’d worn beautiful clothes and had possessed impeccable manners. His hands and skin had been so soft, and he’d touched her as she’d never been touched before. The boys she’d dated previously had pawed her like animals, with their dirty fingernails and rough skin. Of course, she’d been influenced by George’s wealth. What girl wouldn’t be? She was working as a waitress, trying to support herself and find a way to complete her education.
George had used her up and then discarded her. Just like Dean.
Ruby Boyle, a stone-faced gray-haired nurse, came striding briskly into her room. “How are you feeling today?”
“Terrible,” Kathleen told her, scowling. “I need my pain shot.”
“You know Dr. Blankenship discontinued the morphine,” the nurse told her, squeezing the blood pressure pump. “The chart says you were given your pain meds only three hours ago, so you’ll have to wait at least another hour before I can give you any more.” Changing the subject, she asked, “Did you walk some this morning?”
“Yes, and it hurt like a bitch,” Kathleen said. “I almost fainted. How can they force me to walk so soon? I felt like my stomach was going to pop open and my intestines fall out.”
“You have to get out of bed, Kathleen, or you could develop complications. Don’t you want to get your strength back so you can go home?” Boyle pulled down the covers and lifted Kathleen’s gown. “I’m going to change your dressings.” She removed what looked like a large Band-Aid and examined the incision on Kathleen’s abdomen. “You’re very fortunate. They had to remove your left ovary, but otherwise none of your organs were perforated.”
“Then why did I have to be rushed back into surgery six hours after the first operation?” she asked, wishing she could just jump off a bridge. Go home? she thought bitterly. To what?
“Well,” the nurse said, ripping open a package containing the new bandages, “your husband informed the surgeon that you’d ingested a large quantity of Valium a short time before you were admitted. They stopped the bleeding and then had to wait until you could be safely sedated to complete the operation.”
“But I didn’t take a lot of Valium,” Kathleen protested. “I only took half of one pill. My husband was lying. He’s the one who did this to me. That’s why he’s not around. He hasn’t even called me.”
Boyle sighed, dropping her hands to her side. “That poor man,” she said. “Don’t you know his mother passed away? He called and spoke to me on several occasions. He was very distraught. This terrible thing happened to you, and then the very next day he lost his mother.” The nurse started to leave, then stopped. “I remember putting several calls from him through to you. You must have been too heavily medicated to remember.”
Not long after he’d built her up, Kathleen remembered, struggling to get comfortable, Dean had used emotional warfare to stay in control of their relationship. When he doted on her, she was blissfully happy. Then it was as if the sun had darted behind a cloud, and she was left for weeks alone in their cavernous house. She became so starved for his attention, she reached the point where she was prepared to accept that he might be unfaithful.
Dean was the type of man who thrived on adoration. He must have been having affairs all long. More women meant more adoration. Why hadn’t she realized it before? The expression on his face when she’d told him that she wanted to go on the road with him was unmistakable. He was furious, enough to lash out at her in a public place. Then when she confronted him about Andrea seeing him with a woman in Ventura, his rage had
intensified.
Had he been enraged enough to kill?
Before Dean disappeared, he’d come to see her in the recovery room. Although she had been barely conscious, he’d told her that he loved her and kissed her forehead. Her eyes had flickered open. His face had been blurred and distorted. What she remembered wasn’t what she’d seen, but what she had smelled. Her husband had the stench of the dead burglar, Arnold Layman. The noxious odor was forever sealed in her memory, a mixture of urine, body odor, and alcohol.
She remembered awakening when a coarse fabric had touched her skin, probably seconds before the blow to her head. The worst, though, was the picture in her mind of Dean’s twisted face as he held the knife high in his hands.
Now that her mind was becoming clearer, Kathleen was growing more convinced that Layman may have been innocent, somehow used by Dean as a pawn.
She depressed the call button pinned to the bed. When another nurse came in, she told her she needed to call the police. “Is something wrong?”
“Yeah,” Kathleen said. “My husband tried to kill me.”
CHAPTER 29
Wednesday, October 18—4:15 P.M.
Dean sat in a white wicker chair on the terrace at Geoffrey’s Restaurant in Malibu, the ocean stretching out beneath him. The vistas were nowhere near as spectacular as they were on the Monterrey Peninsula, but he would never be able to enjoy those again.
He whipped his head around as a tanned young blonde brushed past him on the arm of a man who had to be in his sixties, her perfume drifting to his nostrils. The women here were beautiful, perhaps not as rich, but far younger and more lithesome than the majority of women in Carmel. This time he wanted someone attractive yet simple, with decent values and a job that kept her busy so she wouldn’t pry into his affairs. A ready-made family, with older children, would be perfect on several levels. He’d come to suspect that his narcissistic supply could never be filled by one woman. Older children whom he could manipulate into loving and needing him might be the answer. Then those children would one day have children, additionally expanding his sources. The past had robbed him of any thought of marrying a woman who wanted a baby, so his options were limited.
Younger women were there for the taking, Dean thought, his eyes zooming in on the blonde two tables over. With his wealth and persuasive personality, he could have any woman he wanted. The problem was that most girls wanted children.
Tossing down his gin and tonic, Dean waved the waiter over to order another. He would never be able to be around a baby without remembering that terrible day Iris’s carriage had gone over the embankment. In reality, Carmel had been a poor hunting ground, something he’d only recently realized. What’s more, the picturesque shoreline that everyone found so breathtaking was too similar to the terrain near his childhood home in Tarrytown, New York.
He stiffened in his chair, hearing Iris shrieking as the stroller crashed against the boulders and landed upside down in the Hudson River. No one had ever told him if she’d died instantly or remained alive and terrified inside the stroller as the river swept her away.
Dean rushed to the men’s room and splashed water on his face. He heard a shrill sound and pressed his hands over his ears. He felt as if his body were boiling inside, about to explode in a fireball of misery. Adjusting his jacket on his shoulders, he got control of himself and returned to his table. As he walked past the entrance, he heard the shrill sound again and realized it was only cars applying their brakes as they drove down the steep driveway to the restaurant. He’d been spending too much time alone. When he was alone, the past surrounded him.
Back at the table, Dean clutched the cold cocktail glass in his hand, reliving the events that had brought him to this place in time—where he judged his future companions primarily on his attempt to predict whether he would one day develop a compulsion to kill them.
Fourteen years dissolved, and he was back in his office in Manhattan, defending himself against the lies of a conniving and money-hungry woman.
Every aspect of his practice was scrutinized. The OPMC dragged him in front of committees and board members, interrogating him about his personal and professional life. They had a zero tolerance for what they classified as moral unfitness.
How could they believe Nicole Pelter when everything she said was total bullshit? She was the one who should be questioned about moral unfitness. Pelter was an actress in real life as well as on stage—a pathological liar. Part of her psychosis centered around preying on well-to-do men. As things progressed he became so enraged, he thought of killing her.
Halfway through the process, he knew that he no longer wanted to see patients. It was true that abuse of patients by psychologists and psychiatrists was far too common, but professionals in his field were also targets of unscrupulous, predatory, and mentally disturbed people, primarily women. Nicole Pelter’s developing a fixation on him was understandable. Most women were attracted to him. He simply couldn’t place himself in such a vulnerable position again.
The attorneys hired by his insurance company advised him that he was on the verge of losing the lawsuit. He could tell by the looks on the jurors’ faces that they were convinced he was guilty. Nicole had given a command performance, probably better than anything she’d ever done on the stage.
The attorneys agreed on a settlement. The board had already yanked his license, and now the greatest hurdle was in front of him—picking up the threads of his life.
April was slipping away from him. If he didn’t focus on what was left of their relationship, he would lose her, an outcome he refused to accept. She’d moved out of his brownstone a few weeks earlier to an apartment on the Upper East Side. Despite his numerous messages, she hadn’t returned his calls. He knew the address, and in desperation, he decided to go to her.
The twenty-story building was protected by an overweight, elderly doorman. Dressed sharply in his charcoal-striped shirt and cufflinks, Dr. Thomas Wright fell in behind a group of businessmen, following them to the bank of elevators. One of the men pressed the floor button, then resumed his conversation with his friends. Thomas stared down at the stone design on the elevator floor until the doors opened and the men stepped out. Glancing at the paper with April’s apartment number on it, he headed to the eighteenth floor.
By the time he reached her place, his nerves were frazzled. A noise was coming from inside. Placing his ear close to the door, he heard a male voice. His body shook in outrage. His fiancée had another man in her apartment. This was his April, the woman he’d planned to marry. He heard footsteps approaching the door, and scurried down the hall, ducking into the rubbish-disposal room.
Peering through the circular glass portal in the door, Thomas saw a Latin man with long, curly hair and strong features. His body became limp as he watched them embrace and kiss. Rejection seized him. If he’d acted swiftly, paying off Pelter under the table, instead of insisting on establishing his innocence in a court of law, he might have saved not only his practice but his fiancée.
April escorted the man to the elevator. As soon as the elevator door closed, Thomas stepped into the hallway and impulsively called to her: “April.”
“What are you doing here?” she said, spinning around in surprise.
“You didn’t return my phone calls,” he said. “I need to talk to you.”
April glanced up and down the hallway. “Don’t make a scene, Thomas. I just moved in here. We’ll talk in my apartment.”
They went into the living room, and she took a seat on the green sofa. He stood stiffly in front of her. “Who was that man?”
“I’m sorry you had to see that, but you shouldn’t be spying on me,” April told him. “He’s someone I work with. We started dating when I moved out. It’s over, Thomas. I thought you understood.”
“You can’t give up on us,” he pleaded. “We’ve been through too much.”
“We had good times, but things have changed. You’re not the same anymore, and neither am I.”
“What do you mean?” he said, walking around in a circle. “I’m exactly the same. The mess with Nicole Pelter didn’t change me. Anyway, we settled it today. It’s finished. We can move on with our lives now.”
“You paid her off?” April exclaimed, her jaw dropping. “That means you’re guilty. You drugged this woman and tried to have sex with her. How could you? You know how frightening it is to find out you don’t even know the man you’re planning to marry?”
He knelt down in front of her. She turned her head away. “April, look at me. I didn’t do anything with that woman. It was her word against mine. There was no factual basis for her claim. The malpractice attorneys forced me to settle. They don’t care if I’m innocent or not. All they’re concerned about is putting out the least amount of money. I love you. Please, you have to believe me. Why would I drug a patient and force her to have sex with me? We have a wonderful sex life.”
“I don’t know,” April said, shrugging. “That’s a question you should be asking yourself.”
“If you’d agreed to testify, maybe things would have turned out differently.”
“Don’t lay a guilt trip on me,” she snapped. “You dug your own grave. Besides, my father wouldn’t let me get involved. What did you expect? He’s a senator. He’s campaigning for reelection.”
“Remember our plans?” he said. “We were going to buy a house in the country. We can still have a great life together. I’m giving up my practice. We can travel now.”
“You think it’s about the money?” She shook her head. “Money can’t buy the important things in life…honesty, integrity, love. As far as I’m concerned, you and my father can keep your filthy money.” She stood and forced her way past him. “You wanted to talk. We talked. Now it’s time for you to leave.”
Sullivan’s Evidence Page 28
