Choose Me

by Tess Gerritsen

  I will never see Maggie again. Or our child.

  “This isn’t who you are, Cody! You aren’t a killer!” Jack pleaded.

  The door swung open, and Cody stepped out, face red and wet. He stared at Jack over the door. “You never even loved her,” he said. “You used her. Then you kicked her away. You killed her.”

  “I didn’t do anything like that.”

  “I’m the one who loved her.” He thumped his chest. “I was the only one. Not you and not Liam. Not even her own father.”

  “Cody, I did not kill her. I wasn’t anywhere near her place when she died. I was home in bed.”

  “Nobody else wanted her dead, only you. Nobody else had a reason.”

  “What about you, Cody? Didn’t you have a reason?”

  “What?”

  “You loved her, but did she ever love you?”

  This was a dangerous move Jack was making, but he didn’t know what else to do or any other way to appeal to Cody. Turn the blame on Taryn. Make her the one responsible for his heartbreak. She had used him, abused him. Cared nothing about him.

  “Maybe you’re the one who killed her,” Jack said.

  Just as he started to sputter an answer, headlights flickered toward them. Jack heard the sound of a vehicle approaching from the lower ramp, and a yellow utility vehicle rounded the curve.

  Cody jumped back into his vehicle and threw it into reverse. Suddenly freed, Jack stumbled forward, his legs numb and wobbly, as Cody’s car shot past the utility vehicle and screeched away down the ramp.

  “Hey, Professor. You okay?” called out the driver. Jack recognized him; it was Larry Walsh, one of the university’s Buildings and Grounds employees.

  Jack was still so shaken all he could do was nod.

  “What the hell was going on here?”

  “Just—just an accident.”

  “Didn’t look like an accident. He had you pinned.”

  “I’m fine, Larry, thanks.” The feeling was back in his legs. He shuffled to the door of the Audi and unlocked it.

  “Did you know that driver?”

  “No.”

  “I noticed he had a student sticker on his vehicle.”

  “Please, let’s just drop it, okay?” Jack slid in behind the wheel.

  “I got a partial read on his plate number. Pennsylvania.”

  Shit. He would probably call it in. Jack needed to get out of here, fast.

  He drove down the ramp, tires squealing, and pulled out of the garage. There was a parking space behind his campus building. He could warm up in his office, think over his next moves, and try calling Maggie again. Then he spotted the Boston PD patrol car parked near the entrance to his building, and instantly his plans changed. Instead, he drove past his building and kept going. Powered off his phone so it couldn’t be tracked.

  But where to?

  Home. He was desperate to see Maggie, and that was where she would be.

  He took a roundabout route, cutting through the back roads of Cambridge and Belmont. When he neared his house, he didn’t slow down but kept driving past it, noting that the windows were dark and Maggie’s Lexus was nowhere to be seen.

  He spotted two unfamiliar vehicles parked on the street. Unmarked police cars?

  As he drove away, he kept glancing in the rearview mirror, expecting to see the headlights of a car in pursuit. The street behind him remained dark.

  He had to find Maggie. He had to make things right between them. If she wasn’t home, there was only one other place she would be.

  CHAPTER 44

  FRANKIE

  “Yeah, I’m absolutely sure the man was Professor Dorian. I’ve been working Buildings and Grounds for twenty-eight years now, so I know most of the professors. I know their cars too. I make it my business to keep an eye on everything that goes on around this campus.”

  Larry Walsh is the university’s facilities supervisor, and judging by the excitement in his voice, this is the most thrilling thing that has happened on his watch in a long, long time. He has all the hallmarks of a wannabe cop: buzz-cut hair, boots planted in a wide stance, a tool belt sagging with keys, plus a walkie-talkie and a comically huge flashlight. In a spiral notebook, he’s jotted down all the relevant details of “the incident,” as he calls it, which he now proceeds to read to Frankie and Mac. “The vehicle was a black Toyota SUV, late model. Student-parking sticker on the windshield. I didn’t get a good look at the license number because the vehicle pulled away so fast, but I know it was a Pennsylvania plate, first letter F, then a two.” He closes his notebook and looks at the two detectives as if expecting a gold star for his performance.

  “You said it looked like an assault on Professor Dorian, not an accident?” says Frankie.

  “Oh, it was absolutely an assault. Crazy kid had the professor pinned between two vehicles, like he was about to crush him. If I hadn’t come around the curve just then, who knows what could’ve happened. Might’ve found his dead body lying here.”

  “Tell us about this kid,” says Mac. “You said he was out of the vehicle when you got here?”

  Larry nods. “As soon as I showed up, he jumped back into his SUV and took off. I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him around before. White male, on the hefty side. Dressed all in black except for a red baseball cap.”

  “What do you mean by hefty?”

  Larry looks down at his own bulging belly and sighs. “Okay. Fat.”

  Frankie and Mac exchange glances, both of them thinking the same thing.

  “I’ll check if Cody Atwood drives a black SUV,” says Mac, and he steps away to make the call.

  “Why would a student attack him, Mr. Walsh?” Frankie asks. “Do you know what their fight was all about?”

  “No idea. But you know, some of these students are spoiled rotten by their parents. They don’t know how to deal with the real world or with real criticism. Give ’em a bad grade, hurt their widdle feelings, and they go nuclear. I wouldn’t want to be a teacher these days, having to put up with these snowflakes. Poor Professor Dorian looked real shook up by the attack.”

  “Yet he didn’t want to report it.”

  “Maybe he was embarrassed. Or he didn’t want to get the kid in trouble. But I thought I should call it in anyway, and I have to say, I’m impressed by the response. Just a few minutes after I got off the phone with Boston PD, a cruiser came squealing up this ramp.”

  “I’m glad you did call it in, Mr. Walsh. As it turns out, we’ve been trying to locate Professor Dorian all afternoon.”

  “Why are you looking for him? He didn’t do something wrong, did he?”

  “That’s what we’re trying to establish.” Certainly Jack Dorian is behaving like a guilty man. He isn’t answering his phone, and now he’s avoiding any contact with the police. Frankie looks around at the garage, picturing the events that Larry has just described to her. She imagines Dorian pinned between his vehicle and Cody Atwood’s black SUV. She thinks of how easy it is to shatter bones and crush flesh with one stomp on the accelerator. Why did the boy attack him? Was this about Taryn Moore, a battle between someone who’d loved her and someone who’d wanted her dead?

  “Frankie,” Mac calls out, waving his cell phone. “You’ll never guess who just walked into Schroeder Plaza and wants to talk to us.”

  “Jack Dorian?”

  “No. His wife.”

  On a normal day Dr. Maggie Dorian would be considered a beautiful woman, but this is not that day. She sits slumped at the interview table, her red hair in disarray, her eyes hollowed out by anguish. Now approaching her forties, she no longer glows with the rosy flush of youth; how can she compete with the parade of eternally fresh-faced girls who pass through her husband’s classroom? Frankie and Maggie belong to the same sisterhood whose husbands have betrayed them, so it is all too easy to identify with her pain, but sympathy could blind Frankie to the truth. As she pulls out a chair and sits down, Frankie keeps her face neutral, betraying no hint of that sympathy. Althou
gh Mac is next door, watching them through the one-way mirror, neither Frankie nor Maggie can see him. In this room there are only the two of them facing each other across the table, woman to woman.

  “We’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon, Dr. Dorian,” says Frankie.

  “I know.”

  “Why didn’t you return my calls?”

  “I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I needed time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “To think. To decide what to do about my marriage.”

  Maggie’s head droops, and Frankie notices streaks of gray in her auburn hair. This woman has devoted years to her marriage, to a man she trusted, and she has every reason to be angry. But instead of rage, what Frankie sees in the slumped shoulders and bowed head is grief.

  “If he were my husband, I know what I’d want from him,” says Frankie. “I’d want to know the truth.”

  “The truth?” Maggie raises her head and looks at Frankie with haunted eyes.

  “About his affair with Taryn Moore. Do you know about it?”

  “Yes. He told me.”

  “When?”

  “Today. He said you’d questioned him about the girl’s death. He said it was all going to come out anyway, and he wanted to be the one to tell me.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “That she’d gotten pregnant and . . .” Maggie pauses, holding back tears. “He might be the baby’s father.”

  “That must have been painful to hear.”

  Maggie wipes a hand across her face. “Especially because we’ve been trying for years to have a baby. And then, a few weeks ago, we found out it was finally going to happen.”

  Frankie frowns. “You’re pregnant?”

  “Yes. And we were so happy. I was so happy.” Maggie takes a deep breath. “But now . . .”

  In the face of such misery, Frankie can scarcely bring herself to ask the next question, but it must be asked. “Did you have any idea your husband was having the affair?”

  “No.”

  “Has he done this before? Been involved with other women?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  For a moment Maggie stares at her with tear-swollen eyes. This is the point when it could get interesting, thinks Frankie. Now the woman is questioning everything she thinks she knows about her husband. She is wondering if she’s been blind to other secrets, other infidelities.

  “Dr. Dorian?”

  Maggie gives a sob. “I’m not sure of anything anymore!”

  “So there might have been other affairs.”

  “He told me this was the only one.”

  “And do you believe that?”

  “Maybe I’m crazy, but I do. I can even understand how this happened. Why it happened.”

  “The affair, you mean.”

  “Yes.” Maggie wipes away another tear. “God, marriage is so complicated. I know how easy it is for things to get stale, monotonous. But even on our worst days, I never once believed that he stopped loving me. I know he still loves me. Yes, part of me wants to strangle him. But another part of me wants to forgive him.”

  “You’d forgive a murderer?”

  Maggie stiffens. “You don’t really think Jack would kill anyone?”

  “Let me present you with some facts, Dr. Dorian. We know that Taryn Moore was murdered. We know there was a struggle in her apartment and she fell and hit her head against a coffee table, fracturing her skull. The killer then dragged her out to the fifth-floor balcony and dropped her to the sidewalk, discarding her body like a used-up piece of trash. And you can’t decide whether to forgive him?”

  Maggie shakes her head. “He couldn’t have done that. It’s not possible.”

  “Not only is it possible, it’s likely.”

  “I know my husband.”

  “Yet you didn’t know he was having an affair.”

  “That’s different. Yes, he made a mistake. Yes, he was stupid. But killing a girl?” Again, she shakes her head, this time emphatically. “He’d never hurt anyone.”

  Frankie glances at the one-way mirror, wondering if Mac feels as frustrated as she does. It is time to strip the veil from her eyes and force the woman to confront the brutal truth about her husband.

  “Dr. Dorian,” Frankie says, “here’s what we can prove. Your husband had an affair with his student, Taryn Moore. She became pregnant and was about to reveal the truth. She was a threat to his reputation, his career, and his marriage. He would lose everything. I’d call that a pretty good motive for murder.”

  “It still doesn’t mean he killed her.”

  “Friday night—the night she was killed—he went to her apartment.”

  “No, he didn’t. He stayed home.”

  “Are you prepared to swear to that?”

  “He told me—”

  “Will you swear he was home with you that night, all night?”

  Maggie sags back in her chair. “I can’t,” she says softly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wasn’t home all night. I was called into the hospital around midnight to see a patient. When I got back home at four, Jack was still in bed, sound asleep. Just the way I left him.”

  “So there were four hours when you weren’t at home. That’s plenty of time for him to have slipped away to Taryn’s apartment. He had both the motive and the opportunity to kill her.”

  “Where’s your proof that he actually went to her apartment? Is there a witness? Surveillance video?”

  “We have his text messages.”

  Maggie blinks. “What messages?”

  “The ones he sent to his girlfriend,” Frankie says and notes the way Maggie flinches at the word. Girlfriend. “Taryn’s wireless carrier provided every text message she sent and received. Lo and behold, your husband’s cell phone number shows up again and again. On the night she died, they’d made plans to meet at her apartment.”

  “But Jack stayed home that night. He told me he was home.”

  Frankie pulls out the printout of Taryn’s text messages and shoves it toward her. “Then how do you explain this?”

  Maggie stares at what her husband texted to his mistress. There it is, printed in black and white, the evidence that he lied to his wife.

  Tonite, your place. Wait for me.

  “He wrote that on Friday evening, the same night Taryn Moore died. While you were in the hospital, busting your butt as a doctor and saving lives, your hubby slipped out of bed—your bed. He drove to his girlfriend’s apartment, the girlfriend who’d been causing him all that trouble, and he took care of the problem. He cleaned up the blood to make it look like a suicide, and then he went home. In time to be back in bed when you returned.”

  “No. This is all wrong.”

  “Where is your husband right now?”

  “This can’t possibly be—”

  “Tell me where he is.”

  “He’s probably at home.”

  “He’s not there. We’ve been watching your house.”

  “Then he’s at the university.”

  “He’s not there either.”

  “Oh God, this isn’t happening!” Clutching her head, Maggie stares down at the table. “I know my husband. I know what kind of man he is, and he can’t even kill a fucking spider. How the hell could he . . .” She stops, her gaze fixed on the printout of text messages. “Maybe he didn’t write this,” she says softly.

  “Oh, come on. You can see it was sent from his phone. Friday, six thirty-seven p.m.”

  “Friday,” Maggie murmurs. For a moment she sits perfectly still, staring at the sheet of paper. “That’s the night it rained so hard. The night we had dinner and . . .” Her head snaps up. She rises from the chair. “I think I know where Jack is.”

  “Dr. Dorian! Where are you going?”

  Maggie doesn’t even glance back as she heads for the door. “I’m going to save my husband.”

  CHAPTER 45

  JACK

  It
was nearly eleven when he arrived at Charlie’s house. The only car in the driveway was Charlie’s. No silver Lexus. And to his relief, no squad cars.

  The bluish glow from the living room told him that the television was on, which meant Charlie was home. But where the hell was Maggie?

  As he walked to the front door, he pulled out his cell phone, tempted to power it on and check if Maggie had messaged him. No, bad idea. If he turned it on, the police would be able to track his location. He started to slip it back into his pocket and suddenly paused, thinking. Remembering the evening when he’d received Taryn’s text message: I’m pregnant. He remembered how he had gone downstairs to fold Charlie’s laundry while Maggie had been upstairs in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher, grinding coffee, setting cups and saucers on the tray. How long was Charlie alone at the dinner table? Five minutes, ten?

  Long enough.

  For a moment he stood outside Charlie’s front door, feeling as if the world had suddenly tilted off its axis. He should leave, now, except that he had nowhere else to go. The police were after him and his life was crumbling, but he had to know the truth.

  He used his key and entered the living room. “Charlie?”

  “In here,” Charlie called out.

  Jack made his way into the kitchen, where Charlie sat on a barstool at the island, drinking a glass of whiskey. He was dressed in pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt. The air was laced with the odor of disinfectant and the sour smell of a man full of cancer.

  Charlie held up his glass. “Want to join me?”

  “No, I’m fine.” Jack stood on the other side of the island, facing him. He couldn’t reconcile this dying man with the images that were now flashing through his head.

  “Everything okay?” Charlie asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t look like it is. Sit down; take a load off your feet.” Charlie nodded at an empty barstool.