“Still alive when we did the story, but in bad shape. He had only a few months left.”
“Do you have anything else on Clarence Redfield for that year?”
“Nothing else showing up. Other than his lawsuit, no one was paying attention to him at the time.”
“And then he left town in 2011 and didn’t come back until four years ago, when his mother was ill.”
Angus said, “And no one was paying much attention to him then, either, until he started writing his crime thread.”
“And by then his mother had died and he’d gotten married. And then his wife and baby died.”
“What’d they die of?”
McCabe paused with her glass halfway to her mouth. “In childbirth.”
“I know they died in childbirth. But what happened?”
“I’m not sure what happened.”
“Guess if it was anything that Redfield thought the doctor did wrong, he would have filed another lawsuit.”
McCabe put her glass down on the table. “As far as we know, he didn’t file a lawsuit. But mothers and babies don’t normally just die during childbirth, do they?”
“Tell that to mothers and babies in—”
“I mean here in the United States, Pop. Middle-class mothers and babies under a doctor’s care. And after Redfield’s experience with his father’s doctor, you would think he would have been especially careful to make sure his wife’s doctor was competent.”
“Then I guess you probably want to find out why Redfield’s wife and baby died anyway.”
“Yeah, I guess I do want to find that out.” McCabe got up from the table. “Thanks.”
“Always here to provide you with information.”
She kissed the top of his head. “And I don’t know what I’d do without you, Pop.”
“Don’t go getting mushy on me. Any food left?”
“On the stove,” McCabe said. “I made enough for dinner and your lunch tomorrow. I’ve got to go send a tag to Research.”
* * *
Angus was sitting on the sofa in the living room, watching a movie, when she came downstairs. This time, it was John Wayne in Rio Bravo.
“The Duke?” McCabe said. “Did you take your antacid?”
“Angie Dickinson’s in this one. I’m ignoring his politics.”
“I’m going out for a while, Pop.”
“Bring back some ice cream. Rocky Road.”
“You might be in bed before I get back.”
“Bring it anyway. If I don’t get it tonight, I’ll have it for breakfast in the morning.”
“Okay. See you later.”
The drive across town took less than twenty minutes.
McCabe glanced at the clock on her console. It was 8:57. She got out and locked her car door.
She let herself in through the terrace doors with her key.
As she stepped into the dimly lit room, strong arms snuggled around her from behind. “Glad you could make it.”
She turned and smiled, hands going to his shoulders. “So am I. I’ve missed you.”
“Good, because I’ve missed you, too.”
“But we need to talk. Someone may know that we’ve been meeting. There was a tracker on my car.”
He was silent for a moment. “Who do you think put it there?”
“It could have something to do with the serial killer case. Maybe Clarence Redfield.”
“Or someone else.” He touched her face. “I worry about you.”
“I’m not the one who thinks midnight confabs with gang members is a good idea.”
“I go where I have to. Sooner or later, I’m going to get them to the table.”
McCabe shook her head. “If someone’s been monitoring my movements, they may know about us.”
“It’s been almost three weeks since the last time we saw each other. Between your caseload and my trip out of town—”
“But we don’t know how long I was being tracked.”
“McCabe, this … the two of us … isn’t actually illegal, you know. Only a few saintly souls would even consider our rendezvous immoral.”
“I know. But we agreed that before we went public, we’d be sure—”
“That we aren’t just having a fling.”
“Because once people begin to realize we’re involved—”
“If and when that information comes out, we’ll both survive.”
“We’ll survive, but it would be better if we could decide if and how—”
“We may not have that option. Hey, could we continue this conversation later?”
“What would you like to do right now?”
“Well, let’s see. I have a bottle of wine chilling, and I’ve started your bubble bath running upstairs.…”
“That sounds like bliss.”
“Then come with me, Detective McCabe.”
26
Tuesday, October 29, 2019
Driving into work, McCabe treated herself to the sound stream from Elvis’s 2000 farewell concert in Central Park.
She had been fifteen, watching the monumental event on television.
In her car, fingertips keeping beat on the steering wheel, McCabe belted out “Suspicious Minds,” singing along with the King.
She knew it was a temporary lull. But she intended to enjoy her good mood until she walked through the door of the station house.
And if they were lucky, today they would find the piece that would make sense of three murders.
She was parking her car when she gave in and checked the news.
Perfect timing. The announcer was saying, “This afternoon at four, a memorial service will be held for Margaret Givens, the seventy-eight-year-old victim of a gang homicide that Albany police are currently investigating.…”
McCabe sighed. She would have to leave early enough to attend the memorial.
Would Clarence Redfield turn up, too, so that he could thread about it?
Even if he did, it wouldn’t be the place to question him about his knowledge of the serial murders. Mrs. Givens deserved respect.
She wondered in passing if the mayor would put in an appearance. The mayor had lost no time getting to Ted Thornton’s house to express her sympathy to Greer St. John. Would Mrs. Givens’s family receive the same attention? If the mayor was on her political game, she’d be there. The chief would probably turn up, too.
“Morning, partner,” Baxter said.
“I thought I was early. You beat me in.”
“Wanted to see if Research had sent anything on the names we gave them.”
“I added another query about Clarence Redfield last night,” McCabe said. She dropped her jacket on her chair back and reached for her coffee mug. “I got my dad to look through his notes from 2010. It turns out Clarence Redfield made the newspaper that year.”
“What’d he do?”
McCabe told him about the lawsuit. “So the question is, what happened to Redfield’s wife and baby? Was it another incompetent doctor, or something else?”
“And you think that might be related to our case?”
“No idea,” McCabe said. “But we won’t know until we look.”
The report that they received on Redfield later that morning contained all of the information that Research had been able to generate from an array of sources.
“Here’s the answer to your query,” Baxter said, highlighting that section on the wall. “‘Wife suffered traumatic brain injury as the result of a fall. Emergency surgery left her brain-dead.’”
“‘Twenty-one-week fetus in distress,’” McCabe read. “‘Delivered by C-section. Did not survive.’”
“And Redfield made the decision to remove his wife from life support and allow her organs to be harvested,” Baxter said. “That must have been tough.”
“Yeah,” McCabe said. “But I wonder how she came to fall.”
“Read farther down. Says here that she fell from a stepladder in the nursery and struck her head. Redfield said she was ha
nging a mobile. He was asleep, heard the crash. Found her on the floor.”
“Looks like it happened at around ten-thirty in the morning. Why was he still in bed? Oh, wait, here it is. He said he’d been working late at the office the night before.”
“And she tried to put up the mobile by herself while he was asleep.”
McCabe said, “It sounds like a tragic accident.”
“But you’re wondering if it wasn’t?”
“Redfield makes me wonder about a lot of things. He’s an odd duck, as my dad would say. Let’s go through the rest of the report from Research and see if we can find justification for an interview.”
“And if we do and drop by his place rather than bringing him in here—”
“We might be able to get a foot in the door and see what we can see.”
* * *
“Now, this is interesting,” Baxter said.
“You’ve found something?” McCabe asked, turning from the display of documents that she had been searching.
“Another connection to Teddy.”
McCabe ducked behind her desk and sat down. “Okay, I’m ready. What connection does Clarence Redfield have to Ted Thornton?”
“Indirect and almost buried in the fine print, but someone in Research must have remembered that we’d also asked about Ted Thornton.”
“What’s the connection?” McCabe asked.
“After he moved back to Albany in 2015, Redfield worked as an independent consultant for a company that was a subcontractor for one of Thornton’s companies.”
“So, let me get this straight. The company that Redfield worked for had a contract with one of Thornton’s companies.”
“You’ve got it.”
“Is Redfield still working for the company?”
“No, his contract with them ended a couple of years ago.”
“About the time his wife died.”
Baxter sent the document he was looking at to the wall. “See this? Redfield was working on his last contract with the company when his wife died. In fact, the company submitted a bid to Thornton the morning that Redfield’s wife died.”
“So that must have been why he was working late the night before.”
“And then he came home and went to bed. And while he was asleep, his wife fell from a ladder—”
“And she died and so did their baby,” McCabe said.
Baxter sat down on the edge of his desk. “Wanna bet Thornton isn’t one of Redfield’s favorite people?”
“But,” McCabe said, “we still have a big gap between that and three women being murdered.”
“One of the women was Vivian Jessup. She and Thornton—”
“But if Redfield were getting revenge on Thornton for … at least in his mind … being responsible for his wife’s death, why not go after Thornton’s current fiancée rather than a woman who might have been Thornton’s lover at some point?”
Baxter said, “And there’s no way to connect any of this to the summer science camp that brought Bethany and Sharon together.”
“Unless…” McCabe stared at the bulletin board across the room, trying to think it through. “Unless Clarence Redfield is connected somehow to that summer science camp.”
“How? We’re pretty sure he wasn’t a teacher there. And Deirdre Chase said she was the only teaching assistant.”
“But we know Redfield was here in Albany in 2010, because he was suing his father’s doctor for malpractice.”
“Right. His first job out of the country was in November 2011. He went to Saudi Arabia. That summer of 2010, his father was in a nursing home, and Redfield was living at home with his mother. He had a job with a local company.”
McCabe stood up and went to the wall work space. “Okay, let’s get the time line up. Redfield attends college in Massachusetts from 2000 to 2004. He comes home for a couple of years. Then he leaves to take his first oil company job.”
Baxter said, “According to Research, the company he was working for here in Albany got hit by the recession and went out of business.”
McCabe nodded. “Okay. So that probably explains why he decided to take the oil company job in October 2006. Then his father is ill, and he comes home. Is here in 2010, when Bethany, Sharon, and Johnnie Mae are attending a summer science camp.”
“So,” said Baxter. “How does Redfield come in contact with two or maybe three little girls at a science camp?”
“If he did come in contact with them. We may really be reaching on this one.”
Baxter shook his head. “I think we’re onto something.”
“Or maybe we just don’t like the guy.”
“Well, we’ve already spent all this time on it, so we may as well finish playing it out.”
“True.” McCabe picked up her mug and went over to the coffee machine. “Okay. Maybe Redfield was a relative of one of the other students.”
“No brothers or sisters,” Baxter said. “And his parents seem to have been only children, too.”
“What about…” McCabe whirled around. “Remember what Deirdre Chase, the teaching assistant, told us? That she and the teacher went out looking for Johnnie Mae. And when they got back to the camp, the director told them that Johnnie Mae’s sister and the sister’s boyfriend had gone to pick Johnnie Mae up. What if Redfield was—”
“The sister’s boyfriend?” Baxter said. “What do we have on Johnnie Mae’s older sister?”
“Anything?” McCabe said, watching him check his screen.
“Research is still trying to pick up the trail after the family left Albany. But we have a name for the sister. Melanie. Melanie Jacobs. She and Johnnie Mae had different fathers.”
“Do we know yet if Johnnie Mae was biracial?” McCabe asked.
“Black father. Melanie’s father was white. So was the mother.”
“So, next question,” McCabe said. “Did Melanie Jacobs and Clarence Redfield know each other when they both lived here in Albany?”
They were twiddling their thumbs and waiting when the lieutenant passed through the bull pen. “You two got nothing to do?” he said.
“We’re waiting on Research, Lou,” McCabe said. “We’ve got this idea about Clarence Redfield.”
“How he might be tied into our serial murder case,” Baxter added.
The lieutenant gestured toward his office. “I want to hear this.”
* * *
They were still in the lieutenant’s office, going over everything they knew about Clarence Redfield, when McCabe received a tag from Research. “They’re both dead,” she said.
“Who?” the lieutenant asked. “We don’t need any more bodies.”
“Johnnie Mae Dupree and her mother. According to Research, they’re both dead. When they left here, the mother and the two daughters went to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The mother opened a craft shop. The shop lost money, until she finally closed. A few weeks after that, Johnnie Mae, who had been enrolled in school, was admitted to a hospital after she passed out in class. She was diagnosed with anorexia. While she was in the hospital being treated, she came down with pneumonia. She died a few days later.”
“So that left the mother and the older sister, Melanie,” Baxter said.
“But the following week, the mother was picked up by the police in a disoriented state. She was taken to a treatment facility. The doctors diagnosed her as bipolar. She was given meds and released. Ten days later, her daughter, Melanie, called nine-one-one. The mother had OD’d on prescription and other drugs. She was DOA by the time they got her to the hospital.”
Lieutenant Dole said, “What happened to the older sister after that? She’s the one you say you’re interested in.”
McCabe shook her head. “Research can’t find any record of her. She walked out of the hospital after her mother died and disappeared. She didn’t even go back to the house they were renting to close it up.”
“Damn,” Baxter said. “Nine years ago, people could still do that. Even with Homeland Security, it was pos
sible just to walk away. Become someone else.”
“Assuming she did,” McCabe said. “For all we know, she may be dead, too.”
“What about her possible link to Redfield?” the lieutenant said. “Anything on that?”
“Not yet. According to Research, she did have a job when the family lived here in Albany. She worked for a telecommunications company. One of the computer techs. But the company moved south back in 2014. Research is trying to contact that personnel department to find out if they can provide any information about her.”
Baxter said, “Which won’t help us much unless she and Redfield crossed path through their jobs.”
Lieutenant Dole said, “Stay on this. The missing sister and Redfield’s connection to Thornton is a lot more promising than anything else we’ve had. If that little shit’s involved somehow—”
“Then we have to give the guy major points for chutzpah,” Baxter said.
27
At noon, McCabe and Baxter decided to go out and get some lunch.
McCabe offered to pay off the bet Baxter had won at the eating place of his choice. As long as he remembered they were dining on a cop’s salary.
“I could go for a really good fish sandwich,” Baxter said. “Let’s see if we can get a table on the barge without shoving anyone off.”
“The barge” was a floating restaurant on the bank of the Hudson River. Today, when the temperature was back in the mid-eighties, with a slight breeze, it was the ideal place for lunch.
They drove along Broadway, passing the massive building that housed the SUNY administrative offices, then through the underpass and along the road that ran parallel to the river.
When Baxter turned into the parking lot, McCabe looked at all the cars. “Well, if we’re lucky, maybe we’ve at least beaten the people who are taking the river walk over.”
Baxter said, “It was bad enough when we just had state workers. Now we’ve got UAlbany’s nanotech operation and the convention center, and getting a table anywhere at noontime is a pain in the ass.”
“You get grouchy when you’re hungry, don’t you?” McCabe said.
Baxter grinned, looking a little sheepish. “Feed me and I’ll stop complaining.”
They waited fifteen minutes for a table, which wasn’t bad, considering.
The Red Queen Dies Page 22
