by Joy Fielding
“Seventy percent,” Jo Lynn repeated, dismissively.
The same was true of the teeth marks that had been etched into the flesh of several of the victims. A mold had been taken of Colin Friendly’s mouth. It closely—but not conclusively—matched the bite marks on the bodies. Traces of saliva left inside the wounds pointed to—but didn’t pinpoint—the accused. Despite this, there was no question in his mind, Dr. Ronald Loring pronounced, but that Colin Friendly had been responsible for the bites on the bodies of the dead girls.
What of the bodies that had decomposed beyond recognition, that were mere collections of bones by the time they were unearthed? the prosecutor asked. How could the doctor tell that these unfortunates had been murdered, let alone murdered by Colin Friendly?
Dr. Loring went into a lengthy discussion of the marvels of forensic medicine, how scientific techniques had become so sophisticated, they could often precisely pinpoint the exact time and cause of a person’s death. He went into considerable detail regarding the methods his department employed. His voice was steady, his delivery dry. I could tell he was losing some of the jury, who looked bleary-eyed, one man’s eyes threatening to close altogether.
“Mumbo jumbo,” Jo Lynn muttered.
Aside from this, there were patterns to the violence that linked the accused to each of his victims, Dr. Loring continued, as the jury and the rest of the courtroom perked up. The women had all been severely beaten, their noses shattered. Multiple stab wounds circled the breasts of the victims, forming horizontal figure eights; the women’s stomachs had been sliced open; they’d been stabbed directly, and repeatedly, through the heart.
The thirteen women Colin Friendly stood accused of killing had been murdered by the same man, the medical examiner concluded. That man was Colin Friendly.
“What a crock,” Jo Lynn pronounced.
I couldn’t help it. Like a hungry fish, I snapped at the bait. “How can you say that? Didn’t you hear anything Dr. Loring said?”
“I heard him say ‘seventy percent,’ not ‘one hundred,’” she snapped back. “I heard ‘closely matched,’ not ‘perfectly matched.’ Just wait till Mr. Archibald gets through with him.”
Mercifully, the judge called a recess for lunch. I watched as Colin Friendly stood up, spoke briefly to his lawyers, then smiled over at Jo Lynn as he was led from the room.
“Hang in there, Colin,” Jo Lynn said, underlining her faith in him with a nod of her head.
“I think I’ve heard enough,” I told Jo Lynn. “Why don’t we call it a day.”
She looked indignant. “What’s the matter? Your boyfriend doesn’t show up, so you’re gonna pick up your marbles and go home?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“That’s the second time today you’ve called me ridiculous. I’m not ridiculous. You’re the one who’s ridiculous, mooning over some guy who dumped you thirty years ago.”
It took every ounce of self-control I had to keep from screaming. Instead, I took several very deep breaths, and grabbed my purse, signaling my intention to leave. Jo Lynn stood back to let me pass, and I stepped into the aisle.
“Excuse me, Miss Baker.”
I turned to see the muscular, fair-haired attorney for the defense approach my sister. He leaned forward, whispered something in her ear, then walked away.
Immediately, we were surrounded by reporters, their cameras clicking wildly, like a gaggle of geese. I lowered my head, kept walking to the door. Jo Lynn followed after me, but slowly enough for the cameras to keep up.
“What did Jake Archibald say to you?” a reporter asked.
“It’s confidential, I’m afraid,” my sister replied, smiling sweetly, lips pursing, eyes slightly downcast. The eternal coquette.
“What exactly is your connection to Colin Friendly?”
“I’m just a friend who’s convinced of his innocence.”
“Even in light of this morning’s evidence?”
“I think evidence can be planted and lab samples can be tainted. The Palm Beach County medical examiner’s office is old and run-down,” she said, subverting what I’d told her to support her case. “Their equipment is hardly state-of-the-art.”
Serves me right, I thought, for confiding anything in her.
“Is Colin Friendly your boyfriend?”
“Really, that’s much too personal.”
“Tell us what Jake Archibald said to you.”
Jo Lynn stopped, smiled at each of the reporters gathered around her, wet her dark red lips for the camera. “Really, guys,” she said, as if these strangers were her best buddies, “you know I’d tell you if I could. Please, bear with me.”
With that, she grabbed hold of my arm and pushed me out into the corridor.
“For God’s sake,” I whispered under my breath, “what were you doing in there?”
“Being polite. Like Mama taught us.” She backed me into a corner, smiled teasingly. “Don’t you want to know what Jake Archibald said to me?”
“No,” I said.
“Liar,” she said. “Go on, ask me.”
I tried to keep silent, but my heart wasn’t in it. In truth, I was desperate to know, and we both knew it. “What did he say?”
Jo Lynn’s smile exploded across her face. “It’s happening,” she said as my body went numb. “Colin Friendly wants to see me.”
Chapter 8
Why don’t you tell me what brought you here.”
The dark-haired, middle-aged woman looked nervously toward her husband, whose eyes were all but glued to his brown Gucci loafers, then back at me. “I’m not sure I know where to begin.” Again, she glanced anxiously at her husband.
“Don’t look at me,” he said without looking up. “I’m not the one who wanted to come here.”
“You didn’t want to come?” I repeated.
“This was her idea.” A dismissive thumb jerked in the direction of his wife.
Lois and Arthur McKay sat across from me, their chairs angling toward opposite walls. They were a handsome couple—tall, immaculately groomed, almost regal in bearing. Probably they’d been breathtaking in their youth, the campus football hero and his beautiful homecoming queen. They’d been married almost thirty years and had three grown children. This was their first visit.
“Why do you think your wife wanted to come here?”
He shrugged. “You’d have to ask her.”
I nodded. “Lois?”
She hesitated, looked around, eyes dropping to the floor. “I guess I’m tired of being ignored.”
“You’re complaining because I play golf and bridge a few times a week?”
“You play golf every day and bridge three times a week.”
“I’m retired. It’s why we moved to Florida.”
“I thought we moved here so we could spend more time together.” Lois McKay took a deep breath, reached for a tissue, said nothing for several seconds. “It’s not just the bridge,” she said finally. “It’s not just the golf.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“About a year ago,” Lois McKay began without further prompting, “I went for my routine yearly physical. The doctor discovered a lump in my right breast. She sent me for a mammogram. To make a long story short, the mammogram showed cancer. I had to have a mastectomy. Ask my husband what he was doing while I was in surgery.”
“This isn’t fair,” her husband protested. “You said you didn’t need me there, that there was nothing I could do at the hospital.”
“Did you want him at the hospital?” I asked.
Lois McKay closed her eyes. “Of course I did.”
“Did you or did you not tell me that I should go play golf?”
“Yes, that’s what I told you.”
“But you didn’t mean it,” I said gently.
“No.”
“What stopped you from telling your husband that you wanted him with you?”
She shook her head. Several tears fell onto her lap, staining the skirt of her
light green suit. “I shouldn’t have to tell him.”
“I’m supposed to read your mind?”
“I wanted him to want to be there,” Lois McKay whispered.
“And you were hurt when he wasn’t.”
She nodded.
“I’m supposed to be a bloody mind reader,” her husband reiterated.
“You’re supposed to be there for me. You’re supposed to care about whether I live or die. You’re supposed to have the common decency to at least visit me in the hospital!”
“You didn’t visit your wife while she was in the hospital?” I asked.
“She knows how I feel about hospitals. I hate the damn things. They make my skin crawl.”
“Ask him the last time he touched me. Ask him the last time we made love.” She continued without pause. “We haven’t made love since before my operation. He hasn’t come near me, not once.”
“You were sick, for God’s sake. First the surgery, then the radiation. You were exhausted. The last thing on your mind was sex.”
“I’m not sick anymore. I’m not tired anymore. I’m just sick and tired of being ignored.” She broke down into sobs. “It’s like I don’t even exist, like when they took off my breast, the rest of me disappeared as well.”
For several seconds, the only movement in the room was the quiet shaking of her shoulders. I turned toward Arthur McKay. He sat absolutely rigid, the muscles in his face pulled tight against his scalp, like a death mask. “Were you scared when you found out your wife had cancer?” I asked.
He glared at me. “Why should I be scared?”
“Because cancer is a scary thing.”
“I know all about cancer. My mother died of cancer when I was a little boy.”
“Were you afraid your wife might die?” I asked.
His eyes flashed anger, his hands forming fists at his sides. He said nothing.
“Did you talk to your wife about how you were feeling?”
“She wasn’t interested in how I was feeling.”
“That’s not true. I tried to talk to you many times.”
“Look, what difference does any of this make?” he said. “It’s all water under the bridge. There’s nothing we can do to change it.”
“What about now?”
“Now?”
“Are you scared now?”
Arthur McKay opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it, said nothing.
“A mastectomy is a lot more complicated than most surgery. The loss of a breast has so many implications. For both partners. How did you feel about your wife’s surgery? How do you feel?” I immediately corrected.
“I don’t know,” Arthur McKay said impatiently.
“I do,” Lois McKay said, wiping at her tears with a fresh tissue. “He’s repulsed by it. By me.”
“Is that true?” I asked. “Are you repulsed by it?”
For one long, horrible second, Arthur McKay said nothing, then: “How am I supposed to feel?”
“How about grateful I’m alive?” Lois snapped.
“I am grateful you’re alive.”
“Grateful but repulsed.”
Another interminable silence. Arthur McKay rose to his feet, began pacing back and forth in front of the window, like a caged tiger in a zoo. “This is just great. Now I’m an even bigger shit than I was before. It didn’t seem possible, did it? You’d think you couldn’t sink much lower than a guy who plays golf while his wife is on the operating table and then doesn’t visit her in the hospital. But hey, we’re just getting started. It seems this guy is actually repulsed by his wife’s surgery. And he knows it’s not going to change. He can’t help the way he feels. And he’s sick and tired of feeling guilty.”
“Losing my breast didn’t make me any less of a woman,” Lois McKay said, tears streaming freely down her cheeks. “It just made you less of a man.”
For several seconds, Arthur McKay stood absolutely still. Then he walked to the door, opened it, and stepped into the hall. The door closed behind him.
I jumped to my feet.
“Let him go,” Lois said quietly, twisting the tissue in her lap.
“We can work through this,” I told her, knowing only a few words were necessary to bring her husband back into the room.
She shook her head. “No. It’s too late. Actually, it’s a relief to finally get it all out in the open.”
“He’s terrified of losing you,” I told her, knowing how strange those words probably sounded in light of the things her husband had said.
“Yes, interestingly enough, I think you might be right,” she agreed, surprising me. “But I don’t think it matters anymore.”
“He may come around.”
“I don’t have that kind of time,” Lois McKay said simply. “Besides, he’s right—he can’t help the way he feels.”
“How do you feel?”
She took a deep breath, the words tumbling out of her mouth as she exhaled, like children tossed from a sled. I could almost see them hit the air. “Hurt. Angry. Afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“The future.” She shrugged. “Assuming I have one.”
“You’ll have one.”
“A fifty-five-year-old woman with one breast?” She smiled, but it was a smile heavy with sadness, like a cloud threatening rain. Before she left, she scheduled a number of other appointments. Just for herself, she stressed. She’d be coming alone.
Moments after she’d left, I was out of my gray suit and into my sweats, marching determinedly on my treadmill. I wondered how I’d feel if faced with the loss of a breast. I wondered if Larry would react the same way as Arthur McKay.
I already knew the answer, at least as far as Larry was concerned. He wouldn’t give a damn about the breast, any more than he would care whether I gained twenty pounds or lost all my hair. We’d met on a blind date in college. Some friends fixed us up. I was very reluctant—dating had never been my strong suit. At almost twenty-one, I was still a virgin, although less by choice, at this point, than by circumstance. I hadn’t had a date in ages. My days were spent in classes, my nights at the library. I went home only as a last resort. I’d go to bed hearing my stepfather’s rants; I’d wake up to my mother’s sobs. I think that’s why I finally agreed to go out with Larry: anything to get out of the house.
We went out for dinner, a small Italian restaurant close to the university campus. He told me later that he fell in love with me that very first night. “Why?” I asked, anticipating a wealth of compliments regarding my eyes, my lips, my towering intellect. “Because you ate everything on your plate,” he answered.
How could I not love him?
There were no games, no pretenses. His kind eyes were an accurate reflection of his generous spirit. I felt safe around him. I knew he’d be good to me, that he’d never intentionally do anything to hurt me. After all the abuse I’d witnessed at home, that was the most important thing to me. Larry was decent and honorable, and as moral a man as I would ever meet. I knew that he would love me no matter what.
I was on my treadmill when the phone rang. Normally, I’d let my voice mail answer it, and I’m not sure why I chose to jump off the treadmill and answer it myself. Probably I thought it was Jo Lynn, who’d taken to calling every day with a breakdown of the day’s events. The prosecutor had spent most of the last week trying to convince the jury of the exactitude of DNA evidence, calling witness after witness to break down and explain the complicated and often tedious procedures involved in its testing. The defense had spent an equal amount of time trying to discredit the claims. Jo Lynn was getting antsy. She still hadn’t met with Colin Friendly, was becoming convinced that there was a conspiracy afoot to keep them apart.
“Family Therapy Center,” I said into the phone.
“May I speak with Kate Sinclair, please?”
“Speaking.”
“Kate Sinclair,” the voice said, “Robert Crowe.”
Immediately my heart started to race and my breathing
became labored, as if I were back on the treadmill.
“Hello? Kate, are you there?”
“Yes,” I said quickly, ashamed and angry at my body’s automatic response to the sound of his voice. Hadn’t I just been waxing rhapsodic about my husband’s strong moral core? Where was my own? “How are you?”
“Great. I missed you in court this morning.”
“You were there?”
“I was. You weren’t.”
“I can only go on Wednesdays.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. I saw your sister.”
“She’s hard to miss.”
“That was an interesting mention she got in the paper the other day. ‘Friendly’s New Friend.’ Catchy little phrase. What’s the real story?”
“There isn’t one.” Was that why he was calling? To get the inside scoop?
“Well, you didn’t miss anything today. The judge adjourned the trial until next week.”
“He did? Why?”
“Apparently Colin has a touch of the flu. Poor baby wasn’t feeling very well, so his lawyers asked for an adjournment. Who knows? Maybe he just needed a break.”
“We could all use a break.” I hoped Colin Friendly would develop pneumonia and die.
“That’s exactly why I’m calling,” Robert said, and I wondered for a moment whether I had missed part of the conversation. “I thought maybe I could take you out to lunch.”
“Lunch?”
“How about next Wednesday? That’s if you can tear yourself away from the courthouse.”
“You want to have lunch?” I repeated, biting down on my tongue to keep from saying it again.
“I have an interesting proposition for you.”
“What kind of proposition?”
“Something I think you’ll like.”
“Are you going to tell me what it is?”
“I will on Wednesday. Where should we meet?”
We agreed on Charley’s Crab over on South Ocean Boulevard. Twelve o’clock noon. I hung up the phone, wondering what the hell I was doing. “Oh God,” I muttered, about to call Robert back, cancel our date, except it wasn’t a date, I reminded myself, deciding I was being silly. It was just lunch. And an interesting proposition. What did that mean? “Guess I’ll find out on Wednesday,” I said, letting go of the phone.
