Above Suspicion

by Sharkey, Joe;

  “But they never said a word till the very end of the interview, when Richard Ray reached into his briefcase and pulled out a pair of gym shorts. ‘These look familiar?’ and I’m sitting there thinking, where in hell did that come from?”

  “Nope,” Mark said truthfully.

  The shorts were among the possessions of Susan’s that Poole had collected from her room at the Landmark after she went missing. They had no bearing on the case.

  “So Ray just put them back into his briefcase. That was his whole contribution to a seven-hour interview,” Huggins recalled with a laugh. “I called it a day. I said, hey guys, anything you’d like to ask Mark? And they agreed, no, you pretty much covered it.

  “And then I told Mark, you know, buddy, there are some problems. There’s some stuff we have to go over. It’s been a long day. Let’s continue in the morning.”

  Mark replied eagerly, “Yes, sir, Jim. I want to get this over with.”

  Huggins, Maynard, and Ray went back to their hotel nearby in Fort Lauderdale, had dinner, and made arrangements to meet in the restaurant early the next morning before going back to the FBI office to question Mark again. That night, Huggins stayed up until dawn, rereading the missing person’s report and jotting down questions to ask Mark the next day. But Huggins now knew that Mark was guilty.

  14

  Kathy was in the kitchen making dinner, monitoring the noises of the kids playing out back near the screened-in porch. From the canal two blocks away, a breeze drifted over neat lawns deep green from spring rains.

  Absently, she glanced up and saw her husband standing mutely on the other side of the breakfast counter, his shoulders slumped and his tie undone. As he peeled off his suit coat and dropped it on a chair, he sagged with weariness. He tugged at his holster and took out the .357, and, to her annoyance, laid it on the breakfast counter. They had an inviolate policy about that gun. It belonged high up, usually on the upper shelf of the bedroom closet, in the back. She scowled at him and placed the gun pointedly atop the refrigerator. When she turned, he was standing right beside her. He took her in his arms and kissed her clumsily.

  “You know I love you.”

  She did, but she hadn’t been hearing it much lately and was curious about why she was hearing it now, with a pot lid rattling on the stove. Laughing uneasily, she moved away and studied his face. His eyes looked sunken; he was pale, as if he hadn’t seen the sun in a year.

  “What’s the matter with you? You look awful.”

  He looked drunk, in fact, but Mark seldom drank, and never more than two beers, and never before coming home from work.

  He sat her down and tried to guide her into a channel he knew was soon going to become deep and fast. “They came down to interview me today. It went on for a long time, all day after lunch. I’m a little worried.”

  Susan, again. So they’d finally come down from Pikeville. She and Mark had discussed the possibility that he would be questioned, especially with the first anniversary of Susan’s disappearance approaching. Cops got nervous when anniversaries passed without results. Poole had been calling with the play-by-play every week or so. Kathy wouldn’t talk to him, but she could tell by Mark’s clouded expression when Poole was discussing Susan. Kathy knew that Shelby was making noise. So fine, she thought. She was sick of the innuendo and gossip. She was sick of Poole’s constant probing. She had warned Mark that Susan was trouble, yet there was no satisfaction in being right. All she wanted was for Susan to be out of her life.

  “The thing with Susan?” she ventured warily.

  “Yeah.”

  “Has she turned up?”

  “No. That’s what they wanted to interview me about.”

  “Mark, who came to interview you?”

  They had gone in to sit on the couch in the living room. “The FBI’s been getting into the investigation,” he said. “A guy named Jim Huggins from the Lexington office. He came down, and so did Richard Ray and Paul Maynard.” She could see he was holding back.

  She had met Richard Ray. He was always on the big cases. She also knew that Ray would lock up his granny if he had evidence, and she did not like the idea that the Kentucky State Police, who were so cheap that a man on a stakeout couldn’t even put in for a cheap motel room and was expected to catch a nap in his car, had sent detectives all the way to Florida for what should have been a mere formality of a phone interview.

  Kathy felt her anger rise. In fact, if it hadn’t been after office hours, she would have got into the car and gone right to Miami to let Mark’s boss have a piece of her mind over what she regarded as an example of stupid harassment of an officer who had done his job well under difficult circumstances and deserved to be left alone to continue doing that job. The bureau questioning Mark was one thing. She welcomed that as a way to finally clear the air and put Pikeville behind them. But the Kentucky State Police? What business was this of theirs?

  She said, exasperated, “Richard Ray is handling this investigation?”

  “Yeah.” Mark got up unsteadily and trudged up the stairs to change.

  Later, after watching Mark talk to the kids with forced animation and pick listlessly at a late dinner, she put Danielle and little Mark to bed and came down feeling it was time for her to step in and put an end to the nonsense. She had, in fact, already spoken with Terry Hulse about what she regarded as the whining in Pike­ville over Mark’s deeply misunderstood relationship with Susan. The more she thought about it, the more infuriated she was at the idea that her husband should be put in the humiliating position of being questioned by a pair of hillbillies from the Kentucky State Police who couldn’t even find a missing person.

  She and Mark had finally gotten things back on track. Their marriage, she felt, had begun to renew itself in Florida, despite the lingering distractions from Pikeville. Mark had been asked to become a supervisor. Things should be going beautifully. Too much was at stake for her to let them continue pushing him around.

  “Mark, you are just too trusting,” she said in the sternly reproachful tone she used when she thought his good nature overwhelmed his good sense. “Tomorrow morning, I want you to call in and tell them you’ll be a few hours late. You stay with the kids. I’m going down to the office first thing in the morning. They’re going to hear me out before this goes on any further.”

  He didn’t object, and he didn’t ask her what she was going to say. She figured he was so beaten down from it that he didn’t care.

  He went out to run. When he returned, he found her out back smoking in the darkness of the porch. He pulled up a lawn chair and sat facing her.

  She pressed her palms against his hot cheeks. “Is there anything you haven’t told me about, Mark? No matter what, we’ll work it out.”

  He felt tears again. He broke eye contact. He tried to force himself to tell her everything.

  “No,” he said. “There’s nothing else.” Across the stockade fence, the neighbors’ electronic bug-zapper crackled and went quiet.

  “Do you remember when the windshield broke in the rental car?” he asked after a minute.

  “Mark, what does that have to do with it?”

  “Well, if they ask you any questions about that, I just wanted you to know that it wasn’t a piece of coal that fell off a truck and broke that window. Remember that’s what I told you?”

  She only vaguely remembered. It was nearly a year ago, after all. He had phoned from Pikeville, worried that the car rental company was going to make him pay for the goddamned windshield, cracked by a chunk of coal bouncing off a truck, a common enough occurrence on the mountain highways. The kind of Boy Scout earnestness Mark conveyed in that phone call was one of the few things that truly irritated Kathy about her husband. Here he was, a G-man, worried that a rental agency would yell at him for an accident. She had suggested to him that he simply return the car and tell them how the windshield got crac
ked. It was the last she’d thought of the matter until now.

  “I just wanted you to know that that’s not how that happened,” Mark said, pressing on. “The windshield didn’t break the way I told you it did.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?” she said, gesturing impatiently, as if to dismiss the topic.

  “Do you remember when I smashed my hand?”

  That was the same trip. Cleaning the garage, a nail. Two weeks later, when he got back to Florida, his hand was badly swollen, gashed across the knuckles. He thought he’d broken a finger, but it was healing. Hard-charging Mark was always banging something up, on the job or at home doing chores. Of course she remembered.

  “Well, I said it was a piece of coal off a truck because I was worried about what you would say,” Mark continued deliberately. “The truth is, I was working in the garage, and after I snagged my hand, I got mad and kicked the windshield of the car. That’s how it really got cut. I didn’t want to tell you that because you would think, how could he be so stupid? What if the insurance company makes us pay for the damage? I didn’t want you to worry. If you go down there tomorrow, they’ll probably ask you some questions about the windshield, and I want you to know what really happened.”

  A warning bell went off in Kathy’s head. She realized that she was not the first person today to hear this incidental piece of information, this adjustment, from Mark. “Did you tell them that when they interviewed you today?” she asked sharply.

  Uneasily, he replied, “Yeah, I did.”

  “Jesus, Mark! What are you telling them about something like that for? Why did you even mention the goddamn windshield? Don’t you realize how that makes you look? How could you be so stupid? What does that have to do with anything?” She folded her arms, simmering.

  “Because Kathy, they think I had Susan in the car and I took her head and smashed it into the windshield.”

  The bluntness of the statement stunned her. Not even Shelby was saying anything quite like that. Kathy tried to analyze the situation. If, God forbid, Susan was dead, if she had actually turned up dead, it would be reasonable for the authorities to question Mark, since he had been so close to her. Fine, she thought. He should tell them what he knows and that will be the end of it. Why was he compounding the equation? Why in the world was he babbling about the goddamn windshield?

  He got up to pace, and she knew he was looking not at her but somewhere out into the darkness. “They wanted to know about my activities that week,” he explained wanly. “I have to tell them everything that happened as it happened.” He explained that after the meeting with Ray and Maynard, he dug the car rental agreement out of his travel voucher file and gave it to Huggins.

  “This is totally out of hand!” Kathy shouted, her almond eyes flashing. “You’re fueling this yourself now!” She stormed into the house, letting the screen door slam behind her, and went to bed.

  As she lay there, many bad thoughts barged into her mind. The night he returned to Florida from Pikeville, it was clear that his hand had been very badly cut. Now she thought: A nail? A nail? Closing her eyes tight, she fought to expel her misgivings. But the misgivings intruded. The morning after he had got back from Pikeville, almost a year earlier, she had walked into the bathroom as he was stepping out of the shower. There were purple scratch marks on his neck. “They’re from crawling under a truck when we were wrapping up the chop-shop audit out there in the hills,” he explained. But she wondered, those scratches must have been pretty deep to be still showing.

  An hour later, she was awake and fuming when he climbed into bed next to her. There were things she did not understand, and Kathy was a person who demanded clarity. She lay pointedly on the far side of her half of the mattress so their bodies did not touch. For a long time, neither of them spoke.

  Grinding her teeth, Kathy decided to take charge, though she was uncertain about what she was taking charge of. She thought, I am goddamned if this nonsense is going to continue. We worked hard to get where we wanted to be—that Pikeville nightmare was supposed to be behind us. Finally, still without acknowledging her husband’s presence, she drifted off to a fitful sleep.

  The next morning when he went down to breakfast at the hotel Huggins was surprised to find Maynard sitting alone in a booth.

  “Where’s Richard? He’s running late?” Huggins asked.

  “No, he’s on a plane. He left early to rush back to Pikeville,” Maynard said.

  “What? Why?”

  “He said he was having stuff done around his house and there was a message that they were delivering concrete today, so he had to get be back.”

  Huggins shrugged and thought, Why in hell would a guy leave when this has to be the biggest case of his life, to make sure some guy delivers concrete? But he didn’t press the matter as he and Maynard drove to the office, where Tubergen met them with a worried look.

  “Kathy Putnam is in my office,” he said.

  Brimming with indignation early that morning, Kathy had gulped down a cup of coffee and drove to the FBI offices, which were housed in a nondescript modern office building just off the interstate in North Miami Beach. Even agents’ wives are required to show identification, so she brusquely dropped her driver’s license on the reception desk and stated her business with a cool succinctness that struck the receptionist as arrogance. “I’m Kathy Putnam, Special Agent Mark Putnam’s wife. And I’m here to see Mr. Huggins.” The receptionist picked up a phone, murmured a few words into it, and asked Kathy to take a seat.

  As she waited, she had studied the agency’s seal on the wall between the two mahogany doors leading into the inner offices and snorted quietly at the slogan depicted on a banner beneath the scales of justice: FIDELITY—BRAVERY—INTEGRITY. We’ll see about that, she thought. Above the seal, a video surveillance camera peered obtrusively into the reception area, recording on a tape that no one would ever watch.

  After a few minutes, the door to the left opened and a man who looked to be in his fifties appeared with a hand extended and one foot planted on the reception-area rug. He introduced himself as Roy Tubergen and asked her in with a cordial flourish. It was the first time they had met. Kathy shook his hand briskly and got right to the point. She saw no need under the circumstances to play the role of the prim careerist wife or waste time with a man who probably didn’t have a clue about what had gone on in Kentucky.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Tubergen, but I came here to see Jim Huggins. I want to see Huggins, and I want to see that state trooper from Kentucky.”

  Tubergen was behind his desk, an immense glass-topped expanse on which he displayed a spray of miniature flags in a planter. Tubergen’s hands were folded casually beneath parchment-stiff cuffs and squarely fastened with shiny silver links. Teeth gleaming, he smiled at his visitor, who sat erect in a chair placed carefully just to the side of the desk. A plush dark carpet and billowing tropical plants required only the accompaniment of a lazy wood blade ceiling fan to complete the impression of a concierge station at a first-class Moroccan hotel.

  “I know you’re upset, and I know Mark’s upset,” he said with studied sympathy. “Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?”

  By this point, Kathy had no use for pleasantries. “Listen. I want to talk to them, not to you. As far as I’m concerned, the bureau owes me right now. I went through hell in Kentucky. I slept with a gun for this agency. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to be jerked around or let you do what you’re trying to do to my husband. I’m sorry!”

  “I’m really sorry that you’re upset like this,” Tubergen said, assuming that her tears were about to arrive. His hand brushed at the handkerchief peeping out from his breast pocket.

  But her brown eyes flashed anger instead. “No, you don’t seem to understand. This is not a matter of my being upset. When an agent’s name—Mark’s name—is thrown out in the way it obviously has been
in Kentucky, the FBI should have been all over it before it escalated to the point where my husband’s integrity was on the line. I have never seen my husband like this. And now they are questioning him? I am here with information that should have been included in this investigation a long time ago, and I want it straightened out. I demand to be interviewed. The FBI is going to hear me.” Her chin was set.

  Tubergen had had only a short time to prepare himself for the prospect of an agent under his supervision being the possible target of a criminal investigation. He had taken no time at all to anticipate an assault from that agent’s wife. However, a career in the federal bureaucracy had prepared him with the requisite etiquette. “Let me get Mr. Huggins for you.”

  Tubergen vacated his office with relief and found Huggins with his office door closed. He was well aware that Kathy had arrived.

  “Kathy Putnam wants to talk, and I am glad she is talking to you and not me because she is pissed,” Tubergen told Huggins, who stood, buttoned his coat, smoothed his tie, and waited for Tubergen to bring her in.

  Huggins later recalled, “I’m thinking, what a great way to start off what is going to be an awful day. So Roy brings her in and she’s friendly at first: ‘Mr. Huggins, I am Kathy Putnam and there’s some things I want to talk to it talk to you about.’ For about two minutes she was cordial while she built up a head of steam.”

  “Where is Richard Ray?” she said.

  “He had to go back to Pikeville this morning,” Huggins told her.

  She let loose on Ray, accusing him of many things that were new to Huggins. “That no good son of a bitch Richard Ray doesn’t have the balls to face me?”