The Spire

by Richard North Patterson

  Standing, Taylor went back into the house. Darrow followed her with his eyes, then became aware that Farr was watching him watch his daughter, his own expression thoughtful and enigmatic.

  AFTER LIGHTING A candle, Taylor poured three glasses of chardonnay, then distributed slices of pepperoni pizza. “So,” she asked Darrow, “what did the prosecutor say Steve’s motive was?”

  “He didn’t,” Darrow said. “Your dad makes a good argument that people in extremity are capable of the worst. But the Steve Tillman I knew was never abusive to women or aggressive toward anyone off the football field. And Farragher found no one to say otherwise. That makes strangling Angela a pretty startling anomaly.

  “You asked how I would have defended Steve. After raising reasonable doubt, I’d have hammered on motive, then tried to find an alternative suspect. If Nordlinger had done that with any plausibility, my guess is that they’d have acquitted Steve.”

  Farr did not touch his pizza. “What I keep returning to,” he said slowly, “is that two courts of appeals upheld the guilty verdict.”

  “True,” Darrow answered. “But Nordlinger lost the appeal by screwing up the trial. Appellate courts don’t reopen the evidence. They just review the record before them—in this case, one made by a skilled prosecutor and a lousy defense lawyer, perhaps an impaired one. And judges don’t like finding lawyers inadequate. Even—and this is an actual death-penalty appeal in Texas—a drunk who slept through his client’s trial. If there was enough evidence to keep Steve in jail, they don’t care what the trial was like. And there was enough evidence—barely.”

  Farr stared at the flickering candle. “Then perhaps there’s nothing for it,” he said at length. “I’m sorry, Mark. But I can’t help thinking about all you’re facing in the here and now, and all the board and alumni expect you to do for Caldwell. If they sense you’ve been distracted from that, they’ll never understand the reason.”

  Darrow felt nettled, perhaps because he saw the truth of this. “I don’t expect them to,” he answered. “And they won’t have to. I’ll do the job I came to do. But two years ago, Lionel, life conspired to give me some spare time. So instead of reading bedtime stories to a two-year-old boy, I’m reading trial transcripts.

  “I was once a criminal lawyer, and Steve Tillman was once my friend. Knowing he’ll die in prison after a trial like this one gives me a restless conscience.”

  Taylor, Darrow noticed, had become pensive. She remained so throughout dinner.

  13

  I

  N THE EARLY-MORNING LIGHT, DARROW STOOD BY HIS mother’s untended grave.

  Oak Hill Cemetery was quiet. A few robins chirped; the damp overgrown grass had a fresh day’s sheen of newness. NEILA DARROW, the headstone read, WIFE OF GEORGE, MOTHER OF MARK. No one knew George Darrow’s whereabouts. Steve Tillman’s parents had paid for the marker; they knew better than to make more elaborate claims.

  “Well,” Darrow said softly. “I’m back.”

  But she would not have known him. Even in his teens she barely did; the insanity that enveloped her made her perceptions a distorted mirror. And the Mark Darrow gazing at her worn headstone was, as he had acknowledged to Taylor, his own invention—even Darrow’s erudition of speech, a departure from his plainspoken youth, was derived from listening to Lionel Farr, and summer nights spent reading the books Farr suggested. Neila had given him life and, Darrow profoundly hoped, little else: her last years had frightened him almost as much as how she had chosen to end them. Surely he had transcended her madness, her terrible dissociation from others.

  But only Neila had a son.

  Enough, he told himself. The past was done. He would spend this day, then whatever days fate gave him, as best he could.

  He went to meet Fred Bender.

  SITTING BESIDE BENDER on the bench where they had first met, Darrow had the ironic perception that—despite his credo, and by his own acts—his past had resumed tugging at his present.

  Bender smoked a Camel. His once-red hair was steel gray; the mottled skin of his face was so close to the bone that it evoked a mummy. But the seen-it-all cop’s eyes staring from this weathered carapace remained a clear and lucid blue.

  “President Darrow,” he commented wryly. “Who knew.”

  “Who indeed. It’s ‘Mark,’ by the way. Like on the day you questioned me.”

  Bender took a drag, then exhaled. “A long time now.”

  “A long, safe time. Thanks to you, in part.”

  As two female students passed by, laughing, Bender watched with the air of a silent guardian. “More thanks to Lionel Farr. The campus security plan he designed has stood the test of years. Phones every hundred yards, a buddy system, and monitors at campus entry points.”

  “The technology’s different,” Darrow pointed out.

  “True. Now we use computers to warn students of any problems and remind them of what they shouldn’t do—drinking too much or tearing up their dorms. But we still deal with our issues in-house. Parents don’t send their kids here so we can turn them over to the Wayne police.” He gave a faintly sarcastic laugh. “No matter how many FBI training courses Garrison sends them to.

  “What’s different is that Caldwell’s stopped being a sanctuary for bad behavior. Angela Hall’s murder started with drugs and alcohol. Now we bust kids for public intoxication, conduct periodic sweeps for drugs, monitor fraternity parties, discipline underage kids for going to places like the Alibi Club, and let outsiders like Carl Hall know that they’re not welcome here. All that’s Lionel’s doing—the Hall murder hit him hard. I just oversee things.”

  Darrow gazed up at the Spire. “How’d you come to take the job?” he inquired. “With all that Lionel’s done, seems like Caldwell might be too quiet.”

  Bender took a ravenous puff, flicking ashes off his sport coat. “After the Tillman trial was done, he approached me about coming here. Farr’s pitch was pretty much the same, I guess, as the one he just gave you—you can have all the systems you want in place, but it’s people who inspire confidence. Even with the school’s fiscal crunch, he dangled more money than I was making, then sold the idea to Durbin.” He paused, adding softly, “Who knew about him, either.

  “Anyhow, I came here. Since then we’ve had a couple of assaults, a few brawls, and our share of petty theft. But no rapes in sixteen years. And, thank God, no murders.”

  “Seems like Lionel and you made my job a little easier.”

  Bender shrugged. “Lionel Farr is a leader. Guess he’s been one since he left West Point. Hope you can do as well.”

  Darrow found that Bender’s awe of Farr both nettled and amused him. “That’s what I’m praying for,” he answered mildly. “I still can’t walk on water, but I’m learning how to skate.”

  Eyeing Darrow anew, Bender gave a hollow chuckle. “Somehow I think you’ll do just fine. So what else can I do for you?”

  Fred Bender was no fool, Darrow reminded himself. “I know it’s ancient history. But Steve Tillman was my closest friend, and being here brings all that back. Especially because I helped put him where he is—”

  “Tillman,” Bender interrupted harshly, “put himself there—not you, and not us. We just followed his bread crumbs.”

  “Mind if we talk about that?”

  “You’re the boss. Anything in particular?”

  “Several things. I’m curious about what you did after you questioned me.”

  Bender ground out the cigarette butt on the sidewalk, then tossed it into a metal trash bin, a smoker retrained. “We started wondering about you—it wouldn’t be the first time the real killer dropped the dime on somebody else. So we sent George Garrison to the DBE house to ask about what you did the night before.” He paused, then added with satiric wonder, “George Garrison as chief is another ‘who knew.’ But George more or less cleared you. By then we’d been to Tillman’s room.”

  As though reverting in time, Darrow felt events closing around his friend. “How was he?”r />
  Bender lit another cigarette. “Seemed pretty fucked up. His room sure was—broken lamp, sheets half off his bed, drink glasses on the floor, a trace of white powder on his desk. With the naked eye I could see come stains on the mattress, a couple of dark hairs on the pillow that didn’t look like his. Even before we brought in the forensics people, you could feel that something might have happened in that room.”

  Darrow tried to envision this. “Think we can take a look?”

  Bender appraised him, then shrugged. “Why not—I’ve got the keys. The walk will give me time to finish off my smoke.”

  DARROW AND BENDER stood at the base of the football field. Inserting a key, Bender gave the door a savage jerk, and then Darrow stepped into his own past.

  The entryway was barren, the lights dim, the tile as scuffed and worn as he remembered. Turning to his right, he walked through the bleak corridor toward Steve Tillman’s room, as the young Mark Darrow had countless times before.

  The door was unlocked. Pushing it open, Darrow found—in place of the bed and desk and posters summoned by his mind’s eye—a storeroom jammed with ancient audiovisual equipment. Memory plays tricks, Darrow reflected—the room was smaller than he remembered. Stale air filled his nostrils. Darrow’s stomach felt sour.

  “Different,” Bender observed. “No one’s lived here since she died here.”

  The thought haunted him, Darrow found. Drawing a breath, he sat on a giant loudspeaker that lay sideways, gazing through the open door. Arms folded, Bender leaned against the cinder-block wall. “Bring back memories?”

  “I’m more interested in yours. Remind me of what the crime lab found.”

  “A lot of what I already knew. The sperm was Tillman’s; the hairs, Angela’s. Two glasses contained traces of rum and Coke; the powder turned out to be cocaine.”

  “What about fingerprints?”

  “Yup. His and hers, each on one of the glasses.”

  Pensive, Darrow tried to imagine Steve and Angela’s drunken arrival and, crediting Steve’s story, her mystifying departure. Once more his eyes lit on the doorway. “What about on the doors?” he asked. “Both to the dorm and to Steve’s room. On the outside and the inside.”

  Bender’s eyes glinted. “Let me see if I follow you. The lab might well find Tillman’s prints on both sides of those doors or doorknobs—after all, he came and went all the time. But not Angela. Her prints on the inside of either door might suggest she’d left here still alive. You’re wondering if we thought of that, and what we might have found.”

  “All these years, Fred, and you’re still ahead of me.”

  Bender smiled without humor. “Yes, we thought of that. And no, she left no prints on the inside of either door. Finding prints is hit or miss. But we found no evidence that she’d left this room alive. Unless you count Tillman’s illogical story.”

  “You said he was ‘fucked up.’ Does that mean disoriented?”

  “Maybe that. He still seemed drunk to me, like he couldn’t compute what was happening. His account was Swiss cheese—he claimed to remember almost nothing. But he had a small-town boy’s manner: open, respectful of authority, hoping you’d like him. You didn’t want to believe how things were beginning to look for him.”

  “But you did believe it.”

  Bender’s eyes narrowed slightly. “In other words, did we consider other suspects or just take the easy way out.”

  “Not my question,” Darrow answered. “All I know is that Angela was killed on Saturday and Farragher charged Steve with murder the following Thursday.”

  “That’s Farragher. For our part we worked around the clock, interviewing anyone who might know anything at all—Angela’s friends, the other kids at the party, her mother, her scumbag of a brother. Joe Betts, you already know about.

  “Our big focus was Angela Hall herself. You had to figure she’d been strangled for a reason. So we went all over her life and anything she’d left behind—her room, her calendar, her medical records, her checkbook. We even tracked down an old boyfriend whose name we found on a postcard, and delved into their sex life.” He took out the pack of cigarettes. “Before you ask, she left no scratches on his back. Or so he claimed.”

  Bender, Darrow saw, could track his thoughts with ease. “What about her academics?” Darrow asked. “Any changes?”

  “We looked for that, too. We checked out her files and talked to her professors for the last couple of semesters—including Farr, who also ran the committee that reauthorized her scholarship every year. We found no sign of trouble, and nobody thought different. In fact, I seem to recall her grades were on the rise.”

  Stymied, Darrow sifted his impressions of Angela. “At the party, she seemed troubled to me—like drinking was an act of self-obliteration. Was there a hint of any new problems in her life?”

  For an instant, Bender hesitated. “We couldn’t be sure. Her mother said she’d started going out in the middle of the night—one A.M., two A.M. College kids do that. But this was new for her, Mom said, and Angela wouldn’t tell her where or why.”

  Darrow felt his nerve ends tingle. “Did you ever figure it out?”

  Bender frowned. “No. We looked for suggestions of a drug problem, or even that she’d turned to hooking. No evidence of either—she seemed like a different proposition than her brother.”

  “And yet she’d started leaving at nights, and never saying why. Did you ever find anyone who’d admitted seeing her?”

  “Nobody. That seemed to haunt her mother.” Reaching into the pack of Camels, Bender began fidgeting with an unlit cigarette. “According to Mom, when Angela was younger she’d kept a diary hidden beneath her mattress. Her mother thought that she still did, though she swore she’d never read it. That was hard to believe—my wife sure as hell would have. But the woman was absolutely torn up—if she’d read the diary, she kept saying, maybe she could have saved her daughter.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Grief and helplessness. Anyhow, we never found a diary. Wish we had. But we couldn’t chase after something that might never have existed—or if it did, might not have told us anything of value. Whichever one, sure as hell the murderer didn’t make it disappear.”

  “Did you ask her brother about it?”

  “Yup. He gave us nothing: no diary, no boyfriends, except maybe Tillman. We had to lean on him about his drug dealing to even get him to talk about his murdered sister. All we got was what we already knew: that Carl was a greedy little shit. Which he still is, only now he’s a prosperous little shit.” Bender’s lips compressed. “Too bad. What with his dislike of whites and his connections with bad people, I thought he might have something to do with her murder. That would have suited me fine.”

  Darrow considered this. “Where’d Carl go after the party?”

  “Home, he said. To bed. We never found out different.”

  “Just like Joe Betts,” Darrow observed. “That’s how he got to be a witness. While we’re here, mind if we look at his room?”

  For a moment, Bender watched Darrow’s eyes. Then he shrugged. “Why not,” he answered. “If we open that window, I can smoke this cigarette.”

  14

  D

  ARROW AND BENDER LEANED OUT THE WINDOW OF JOE Betts’s old room on the second floor, Bender smoking, Darrow watching a few summer students, clad in shorts and T-shirts, taking the pathways that radiated from the Spire. Shadowed by trees, its base was barely visible—the distance, Farr had calculated, was roughly two hundred yards. Darrow tried to imagine the scene on the night of Angela’s murder.

  “Exactly where,” he asked Bender, “did Joe say he saw Steve?”

  Bender pointed to a spot a few feet from the entrance. Gazing down, Darrow observed, “Seems like you’d mostly see the top of someone’s head. There weren’t any outdoor lights then, right?”

  “Just by the door itself.”

  “And the moon?”

  “Full.” Bender took a drag, exhaling the smoke away
from Darrow. “Muhlberg and I tried it two nights later, and I could make out who he was. It helped that I knew him. But Betts knew Tillman, too.”

  Darrow turned to him. “But if Steve was close enough to identify, Joe couldn’t know which direction he was coming from—let alone that he was returning from the Spire. For all Joe knew, Steve could have been outside throwing up.”

  “No upchuck in the grass,” Bender said tersely. “Or footprints we could trace to anyone—the ground was semi-frozen. As I said, we were thorough.”

  “But thanks to Joe you had your murderer?”

  Bender did not react to this. Instead, he asked, “Back then, how well did you know Joe Betts?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Did you like him?”

  Darrow parsed his feelings, then and now, conscious of their implications. “It depended on the moment. And whether he’d been drinking.”

  Bender flicked an ash. “Really? Betts was more or less sober when we found him. And I still thought he was a dick.”

  Surprised, Darrow asked, “How so?”

  “He had attitude—not like Tillman at all. Betts was an East Coast kid, a preppy out of some rich suburb in Connecticut. We still get them at Caldwell—too lazy as students to make the Ivy League, thinking they’re above whatever team they’re playing on.” Bender’s tone was flat. “That was Joe Betts—he thought just getting born had made him better than anyone. That was his attitude toward us.”

  “Still, he gave you Tillman.”

  With a thin smile, Bender rejoined, “At first he gave us nothing. Based on what you’d told us, we started by asking him about the party. He refused to talk. Next thing we knew, his uncle had the kid lawyered up—a criminal defense specialist out of Columbus, expensive and smart. The lawyer kept him on ice for twenty-four hours, refusing to let us take a polygraph or meet with Betts at all.

  “Finally, we let it drop to your old coach that Betts was looking good for the crime—a little psychology, to loosen Betts up. Like we knew he would, Coach Fiske passed the word. That was when Betts and his lawyer decided to give up Tillman.”