The Spire

by Richard North Patterson

“I was wondering why Farr wasn’t prosecuted.”

  “The army was set to bring charges. Then both women retracted their stories. It seemed clear they’d been intimidated, but neither would say so. Without them a court-martial was pointless.” Rotner’s tone contained a quiet awe. “The army threatened Farr with prosecution anyhow, hoping to compel his resignation. Farr called their bluff. What’s plain is that the man had the nerve of a cat burglar, completely without fear.

  “In the end, all the army could do was arrange an administrative separation, effectively burying the reasons. The only trace of what must have happened is the file on my desk. To the rest of the world, Lionel Farr was just a war-weary soldier, like so many others in those times.”

  “He’s not like the others,” Darrow said quietly. “He’s much more remarkable.”

  “And much more dangerous,” Rotner said. “According to these files, he must be in his sixties. But he’s not someone who’s passive when cornered. Be cautious, Mark.”

  Darrow promised he would.

  FOR THE NEXT few minutes, Darrow thought of many things: the moment when Farr offered to change his life, Farr kneeling beside Angela’s body, Farr helping Durbin take charge of Caldwell’s response, Farr promising his help on the day the police arrested Steve Tillman. But Darrow’s mind kept returning to Taylor, both the child and the woman.

  Picking up the telephone, he called Carly Simmons again. “Got your message,” she said brusquely. “But the dead have their ways of demanding my attention. You’d think they’d be more patient than the living.”

  On another day, Darrow might have laughed. “I’ll make it quick,” he said in an apologetic tone. “Fifteen years ago, would an unattended death in Wayne County have automatically triggered an autopsy?”

  “Automatically?” Simmons sounded mildly amused. “We certainly autopsied Angela Hall.”

  “This isn’t about Angela. My question pertains to a woman in her mid-forties with a history of heart disease.”

  “You’ve sure got a wide-ranging curiosity,” Simmons said dryly. “In the case you describe, it depends. Back then the old doctor who’d come out and sign the death certificate, Rodney Harrison, might not have called for an autopsy. Especially if he knew the woman and her history and nothing seemed amiss.”

  Darrow’s mouth felt dry. “One last question. If you wanted to kill someone in her sleep and leave no trace, how would you do it?”

  “Last time I did that,” Simmons replied in a quietly caustic tone, “I used a pillow. Of course, an autopsy would give you the cause of death. But there’s a good chance nothing would be apparent to the naked eye.” More sharply, she said, “Mind telling me what this is all about?”

  “I will,” Darrow promised. “Just not yet.”

  “Then let me get back to my corpses, Mr. Darrow. They’re generally more informative.”

  Darrow thanked her. Without putting down the telephone, he called Taylor on her cell. “Where are you?” he asked.

  Taylor sounded puzzled. “My dad’s house. Working on my dissertation.”

  “Stay there,” he said. “I’m coming over.”

  10

  T

  AYLOR MET HIM AT THE DOOR, HER FACE DRAWN FROM LACK of sleep. Her voice anxious, she asked, “What’s wrong, Mark?”

  He brushed past her, tense as she, glancing around the living room. “Where’s Lionel?”

  “At work.” She paused. “It’s not even four o’clock.”

  He turned to her. “I want you out of here. Pack up what you need.”

  She folded her arms, visibly striving for a deliberate calm, her eyes flecked with doubt and worry. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “Later.”

  “Now,” she said tightly. “Is this about my father?”

  Darrow made himself pause, searching for words. “And your mother,” he said. “Do you remember if she had an autopsy?”

  Taylor stared at him. She could not seem to move. “Why are you asking?”

  Silent, Darrow placed his hands on her shoulders. For a moment, she looked into his face. Then, haltingly at first, Taylor began speaking.

  THE WHITE-HAIRED DOCTOR stood with her father by her mother’s bed, touching Anne Farr’s wrist. Taylor watched from the doorway, gazing at her mother’s lifeless face, a ghastly yellow in the light through her bedroom window. In a dispassionate tone, the old man said, “I’m sorry, Lionel. But Anne appears to have died quite peacefully. I guess her heart just gave out.”

  “So it seems. Taylor found her like this.”

  Neither man, Taylor realized, had noticed her. “Dear God,” Dr. Harrison said in a sorrowful wheeze. “That must have been hard for her.”

  “It’s what we always feared,” her father responded. “But this came too soon. We’re not ready, Taylor and I.”

  “At least she has you.” The doctor placed a consoling hand on her father’s shoulder. “Are you curious about the precise cause of death? If so, we can perform an autopsy.”

  It took a moment for her father to answer. “If you feel compelled to do it, Rodney.”

  “And otherwise?”

  Turning, her father spoke in a voice thick with grief. “She’s dead, for God’s sake. Will carving up Anne’s body bring her back to life? We both know her heart betrayed her.” His speech slowed. “Forgive me. But remembering her like this is hard enough. I don’t want to think about an autopsy.”

  Awkwardly, Dr. Harrison patted his shoulder. “I understand.”

  “Good,” her father answered. “As you say, there’s Taylor to think of now.”

  TAYLOR LOOKED AT Darrow, the cloud of anguish darkening her eyes. Darrow felt the entire foundation of his life being upended by the same man, her father. “Your dreams are about something,” he told her. “I’m not sure they’re dreams at all.”

  Taylor shook her head, less in denial, Darrow perceived, than dismay at what she had never acknowledged. He spoke with gentle urgency. “You were a child, Taylor, unable to face your doubts, and without anyone to hear them. All you could do was repress your deepest fears, then run away as far as you could go. At least until now.” He paused, then added quietly, “I think your mother knew what he’d done—or believed she did. That’s what you’ve been sensing.”

  To his surprise, Taylor backed away, saying in a cool, clear voice, “Dreams aren’t proof, Mark. Tell me what else you know.”

  “There’s no time for this—”

  Her eyes filled with pain and rage. “Tell me, dammit.”

  “All right,” he said. “The money embezzled from Caldwell went to bank accounts controlled by Carl Hall. Somehow Carl knew that your father was the man in Angela’s diary. Lionel used the weakness in Caldwell’s financial system to pay off Carl and frame Clark Durbin by fabricating his e-mail—”

  “How?” Taylor interrupted. “When it comes to computers, my father struggles just to cope.”

  “Or so he’s made us think. It seems he’s very good at that.”

  Taylor took this in, her gaze intense with thought. Briefly, she shut her eyes. Then she seemed to stand straighter, controlling her emotions with an act of will. With icy calm, she said, “We have to check his office, Mark.”

  Darrow stared at her. Moments before, she had confronted her own suspicion that one parent had murdered the other, which must have been lodged in her subconscious since adolescence. Now, eerily, she had begun to function as her father did in moments of crisis or danger—detached from her own emotions, thinking swiftly, so devoid of doubt or fear that it sharpened Darrow’s edginess. “We need to get out of here,” he said. “Go to the police.”

  “And tell them what?” Taylor stared into Darrow’s eyes, speaking with the same dispassion. “I finally know why he keeps his study locked. I also know where he keeps his keys. If we don’t look, he’ll destroy whatever’s there. Just like he cremated my mother’s body.”

  Turning, she went to her father’s bedroom. Darrow followed and found her reaching into
a small drawer in a rolltop desk. She held up a set of keys. “When I was a child,” Taylor said, “this was where he hid things. He never knew I saw him.”

  This enmity, Darrow realized, was years deep, practiced by two quiet adversaries. “How do you know what these open?” he asked her.

  “One day my laptop shut down. He wasn’t home, and I needed to check my e-mail on his computer. He never knew I’d violated his sanctuary.” Swiftly, Taylor walked to his study. “How many men, I wonder, lock their study at home to keep their family out.”

  Darrow stared at the dead bolt. “I don’t remember seeing this.”

  “You didn’t,” Taylor answered tersely. “He installed it the day after we scattered her ashes. It was one of the things we never spoke of.”

  Though made gloomier by the absence of light, the office was familiar: the map of Vietnam, the oil painting of Mad Anthony Wayne, the leather chair where Farr had sat when he offered the teenage Darrow a new vision of his future. The sense of trespass caused Darrow to pause. He watched Taylor pull out her father’s desk chair and log in to Farr’s laptop. “You won’t find anything,” Darrow said. “To imitate Durbin’s e-mail, he’d have needed a different computer.”

  Glancing up, Taylor handed him the keys. “Then look in his drawers.”

  These, too, had locks. Finding the key, Darrow unlocked three drawers. Two were empty save for writing utensils and printing paper; the third was stuffed with bank records and extra checks. Wedged into the fourth was a small laptop. Darrow remembered a report prepared by Greg Fox and Joe Betts; Farr’s spare computer, he realized, was identical to the one Clark Durbin had used as president of Caldwell. Glancing up, he discovered that Taylor was watching him.

  “We should take that,” she said. “Someone can look it over later.”

  “Then let’s go. I don’t want you anywhere near here, Taylor. Let Garrison do the rest.”

  “What will you tell him? If I understand what you’ve told me, my father set all this up perfectly, including Swiss bank accounts. Then he murdered the only witness.”

  “That’s my point.”

  “And mine. If dreams and instincts and pages from a diary added up to anything, you’d have already gone to the police.” With the same frightening calm, Taylor refocused on her father’s laptop. “There’s a reason he didn’t want me touching this.”

  Darrow glanced at his watch. It was nearly five o’clock. “What time does he come home?”

  “Usually around six.” Taylor tapped the keyboard, summoning her father’s files—research papers, records of bills, student essays. “When I began my dissertation,” she told Darrow, “I was absolutely paranoid that someone might steal from it. So I encrypted it with a password: ‘Anne,’ after my mother. No one could have guessed it unless they knew me very well.”

  She could have been discussing the last novel she had read or her favorite restaurant in the West Village. Only the way she held her head, still and focused on the screen, betrayed her feelings. Quietly, she said, “He must have hidden a file using a separate password.”

  Watching her, Darrow flashed on his first financial fraud case. The chief financial officer of a major company had mapped out the falsification of profits on his home computer, in a file entitled “Liberal Accounting Adjustments.” The man was more arrogant than inventive; too accustomed to believing himself smarter than his adversaries, he thought himself impervious. In this he had been wrong. The password he had chosen, the name of his graduate school, had embarrassed Wharton deeply when Darrow revealed it in court. Taylor looked up. “I just tried to open a file called ‘Family Pictures,’ ” she told him. “But the computer is asking me for a password. Any ideas?”

  “No.”

  “We both know things about him,” Taylor insisted. “What password would he use?”

  “Try ‘Nietzsche.’ ”

  Swiftly, Taylor did this. “No,” she told him.

  She tried several others. Edgy, Darrow went to the entrance of the study, half-expecting Farr. Darrow had betrayed his thoughts, though not quite all, to a man with a feral sense of danger. He thought of all the ways Farr had covered himself, even within his own family, in part to keep his daughter’s doubts at bay. An ambiguous but disturbing image came to Darrow: Anne Farr painting beside the river; Lionel Farr staring at a depiction of the Spire that Taylor had never seen again.

  Over his shoulder, Darrow said, “Try ‘Spire.’ ”

  He walked into the living room. Opening the front door, he stood on the porch and looked up and down the street. Though blocks away, neither of the two men he saw on foot had Farr’s erect posture or martial stride. How many times, Darrow wondered, had the sight of those things made him smile? With a leaden feeling, he closed the door, carrying the burden of his fears and memories to Farr’s office.

  Taylor had turned from the screen.

  In profile, her skin was unnaturally pale. She did not move. All that distinguished her from a mannequin was the single tear running down her face.

  “What is it?” Darrow asked, and then looked at the screen.

  Her back to a dark stone wall, Angela Hall stared back at him, naked but for the leather straps that bound her wrists and ankles. Stunned, Darrow placed his hand on Taylor’s shoulder and felt the tremor running through her. With unearthly quiet, she said, “Imagine calling this file ‘Family Pictures.’ ”

  His hand resting on her shoulder, Darrow clicked to another photograph, then several more. Her face frozen when it was not turned away, Angela was captured in different poses. The photographs suggested varied possibilities. But their common theme was exposure and helplessness—the man behind the camera could tell her to perform the act suggested and Angela could not resist. The photographs could have illustrated her diary.

  Darrow clicked again.

  The next set of photographs was of a young white woman he did not know. From the length and style of her hair, Darrow guessed, she had entered Caldwell before him. He supposed that she, like Angela, might have majored in philosophy.

  Darrow stopped clicking.

  “Keep going,” Taylor said in an ashen voice.

  She had turned to the screen, the streaks of wetness on her face glistening in its gray-blue glow. “No,” he answered.

  Reaching past him, Taylor clicked the mouse. Rather than looking at the screen, Darrow watched his lover’s face.

  Her expression, he thought now, was like Angela’s: oddly stoic, eyes frozen in shock. Suddenly she flinched, crying out, then bent forward with her eyes shut.

  Darrow faced the screen. Naked, Anne Farr hung by the wrists from the chain of the Spire’s bell. The bell was behind her head; had Farr pushed her, Darrow thought, it might have rung.

  Darrow shut off the computer.

  Resting his face against the crown of Taylor’s head, he murmured, “Take both laptops, Taylor. That’s all that’s left for you to do.”

  There was nothing else to say, Darrow knew, or the time to say it. Taylor seemed to grasp this. After a moment, she raised her head to look at him.

  “Go to the police station,” Darrow directed. “Tell Garrison what we found.”

  Moving slowly, Taylor unplugged the laptop. Her voice muted, she said, “Where will you be?”

  Darrow did not respond. Instead, he picked up Farr’s desk phone and dialed a number he knew from memory.

  On the third ring, Farr answered his private line. “It’s Mark,” Darrow said. “I need to see you.”

  For an instant, Farr did not respond. “Concerning what?”

  “Family pictures. The ones on your computer.”

  As Darrow absorbed Farr’s profound silence, Taylor’s eyes widened in fear. “So this is what we’ve come to,” Farr said at length.

  “Yes.”

  “Then I’ll meet you at the Spire, Mark.”

  Abruptly, Farr hung up.

  Taylor grabbed the lapels of Darrow’s suit coat. “We know what he is,” she said in desperation. “Please,
don’t do this.”

  “I have to,” Darrow answered. “Because of all he is to me.”

  11

  W

  HEN DARROW REACHED THE SPIRE, THE OAKEN DOOR AT its base was ajar.

  He stopped, afraid of what might follow if he entered, dreading the claustrophobia that had enveloped him in the tower sixteen years before. Farr would know this; he knew Mark Darrow well. Breathing deeply, Darrow filled his lungs and then crossed the threshold.

  The dank smell of moist sandstone flooded his nostrils. The winding stairs above him, lit dimly by lamps placed too wide apart, disappeared in shadows. Darrow began climbing, his loathing of close spaces tightening around him like a vise. This time, he could not distract himself by counting the steps. This time, Farr awaited him.

  As he climbed the Spire, Darrow thought of finding Angela Hall’s body. From the moment a stunned Mark Darrow had run to him for help, Farr had taken control, improvising with what Darrow now understood was a psychopath’s nerveless brilliance. Perceiving that Darrow’s account of the party led directly to Steve Tillman, Farr had prevented Darrow from warning Steve by taking him to Durbin’s home. There Farr had taken charge of Caldwell’s response, making himself as indispensable to Durbin as he was above suspicion. When Steve was arrested and Mark had asked for his help, Farr had sent Steve to a lawyer he knew to be incompetent. The last piece of Farr’s lightning adaptations was the sacrifice of Mark’s closest friend to a life in prison.

  Briefly Darrow paused in the darkness, recalling the night Farr had first approached him. Moments before that, he had thrown the winning touchdown pass to Steve; barking signals, Mark had shut down his emotions, banishing all thought except to execute this play. The crowd noise had vanished; the task before him became no more daunting than a video game. Mark had first done this as a boy, shutting out his mother’s frightening shifts of mood, the sudden violence of his alcoholic father. Perhaps that was why his coach had called him the “mentally toughest guy around.” Except, perhaps, for the man at the top of the Spire.