He opened the first volume. “I’ve flagged Smith’s testimony as well as Skip’s. The crux of the matter is that we are certain there was someone else involved, and we have reason to believe it was another man. In fact. Skip was convinced that Suzanne was involved with another man, perhaps even more than one. What precipitated the second quarrel, the one that occurred when he went home at six o’clock, was that he found her arranging a bunch of red roses—sweetheart roses, I think the press called them—that he had not sent her. The prosecution maintained that he went into a rage, strangled her, then threw the roses over her body. He, of course, swears that he didn’t, that when he left, Suzanne was still blithely puttering with the flowers.”
“Did anyone check the local florists to see if an order for the roses had been placed with one of them? If Skip didn’t carry them home, somebody delivered them.”
“Farrell did at least do that. There wasn’t a florist in Bergen County who wasn’t checked. Nothing turned up.”
“I see.”
Geoff stood up. “Kerry, I know it’s a lot to ask, but I want you to read this transcript carefully. I want you to pay particular attention to Dr. Smith’s testimony. . . . ”
She walked with Geoff to the door. “I’ll call you in the next few days,” she promised.
At the door, he paused, then turned back to Kerry. “There’s one more thing I wish you’d do. Come down with me to Trenton State Prison. Talk to Skip yourself. On my grandmother’s grave, I swear you’ll hear the ring of truth when that poor guy tells you his story.”
Saturday, October 28th
At eight o’clock Saturday morning, Kerry received a phone call from Geoff Dorso. “I beeped in to the office and got your message,” he told her. “I’m going to Trenton to see Skip this afternoon. Can you make it?” He explained that in order to register for the three o’clock visit, they would have to be at the prison by 1:45.
Almost as a reflex, Kerry heard herself say, “I’m sure I can make it. I’ll have to make arrangements for Robin, but I’ll meet you there.” Two hours later, Kerry and an impatient Robin were in Livingston, New Jersey, in the office of Dr. Ben Roth, a noted plastic surgeon.
“I’m going to miss the soccer game,” Robin fretted.
“You’ll be a little late, that’s all,” Kerry soothed. “Don’t worry.”
“Very late,” Robin protested. “Why couldn’t he see me this afternoon after the game?”
“Perhaps if you’d sent the doctor your schedule, he could have worked around it,” Kerry teased.
“Oh, Mom.”
“You can bring Robin in now, Ms. McGrath,” the receptionist announced.
Dr. Roth, in his mid-thirties, warm and affable, was a welcome change from Dr. Smith. He examined Robin’s face carefully. “The lacerations probably looked pretty bad right after the accident, but they were what we call ‘superficial.’ They didn’t deeply penetrate the dermis. You haven’t got any problems.”
Robin looked relieved. “Great. Thanks. Doctor. Let’s go. Mom.”
“Wait in the reception area, Robin. I’ll be out in just a moment. I want to talk to the doctor.” Kerry’s voice carried what Robin called “the tone.” It meant “and I don’t want to hear any arguments.”
“Okay,” Robin said with an exaggerated sigh as she departed.
“I know you have patients waiting, so I won’t be long. Doctor, but there is something I must ask you,” Kerry said.
“I have time. What is it, Ms. McGraih?”
Kerry reduced to a few brief sentences a description of what she had seen in Dr. Smith’s office. “So I guess I have two questions,” she concluded. “Can you remake just any face to look like someone else’s or does some fundamental factor, like a similar bone structure, have to be present? And knowing that it is possible to remake some faces so that they look alike, is this something that plastic surgeons do, I mean deliberately remake someone to look like someone else?”
It was twenty minutes later when Kerry rejoined Robin and they rushed to the soccer field. Unlike Kerry. Robin was not a natural athlete, and Kerry had spent long hours working with her because her heart was set on being a good player. Now, as she watched Robin confidently kick the ball past the goalie, Kerry was still reflecting on Dr. Roth’s flat statement: “It’s a fact that some surgeons give everyone the same nose or chin or eyes, but I find it extremely unusual that any surgeon would in essence clone the faces of his patients.”
At eleven-thirty she caught Robin’s eye and waved good-bye. Robin would go home from the game with her best friend. Cassie, and would spend the afternoon at her house.
A few minutes later, Kerry was on the road to Trenton.
She had visited the state prison several times and always found the grim aspect of barbed wire and guard towers a sobering sight. This was not a place she looked forward to seeing again.
* * *
Robin looked relieved. “Great. Thanks, Doctor. Let’s go. Mom.”
“Wait in the reception area, Robin. I’ll be out in just a moment. I want to talk to the doctor.” Kerry’s voice carried what Robin called “the tone.” It meant “and I don’t want to hear any arguments.”
“Okay,” Robin said with an exaggerated sigh as she departed.
“I know you have patients waiting, so I won’t be long. Doctor, but there is something I must ask you,” Kerry said.
“I have time. What is it, Ms. McGrath?”
Kerry reduced to a few brief sentences a description of what she had seen in Dr. Smith’s office. “So I guess I have two questions,” she concluded. “Can you remake just any face to look like someone else’s or does some fundamental factor, like a similar bone structure, have to be present? And knowing that it is possible to remake some faces so that they look alike, is this something that plastic surgeons do, I mean deliberately remake someone to look like someone else?”
It was twenty minutes later when Kerry rejoined Robin and they rushed to the soccer field. Unlike Kerry, Robin was not a natural athlete, and Kerry had spent long hours working with her because her heart was set on being a good player. Now, as she watched Robin confidently kick the ball past the goalie, Kerry was still reflecting on Dr. Roth’s flat statement: “It’s a fact that some surgeons give everyone the same nose or chin or eyes, but I find it extremely unusual that any surgeon would in essence clone the faces of his patients.”
At eleven-thirty she caught Robin’s eye and waved good-bye. Robin would go home from the game with her best friend, Cassie, and would spend the afternoon at her house.
A few minutes later, Kerry was on the road to Trenton.
She had visited the state prison several times and always found the grim aspect of barbed wire and guard towers a sobering sight. This was not a place she looked forward to seeing again.
* * *
Kerry found Geoff waiting for her in the area where visitors were registered. “I’m really glad you made it,” he said. They talked little while they waited for their scheduled meeting. Geoff seemed to understand that she did not want his input at this time.
Promptly at three o’clock a guard approached them and told them to follow him.
Kerry did not know what she expected Skip Reardon to look like now. It had been ten years since she had sat in at his sentencing. The impression she had retained of him was of a tall, good-looking, broad-shouldered young man with fiery red hair. But more than his appearance, it was his statement that had been burned into her mind: “Dr. Charles Smith is a liar. Before God and this court, I swear he is a liar!”
“What have you told Skip Reardon about me?” she asked Geoff as they waited for the prisoner to be escorted into the visiting area.
“Only that you’ve unofficially taken some interest in his case and wanted to meet him. I promise you, Kerry, I said ‘unofficially.’ ”
“That’s fine. I trust you.”
“Here he is now.”
Skip Reardon appeared, dressed in prison denims and an open-necked
prison-issue shirt. There were streaks of gray though the red hair, but except for the lines around his eyes he still looked very much as Kerry recalled him. A smile brightened his face as Geoff introduced him.
A hopeful smile, Kerry realized, and with a sinking heart wondered if she shouldn’t have been more cautious, perhaps waiting until she knew more about the case, instead of agreeing so readily to this visit.
Geoff got right to the point. “Skip, as I told you, Ms. McGrath wants to ask you some questions.”
“I understand. And, listen, I’ll answer them no matter what they are.” He spoke earnestly, though with a hint of resignation. “You’ve heard that old saying, I have nothing to hide.”
Kerry smiled, then went straight to the question that was to her the crux of this meeting. “In his testimony, Dr. Smith swore that his daughter, your wife, was afraid of you and that you had threatened her. You have maintained that he was lying, but what purpose would he have in lying about that?”
Reardon’s hands were folded on the table in front of him. “Ms. McGrath, if I had any explanation for Dr. Smith’s actions, maybe I wouldn’t be here now. Suzanne and I were married four years, and during that time I never saw that much of Smith. She’d go into New York and have dinner with him occasionally, or he’d come out to the house, but usually when I was away on a business trip. At that time my construction business was booming. I was building all over the state and investing in land in Pennsylvania for future development. I’d be gone a couple of days at a time on a fairly regular basis. Whenever I was with Dr. Smith, he seemed not to have much to say, but he never acted as though he didn’t like me. And he certainly didn’t act as though he thought his daughter’s life was in danger.”
“When you were with both him and Suzanne, what did you notice about his attitude toward her?”
Reardon looked at Dorso. “You’re the guy with the fancy words, Geoff. What’s a good way to put it? Wait a minute. I can tell you. When I was in parochial school, the nuns got mad at us for talking in church and told us we should have reverence for a holy place and holy objects. Well that’s the way he treated her. Smith showed ‘reverence’ for Suzanne.”
What an odd word to use about a father’s attitude toward his daughter, Kerry thought.
“And he was also protective of her,” Reardon added. “One night the three of us were driving somewhere for dinner and he noticed that Suzanne hadn’t put on her seat belt. So he launched into a lecture about her responsibility to take care of herself. He actually got fairly agitated about it, maybe even a little angry.”
It sounds like the same way he lectured Robin and me, Kerry thought. Almost reluctantly she admitted to herself that Skip Reardon certainly gave the appearance of being candid and honest.
“How did she act toward him?”
“Respectful, mostly. Although toward the end, before she was killed, the last few times I was with them she seemed to be kind of irritated at him.”
Kerry then ventured into other aspects of the case, asking him about his sworn testimony that just prior to the murder, he had noticed Suzanne wearing expensive pieces of jewelry that he had not given her.
“Ms. McGrath, I wish you’d talk to my mother. She could tell you. She has a picture of Suzanne that was run in one of the community papers, taken at a charity affair. It shows her with an old-fashioned diamond pin on the lapel of her suit. The picture was taken only a couple of weeks before she was murdered. I swear to you that that pin and a couple of other pieces of expensive jewelry, none of which I gave her, were in her jewelry box that morning. I remember it specifically because it was one of the things we argued about. Those pieces were there that morning and they weren’t there the next day.”
“You mean someone took them?”
Reardon seemed uncomfortable. “I don’t know if someone took them or if she gave them back to someone, but I tell you there was jewelry missing the next morning. I tried to tell all this to the cops, to get them to look into it, but it was obvious from the beginning that they didn’t believe me. They thought that I was trying to make it look like she had been robbed and killed by an intruder . . . Something else,” he continued. “My dad was in World War Two and was in Germany for two years after the war. He brought back a miniature picture frame that he gave to my mother when they became engaged. My mother gave that frame to Suzanne and me when we were married. Suzanne put my favorite picture of her in it and kept it on the night table in our room. When my mother and I sorted Suzanne’s things out before I was arrested, Mom noticed it was missing. But I know it was there that last morning.”
“Are you trying to say that the night Suzanne died, someone came in and stole some jewelry and a picture frame?” Kerry asked.
“I’m telling you what I know was missing. I don’t know where it went, and of course I’m not sure it had anything to do with Suzanne’s murder. I just know that suddenly those things weren’t there and that the police wouldn’t look into it.”
BERNARD VIDALL
MARY HIGGINS CLARK is the author of thirty-one worldwide bestsellers. There are more than eighty million copies of her books in print. She lives in Saddle River, New Jersey.
BY MARY HIGGINS CLARK
Nighttime Is My Time
The Second Time Around
Kitchen Privileges
Mount Vernon Love Story
Silent Night/All Through the Night
Daddy’s Little Girl
On the Street Where You Live
Before I Say Good-bye
We’ll Meet Again
All Through the Night
You Belong to Me
Pretend You Don’t See Her
My Gal Sunday
Moonlight Becomes You
Silent Night
Let Me Call You Sweetheart
The Lottery Winner
Remember Me
I’ll Be Seeing You
All Around the Town
Loves Music, Loves to Dance
The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories
While My Pretty One Sleeps
Weep No More, My Lady
Stillwatch
A Cry in the Night
The Cradle Will Fall
A Stranger Is Watching
Where Are the Children?
BY MARY HIGGINS CLARK AND CAROL HIGGINS CLARK
He Sees You When You’re Sleeping
Deck the Halls
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Four of the stories in this book have been published in different form, as follows: “Death on the Cape” appeared in Woman’s Day, July 18, 1989; “Body in the Closet” appeared in Woman’s Day, August 7, 1990; “Plumbing for Willy” appeared in Family Circle, August 1992; “A Clean Sweep” appeared in Justice in Manhattan published by Longmeadow Press (Bill Adler Books), copyright © 1994 by Mary Higgins Clark.
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The Lottery Winner Page 24
