A Faint Cold Fear (26 page)

'Don't leave it like this,' he said, aware that he was begging. 'Please, Lena. I just… Please.'

She huffed a laugh, making him feel like an idiot.

'I told you I'd talk to you,' she said. 'Unless you've got something to charge me on, I'm out of here.'

He sat back in the chair, willing her to explain this all away.

'Chief?' she said, putting as little respect into the word as was humanly possible.

He skimmed the file, reading aloud from the list of charges that never saw the light of a courtroom.

'Arson,' he said. 'Felony assault. Grand theft auto.

Rape. Murder.'

'Sounds like the latest best-seller,' she said, standing.

'Thanks for the chat.'

'The girl,' he said. 'The one who was raped and beaten to death while he sat in his truck and watched?'

She did not leave, so he continued. 'Do you know who she was?'

She came back fast. 'Snow White?'

'No,' he told her, closing the file. 'She was his girlfriend.'

Jeffrey sat in his car in front of the student-union building, staring at a group of women taping posters to the light poles around the courtyard. They were all young and healthy-looking, dressed in jogging outfits or sweats. Any one of them could have been Ellen Schaffer. Any one of them could be the next victim.

He was here to tell Brian Keller that his son was probably murdered. Jeffrey wanted to see what the man's reaction to the news would be. He also wanted to find out what Keller had not wanted to say in front of his wife. Jeffrey hoped that what Keller said would give him a solid lead to go on. As it was, all he had was Lena, and Jeffrey could not accept that she was involved in this.

Last night Sara had kept hitting on the differences between the Rosen and Schaffer crime scenes. If someone had staged Andy Rosen's suicide, they'd done a damn good job. Ellen Schaffer was a different matter.

Even if the killer had not known about the aspirated tooth, the arrow in the yard was a pretty obvious taunt. Sara had suggested at one point that the differences between the two crimes could indicate there could be two killers instead of one. Jeffrey had dismissed her idea last night, but after seeing Lena and Ethan together this morning, he was not sure of anything.

Lena had been a different person in the interrogation room, someone he had never met before. The way she had not just defended Ethan White's past but denied that he had harmed her made Jeffrey want to question everything she had said so far in the case.

He'd been a cop for a long time and seen how abusers sucker in even strong women. It was amazing how similar their methods were and how easily some women were swayed. There were thousands of women sitting in jail right now because they'd been caught holding dope for their boyfriends. Thousands more had probably committed some kind of crime because they knew that jail was the only way they could protect themselves from the abuse.

In Birmingham, back when Jeffrey was working patrol, he had been called to one woman's house at least ten times. She was the communications manager of an international company and had two degrees from Auburn. At least a thousand people all over the world answered to her, and every time Jeffrey came to her house because her neighbors had called, she stood there in the doorway, her face bleeding, her clothes torn, saying she had fallen down the stairs.

Her husband was a scrawny little fuck who called himself a stay-at-home dad. In reality he was a drunk who could not keep a job and lived off his wife's money. Like most abusers, he was charming and gracious and blind to what his wife looked like when he was finished with her. These days a cop didn't need the wife's testimony to arrest her husband for abuse, but back then the laws had protected the husband.

Jeffrey remembered one time in particular. He was standing on her doorstep in the freezing cold, watching blood drip down her leg and pool at her feet from God knows what, while she insisted that her husband was a gentle man who never laid a hand on her. In fact, the only time Jeffrey ever saw the husband touch her was at her funeral. He reached into her coffin and patted her hand, then gave Jeffrey the biggest shit-eating grin he had ever seen and said, 'That last step was a killer.'

Jeffrey had worked two years with the medical examiner trying to get something on the asshole, but while you could show with a fair amount of certainty that someone had fallen down the stairs and broken her neck, proving she was shoved was a little more difficult.

All this brought him back to Lena and how she behaved this morning. She was right that the hair match only circumstantially linked her to Andy Rosen.

The fingerprint on the book could be explained away by a good lawyer. Jeffrey had trained Lena himself, and he knew that she was more than familiar with the ins and outs of forensic investigation. She would have known to be careful. She would have known exactly how to cover her tracks. The question was, did she have it in her? Was she so wrapped up in Ethan White that she would do anything to cover for him?

Jeffrey had to look at the facts, and the facts made Lena look suspicious as hell, especially considering her hostile attitude in the interrogation room this morning. She had all but challenged him to put the pieces together.

As much as he did not want to, Jeffrey made himself consider the two-killer scenario Sara had brought up last night, one who'd killed Andy and stabbed Tessa and one who'd killed Ellen Schaffer. The weak point they kept coming back to was Tessa's attacker in the woods. After looking at Ethan White's sheet, then talking to Lena, Jeffrey had to consider a variation on the theory.

Ethan could have killed Andy Rosen. Lena had come late to the scene. She could have called Ethan on her cell phone and told him Tessa was in the woods. There was no telling where either of them was when Ellen Schaffer killed herself, but Jeffrey knew that Lena would have noticed the discrepancy in the ammo. She knew more about guns than any man he had ever met. He took little consolation in the fact that Lena's involvement in this could be as a mere accomplice. Under Georgia law she was just as guilty as Ethan.

He rubbed his eyes with his hands, thinking he was being ludicrous. Lena was a cop, despite the fact that she wasn't carrying a badge. Crossing the line into murder, even as an accomplice, was not something she would do, no matter what kind of charm Ethan White poured on. This was crazy, and there was no reason to suspect her other than that she was being difficult.

As Sara had pointed out, Lena thrived on being difficult.

He took his cell phone out of his pocket and called Kevin Blake's office. The dean of Grant Tech liked to give people the impression that he was a very busy man, but Jeffrey knew for a fact that Blake spent most of his free time on the golf course. Jeffrey wanted to make an appointment with the man to update him on the case before Blake sneaked out early. Blake's secretary put Jeffrey right through.

'Jeffrey,' Blake said. He was using the speakerphone, and if the tension in Blake's voice was not enough to tell Jeffrey that someone else was in his office, the speakerphone was.

Blake asked, 'Where are you?'

'On campus,' he answered. Keller had told Frank he would be in his lab all day if Jeffrey wanted to talk to him alone. Before Lena this morning, Keller had been the best avenue Jeffrey had to explore. Jeffrey knew that it would be easy to get sidetracked, but there was nothing he could do with Lena right now, and he knew better than to go at Ethan White with nothing to use as leverage.

Blake said, 'I've got Albert Gaines here with Chuck.

We were about to call you at the station and see if you could come by.'

Jeffrey suppressed the curse that wanted to come.

'Hey, Chief,' Chuck said, and Jeffrey could imagine the smug look on the other man's face. 'We got some doughnuts and coffee here for you.'

There was a grumbling sound that was probably Albert Gaines.

Blake said, 'Jeffrey, could you drop by the office?

We'd like to talk to you.'

'I can be there in an hour,' Jeffrey told him, thinking he would be damned if he came running when they snapped their fingers. 'I've got a lead to track down.'

'Oh,' Blake said, probably thinking he would have to postpone his tee time. 'Sure you can't just run by here a second?'

Albert Gaines grumbled something again. He was a gruff man, and he demanded answers from his subordinates, but he had always been supportive of Jeffrey.

Blake had obviously been reprimanded. His tone was brisk when he said, 'We'll see you in about an hour, then, Chief.'

Jeffrey closed his phone, holding it to his chin as he watched the group of girls move on to the next section of the courtyard. He got out of the car and walked toward the student union, stopping to look at one of the posters. At the top was a blurry black-and-white photo of Ellen Schaffer and a separate, even blurrier one of Andy Rosen. Beneath these were the words 'Candlelight Vigil.' A time and a location were given, along with a new suicide hot-line number that had been set up through the mental-health center.

'Do you think it will do any good?'

Jeffrey jumped, startled by Jill Rosen.

'Dr. Rosen-'

'Jill,' she corrected. 'I'm sorry I frightened you.'

'It's okay,' he said, thinking that the mother looked worse than she had the day before. Her eyes were so puffy from crying that they were barely slits, and her cheeks looked gaunt. She was wearing a white long-sleeved sweater with a collar that zipped into a turtleneck As she talked to Jeffrey, she clutched the collar together in her hand, as though she were fighting the cold.

'I look a sight,' she apologized.

'I was just going to talk to your husband,' Jeffrey said, thinking he had blown the opportunity to speak to Keller alone.

'He should be here soon,' she told him, holding up a set of keys. 'His spare set,' she explained. 'I told him I'd meet him here. I just needed to get out of the house.'

'I was surprised to hear he was at work.'

'Work restores him.' She gave a wan smile. 'It's a good place to hide when the world is falling down around you.'

Jeffrey knew exactly what she meant. He had thrown himself into work after Sara divorced him, and if he hadn't had a job to go to every day, he would have gone crazy.

'Here,' he told her, indicating a bench. 'How are you holding up?'

She exhaled slowly as she sat down. 'I don't know how to answer that.'

'I guess it was a pretty stupid question.'

'No,' she assured him. 'It's something I've been asking myself a lot lately. "How am I holding up?"

I'll let you know when I get an answer.'

Jeffrey sat beside her, looking out at the campus quad. Some kids had wandered out onto the lawn for lunch, spreading blankets and taking sandwiches from brown paper bags.

Rosen was staring at the students, too. She had the edge of her shirt collar in her mouth. He could tell from the frayed material that this was a nervous habit.

She said, 'I think I'm going to leave my husband.'

Jeffrey turned to her but said nothing. He could tell that her words took effort.

She said, 'He wants to move. Move away from Grant. Start over. I can't start over again. I can't.' She looked down.

'It's understandable to want to get away,' Jeffrey said, trying to keep her talking.

Rosen indicated the campus with a tilt of her head.

'I've been here nearly twenty years. We made our lives here, such as they are. I've built something at the clinic.'

Jeffrey let some time pass. When she did not add anything more, he asked, 'Did he say why he wanted to move?'

She shook her head, but not because she did not know why. There was an almost unbearable sadness in her voice, as though she'd decided to admit defeat.

'That's his response to everything. He's all macho bluster, but at the first sign of trouble, he runs away from it as fast as he can.'

'Sounds like he's done this before.'

'Yes,' she agreed.

Jeffrey tried to press her. 'What's he running away from?'

'Everything,' she said, but she did not explain. 'My working life has been built around helping people confront their past, yet I can't help my own husband stay and face his demons.' She said more quietly, 'I can't even help myself.'

'What demons does he have here?'

'The same as mine, I suppose. Every corner I turn, I expect to see Andy. I'm at home and I hear something outside and look out the window, expecting to see him climbing the stairs to his room. It has to be harder for Brian, working in the lab. I know it's harder for him. He has to meet this deadline. A tremendous amount of money is at stake. I know that. I know all of that.'

Her voice had gone up, and he sensed anger that had been brewing for a while.

He asked, 'Is this about the affair?'

'What affair?' she said, and her surprise seemed genuine.

'I'd heard a rumor,' Jeffrey explained, wanting to kick Richard Carter's teeth in. 'Someone told me that Brian was involved with a student.'

'Oh, God,' she breathed, covering her lips with the collar. 'I almost wish that were true. Isn't that horrible?' she asked. 'It would mean he was capable of caring about something other than his precious research.'

'He cared for his son,' Jeffrey said, remembering the argument he had overheard the day before. Rosen had accused Keller of not caring about Andy until after he was dead.

'He cares in spurts,' she said. 'That car. The clothes.

The television. He bought things. That was how he cared.'

There was something else she was trying to tell him, but Jeffrey did not know what. He asked, 'Where does he want to move?'

'Who knows?' she said. 'He's like a turtle. Whenever anything bad happens, his response is to tuck his head in and wait for it to pass.' She smiled, realizing that she had been tucking her head into her collar.

'Visual aid.'

He returned her smile.

'I just can't do it. I can't live this way anymore.'

She slid her gaze toward Jeffrey. 'Will you bill me for this session, or should I pay you now?'

He smiled again, willing her to continue.