Clear and Convincing Proof (19 page)

His practice—trusts, wills, corporate matters—could all be put on hold, she thought then, and he could cheerfully turn his back on them and have fun. She almost envied him that luxury.

They lingered over dinner and afterward he took her home. He had been up at the crack of dawn in order to make his flight. “I'll call in a day or two,”
he said at her door. “Now I'm ready for a very long sleep.”

Signs had been given, signals received and interpreted, body language had spoken, and she understood that he was waiting for her to make her decision, to leave her work in the office the way he did, or not. She could not tell how much he cared what that decision would be.

“H
i,” Barbara said to Frank on Sunday afternoon. It was pouring rain at the moment, although half an hour earlier snow had been falling. She shook water off her umbrella at the front door, left it outside on the porch.

“What's all that?” he asked, reaching for her raincoat. She was carrying a shopping bag along with her purse and laptop.

“An experiment. I'll keep the coat on for a few minutes. Let's go to the kitchen, I'll tell you your part.”

In the kitchen she fished in the shopping bag and brought out her digital camera. “Upstairs,” she said then. She led the way to the bedroom that was always ready for her, with her old patchwork quilt in place,
the Monet prints on the wall, her Raggedy Ann doll on the window seat. She went to the window and opened the drapes all the way, moved the sheer curtain to the side, peered out. The back garden was sodden, everything dripping. Thing One and Thing Two entered the bedroom and wrapped themselves around her legs, then forsook her and leaped onto the bed where they started to wrestle, tumbling over each other.

Ignoring them, looking as straight down as possible, Barbara could see the end of the back porch, and the pavement going to the garage. Just as she remembered, she thought in satisfaction.

“What I want you to do,” she said, “is keep an eye out down there, and as soon as you see movement, start taking pictures.”

“Pictures. Of rain. The porch railing. Give me a hint, Bobby. Pictures of what?”

“You'll know when you see it. Want to make sure the rail is in focus? I don't know if you should open the window or not. You decide. But don't lean out.” She handed him the camera and went to the door.

Mystified, and a little annoyed, Frank peered through the viewfinder, and after a moment lowered the camera and opened the window, tried it again. A gust of wind blew icy rain into the room, but a little water was not going to hurt anything, he decided, and left the window open.

Then he drew in a sharp breath as a black figure moved into sight. Water poured off its shiny carapace, or whatever the hell it was, he thought, snap
ping a picture, another. Big head, shiny black outer cover of some sort, black feet—boots, he realized. The figure was moving awkwardly, walking backward. It turned and he sucked in another quick breath. There was the tail. He snapped two more pictures before the figure moved out of sight.

“Christ on a mountain,” he muttered, lowering the camera. “She found the demon.”

He closed the window and hurried downstairs to the kitchen. On the back porch Barbara was waiting for him, still in the shiny black thing. As he watched, she extended one gloved hand from a slit in the front of the covering, pointed her finger at him and said, “Bang, bang.”

Trash bags, he realized. A large one covered her body, and a smaller one was over her head with part of it cut away leaving her face exposed. She extended a slit in the large one, reached up to pull the other one off her head, revealing her hood, and explaining the oversize head. She finished slitting the large bag to the bottom and pulled it away. Moving quickly she rolled it up into a compact ball, stuffed it inside the small bag and pulled a drawstring tight. Done.

A little later, sitting side by side before her laptop at the dinette table, they compared the pictures he had taken with the one that Alex had drawn and manipulated.

“Close,” she said. “The drawstring is the tail. And remember, Dorothy Johnson was quite a bit higher than upstairs in this house. I bet if Alex manipulated
this picture the same way he did his, it would be a very good match.” She leaned back in her chair and said, “But even if we know without a doubt that's how it was done, so what? We knew it was premeditated, this just makes it more cold-blooded than simply pulling a gun and shooting.”

“You could toss a trash bag into a ditch, on the side of the road, a Dumpster, who'd pay any attention?” Frank said. “And traces of gunpowder, blood, everything else forensics might search for also gone.”

“What I was thinking last night while I was destroying plastic bags,” she said, “is that there are too goddamn many saints mixed up in this murder. Saint Thomas Kelso devoted more than fifty years of his life to the clinic, probably alienating his own kids, but that's the price. Saint Greg Boardman, family doctor par excellence, father confessor. Saint Darren Halvord, whom everyone loves, gifted with magic hands, who can do no wrong. Saint Annie, living a life so virtuous it makes my teeth hurt. All those other saintly volunteers working hard to keep the clinic running. Think of Erica Castle, teaching kids all day, then reading to the patients every evening. She and Darren both hauled away at their bootstraps, rose above disastrous childhoods, avoided the usually inevitable, destructive behavior of everyone around them, achieved sainthood. Just one damn saint after another, all above reproach, all above suspicion.”

“What about Erica Castle?” he asked.

He had not heard Bailey's report; she filled him in on Erica and Lorraine McIvey. “Now that one's no saint,” she said. “Why make up such a story, that McIvey wanted them to get back together, wanted her to run the clinic as a profitable business? It must be to back up her claim that the children should inherit the whole kit and caboodle. Besides adding a real live motive for Annie to have pulled the trigger.”

“I doubt her claim will hold up in probate, but the court won't be in a rush to decide, not until Annie is cleared, or found guilty, whichever comes first.” After a moment he said, “You didn't mention that all those saints had a motive to kill McIvey, or else to lie about who did.”

She nodded. “I know. I should talk to my clients with a truth serum in hand.”

He looked at the images on her screen again, then, shaking his head, he moved away. “I thought Will was coming back yesterday. Change of plans?” It was a guarded question, the way he always approached the subject of Will Thaxton.

“He's home. We had dinner and called it a night pretty early and he went to his place to get some sleep.” She shut down the computer and closed the top, then wandered to the door to look at the back garden. “He's going to Europe—England, France, Italy—for several weeks to do some work. He asked me to go with him. It's snowing again. I wish it would make up its mind.”

“Unsettled,” Frank said and realized he didn't mean just the weather.

Watching her, the back of her head when she pressed her forehead against the glass, he felt an ache that recurred with irritating regularity. He thought of articles he had read recently, how couples might soon be able to tailor-make their offspring, pick and choose among the genes for this or that quality. Given such a choice, would he have traded an iota of her mind for just a touch of…What? Domesticity? He shook his head impatiently. He knew people with less domestic calling than his daughter who still managed to have a fulfilled life beyond work. She needed someone as brilliant as she was, someone who would not interfere with her work, would give her room, not demand subservience in any manner, respect what she did, recognize that she was the best…A couple of times it had appeared that she had found such a man; one especially—Mike Dinesen—had been perfect, he had come to think. But Mike had died prematurely. Another one had turned out to be Mr. Wrong when the chips were down.

Will Thaxton was not even in the running. Although he would have cut out his tongue before voicing this, Frank knew that intellectually Will was a featherweight, and that he was just a little too dishonest, even for a corporate attorney. On the other hand, he thought then, maybe she didn't need any more mental stimulation than her work provided; maybe a lightweight at home would be even better, someone to play with, dance and have fun and relax with. And in that case Will would do. It occurred to
him that she could be anxious to wrap up the McIvey business in order to go off to Europe with Will. He sighed deeply, and Barbara turned to regard him.

“Sorry,” she said. “What?”

“Nothing. Just remembered I have to get something out from the freezer.”

 

By the time Barbara left Frank's house, the weather had cleared up, and a few stars were visible. So much for snow, she thought, driving home. There, she read for a while, watched the nightly news, took a long fragrant bath and went to bed early. At this rate, she told herself, she'd run out of excuses not to go traveling with Will. Certainly work could not be used as an excuse. There was nothing for her to do until something broke; she had run out of ideas.

She backed up in her thoughts, troubled. Was she really looking for an excuse not to accompany her sometime lover on an odyssey to foreign lands? No excuse was called for, she told herself angrily. Strolls along the Thames, boat rides on the Seine? Not in the winter, for heaven's sake. Wrong time of year for a European vacation. She knew she was avoiding the real reason for her hesitation and finally admitted that it was more than just a little vacation that she was considering. Was she ready for the next step with Will? Although she couldn't think of any good reason not to take that step, on the other hand neither could she think of a good reason to go ahead. The status quo seemed ideal. Nothing was broken, nothing
needed fixing, she told herself irritably. Why couldn't people just leave things alone?

She rolled over, determined to go to sleep, but she seemed stuck in a tape loop, around and around, until eventually, when she realized that her irritation was turning to anger, she got up to see if there was a late-night movie worth watching.

 

Glennis Colby liked her hours at the clinic, midnight until seven in the morning. She kissed her boyfriend good-night; he went to bed and she went to work. Overnight at the clinic was not a busy time; the patients slept like babies for the most part, and she read one mystery or romance novel after another. When she got home Phil usually had breakfast for two just about ready, then he took off for his job, and she went to bed. From a little after four in the afternoon when he returned they had until nearly midnight together, and that was fine, the best hours out of twenty-four. She was cheerful that Sunday night as she turned into the parking lot at the clinic at five minutes before twelve.

There were other cars in the lot. The evening shift had not left yet; they were waiting for their replacements. Another car pulled in close behind hers. She got out and waited to see who else was checking in, not really late yet, but close enough. It was Bev Werner. They started to walk to the door together, then Bev veered off to the side, murmuring, “That's strange. Isn't that Bernie's Corolla?”

Glennis didn't have a clue. She didn't know one
car from another. She joined Bev, and together they peered in through the windshield. Bev muttered something and went around to look in the driver's side window. Glennis followed and Bev stifled a scream.

Glennis pulled her back, took another look, then hauled Bev with her to the staff door and rang the bell. She did not remove her finger from the bell until the door opened and Stell Vogel said, “For heaven's sake! You want to wake up the dead?”

“Call the police,” Glennis said. “Bernie Zuckerman's out there in her car. She's dead. Covered with blood.”

 

The ringing of the phone jerked Barbara from a deep sleep. She pulled the cover higher, letting her answering machine take it, but after a moment, she stirred again and sat up. It was seven o'clock. No one in his right mind made a call at that hour. But a stab of fear made her first sit up, then get out of bed and pull on her robe to go listen to the message. It was unreasonable, she knew, to feel that jolt of fear when the phone rang at an unusual hour, but Frank had had a minor heart attack years earlier, and there was always the residual fear that he was in trouble. When she heard his voice on her machine, the fear flooded in.

“Bobby, there's been another shooting, Bernice Zuckerman's dead. It's in the newspaper, section B, page one. Call me when you wake up.”

She turned on the radio in the kitchen, then hur
ried down the stairs to her front door to retrieve the newspaper. The news story was little more than Frank had said over the phone. Bernice Zuckerman had been shot dead in her car at the clinic sometime the previous evening. A recap of the death of David McIvey followed. After starting coffee, as the radio voice rattled on about everything except a shooting, she called Frank.

“There's been damn little released,” he said. “Nothing on television yet. Just another murder. Shot in the head, close range. That's all I know about it. But we have to talk before the police come nosing around.”

She nodded. Not her office, not yet. The cleaning crew might not even be finished. Certainly not his office where the idea of criminal law was anathema those days. And the police would be asking questions as soon as they learned how much time she had spent with Bernice Zuckerman on Friday. “Your place,” she said. “Twenty minutes.”

She hung up, thinking she should have told Bernie not to mention seeing a car leave on the day McIvey was killed. But even as she thought this, she knew it would have been futile. Bernie had been a talker; once she realized the importance of what she had seen, what she had said about it, she would have told anyone who would listen. But she should have warned her, Barbara thought miserably.

Driving to Frank's house, she heard a radio version of the story, tucked in between a weather report
and some nonsense about high school sports. It was brief, no more informative than the newspaper article had been.