I stared.
Okay, you piece of shit. I got the message.
It was then that I knew for sure. I’d sensed it before, in my life, in my training. In the few times when my work brought me into contact with someone like him. But I could never prove it. Not before any clinical board, not even with a battery of tests. I had only my gut, my experience, to go on.
And what I saw in that tiny smile. Those milk-white, remorseless eyes.
Miles Wingfield was a true sociopath.
Behind me, Carl Trask cleared his throat. “Anything ya want
me
to do, Mr. Wingfield?”
“What you do best, Carl. Shut up and look lethal.” He gestured toward the far corner. “But do it over there, okay?”
The pressure of the gun left my neck; then the heavy pad of footsteps moved off. Without another word, Trask took up position again in the corner.
Wingfield turned and poured himself an Evian water.
“I wasn’t sure we’d have the opportunity to meet,” he said. “Before things became…well, unpleasant. I’d hoped Mr. Trask here would be able to persuade you to come.”
“His gun was very persuasive.” I stood up.
Wingfield frowned. “Gun? What are you talking about?” He looked past me. “Carl? What is he talking about?”
Trask grinned. “Beats hell outta me, Mr. Wingfield.”
“You see, Dr. Rinaldi,” Wingfield said smoothly, “it appears you came here voluntarily.”
He leaned forward, his voice amiable. “I promise you, given my considerable resources, nothing I do will be outside the law. There’s no need.”
“Except kidnapping. Assault with a deadly.”
He shrugged. “What was it Sheila said to you? About perspective? I see before me not a victim of anything, but rather a perpetrator of an unspeakable crime. Against me.”
He sipped his water. “I see a man who came here full of contrition for his acts against me and my family. Who offers an apology I cannot, and will not, accept.”
“I don’t remember apologizing to you for anything.”
Wingfield considered this, turning the glass in his hand. “That’s right, you haven’t. Why not?”
I was silent.
“I said, why not?” Something changed in his eyes.
Suddenly, he closed his fist on the glass. It shattered noisily, water and splintered crystal flying.
Wingfield took a full step toward me, bristling. Livid with rage. Unmindful of the deep gash in his palm, oozing freely, welling blood.
“Don’t you understand what you’ve done to me?” he shouted. “The steps I’ll take to destroy you?”
There was no grief in his eyes, only white hatred. Narcissistic rage. Kevin’s death was no tragedy in itself. What I saw on his face wasn’t the horror of a parent’s loss of a child. It was the pain of insult.
He stood, glowering. Until the anger etched on his face turned to disdain, and then to disinterest.
Finally, he looked at his cut hand, curled his fingers to pump the blood. A thick, red rivulet, spreading. He seemed fascinated.
“Yes, I have a fleet of lawyers, and the resources to ruin you. I will see you in the gutter. But will that really satisfy me? Will that be enough?” His gaze found mine again. “No, Doctor. No, it will not.”
We stood that way for a long moment, our eyes locked. Without turning, he finally spoke.
“I’ve changed my mind, Carl. Go have a smoke.”
Trask hesitated a moment, then padded out of the room.
“Good man,” Wingfield said, as the doors to the hall closed softly. “Ex-Navy SEAL. Special Ops. I’m lucky to have him. They wanted him as a consultant on Fox News. That’s where all the old soldiers go now. They don’t die, and they don’t fade away. Instead, they all get agents and trade sound-bites with Bill O’Reilly.”
He took a silk handkerchief from his pocket, wrapped it around his hand. Then, to my surprise, he bent over the coffee table and began gingerly picking up shards of glass. Swabbing up water with a napkin. This seemed to calm him.
“Do you have children, Dr. Rinaldi?”
“No.”
“Then you couldn’t understand what I meant just now. That no matter what I do to you, it won’t be enough. It won’t bring Kevin back.”
Wingfield straightened up. “I know what you’re thinking, Doctor. How can I talk this way after abandoning my children years ago? After leaving them in Banford.”
“Maybe you could explain that to me.”
“It’s not complicated. I was presented with a business opportunity that meant I had to leave town, so I took it. There was no life there with my kids anyway. All the gossip, the scandal. I was branded a horrible father because I hadn’t known about what was going on under my own roof. Frankly, I didn’t have a clue.”
He smiled. “You have to understand, I didn’t belong in that town to begin with. Its smallness was oppressive, its view of life provincial, constraining. I tried to fit in, for my family’s sake. To deny my true self, my…well…my larger perspective on life’s possibilities. Especially for a man like me.”
He sighed, burdened. “Instead, I worked in a bank whose total assets wouldn’t cover my current weekly payroll. I was expected to behave and think as though I were…ordinary. I was suffocating, you understand? Barely aware of anything other than the lack of air.”
“You mean, like what might be going on between your own son and daughter…?”
“As I said, Dr. Rinaldi, I hadn’t a clue.” His head tilted. “Though even now, I find their…behavior… literally unthinkable.”
“You had no idea at the time? There
are
signs, things to look for…”
He sat back on the sofa arm. “Not to me. Then again, after my wife’s death…” Here he paused. “Perhaps I was just too upset to…I mean, wouldn’t any man be?…”
He gave me a strangely careful look, as though he was trying to gauge my reaction to his story.
“Besides,” he went on, “in a real sense I didn’t desert my children.
They
deserted
me
. Years after I left Banford, I made repeated attempts to contact them, and was rebuffed. This was after I’d founded Wingfield BioTech. I merely wanted to help them. To have them share in my good fortune.”
He looked off toward the huge window. “But they each, in their own way, rejected me. Kevin changed his name, lived like a bum. In and out of mental institutions, straggling his way through college. Karen ran away, got married and divorced. There may be a child.” He shook his head. “Frankly, they’ve both been quite a disappointment.”
Classic. Nothing’s his fault.
He’s
the injured party, the aggrieved, the justified.
“Since Kevin’s death, I feel I should try to contact my daughter again,” he went on distractedly, adjusting the makeshift bandage on his hand. “Carl has his people on it, and assures me he’ll have a name and location in two or three more days.”
“Whatever he comes up with, you better hand it over to the cops,” I said. “They’ll be wanting to talk to any of Kevin’s immediate family.”
“Of course. Anything that will help catch the killer. Not that it matters. I don’t care about some sub-human piece of trash. And I don’t care if his intended victim was really you. I hold you, and you alone, responsible for what’s been done to me.”
“That’s just it. Nothing’s been done to
you
. It happened to your son.”
The silence between us was very still. Dead air.
Then, as slowly as if attached to a set of old gears, a smile began to form on his lips. That small, hard smile.
“You know, you’ll soon wish it
had
been you killed in that garage after all,” he said quietly. “Not Kevin.”
Another aching silence, emptied of everything but his hate.
Then, as though nourished by it, he stood up abruptly and put his hands together. As if in prayer.
“Anyway, time to get down to business. As I say, my legal representatives will be taking over from this point on, so it’s unlikely I’ll be seeing you again. You’re not the only project demanding my attention, you know.”
“Yeah, I heard. The Cochran merger. The Senate. You’re a busy guy.”
He ignored this. “I will of course be suing you for malpractice, wrongful death, loss of your license, and financial damages for my emotional pain and suffering. You’ll be brought before the appropriate boards, as well as civil court, and, if possible, criminal court. You will, I promise you, be eviscerated to the fullest extent possible by law. Shall I have Peter call you a cab?”
My jaw tightened. “No thanks. I’ll get myself home.”
He shrugged, uninterested, and turned away.
I watched him cross the room. He was a businessman, on a schedule, and this part of his business had been concluded. I literally felt myself drop, like a downed plane, from his radar screen.
Meanwhile, my mind raced, considering what he’d just laid out. I had all the appropriate insurance, and thus access to lawyers, support from various professional organizations and the like.
I
had resources, too. But not like Wingfield’s. Not enough for what I’d be up against.
It was time to see myself out.
Wingfield was flipping idly through a stack of papers as I headed for the door. Without looking up, he spoke again.
“By the way, you might be interested in the expert witness we’ve retained to present the clinical evidence against you. The foremost man in his field, they tell me.”
Only then did Wingfield look up.
“In fact, I believe you two know each other?” He spoke easily, hooded eyes devoid of light. “Dr. Phillip Camden?”
It was midnight by the time I got home, changed my clothes, and poured myself an Iron City. I was in the kitchen, with Coltrane’s dusky tenor pouring softly from the CD speakers.
I’d flagged a cab—a legit one—outside the hotel and spent the ride back up to my place with both rear windows down. I let the bracing cold hit me, clearing the cobwebs.
I brooded on the darkness, and the events of the past forty-eight hours. Kevin’s death, and then Brooks Riley. The cops. Wingfield. And now Phil Camden.
It was like a black storm rising up out there in the night, gathering strength, heading in my direction. My life’s work, everything I’d built. That mattered to me.
As we drove over the lookout, a sliver of moon hung in the sky. Edged like a knife-blade.
He
was out there, too, I thought. In that same night. Perhaps gathering strength as well. Watching that same moonlight glint off the length of another long, thin blade.
Watching. And waiting.
That’s when something shifted inside me. Fueled by rage, and incomprehension, and a welling grief over the obscenity of Kevin’s murder. Those sad, lifeless eyes still looking up at me…
Fuck the cops, I thought.
And
Miles Wingfield. Hell, fuck the killer.
I was through playing defense.
By the time the cab pulled into my driveway, bathing it in lights from the front porch, I already knew what I had to do.
***
Sam Weiss’ voice was a hoarse mumble on the phone.
“Jesus, Danny, it’s after midnight.”
“Yeah, I know, Sam. Sorry. We need to talk.”
Bed sheets rustled as Sam turned to his wife and whispered something. Then his voice again, coming more fully awake.
“Okay, just give me a minute to get to a phone downstairs. This better be good.”
I waited, taking another pull from my beer.
I’d known Sam Weiss for years, since first coming back to work after Barbara’s death. Sam was a feature writer now for the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
but he’d started there on the police beat. He’d been one of the lead reporters on the Handyman story, and had snagged an exclusive interview with Troy David Dowd after his arrest. A year later, Sam wrote the best-selling book on Dowd’s crimes that became the basis for the movie now underway in Hollywood.
Naturally, this got him local notoriety, a feature position at the paper, and the veiled envy of his colleagues. It also got him the expensive two-story house in Squirrel Hill where I’d just called him.
I heard the click of a receiver picking up.
“I’m here,” Sam said. “I just realized, this is about your patient that got killed, right?”
“Right. Kevin Wingfield.”
“Wingfield? I thought his name was Merrick.”
“So did I. Watch the morning news. Kevin was Miles Wingfield’s son.”
“
The
Miles Wingfield? Holy shit. You know what this means? This could be bigger than—Holy shit.”
“Tell me. That’s why I’m calling you. I need to get the jump on this before the circus comes to town.”
Sam’s voice dropped an octave. “What do you need?”
“Everything there is on Miles Wingfield. Background, financial stuff. Whatever you can find. Rumor, gossip. The works.” I hesitated. “And, Sam, I need it by tomorrow.”
He gave a laugh. “Sure. No problem. Anything else?”
“Look, I know what I’m asking. And if you can’t do it, that’s okay, too. I know you work for a living.”
A long pause. “You also know I owe you. Big-time.”
I was taken aback by the emotion in his voice.
“That’s got nothing to do with this,” I murmured. “Believe me, you don’t owe me anything.”
“Not how I see it, Danny. Never will be. You got her through it, man. It was
you
. So shut the hell up about it.”
A few years back, Sam had called me in a panic about his beloved kid sister. A high school junior, she’d been brutally raped by a hitchhiker she picked up. Before leaving her bruised, naked body by the side of the road, he’d taken the trouble to carve swastikas in her face and breasts with an Exacto-knife. Sam used to drive her to my office himself almost daily for eighteen months.
“So,” Sam went on, “how ’bout we meet at Primanti’s tomorrow, around one? I’ll have the goods by then.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
I hung up, and immediately began flipping through my address book again. I found Nancy Mendors’ home number and dialed. She picked up on the second ring.
“Hello?” Guarded but alert. I knew from experience that she’d be wide awake. Nancy was an insomniac.
“It’s me.”
“Dan. Thank God. I thought it was another reporter. I almost didn’t pick up.”
“I’m glad you did.” I paused. “How’re you holding up?”
“Not great. I-I still can’t get the image of Brooks out of my mind. The blood…”
“I’m so sorry you had to find him like that.”
She hesitated. “You know, it’s funny, about you and me…Do you realize we’ve each found a dead body in the past two days? I mean, what are the odds?”
That thought had already occurred to me. But I didn’t say so. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could make sense of by talking about it.
“The cops have been there all day,” she went on. “Poor Bert’s going crazy. All the press, the bad publicity. Patients destabilizing left and right. Not to mention their families calling, frantic—”
“But what about
you
?” I insisted. “Shouldn’t you take some personal time? I’m sure Bert—”
“He’s already ordered me to stay home the next few days. Though one of the cops actually told me not to leave town. Can you believe that? Like on TV.”
“Don’t sweat it. You found the body, and that makes you a prime suspect. I’ve been there. They’ll get over it.”
“Elaine
did
say I should get a lawyer.”
“Bert’s wife?”
“Yeah. I have to admit, I was surprised. I mean, the Lady Garman came right down with
their
lawyer in tow. Like a tigress protecting her mate.”
“Why were you surprised?”
She managed a rueful laugh. “Does Elaine strike you as Loving Wife of the Year?”
“I guess I haven’t given it much thought. Listen, what about Lucy and Helen? That fight in the yard.”
“Yeah, a detective interviewed each one separately. Female cop, I forget her name.”
“Detective Lowrey.”
“That’s her. Anyway, pretty soon Lucy’s lawyer showed up—real high-powered type—and that was the end of that. I swear, there were more lawyers than cops on the scene.”
“Christ, tell me no other patients were questioned.”
“Oh, yes. Another cop set up a makeshift interrogation room, I guess it’s called, and trooped them in one by one.”
“No way Bert Garman should have allowed that.”
“He tried to stop it, Danny. Though you should’ve seen Richie Ellner. Had to be sedated
and
restrained. All the fear and confusion, uniformed authority figures throwing their weight around…It was all too much for him.”
“I can imagine. Poor bastard.”
“Anyway,” she went on, “according to the grapevine, doesn’t sound like anybody saw anything. Practically all the patients were out in the rec yard at the time, undoing years of treatment.” A wry whistle over the phone. “Must have been some party.”
“You didn’t miss a thing.”
“Danny?…” Her voice small. Tentative.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for calling. I…it’s good to hear your voice, you know? I mean, after today.”
I took a breath. “You just get some rest, okay?”
A beat of silence. “Right. Sure.”
She softly hung up.
***
I had one more call to make. Unfortunately, I got Sonny Villanova instead of his wife.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Sonny, it’s Dan Rinaldi. I know it’s late, but could you put Angie on the phone? It’s important.”
“Angie? Angie’s asleep.
I
was asleep. The whole goddam world’s asleep, except the asshole I’m talkin’ to.”
“C’mon, Sonny, cut the shit and put her on.”
“All right, hold on. Christ.”
I opened a second Iron City. Though I’d turned down the volume, I could still make out the honeyed timbre of Sarah Vaughn. A night siren luring me out of myself, my troubles, my own damn stubbornness. Was Sonny right? Was every sane person in the world asleep?
Angie’s sharp voice crackled in my ear. “What’s up?”
“Angie. Thanks. Listen, I need a favor.”
“Are you kiddin’ me? I shouldn’t even be
talkin’
to you. I heard about you refusing police protection. The DA’s spittin’ nails. Biegler wants to pull you in again, charge you with obstruction. Just to get your ass off the street.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“No, sir. ’Cause
this
time I’m inclined to agree with them. We’re in the middle of a high-profile case here. Word is, Wingfield’s going public tomorrow—”
“I know.”
I could tell this threw her, but she did her best not to indicate it.
“Good,” she said crisply. “So you know. Then you also know you’re a big piece of this puzzle, and the last thing we need is you getting yourself killed.”
“Gotcha. Now, about that favor—”
“I’m gonna hang up, I swear it.”
“No, you’re not. ’Cause we’re
paisans.
Family.”
She laughed. “Yank my other one. Shit.”
“Just make a call to the uniform watching my office. They’ve still got it under seal. But I want to get in.”
“Why?”
“Just a hunch. But I think I know how the killer got in and planted the murder weapon on my desk. Don’t you want to find out if I’m right?”