Murder Suicide (23 page)

She didn’t have to say anything more.  The smell of her was part of their lock-and-key fit.  He pulled her toward him.

*            *            *

Clevenger found Coady pouring himself a cup of coffee from a dilapidated Mr. Coffee outside the interrogation room.  "Sorry about what I said in your office," he told him.  "Looks like we’re both caught in something we can’t quite control here."

"We’ll see about that," Coady said, stirring in three packages of Equal.

"Meaning?"

Coady leaned back against the cracked Formica countertop.  "Fucking FBI," he said.  "They’ve been steamrolling this department for too long.  I can’t believe it’s still going on."

"What do you plan to do about it?"

"I’m not backing off, that’s for sure."  He looked around, checking that no one was in earshot.  "There are a couple things you need to know."

"Shoot."

"Kyle Snow was spotted downtown Boston at 3:10
A.M.
the morning his dad was shot.  He was buying Oxycontin tablets from his dealer."

"How do you know that?"

"Kyle rolled on him when I threatened to leave him in jail to serve out the rest of his probation.  I went to visit this guy — a college kid from B.U.   He was just as much of a stand-up guy.  Told me what he’d sold Kyle, and when."

"How can you know he’s on the level?"

"He sold it to him in the Store 24 on the corner of Chestnut and Charles.  Kyle’s on the surveillance tape buying a sandwich and a carton of milk after the deal went down."

"People actually eat those sandwiches?"

"They buy ’em.  I don’t know if they have the courage to eat ’em."

"So we have him approximately four blocks from the shooting, about an hour and a half before it happened," Clevenger said.

Coady nodded.  "Second thing:  I’m gonna bring George Reese in for questioning at the end of the business day.  No warning.  That should put these people on notice.  I’ll cuff him and drag him in here.  You free?"

This was a whole new Mike Coady.  Sometimes when you push someone, you find out who that person really is.  "You know I am," Clevenger said.

"The suits come down from D.C., take evidence out of my case file?  No notice?  No respect?  I let ’em do it to me this once, pretty soon I won’t respect myself."

"You’re worrying me."

"How come?"

"We’re starting to think alike."

Chapter 14

Kyle Snow was a wiry sixteen-year-old with fine, almost feminine features and longish black hair he kept flipping out of his blue-gray eyes.  He could barely sit still.  He was wearing the standard issue orange jumpsuit of the Massachusetts Department of Corrections.  He tapped his heel on the floor as he sat across the table from Clevenger.  His pupils were dilated.  Tiny beads of perspiration covered his forehead.  He needed a fix.

"Yeah, I gave him the note," he said, in response to Clevenger’s question about delivering Grace Baxter’s suicide note to her husband, George Reese.  "So what?"

"Did he read it?"

"Sure."

"What was his reaction?"

"He said ‘thank you,’ real cool like that.  He wasn’t upset or whatever.  You ask me, he knew she was doing her own thing.  He’s probably been doing his own thing, too."

"Did he ask you anything?"

"Just how I got it."

"Did you tell him?"

"Nope."

"Why did you bring it to him?"

"I don’t know."

"Were you angry about your father and Grace Baxter?"

Kyle started tapping his feet.  He looked toward the door of the interview room.  "They ever getting me that methadone?"

"Couple more minutes," Clevenger said.  He waited a few seconds.  "Were you angry at your father?"

"Not particularly."

Clevenger decided to take another tack.  "You and your dad didn’t have much of a relationship, until recently."

"He hated me," Kyle deadpanned.  "That’s a kind of relationship."

Clevenger knew that firsthand, from his own father.  "Did you hate him back?"

Kyle smiled.  "I used to fantasize about killing him.  Does that answer your question?"

"Killing him, how?"

"Shooting him."  He smiled, shook his head.  "Weird how things work out."

Clevenger stayed silent.

Kyle wiped his brow.  "I’m not holding together."

Clevenger stood up and walked to the door.  He opened it, motioned for the guard seated in the corridor outside.

The guard stood up, walked over.

"How about that methadone?" Clevenger asked him.

"Should have been here, Doc," the guard said.  "I’ll call the infirmary again."

Clevenger walked back into the room, sat down across from Kyle.  "You were spotted close to Mass General around the time you dad was killed."

"Too bad I didn’t know.  I could have watched."

Clevenger looked into his eyes and believed him.  Maybe Kyle Snow had seen his father shot, maybe he hadn’t.  But he certainly would have enjoyed it.  "Do you know anything about the project your father was working on when he died?" he asked him.

"I don’t know what it was.  I know it had him tied in knots until the last month or so."

"How did you know that?"

"He got real uptight when things weren’t flowing.  He’d stay up the whole night, pacing around, walking the neighborhood.  He was doing all that shit.  Then it all seemed to turn around.  Like maybe he had some sort of breakthrough, or something.  You could see it in the way he walked.  A little lighter on his feet.  And his brow.  It could stay furrowed for months, like he was trying to read fine print that was just too small.  But when he finished a project, that would go away, too.  And it did."

"You could read him pretty well," Clevenger said.

"All those years he wouldn’t talk to me, would hardly look at me, I was watching him, trying to figure out what he was thinking, what was wrong.  Stupid."

"Why?"

"’Cause it didn’t matter.  I was trying to find a way in.  There wasn’t one.  Not for me, anyhow."

"How about Lindsey?" Clevenger asked.

"What about her?"

"Did she feel the same way about your dad?"

"’C’mon.  She worshiped him.  He worshiped her.  Until all this."

"The affair."

"That wasn’t the whole story.  He was different.  More human.  Hooking up with Grace Baxter was just part of it.  The fact that he was getting along with me, all of a sudden — that was another part.  And being more of a person, he happened to have some issues with my sister.  Like her staying out all night with boys.  He tried to lay down the law.  Before, he wouldn’t even notice when she walked in at four, five
A.M.
   Let me tell you, she didn’t like any of it."

"Why didn’t she want you to get closer with your father?"

"Listen, I’m not stupid.  I just standardize-test that way.  She hated my dad paying attention to me.  All those years when he wouldn’t give me the time of day, she had him to herself."  He shifted nervously in his seat.  "She kind of set me up here, if you want to know the truth."

That felt like a fracture line Clevenger might be able to split open.  "By having you deliver the note to George Reese’s office?"

He nodded.  "My dad was bound to find out I did it.  Which probably explains why he didn’t talk to me the last couple weeks."

"Did that bother you?" Clevenger asked.

"I’m used to it," he said.  But his voice made it obvious that deep down, beneath the last traces of Oxycontin, he was in all kinds of pain.

There was a knock on the door.  A male nurse stepped inside.  He was carrying a little paper cup filled with clear liquid — Snow’s methadone.  He walked over, handed it to him.

Kyle drank it down, handed back the cup.  "Thanks."

Clevenger waited for the nurse to walk out.  "I would think it would hurt — being ignored by your father again, after finally connecting with him."

"I never really bought the new him," he said, unconvincingly.

"No?"

"I mean, somebody wishes you were never born, then all of a sudden wants to be your best buddy?  I don’t think so.  He was riding a wave, that’s all.  He was high on Grace.  So he spread the joy around a little.  But it was never about me.  It was about him — and her."

"Did you know about the portrait in the living room?"

"Lindsey told me when she found out.  She was all messed up over it."

"How about you?"

"I thought it was cool, actually."

"Cool?"

"You still don’t get it.  My dad’s nothing but a machine.  A computer.  Data in, data out.  My parents’ marriage was a sham.  I don’t know how she did it, but Grace Baxter brought him back to life.  He should have worn her portrait as a goddamn sandwich sign, if she’d asked him to."

Clevenger stared at Kyle for a few seconds.  "Bottom line," he said finally, "Are you glad he’s dead?"

Kyle didn’t respond.

Clevenger waited.

"I miss him, I guess," he said.  "But I’ve missed him my whole life.  Having him dead makes it better, actually."

"How does it make it better?"

"He’s not blowing me off anymore."

Kyle Snow was presenting a psychological motive for murder.  Killing his father would have removed from his life the man whose presence was a constant reminder that he was broken and unloved.  Maybe the pain of his father coming close, then pulling away again was just too much to bear.  Maybe it was enough to make him strike out.  But Kyle also seemed acutely aware of his feelings — and painfully honest about them — in a way that argued against him resorting to murder.  And his access to Oxycontin meant he had a steady supply of a drug to suppress his rage.  "Do you think your dad killed himself?" Clevenger asked him."

"He may have fired the gun.  But that’s irrelevant."

"What do you mean?"

"Even if he pulled the trigger, we killed him, Lindsey, me, his partner Collin."  He smiled.  "Have you met Collin?"

"I have," Clevenger said.

"He’s a piece of work.  You know he told Lindsey that Grace and my dad were lovers?"

"Yes," Clevenger said.

"That’s good.  You’re doing your homework.  So here’s how I figure it.  He came alive there for a while with Grace, started breathing for the first time.  Kind of like being reborn.  And we cut off his air supply, strangled him."

"You drove him to suicide."

"You got it.  Which is why I said what I said about the whole thing being so weird.  There I was wanting to shoot him, and I didn’t have to."

Clevenger nodded.  That was a consistent theme.  Collin Coroway, Lindsey and Kyle all believed they had conspired to make life unlivable for John Snow.  Perhaps that was what finally drove him to choose surgery.  Perhaps, for a time, he truly had thought he could be reborn in the love of Grace Baxter.  And when his life closed around him like a noose, he decided the scalpel was the only way to cut himself free.

But one major question remained:  If Grace Baxter loved John Snow enough to write a suicide note when she lost him — If she was his
lovemap
and he was hers — why hadn’t that love been great enough to overcome everything else?  Why would exposing their affair end it?

A piece of the puzzle was missing.

Clevenger looked into Kyle Snow’s eyes, saw his own reflection.  And while he knew he what there to investigate two deaths, while he knew Kyle was a suspect, not a patient, he couldn’t help seeing the world of pain he was in.  He could actually feel it in his gut.  Such was his gift, and his cross to bear.  He was permeable to the suffering of others.  It was the thing that had once driven him to drink and drug and gamble himself into oblivion.  And it was the thing that was keeping him in his seat right now.  Because he had everything he was going to get from Kyle Snow.  Now he felt the need to give something back.  "You think your father being gone is going to make you feel better?  Is that right?" Clevenger asked.

"Pretty much."

"Well, you’re wrong."

"The only one who ever cared about me was my mother.  Now we’re a single-parent family.  I feel better already."

"Maybe you will, for a week.  Maybe two.  But the truth is that taking your father off the planet doesn’t change the fact that he’s still inside you."

"I never went in for all that New Age shit."

"That’s why you use Oxys, by the way.  You’re feeding them to the part of you that’s your dad, the part that thinks you’re worthless, that you should never have been born."

"Plenty of Oxy out there."

Clevenger smiled to himself.  He’d once thought the same way, that he didn’t have a problem so long as he had enough booze and coke to feed it.  "There isn’t enough Oxy in the whole world to put down that feeling.  Not in the long run.  The only way to do that is to start thinking — and feeling — for yourself."

Kyle rolled his eyes, looked away.

"My father used a belt to convince me I shouldn’t be alive.  I think that was actually easier to deal with than being ignored would have been.  Being ignored, you start to wonder if you exist.  I knew.  Just the bruises alone..."  He closed his eyes, remembering.  When he opened them, Kyle was looking straight at him.  "So what are you good at?" Clevenger asked him.  "Why are you on the planet?"

"I’m very good at getting myself arrested.  I can tell you that."

Clevenger kept looking at him.  Ten, fifteen seconds.  C’mon, he thought to himself, give it up already.  Ten more seconds.  He was about to give up himself, call it a day, when Kyle finally spoke.

"I’m decent at drawing," he said, all the tough-guy bravado evaporating as he spoke those words, leaving behind someone who looked and sounded shockingly vulnerable.  A deer in headlights.  "I guess I get that from my mom."

"What kind of drawing?"

"Architectural stuff, like hers.  I’m pretty good at that.  I mean, I think I am."

"Does she know?"

"No."

"Maybe you should tell her."

"Yeah, maybe I should," he said halfheartedly.

Clevenger knew the trouble with Kyle Snow was having with that suggestion.  His father’s love had been the prize he quietly dreamed of.  Actively seeking his mother’s affection would mean he had lost his father’s, once and for all.  "I’m going to tell you something straight out, Kyle," Clevenger said, "because I don’t think there’s any real chance you’re gonna sit down with a shrink a hundred hours or so to figure it out:  Your father couldn’t love anyone.  He worshiped beauty and perfection.  He worshiped his own mind.  But the whole of him, or anyone else, including your sister, was something he just couldn’t embrace.  Maybe Grace Baxter could have fixed that, maybe not.  It turned out to be too late."