Authors: Alafair Burke
S
he was still yawning at eleven o’clock the next morning.
“Damn it, Rogan. I’m telling you, I’m about to burst. I don’t have any choice. I’m doing it.”
“That is disgusting. You are officially a disgusting person.”
“God, you are such a germaphobe. I’ll wash my hands when I’m done.”
“Don’t be counting on any soap in there. Or you know it’s going to be all funked up.”
Ellie hovered over James Grisco’s toilet. The bathroom, like the rest of the apartment, was filthy. She tried not to think about the yellow streaks beneath her feet.
Rogan was right. The only soap was in the mildewed shower stall, and she had no interest in touching soap that had been rubbed on the body that had occupied this space. She found a bottle of dish soap in the kitchen, then rubbed her hands on her pants to dry them.
“Told you it’d be nasty,” Rogan said.
“You and your Starbucks.” That’s the last time she’d suck down a Venti Americano before heading to an ex-con’s crash pad. Regular deli coffee in a normal-size cup was just fine for her.
They’d found the apartment just as Detective Howard had suggested, working backwards from the handwritten directions to the Hamptons that Grisco had left in his car. That had landed them on Ninety-first Avenue in Jamaica, Queens. She took the north side of the block; Rogan took the south. The fourth door she’d knocked on belonged to a sweet old man who had no idea the new tenant living above his garage was a convicted killer.
The landlord could use a lesson in property management, because he confirmed that Grisco had rented the filthy prefurnished apartment only six days earlier. He also confirmed that Grisco lived alone. Now that the sole tenant was dead, so were his expectations of privacy, which meant they didn’t need a warrant.
As it turned out, there was very little to search. The single room was no bigger than four hundred square feet. No computer. No television. Just a few items of clothing in a rickety dresser, undoubtedly unpacked from the empty duffel bag in the closet. Milk, cereal, and two frozen dinners in the kitchen.
“Why can’t this be easy?” Rogan asked. He was searching through Grisco’s clothing more thoroughly.
“What did you expect to find? A neatly typed memo from George Langston to one Mr. James Grisco, subject line ‘re: Murder My Wife’?”
“A computer. A phone. The kinds of things that hold people’s secrets. Wait, I got something.” He reached into a balled sock and pulled out a roll of money. “About fifteen hundred dollars. How much did the old man say Grisco paid for this place?”
“Twelve hundred a month.”
“You could get a palace in Buffalo for that.”
“It may be a dump, but how was he paying for it, and with fifteen hundred bucks to spare?” They had no explanation for why Grisco was in New York City. Now they had learned that Grisco had paid his landlord first and last months’ rent plus deposit—all in cash, despite having no apparent source of income.
Ellie crouched next to the bed, supporting her weight with her knees so she would not need to place her clean hands on the threadbare carpet.
“Grisco was a reader.” She used a pen to slide the stack out from beneath the bed. “Two pornos and a paperback. Hey, look—he’s got the same taste as you.”
She recognized the image on the cover—the trunk of a Lincoln Town Car—as a series Rogan was always raving about.
“I’m strictly online now for all my pornography needs.”
“Very funny. I meant this.” She held up the paperback, and two small cards fell from the pages. She immediately recognized the first as a MetroCard for the buses and subways. The other was one of those frequent-customer cards promising a freebie after the requisite number of purchases. Ellie’s own wallet was bursting with them, and she hadn’t filled one yet. She was about to replace the cards in the book when she pulled the frequent-customer card out again. Grisco had been halfway to a free cup of coffee, but it wasn’t the regularity of his beverage consumption that caught her attention.
The card was from Monster Coffee. “Check this out.”
“Monstrous Coffee. Still have the taste of burnt oil in my mouth.”
Ellie pulled up the Monster Coffee website on her BlackBerry. Eleven locations scattered throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. Maybe it was only a coincidence, but she didn’t like the fact that one of those branches was right across the street from the Casden School.
They moved on to the less obvious places to search: above the kitchen cabinets, behind the dresser, inside the toilet tank.
Rogan must have seen the disappointment in her face. “Maybe we’ll find something in George’s bank records.” They had sent all the major banks a request for account statements for the Langstons, hoping to find proof that George Langston had paid money to James Grisco.
But Ellie’s mind was elsewhere. “You know, I keep thinking about Langston showing up at the police station last night. He looked terrified.”
“If we’re right about him, then things didn’t exactly go as he planned, did they? He might have been terrified of getting caught.”
“No. He looked genuinely worried about Adrienne. Plus, I did some Googling this morning on that family law attorney whose number I got from the Langstons’ caller ID. We assumed George was looking for a divorce, but it turns out Michael Wiles, Esquire, Attorney at Law, is seventy-eight years old with an office above a Chinese restaurant on the Lower East Side. Not exactly the kind of hired gun a guy like Langston would need for a high-priced divorce fight. And why would he send Grisco to the Hamptons house with a knife when he knew Adrienne would have access to a loaded gun?”
“Damn. Are you actually rethinking this?”
“We already made a mistake with Casey. I just don’t want to jump to the wrong conclusion.”
“But you never did jump to any conclusions with Casey. You said all along it didn’t feel right. George, on the other hand, is the one person who ties it all together, remember?” He used his fingers to count off all of the relevant points. “We know one of the threats about his wife came from Julia’s computer. Julia has a mystery boyfriend. Julia is Langston’s daughter’s best friend. And, oh yeah, don’t forget about that picture we have of her at his country house.”
He suddenly stopped talking and looked up at the ceiling.
“What?” She followed his gaze. “You see something?”
“No. But the country property. Ramona said her dad bought it right out of law school with a group of friends. What do you want to bet one of those friends is David Bolt?”
“We’ve been focusing on George because he’s married to Adrienne and obviously knew Julia. But if Adrienne knows that George helped Bolt sweep the Moffit family’s lawsuit under the rug—”
“Then Bolt might have more to lose than even George.”
“Shit. Remember Casey said yesterday that Brandon sent him an e-mail apologizing? According to Brandon, Julia was the one who originally hooked him up with Dr. Bolt, which means she knew about the drug testing, even though Ramona didn’t. Maybe she knew Bolt.”
“As a shrink, Bolt could have slipped her those Adderalls we found in her purse.”
“And David Bolt seems more like Julia’s type than George, anyway,” Ellie said. “She went after her science teacher, so I could imagine her being drawn to someone like Bolt. They could’ve met through the Langstons, or at some Casden alumni event.”
“So now we’re back to Bolt’s drug trial. Assuming Adrienne knows what those guys are up to, is it all so bad that they would not only try to scare her, but send Jimmy Grisco to kill her?”
“We need to talk to Casey.”
C
hung Ri allowed them to use her office to talk to Casey privately. Ellie pasted on her best, most helpful, smile as Ms. Ri threw them one last disapproving scowl before closing the door.
“Sorry about that,” Casey said. “That woman kind of loves me.”
“I think you can hold the ‘kind of’ on that,” Rogan said
.
“I, however, think she’s
kind of
planning a voodoo spell for us.”
“Can we make this quick? I just got a message from Ramona about everything that happened last night in Long Island. Her parents are back in the city now, but she’s really freaking out.”
“Tell you what,” Ellie said. “Let us have a word with you, and we’ll give you a ride up there when we’re done. We need to know more about the drug-testing program you were doing with Dr. Bolt.”
“Okay.” She noticed he looked down at his hands as he spoke. He seemed nervous. “Like I said, Brandon was the one who knew about it. I guess he found out from Julia. We went once a week for counseling and stuff. We’d talk to the doctor and fill out these questionnaires. Mostly we got a hundred bucks.”
“Do you know how Julia knew about the study?”
He shook his head. “No. I mean, I didn’t even know she was the one who told Brandon until that asshole e-mailed me yesterday trying to apologize for setting me up like that. Julia was always trying to find ways of helping people out. She probably told him so he could get some easy cash. I don’t think she knew I was doing it, too, because she never mentioned it. Why are you asking me about this?”
“Sorry, but we can’t tell you. And you can’t tell anyone that we asked you about this. Not even Ramona. Do you understand? We’re taking a chance on you. We need to be able to trust you.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“You said Brandon faked the test to get into the experiment. Do you know how he did that?”
“He looked on some website about manic-depressives and then just tried to answer the questionnaire the way he thought a manic-depressive should. Some of the stuff he was talking about sounded more like OCD to me. I’m surprised it worked.”
So was Ellie. According to Bolt, the diagnostic tests were intended to weed out the fakers.
“And how about you? Did you fake the test, too?”
He stared at the table, lips pressed together nervously.
“It’s okay, Casey. We’re not interested in putting you through anything else. We need to know what’s going on with the study.”
“I told Brandon I was faking it, but at the last minute I decided not to. I’ve been told my whole life that I’m not normal. That the way I think of myself is unnatural and a sign that something is wrong with me. I figured here was a chance to get a real diagnosis from a legitimate doctor. I was pretty surprised when he said I fit the qualifications for the research.”
“Could you tell any difference in how you felt once you started the program?”
“Yeah, at first. But then, I don’t know. I started to feel kind of . . . flat. Like, when all of that stuff went down with Gundley and the way those guys treated me—
terrified
me—it was like I didn’t really care what happened. Like I was outside of my own body or something. I mean, in some ways I’ve lived outside of my body my whole life, but this was different. I was just so . . . yeah,
flat
is the best word to describe it. Like I just didn’t feel anything.”
“And that was a recent change?” Rogan clarified. “You said the drugs were helpful at the beginning?”
“I didn’t really mean the drugs. It was more having a trained person to talk to. I got sent to quacks back in Iowa, and I could never really tell them what it was like—you know, to feel like I’m supposed to be different from the way I was born. Dr. Bolt didn’t seem to judge me. He was actually trying to help me deal with my own self-doubt and guilt. I think he has a lot of young patients. He’s all about separating yourself from your parents—being honest about who they are and how they treated you, but then letting go of it.”
It was all getting a little touchy-feely for Rogan. “But what you’re saying is that the drugs might have been causing you to feel depressed?”
“Yeah, I mean, I’ve wondered about that. I stopped taking them, even though they say you’re not supposed to go cold turkey. But I miss talking to Dr. Bolt. He’s pretty smart. Like, he had me do this exercise where I wrote a letter to my parents. Not that they talk to me anymore. They said I could come back once I was willing to be Cassandra again. But he had me pretend that I could open up to them. He had me write down all of the things I was never able to say to them. Even though you don’t mail the letter—no one even reads it—there’s something about the process of putting it on paper: the rage, the fury, the scribbling, the crossing out.”
Wasn’t that what Adrienne had said about her blog? That writing about the abuse she’d suffered was a way to purge herself of the past?
When Ellie had undergone department-mandated therapy after an officer-involved shooting, the counselor had asked her to do the same thing. In her case, the letter had been to a woman killed by the man Ellie eventually shot to death. If it was a common therapy tactic, writing must bring a form of enlightenment to some, but Ellie hadn’t seen the point. Sure, she had experienced the rage and the fury and the scribbling and the crossing out that Casey described, but she hadn’t let any of it go. She still woke up thinking about that dead girl. And she still had nightmares about her father.
And then Ellie pictured herself writing that fake letter. The pad of paper from the therapist’s office. The crossed-out words.
She knew why Julia Whitmire had written that suicide note to her parents.
“You ready for that ride uptown?” she asked. It was about time she and Rogan had a heart-to-heart with George Langston.
T
he storage room?” Rogan pushed the top of an encrusted mop away from his face. “This was the best we could do?”
They hadn’t been able to contact the photographer who leased the office next door, so this tiny janitorial storage closet was the only other space for them to camp out near Dr. David Bolt’s office. Given the circumstances, they needed to be close.
“Shh.” She pressed the headphones closer to her ears. It had taken George Langston only a day to strike an agreement with the district attorney’s office. He would come clean about his part in the Equivan drug-testing scheme. He would testify against Bolt. He would also set up a meeting and wear a wire. All he got in exchange was a promise of sentencing consideration. It was a lousy deal, but the man was seriously pissed. What had started as a favor to a friend had turned into an attack on his wife.
She heard George’s voice through her headphones. Rogan nodded to indicate his audio was also working.
“Sue’s gone?” George asked. Sue was the receptionist.
“You were the one who said you didn’t want anyone to see you here. I canceled three sessions for this. What’s with all the James Bond action?”
“My wife. Don’t tell me you didn’t get my messages yesterday. A man followed her out to East Hampton. He tried to kill her.”
“And it sounds like she did a good job defending herself. Shouldn’t you be with her?”
“This has gotten totally out of control.”
“What is your
deal
, George?”
“It was supposed to be comments on a website. A few words to scare her—to make everything right again. That’s all I agreed to.”
“And I swear, that’s all it’s been.”
It was only that morning when they’d watched George Langston sob in an interrogation room.
You have to understand,
he said through the tears,
it didn’t seem so terrible at first.
It was only one lawsuit. One screwed-up kid, Jason Moffit, had killed himself during a drug trial. A fluke. A statistical anomaly. But Jason Moffit had been taking Equivan, and the parents were telling anyone who would listen that the experimental drug combination had caused their son to inject himself with enough heroin to kill four junkies.
It was the kind of story that would send the drug companies running and accountability boards ordering the research team to start over from scratch—a larger sample size, a longer study, years of delays. Bolt swore that to interrupt the research would hurt an entire generation of kids who desperately needed better treatment options.
Less selflessly, any kind of investigation could destroy Bolt’s career. To get the manufacturers of Equilibrium and Flovan to fund the research, he had practically guaranteed them a successful trial. He had forecast the likely profits once the two drugs were prescribed together. There were documents. Even a PowerPoint presentation. The drug companies would throw him under the bus. Bolt would lose everything.
And so George had agreed to help him. After Bolt assured him Moffit was a statistical anomaly, George helped make the Moffits’ lawsuit go away, complete with a confidentiality clause and no report to the Food and Drug Administration.
Meanwhile, Bolt went about ensuring his study produced the promised results. He started taking a few kids who didn’t meet the criteria for the clinical trial. Despite the protocol of “blind” testing, he placed these kids in the active drug group, overstating their initial clinical symptoms. Because these kids had never been bipolar to begin with, their “results” would show improvement as they continued the medication.
But then Adrienne had seen that tiny little article about the lawsuit in the
New York Post
after the parents had called a reporter without notifying him.
How can you sue David?
she’d asked.
He and Anne are two of our best friends.
As he recounted the conversation in the interrogation room, he nearly choked on his words. “I’ve always been a terrible liar. Ironic, isn’t it? I told her what I’d done. I didn’t want her to think I’d do that to our friends. I compromised everything I believe in, just to help David.”
And then Adrienne started to change. Those unexplained periods at her computer became longer and more frequent. She pulled away from him in bed at night. And then he heard the same rumors as Katherine Whitmire about his wife’s book deal. He snuck into her e-mail and learned the truth: a six-hundred-thousand-dollar advance that she never bothered to mention to him. He had always known on some level that she’d married him not for love but for station and security. That’s why they had a prenup. That’s why he had never wanted her to legally adopt Ramona. He needed to know she couldn’t leave.
Now she had a measure of autonomy, and he was losing her.
Maybe if he hadn’t told his best friend, nothing would have come of it. Book deals fall apart. Women learn to forgive. But then David Bolt came up with a plan. If Adrienne was too afraid to publish the book, she would have to stay with George. And if she stayed with George, there would be no messy divorce where she threatened to reveal what she knew about Equivan.
Like George said,
It was supposed to be comments on a website. A few words to scare her—to make everything right again.
Now, in Bolt’s office, George was trying to get the man who took it beyond words to admit the true extent of his wrongdoing.
“Drop the act, David. I should have known you were lying when the police said one of those posts came from Julia’s laptop. The girl you’re screwing just happens to kill herself?”
“I told you: Julia was a very disturbed girl.”
“You don’t think I know that? She practically grew up in my home. What kind of man—a psychiatrist, no less—has sex with a teenage girl who’s so obviously troubled? What happened?” Suddenly they heard muffled sounds through the headphones. “Jesus, David, what the fuck!”
“Are you wearing a wire? Are you fucking recording me?”
Ellie had one hand on the closet doorknob, the other on her holstered Glock. This was it.
“Don’t be ridiculous.” George’s voice again. “What do you want? A strip search?”
“Sorry, man. This shit is—it’s, I don’t know what to do. It just wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
Ellie let her hand drop from the gun. They had caught a break. Bolt must have stopped with a cursory search, expecting one of those wires strapped to his friend’s chest like in the movies. This particular audio transmitter was hidden in a fountain pen in Langston’s front jacket pocket.
“Don’t ask me to feel sorry for you. What I agreed to about Adrienne was wrong. But sending someone after her? Trying to hurt my child’s mother? That’s not acceptable. Not in any universe.”
“I swear—on Nate and Charlotte’s
lives
—I did not have anything to do with that.”
“Oh, come on, David. That doesn’t make any sense. You really expect me to believe that Julia killing herself and some murderer coming after my wife is all just a big coincidence?”
Ellie heard the sound of a sliding door, followed by the squeal of a siren and horns blasting below. Someone had opened the terrace door. Did Bolt still suspect a wire?
Don’t go out there
, she willed. She could barely hear them over the sound of the wind. She could read Rogan’s lips next to her.
Idiot.
They made out only bits and pieces.
Julia . . . didn’t know what to . . . could tell . . . research . . . nowhere . . . my files . . . threatened.
It was hard to distinguish Bolt’s voice from Langston’s. They’d lost all track of the conversation. As minutes passed, Ellie and Rogan exchanged worried glances.
Their voices were getting louder.
Liar . . . family . . . police . . . coming out.
And then they heard Langston’s voice even louder now. “What? No!” There was more whooshing, but it wasn’t the sound of wind anymore. Physical contact with the audio transmitter. A loud crash.
She was moving already, Rogan right behind her. She yelled into her radio. “Go. In the office. Now. Now!”
Eight officers poured from the stairwell at the end of the hallway, but she and Rogan had a forty-yard head start. This is why they’d stayed close.
Bolt’s reception area was empty. They ran straight for his office door. Locked.
Rogan slammed his left shoulder hard and low against it like a linebacker. Nothing. They heard a yell inside.
Another low, hard hit, and the door gave way.
Bolt had backed Langston against the railing. Langston had only one foot in contact with the concrete, his weight beginning to tip over the terrace edge.
“David Bolt,” she yelled. “Police.”
He removed his hands from Langston’s jacket and held them high. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. It was an argument. That’s all. Right, George? Tell them.”
Bolt looked at Langston with a look of hope. It was a hope that came from certainty that weak-willed George Langston would do anything to cover his own ass.
“It’s over, David. It’s over.” Langston checked his blazer pocket for the pen-recorder. “You got all that, right?”