Gambelli released a chest full of air and said, “Enough!” attempting to silence his client. To Dart, he said, “I’d like to speak with her alone, Detective. If you intend to pursue this any further, I must speak with her first.”
“Doctors?” Dart said to the woman.
“Do not answer that, Danielle,” Gambelli warned, and this time his client obeyed. She nodded, and hung her head. She wore sky blue eye shadow on eyelids edged with pencil, her lashes gobbed with mascara.
The woman murmured, “There’s nothing to tell. I don’t know any more than that.”
Gambelli shook his head in disgust and slapped his legs with open palms.
“Doctors,” Dart repeated, in the voice of a man thinking aloud.
“I never met ’em,” she said. “But Harry was better toward me, nicer and all, and so I wasn’t complaining.”
A thought occurred to Dart. “Did your husband ask that you leave the house that evening?”
“No way,” she answered sharply.
“It was Halloween,” Dart countered. “Didn’t he want you home to help give out the candy?”
She hung her head again. “It isn’t a friendly neighborhood,” she said.
At least not toward convicted pornographers, Dart thought, realizing that the Paynes would have been shunned following his arrest.
“He didn’t have a meeting planned?”
Gambelli allowed this question to pass.
“No. Not so as he told me about.”
Reading from his notes, he questioned her about the housecleaner, and she confirmed that the house had been cleaned that same morning. She also confirmed that there was no Dustbuster or similar small vacuum in the house. “And who had access to your garage? It operates via a remote, is that right?”
“A clicker, yeah. Sure. Harry and me, we both had clickers in our cars.”
“And you used yours upon your return?” Dart asked.
She nodded.
He said, “And the garage door was down at the time?”
“Sure it was. What’s this with the garage door and all?”
Dart believed that Bragg’s evidence-the pine needles, rock salt, and potting soil found in the garage and inside the study-pointed toward Payne’s killer having entered through the garage. Once inside the garage, the kitchen door was unlocked and would have allowed egress, undetected. Access to the garage was only through the automatic door openers, one of which Danielle Payne controlled. It was this combination of facts that had led him to consider that she had arranged for her husband’s staged suicide-providing her garage door opener to a killer she had hired.
“And none of your husband’s business associates would have a garage door opener for your house.”
“Of course not!”
“Your housecleaner?”
“No.”
“And your security system that night. It would have been on or off?”
“Harry liked to keep it on when we were home. He didn’t want no surprise visits.” She blushed and averted her eyes. It was the police he had hoped to avoid. “But Halloween it would have been off for sure. At least I think it would have been.”
Dart dropped the biggest bombshell he had in his arsenal, hoping for a direct hit. It stemmed from a phone call he had placed earlier that day. “You weren’t with your friends, the Fallowfields, that evening, Ms. Payne, as you claim to have been in your sworn statement.” Dart glanced at Gambelli, knowing that the attorney, if not his client, would understand her vulnerability. “We checked with the Fallowfields. You saw them only for a drink that evening.”
The woman glanced at her attorney.
“I don’t want to file perjury charges,” he said, leaning heavily on the word and presenting it as a serious possibility. “And I wouldn’t want to drag you through the routine of being booked and charged with that or with more serious crimes. But I do need some answers, and so I turn it over to you-the two of you-as to where we go from here.”
Her frightened eyes appealed to Gambelli. The attorney sought out and located the woman’s signed statement and read it over. He then said, “I would advise you to answer the detective’s questions, Danielle. Given the circumstances, I think it’s in everyone’s best interest.” He looked over at Dart with a mixture of anger and respect and seemed to be fully involved for the first time.
“Where were you that night, Ms. Payne?”
For all her forty-odd years, she looked more like a child as she appealed again with her eyes. Gambelli simply glared back at her. She told the detective. “With a friend.”
“A friend?”
“In bed, okay? I was in bed with a friend.”
“You were having an affair,” he stated.
“No shit,” she answered angrily. “We were fucking our brains out, okay? You want the details?”
“I want his name. I want the exact times.”
She asked her attorney, “Do I have to?”
Gambelli nodded.
She provided Dart the details of her assignation, and said, “You satisfied?” It would require a phone call to verify, but he suspected she was telling the truth.
“The doctors,” Dart said. “I need everything and anything that you can tell me.”
“I don’t know shit, I’m telling you! Only that Harry said that some doctors were going to help him get better-about hitting me, you know, about roughing me up-and that I wasn’t to tell no one.”
“Did he meet with these doctors?” Dart asked.
“I don’t know. He must have. Right?”
“Did he take medication?”
“Injections,” she said, touching her own arm. “I know that because I saw the Band-Aid on his arm one night, and he said how that was part of making him better.”
“Injections,” Dart repeated, taking this down in his notepad. “Those were his words, ‘making him better,’” Dart checked.
“Right.”
“And you took that to mean?”
“Better … you know … less hitting … less rough stuff. Not that I mind it a little rough, you know-the for-fun kind of rough, but Harry had a temper on him that wouldn’t quit sometimes. And it wasn’t me, you know-he used to tell me that. It wasn’t me. It was just me being a woman. It was like something chemical in him. Like a bad seed. Like that movie where the guy changes into the crazy doctor who kills people, you know? Like that.”
“You never met these doctors.”
“No.”
“Never spoke to them on the phone.”
“Not that I know of.”
“And he received these injections …?”
“Every two weeks, just about. Seems to me. He’d had maybe four or five.”
“Your husband changed his medical insurance,” Dart stated. “Do you remember that?”
“Don’t know anything about it. Swear.”
“The dates of which appear to coincide with this treatment.”
“He didn’t tell me jack shit about anything to do with money. That was his department. My department …” She hesitated and then said, “My department was the bedroom.” She locked eyes with Dart, hers a fire of fierce intensity and resentment. He had demeaned her, debased her with this questioning.
“If these doctors should contact you-”
“They won’t.”
“But if they should.”
“I should call you,” she stated. “Forget it. No way. Harry’s dead. Let him be. They were trying to help him. So maybe they’ll help someone else.”
An alarm sounded in Dart’s head. Zeller had made a riddle out of it-people taking their own lives but not committing suicide. A drug gone bad, he thought. Guinea pigs. Test subjects.
As Zeller had warned: The blood of the victims could be the key.
CHAPTER 20
“Joe, I’ve got another one,” Abby announced in a forced whisper, dragging a chair over to his desk. She smelled like lilacs in bloom; her cheeks were flushed and her blond hair needed combing.
Dart’s attention was elsewhere. He had just hung up from speaking first with Teddy Bragg and then with pathologist Dr. Victor Ray, requesting the results of Harold Payne’s blood toxicology. The discussions had strayed into unfamiliar territory as Dart explored what could and could not be detected by such tests, finally persuading Dr. Ray to request a complete workup, since, typically, blood toxicology tested only for the more common narcotics and alcohol levels and tightwad Teddy Bragg had not wanted to release the funds necessary for such testing without “some damn good reasons,” which Dart found impossible to provide.