" 'Just as the woman left, I discovered Cynthia had been listening. We didn't say anything to each other, but Cynthia had a fierce look. I think she hates me.' "
Ainslie said nothing, his thoughts too complex to express. His disgust was overwhelming, particularly that neither Gustav nor Eleanor Ernst had given the slightest thought to the welfare of the newborn child her grandson or granddaughter, his son or daughter; apparently neither had cared which.
"I skipped ahead," Ruby continued, "reading just parts of the diary in the years when Cynthia was growing up. There's been no time to read it all; maybe no one ever will. But the picture is that Gustav Ernst stopped molesting Cynthia and began trying to help her, hoping according to the diary she'd 'forgive and forget.' He gave her lots of money and he had plenty. It was all still happening when he was a city commissioner and Cynthia joined the Miami Police. He used his influence to put pressure on the PD, first to get her into Homicide, then to have her promoted fast."
"Cynthia was good at her job," Ainslie said. She's probably have gone ahead anyway."
Ruby shrugged. "Mrs. Ernst thought it helped. though she didn't believe Cynthia would ever be gratef' l for anything she and Gustav did. Here's something Mrs. Ernst wrote four years ago:
" 'Gustav is living in a fool's world. He thinks that all is well between the two of us and Cynthia, that the past has been put behind and left there, and that Cynthia cares about us now. What nonsense! Cynthia doesn't love us. Why should she? We never gave her reason to. Now, looking back, I wish I had done some things differently. But it's too late. All too late.'
"I have one more diary piece to read, and maybe it's the most important," Ruby said. "This is Mrs. Ernst four months before she and Gustav were killed:
" 'I've caught Cynthia looking at us sometimes. I believe a fierce hatred for us both is there. It's part of Cynthia's nature that she never forgives. Never! She doesn't forgive anyone for even the smallest offense against her. She gets back at them somehow, makes them pay. I'm sure we made her that way. Sometimes I think she's planning something for us, some kind of revenge, and I'm afraid. Cynthia is very clever, more clever than us both.' "
Ruby put her notepad down. "I've done what you asked me to. There's just one thing left." She saw Ainslie's troubled face, and her expression softened. "This must have been hard for you, Sergeant."
He said uncertainly, "What do you mean?"
"Malcolm, we all know why you were never made lieutenant. By now you should probably be a captain."
He sighed. "So you know about Cynthia and me. . ." He let his words tail off.
"Of course. We all knew it while it was happening. We're detectives, aren't we?"
In other circumstances Ainslie might have laughed. But something dark and unspoken was hanging in the air. "So what's left?" he asked. "You said there was one thing. What?"
"There's a sealed box in Property that was brought in with the others from the Ernst crime scene, but has Cynthia's name on it. It looks as if she stored it in her parents' house and it got caught up with all the rest."
"Did you check who signed the box in?"
"Sergeant Brewmaster."
"Then it's official evidence, and we have the right to open it."
"I'll get it," Ruby said.
* * *
The cardboard carton that Ruby brought was similar to the others, with the same CRIME SCENE EVIDENCE tape around it. But when that tape was removed there was more tape beneath, colored blue, bearing the initials "C.E.," and secured by sealing wax at several points.
"Take that off carefully and save it,'' Ainslie instructed.
A few minutes later Ruby had opened the carton flaps and folded them back. Both peered inside, where several plastic bags were visible, each containing an object. One, near the top, was a gun that looked like a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver. In another bag was an athletic shoe, with another shoe beneath. Both shoes bore stains. A fourth bag contained what appeared to be a T-shirt with a similar stain; a portion of a recording tape was also visible. Each bag had a label attached, with handwriting that Ainslie recognized as Cynthia's.
He could hardly believe what he was seeing.
Ruby was puzzled. "Why is this here?"
"It was never intended to be. It was concealed in the Ernst house and, just as you said, brought here by mistake." Ainslie added, "Don't touch anything, but see if you can read what's written about the gun."
She leaned closer. "It says, 'The weapon which P.J. used to shoot his ex-wife Naomi with her friend Kilburn Holmes.' There's a date. 'August twenty-first' six years ago."
"Oh Jesus!" Ainslie said in a whisper.
Ruby straightened, facing him. "I don't understand any of this. What is it?"
He answered grimly, "The artifacts of an unsolved homicide. Unsolved until now."
Although the Jensen-Holmes case was not handled by Ainslie's Homicide team, he remembered it well because of Cynthia's long association with the novelist Patrick Jensen. He recalled again that Jensen had been a strong suspect following the murders of his ex-wife and her young male friend, killed by .38-caliber bullets from the same gun. Jensen was known to have purchased a Smith & Wesson .38-caliber revolver two weeks earlier, but claimed to have lost the gun, and no murder weapon was found. In the absence of specific evidence, no charges were laid.
An obvious question: Was the gun in the box just unsealed the missing weapon? Another: If the evidence was real, why had Cynthia labeled it, then concealed it for six years? Such labeling was routine for a trained Homicide detective, which Cynthia was. Concealing evidence was not.
Ruby broke in. "Does this 'unsolved homicide' fit in somehow with the Ernst murders?"
It was one more question Ainslie was already asking himself. The questions were endless. Was Patrick Jensen involved in the Ernst murders? If so, was Cynthia protecting him from that, as well as from an earlier crime?
Weighing it all, Ainslie felt a mood of deep depression sweep over him. "Right now I'm not sure of anything," he told Ruby. "What we do need is an ID crew to go through this box."
He lifted the tiny office's single phone.
PART FOUR
The Past
1
Cynthia Ernst could remember the precise moment when she decided that someday she would kill her parents. She was twelve years old, and two weeks earlier she had given birth to her father's child.
A plainly dressed, middle-aged woman had arrived unannounced at the family's mansion in the exclusive, security-protected Bay Point community on Biscayne Bay. Producing credentials that described her as a child welfare worker, she had asked the housekeeper for Mrs. Ernst.
When Cynthia heard the stranger's voice she moved quietly into the corridor outside the main-floor drawing room, where her mother had taken the woman and closed the door behind them. Equally quietly, Cynthia opened the door just enough to peer through and listen.
"Mrs. Ernst, I'm here officially to talk about your daughter's baby," the woman was saying. She looked about her, seemingly impressed by her surroundings. "I have to say that in matters like this, there's usually poverty and family neglect. Clearly that isn't the case here;"
"There has been no neglect, I assure you. Quite the contrary." Eleanor Ernst spoke quietly and carefully. "My husband and I have cared for our daughter devotedly ever since she was born, and dearly love her. As to what has happened, we are as distressed as any couple can be, though we tell ourselves that somehow we've failed miserably as parents."