This had not come as a total surprise. All afternoon, Tyler and I had focused on Philip Duncan, running his name through our computer, talking to his colleagues, calling up his friends-all stimulated by the small bell that had gone off in my head when I’d heard he had a view of Gail’s office from his desk. What had emerged was a pristine model citizen with a nightmarish childhood-a man about whom several people told me, “I can’t believe he turned out so well.”
Unfortunately, that Boston childhood had been routinely brutal. Duncan had been born into a poor family with multiple and transient fathers, an alcoholic mother, in a neighborhood on the ropes. As a youngster, he and one sister had been legally adopted by a domineering and abusive aunt and gone to live north of the city, where he’d grown up silent, private, and rigidly self-controlled. He’d left home as soon as he’d been legally able and had never returned since.
The sister, with whom he still kept in touch, lived in Greenfield. She’d moved there just before Robert Vogel had raped Katherine Rawlins.
Shortly before we’d sent Sammie out on her interviews, I’d telephoned Gail to ask her again why Duncan’s name had appeared on her list. Speaking to Ron weeks earlier, she’d merely said that Duncan gave her the creeps, and given her state then, we hadn’t pushed her for more.
This time, she went into more detail. “I don’t know if it’ll help, but a few years ago, Ethan Allen Realty had an exclusive listing on a million-dollar estate in Hillwinds. It was Phil Duncan’s account, and he couldn’t get it to move. He kept urging the owners to lower their price. They eventually got tired of him and came to me, and I sold it within a month. It was a pretty standard deal-no breaches of contract or anything-but I guess Ethan Allen was suffering, so the loss was felt generally. Sumner was pretty unpleasant about it-and has been ever since-which is one of the reasons he made it on the list. But Duncan was weird. He confronted me on the street afterward, all smiles and charm, and said he now knew what it felt like to be violated.”
“In those exact words?”
“Close enough. But it was the way he said it-kidding around, but cold, too, like it was some private bad joke. I found the comparison offensive. I told him I seriously doubted it, and we parted company. As far as I know, we’ve never spoken since, and whenever we see each other around town, he makes it a point to avoid me.”
I’d questioned her further, but that had been the total gist of it-from Gail, from my own research, and from Sammie after her interview-an accumulation of muted alarms, not one of them loud enough to allow us to do more than we were already doing. I had people back at the station still checking computer files and making phone calls about Duncan, but right now our current plan seemed as potentially fruitful as any. It also helped us avoid the same trap we’d fallen into with Vogel, of focusing on one man too much and too early.
Still, I had taken the precaution of assigning Klesczewski and Kunkle to watch Duncan’s house, instead of the one-detective/one-patrolman teams all the other suspects were assigned.
Now, as I sat in my car listening to Sammie’s tinny, metallic voice over the small tape recorder/receiver on the seat beside me, I kept reviewing what we knew of Phil Duncan, hoping to catch a glimpse of some metaphorical chameleon, waiting to be seen… Then, as I reached for the receiver’s volume control with my left hand, I simultaneously made a grab for my gloves with my right as they slid off the seat.
I froze in mid-motion, my thoughts suddenly crystallized around a similar ungainliness on the night of Gail’s attack.
“Which hand did he use to cover your face?” Megan Goss had asked Gail in the depths of her hypnotic state.
“His right,” she’d answered, which had surprised me at the time. I mimicked the motion now, using my right hand to push an imaginary face to my right, struck as I had been then by the unnaturalness of the gesture. If I had been the rapist, and had suddenly seen Gail looking at me, I would have pushed her head aside in a crossover movement-moving her face from my right to hers-rather than defeating my own momentum by reversing directions.
Unless I’d intended her to see the clock-so that she could become my alibi.
I switched on my headlights and drove up alongside Tyler’s car. Marshall Smith, the patrolman accompanying Tyler, rolled down his window. “What’s up?”
I handed him the small case holding the receiver and tape recorder. “I’ve got to make a phone call. You’re on your own.”
I pulled out into the Putney Road and turned left, heading downtown. On my portable radio, I called up Ron Klesczewski. He and Willy were in his car, outside Philip Duncan’s house on Allerton Avenue, a middle-class, dead-end street paralleling the interstate. “You had any movement lately?”
“Nothing.”
“But he’s still there, right?”
“As far as we know.”
I pulled into a service station across the intersection from my office, parking opposite a pay phone. I didn’t want to risk meeting any reporters at the Municipal Building.
The snow was falling heavily now, making even the nearby phone booth ghostly and ephemeral, drifting in and out of view at the whimsy of the wind.
I dialed Gail’s number at the friend’s house where she was staying on Lamson Street, far from her own home, her office, or Susan Raffner’s, all of which had been besieged by the press.
She answered on the first ring.
“I need to ask you something about the night you were attacked-something we missed at Megan’s.”
“All right,” she answered cautiously, surprised by my urgency.
“Can you think back to before you woke up-before you realized someone was on top of you?”
“What am I looking for?”
I didn’t want to suggest the answer I was after. “Sounds.”
I heard the phone being put down and imagined Gail settling into a chair, making herself comfortable, perhaps closing her eyes. There was a silence of several minutes, during which I became covered with snow.
Her voice, when it finally came back on, was hard-edged with excitement. “It’s the clock, isn’t it?”
“What did you hear?”
“The same sounds I make when I reset it.”
I let out a sigh of relief. “He had to change the time to establish his alibi. Then he had to make sure you saw the clock before he pulled the pillowcase over your head. He must have changed it back when he went on the rampage later, making enough noise to hide what he was doing.”
She hesitated a moment, before adding, “So who needed that kind of alibi?”
“If my hunch is right, it’s Philip Duncan-but we’re going to have to dig deep to prove it.”
“Here we go again,” she murmured.
“You still have Mary Wallis’s gun?”
Her melancholy was replaced by surprise. “Yes. Why?”
“We’re trying to push a few of the suspects into tipping their hand. Duncan among them. Megan said whoever it was would probably just hunker down under pressure-and that’s what he seems to be doing-it just never hurts to be cautious. I’ll call you as soon as I know more.”
I hung up and got back into my car, dusting off the snow. I was about to leave the filling station to join Ron at Duncan’s house when I was abruptly filled with a sense of foreboding, as if the very mixture of warning and solace I’d given Gail had circled back on itself and settled on my chest.
I keyed the radio next to me, foregoing the formalized language we normally used. “Ron, you there?”
Ron’s voice came back, mildly surprised. “Yeah. What’s up?”
“Knock on Duncan’s door-see if he’s home.”