"Thank you."
"The important thing is the identification. If your wife can remember anything about her captor that would help us to prove he was not Peter Lake."
"I understand. I'll ask her, but I'm certain she won't be able to help you."
Dr. Escalante shook hands with Stewart and showed him out. Then he returned to his office and picked up the photograph of his wife and child.
Betsy had a trial scheduled to start Friday in a divorce case and she was putting the file in her attache case to bring home when Ann told her Reggie Stewart was on the line.
"How was your trip?" Betsy asked.
"Just fine, but I'm not accomplishing much. There's something weird about this business and it's getting weirder by the minute."
"Go on."
"I can't put my finger on what's wrong, but I know I'm getting the runaround about the case when no one should have any reason to lie to me."
"What are they lying about?"
"That's just it. I have no idea. But I know something's up."
"Tell me what you've learned so far," Betsy said, and Stewart recounted his conversations with Frank Grimsbo and Dr. Escalante.
"After I left Escalante, I spent some time at the public library going over newspaper accounts of the case. I figured there would be interviews with the victims, the cops. Nothing. John O'Malley, the chief of police, was the mayor's spokesman. He said Waters did it. Case closed.
The surviving women were hospitalized immediately.
Reardon was institutionalized. Escalante wouldn't talk to reporters.
Ditto Hazelton. A few weeks of this and interest fades. On to other stories. But you read the news reports and you read O'Malley's statements, and you still don't know what happened to those women.
"Then I talked to Roy Lenzer, a detective with Hunter's Point P.D. He's the guy who's trying to run down the case files for Page. He knows Gordon is missing. He searched her house for the files. No luck. Someone carted off all of the files in the case. I mean, we're talking a full shelf of case reports, photographs. But why?
Why take a shelf-load of paper in a ten year-old case?
What was in those files?"
"Reg, did Oberhurst visit the police?"
"I asked Lenzer about that. Gave Grimsbo a call, too. As far as I can tell, Oberhurst never talked to anyone after he talked to Dr. Escalante.
Which doesn't make sense. If he was investigating the case for Lisa Darius, the police would be his first stop."
"Not necessarily," Betsy said. Then she told her investigator about her meetings with Gary Telford.
"I have a very bad feeling about this, Reg. Let me run something by you.
Say you're an unscrupulous investigator. An ex-con who works on the edge. Someone who's not averse to a little blackmail. The wife of a prominent businessman hires you because she thinks her husband is having an affair. She gives you a scrapbook containing clippings about an old murder case.
"Let's suppose that this crooked p.i. flies to Hunter's Point and talks to Dr. Escalante. He's no help, but he does tell the investigator enough information so he can track down Samantha Reardon, the only other surviving victim. what if oberhurst found Reardon and she positively identified Peter Lake as the man who kidnapped and tortured her?"
"And Oberhurst returned to Portland and what?" Stewart said.
"Blackmailed a serial killer? You'd have to be nuts."
"who's the John Doe, Reg?"
The line was quiet for a moment, then Stewart said,
"oh, shit."
"Exactly. We know Oberhurst lied to Lisa. He told her he hadn't started investigating the Hunter's Point case, but he was in Hunter's Point. And he's disappeared.
I talked to every lawyer I could find who's employed him.
No contact. He doesn't return calls. The John Doe is Oberhurst's size and build. What do you want to bet the corpse has a broken nose?"
"No bets. What are you going to do?"
"There's nothing we can do. Darius is our client. We're his agents.
This is all confidential."
"Even if he killed the guy?"
"Even if he killed the guy."
Betsy heard a sharp intake of air, then Stewart said:
"You're the boss. What do you want me to do next?"
"Have you tried to set up a meeting with Wayne Turner?"
"No go. His secretary says he's too busy, because of the confirmation hearings."
"Damn. Gordon, Turner, Grimsbo. They all know something. What about the police chief? What was his name?"
"O'Malley. Lenzer says he retired to Florida about nine years ago.,
"Okay," Betsy said with a trace of desperation.
"Keep trying to find Samantha Reardon. She's our best bet."
"I'll do it for you, Betsy. If it was someone else… I gotta tell you, I usually don't give a fuck, but I'm starting to. I don't like this case."
"That makes two of us. I just don't know what to do about it. We're not even certain I'm right. I have to find that out, first."
"If you are, what then?"
"I have no idea."
Betsy put Kathy to sleep at nine and changed into a flannel nightgown.
After brewing a pot of coffee, Betsy spread out the papers in Friday's divorce case on the dining room table. The coffee was waking her up, but her mind wandered to the Darius case. Was Darius guilty?
Betsy could Dot stop thinking about the question she had put to Alan Page during her cross-examination: With six victims, including a six-year-old girl, why would the mayor and chief of police of Hunter's Point close the case if there was any possibility that Peter Lake, or anyone else, was really the murderers It made no sense.
Betsy pushed aside the documents in the divorce and pulled a yellow pad in front of her. She listed what she knew about the Darius case. The list stretched for three pages. Betsy came to the information she had learned from Stewart that afternoon. A thought occurred to her. She frowned.
Betsy knew Samuel Oberhurst was not above blackmail. He'd tried it on Gary Telford. If Martin Darius was the rose killer, Darius would have no compunction about killing Oberhurst if the investigator tried to blackmail him. But Betsy's assumption that John Doe was Samuel Oberhurst made sense only if Samantha Reardon identified Martin Darius as the rose killer. And that's where the difficulty lay. The police would have questioned Reardon when they rescued her. If the task force suspected that Peter Lake, not Henry Waters, was the kidnapper, they would have shown Reardon a photograph of Lake. If she identified Lake as her kidnapper, why would the mayor and the police chief announce that Waters was the killer?
Why would the case be closed?
Dr. Escalante said that Reardon was institutionalized. Maybe 'she couldn't be interviewed immediately.
But she would have been interviewed at some point.
Grimsbo told Reggie that Nancy Gordon was obsessed with the case and never believed Waters was the killer. So, Betsy thought, let's assume that Reardon did identify Lake as the killer at some point. Why wouldn't Gordon, or someone, have reopened the case?
Maybe Reardon wasn't asked until Oberhurst talked to her. But wouldn't she have read about Henry Waters and known the police had accused the wrong man? She could have been so traumatized that she wanted to forget everything that happened to her, even if it meant letting Lake go free.
But if that was true, why tell Oberhurst that Lake was her kidnapper?
Betsy sighed. She was missing something. She stood up and carried her coffee cup into the living room. The Sunday New York Times was sitting in a wicker basket next to her favorite chair. She sat down and decided to look through it. Sometimes the best way to figure out a problem was to forget about it for a while. She had read the Book Review, the Magazine and the Arts section, but she still hadn't read the Week in Review.
Betsy skimmed an article about the fighting in the Ukraine and another about the resumption of hostilities between North and South Korea. Death was everywhere.