Dennison stood, head at an incredulous angle. “But why does lover boy kill her in the first place?”
Raymond spoke next, his voice trailing off to a whisper. “I think Annie got herself into something she couldn’t get out of. Maybe she tried to, and that’s what set him off. That’s all he talks about — how he can’t ever... own her.”
“The roses,” said Weir. “He sent her the roses because he sensed the end with her. He dressed up, wore a suit, a slick diamond tie tack. Ann did the same. She made love to him one last time, asked him down to the bay for a moonlight walk. She was going to lay it on the line. The footprints showed no hurry, no struggle. They walked with their arms around each other, Ann thinking about what she was going to say, how she was going to break it off, not wanting to hurt him or light his fuse. Maybe they’d already talked about it, worked out the basics, and this whole night was supposed to be just a long goodbye. Either way, be knew. He already knew what was coming. He was ready.”
“But how come she was going to dump him?” asked Dennison. “Assuming this was a real affair?”
“Simple,” said Weir. “She found out she was pregnant. The child wasn’t his.”
The unasked question filled the room. No one seemed willing to give it breath. After another roaring silence, Raymond did it himself. “The child was ours. I know that. We had names, the announcement party, everything...”
“How would Ann know?” asked Robbins. “For sure?”
Raymond considered. “Maybe they used birth control. I know we didn’t. Maybe she didn’t have intercourse with him until April. It was April twenty-seventh when she saw the doctor. That puts her conception back to late March.”
“It could fit,” said Robbins, but Weir detected something disingenuous in his voice. It was not like Robbins to feign. “It could also fit that she hadn’t been intimate with him for long. He was still in the heat of passion for her. No sooner had he consummated than she tried to cut him off. Less than a month. He thought he loved her; she was using him for a fling. That’s a perfect trigger for someone as unstable as this guy is.”
Dennison began pacing the room, shaking his head. “Bunch of fuckin’ baloney. You guys are suckers if you believe much of anything in that letter. The guy’s a nut. That have any bearing here?”
“Quite a bit, I’d think,” said Paris.
“I realize it’s contradicting your assumptions,” said Robbins. He turned to Ray. “For the sake of argument, say the child was his. What would she do, if she knew?”
Raymond stood and looked out the window a long while. The evening had fallen. Headlights crept past on the boulevard below. Ray’s voice was so quiet, it hardly rose above the hum of the air conditioner. “Ann wanted a child badly. If she had gotten pregnant by someone other than me, I think... I think she might have kept it, and told me it was mine. That’s speculation, though. Maybe that’s just a way to convince myself that she loved me more than she really did.” He turned from the window and sat back down, crossing his legs and looking at Robbins.
“And what would she tell him?”
“She sure as hell wouldn’t discuss it with me,” said Ray. “But why speculate? We can’t test the... Ann’s fetus now.”
Weir looked at Robbins, whose face was visibly paler. The medical examiner crossed his arms and shook his head slowly. “We already did. We used the blood they took at the hospital when you were in, ran all the chemical panels. The genetic typing confirmed it this morning. Ray, the child wasn’t yours.”
Jim watched Raymond look out the window again, his eyes as black as the night outside the glass. He seemed to have shrunk inside the funeral suit, which hung loosely on him, pant cuffs slopping down to the floor. He turned and looked at Weir, then at the others in turn. His face had deepened in color. “Well,” he said quietly. “That’s nice to know. It might have shaded my decision when we were picking out names.”
He moved toward his chair, snapped a kick, and sent it toppling and skidding quick along the floor before it slammed into the far wall. Jim watched the eyepiece of the laser scope wiggling with the impact.
“You should have just fucking said so up front.”
“We’re not sure what it means, so far as the case goes,” said Robbins. “There wasn’t any gentle way to tell you. I wish I didn’t have to.”
Raymond stood over his fallen chair now, then reached down and picked it up. He slumped into it, arms crossed, eyes lost to some distance near or far, Weir couldn’t tell, and it didn’t seem to matter. Raymond then straightened himself, composing his face by sheer force of will. “The fact,” he said quietly, “the fact that he mentioned the child means she told him she was pregnant. Ann... she couldn’t have known who the father was, not for sure. She must have just assumed, prayed it was mine. Maybe I’m flattering myself. Maybe she didn’t care enough, even for that. Maybe she was going to make me the father, when really I wasn’t. But it would explain why she was breaking off with him — her in a family... way.”
“I would have to agree,” Robbins said quietly.
Dennison seemed ready to speak but said nothing.
The silence that fell again was merciless and impenetrable. Weir watched the headlights below, studied the dark shapes of the county buildings through the window. Then the door flew open and a courier from Index came in with the print cards.
Robbins took the slides to the laser scope and set Raymond’s prints against the ones taken from Mr. Night’s letter. The latents, as Weir knew they would, belonged to Raymond.
“We’ve got two last shots,” said Robbins. “The possibility that our man used his own saliva to seal the envelope or the stamp, and the off chance that we get something from under the stamp. The serology will take a day or two to work up. We can do the stamp now, with permission from Mr. Eliot. Say your prayers.”
Weir watched as Robbins used an autoclave to steam it off. It curled up on the edges, a folding poet, loosening by degrees. The idea struck Jim that the key to this case was never going to be found under a goddamned postage stamp.
Raymond continued to stare out the window. Jim walked over and stared with him. It was an ugly city on an ugly night.
He was aware of Robbins removing the envelope with his tongs and placing it back on the light table. Dennison leaned over, his hands crossed behind his back.
Then, a sudden motionlessness came over them. Dennison still stood, his hands still folded behind his back. Robbins had straightened, his head bent down toward the light table. He turned to Weir and Ray.
“He left a hair under the stamp,” he said. “A beautiful half inch of dark brown hair.”
Ten minutes later, Robbins had run it against a sample taken by the Newport cops from a brush in Goins’s old bathroom at the Island Gardens, and another taken from a T-shirt hanging in the closet of the El Mar Motel.
No match.
Then Robbins compared it to the hair taken off the blouse that Ann was wearing that night on the Back Bay. “Same guy,” he said finally. “I can put him with Ann; I can put him with the letter. Killer at large. Killer unknown. I need a warm body, gentlemen.”
Dennison considered. He looked at Paris, who seemed to take it as a signal for something.
Paris’s voice dropped in pitch, took on a weight that suggested certainty. “Goins has an IQ of one thirty-nine. He’s bright enough to slip someone else’s hair under that stamp. It’s too convenient. It’s too pat. I’ll go far enough out on a limb to suggest it’s a frame.”