“That’s your idea of how I spend my off-hours?”
“Isn’t it?”
She ignores the question. “How’s Carter doing? Are they still living in that garage apartment of yours?”
“You’ve just reminded me. Now you really do need to come home with me. I talked to Carter this morning, and guess what he said? He and Gina are having a baby.”
She breaks out in a smile. “That’s great.”
“So you’re in? I’ll call Charlotte right now.”
“Fine. I’m in.”
It takes a few minutes to get my wife on the phone. I tell her Cavallo was asking about them all and I suggested dinner so we could all catch up. Surprised, she agrees to book a table somewhere and make sure Carter and Gina are onboard. We settle on seven o’clock, which will give us time to swing by Dr. Hill’s house again and try to catch her at home.
As we walk back to the car, my phone rings.
It’s Joy Hill.
“I’m sorry I didn’t return your message sooner,” she says, “but I’ve only just gotten home.”
“I’d like to swing by, if you don’t mind.”
“Detective,” she says. “Something strange just happened. A man I’ve never seen before came to the door. I thought he might be one of you people-that’s the only reason I answered the knock. But he asked for Simone. He said he’d been trying to call her, but she wasn’t answering.”
“Did you get his name?”
“Oh,” she says. “I didn’t think to ask. It happened so fast. When I told him what happened to her, he pushed inside the house. He was calling her name up the stairs, like he didn’t believe me, and then he broke down and started crying.”
“He cried?”
“He was sobbing. He said she was going to have his baby, Detective.”
“A baby?”
Cavallo raises an eyebrow at me.
“Over and over he kept saying it. Then all the sudden he got up and left. It was very disturbing.”
“He’s gone now? How long ago did he leave?”
“He just left. I called you immediately.”
“I’m coming right over.”
I toss the keys to Cavallo, who’ll get us there quicker, and drop into the passenger seat. I dial the medical examiner’s office. The switchboard puts me through to Dr. Green’s voicemail. I dial back and she does it again.
“Do you have Sheila Green’s direct number?” I ask Cavallo. Unlike me, she has a good relationship with the doctor. She tosses her phone over, telling me to scroll through the saved numbers. Seconds later, Dr. Green picks up the line.
“Hey, girl, what’s going on?”
“It’s Roland March,” I say. “I have an urgent question for you.”
“What are you doing with Terry’s phone?”
“She’s sitting right here. Now listen, is it possible that when you did the postmortem on Simone Walker, you missed something?”
“Anything’s possible,” she says. “What kind of something do you have in mind?”
“Was she pregnant?”
A longish pause. “March. Are you asking me if I did an autopsy on a pregnant woman and somehow missed the fact she was pregnant?”
“She couldn’t have been far along,” I say.
“March. For real?”
“There’s no chance of that?”
“Put Terry on the phone. I’m gonna tell her to whack you upside the head.”
“Okay,” I say. “Is it possible she had an abortion?”
Green exhales into the phone. “Is it possible she had an abortion. Depending on when, that’s not necessarily something I could tell. If there was scarring or something, if the procedure went sideways, then maybe there would be a sign. But there was nothing like that.”
“Could you check again?”
“I don’t need to check-”
“Because a man just turned up on her doorstep claiming she was pregnant with his kid.”
Another sigh. “You want me to wheel her back in here and take a second look? I’m telling you, if there was any sign, I would have noticed. Your new baby daddy is either lying, or she had a termination sometime back.”
I want to argue, but Cavallo grabs the phone out of my hand and hangs it up.
“You wonder why people don’t like you, March.”
We cruise silently down the road, not looking at each other. She pulls up to a red light and flips the blinker on, drumming her nails on the steering wheel.
“Theresa,” I say. “Seriously. People don’t like me?”
CHAPTER 8
MONDAY, DECEMBER 7–5:09 P.M.
The door opens before I get a chance to knock. Joy Hill leads Cavallo and me into the cavernous living room, pointing out the very sofa where her mysterious visitor sat and wept. She describes him in her low, husky voice: a dark-complected Caucasian male in his late twenties, athletic build, black hair combed back from his forehead, dressed in nice jeans and a cream-colored turtleneck sweater, his cologne evident from several feet away, and his speech tinged with an East Texas drawl.
“Did he touch anything?”
“He touched me,” she says. “Took me by the shoulders and moved me out of the way.”
“Anything we can get prints from, I mean.”
“He sank down on the couch right here.” She shows me the indentation on the leather cushion. “I think his hands were like this. .” She cups her face in her hands, leaving only her hooded eyes visible.
“What about his car? Did you happen to see what he was driving?”
A slump of the shoulders. “I didn’t think to look. The whole experience was so-” she struggles for the right word-“disorienting.”
So convenient, too. An unidentified man appears on her doorstep, tells a story that can’t be verified, raising all kinds of questions about who killed Simone Walker and why, and then disappears without a trace. Like Zachariassen’s abduction story, it’s a little hard to take seriously, despite the professor’s vivid description.
While I squeeze more details out of her, Cavallo trails along the built-in bookcases, a picture of distraction, scanning the spines along each shelf. Another of my little assignments: checking the library for a well-read copy of The Kingwood Killing, hidden in plain sight. Though she’s given no sign of remembering Cavallo from their interview several years ago, Dr. Hill keeps stealing glances at her as we talk.
“Excuse me, but Dr. Hill. .”
“Please,” she says with a wave of the hand. “Call me Joy.”
“Joy, then. It’s come to my attention that Simone wasn’t your first tenant. There was a woman living here before, one of your former students.”
“You mean Agnieszka Oliszewski. She wasn’t a tenant so much as a houseguest. There were complications with her immigration status vis-à-vis employment, and until she could sort that out and get a job, she couldn’t really afford a place of her own.”
“So you did a favor for Ms. Oliszewski,” I say, stumbling over the name. “And she repaid it by running off with your husband.”
Her face hardens. Then she gives me a broad, indulgent smile. “You’re trying to get a reaction out of me. But no, I’m not resentful. Agnieszka wasn’t the first woman he brought into the picture, just the last. Having it going on right under my nose. . I guess that’s what I needed to finally take action. They didn’t run off together, as you put it. They were pushed.”
“By you?”
She lifts her palms as if to say, Who else?
Cavallo touches a book and the professor’s head snaps toward her. Cavallo’s hand drops and she relaxes.
“Their departure coincided with your legal problems, isn’t that right? The Zachariassens brought their sexual harassment suit-”
“Which was thrown out.”
“Thrown out? Or was it settled?”
Her shrug implies the two outcomes amount to the same thing. “You know why people agree to settle? Because what they were looking for in the first place was a payoff. Say somebody does to your daughter what those people accused me of doing: would you take a check and move on, or would you want to see justice done?”