The last thing Goldberg had leaked was what he learned from Broome: Carlton Flynn had a stripper girlfriend who worked at La Creme.
There was whimpering in the background.
“Do you have a dog?” Goldberg asked.
“No, Mr. Goldberg, I don’t. Oh, but I had the best dog when I was a kid! Her name was Ginger Snaps. Cute, right?”
Goldberg said nothing.
“You seem reluctant, Mr. Goldberg.”
“It’s Deputy Chief Goldberg.”
“Would you like to meet in person, Deputy Chief Goldberg? We can discuss this issue at your house, if you’d like.”
Goldberg’s heart stopped beating. “No, that’s okay.”
“So what can you tell me, Deputy Chief Goldberg?”
The dog was still whimpering. But now Goldberg thought that maybe he heard another sound too, another whimpering maybe, or something worse, underneath the first-a terrible, pain-stricken noise so nonhuman that paradoxically it could only come from another human being.
“Deputy Chief Goldberg?”
He swallowed and dived in. “There’s this lawyer named Harry Sutton…”
10
The door to Harry Sutton ’s office opened, and Cassie walked in.
She looked pretty much the same.
That was the first thought that hit Broome. In those days, Broome had even known her a little, seen her at the club, and so he remembered her. She’d changed her hair color over the years-she’d been more platinum blond, if he recalled correctly-but that was about it.
Some might wonder, if she hadn’t changed very much, why Broome hadn’t been able to find her in the past seventeen years. The truth was, disappearing is not as hard as you might think. Back in those days, Rudy didn’t have even her real name. Broome had eventually found it. Maygin Reilly. But that was where it ended. She had gotten a new ID, and while she was something of a person of interest, it hardly warranted a nationwide APB or its own episode of Most Wanted.
The other change was that she looked wealthier and more-for a lack of a better term-normal. You could dress a stripper down, but you could always see the stripper. Same with the gambler, the drinker, heck, the cop. Cassie looked like a classic suburban mom. A fun one maybe. The one who gave as good as she got, who flirted when the mood struck, who leaned a little too close when she had a few drinks at the block party. But a suburban mom just the same.
She sat next to him and turned and met his eye.
“Good to see you again, Detective.”
“Same, I guess. I’ve been looking for you, Cassie.”
“So I gathered.”
“Seventeen years.”
“Almost like Valjean and Javert,” she said.
“Like in Les Miserables.”
“You’ve read Hugo?”
“Nah,” Broome said, “my ex dragged me to the musical.”
“I don’t know where Stewart Green is,” she said.
Cool, Broome thought. She was skipping the preliminaries. “You realize, of course, that you vanished at the same time he did?”
“Yes.”
“When you both vanished, you two were seeing each other, right?”
“No.”
Broome spread his arms. “That’s what I was told.”
She gave him a half-smile, and Broome saw the sexy girl from years ago emerge. “How long have you lived in Atlantic City, Detective?”
He nodded, knowing where she was going with this. “Forty years.”
“You know the life. I wasn’t a prostitute. I was working the clubs, and I had fun doing it. So, yes, for a while Stewart Green was part of that fun. A small part. But he eventually destroyed it.”
“The fun?”
“Everything,” she said. Her mouth tightened. “Stewart Green was a psychopath. He stalked me. He beat me. He threatened to kill me.”
“Why?”
“What part of the word ‘psychopath’ confused you?”
“So you’re a psychiatrist now, Cassie?”
She gave him the half-smile again. “You don’t need to be a psychiatrist to know a psychopath,” she began, “any more than you need to be a cop to know a killer.”
“Touche,” Broome said. “But if Stewart Green was that crazy, well, he managed to fool a lot of people.”
“We are all different things to different people.”
Broome frowned. “That’s a tad trite, don’t you think?”
“It is.” She thought about it. “I once heard this guy give a friend some advice about dating a girl who appeared really normal but, well, underneath it all, she was tightly wound. You know the type?”
“I do.”
“So the guy warned his buddy, ‘You don’t want to open that big ol’ can of crazy.’”
Broome liked that. “And that’s what you did with Stewart?”
“Like I said, he seemed pretty cool at first. But he became obsessed. Some men do, I guess. I’d always managed to joke my way out of it. But not with him. Look, I read all the articles after he vanished about what a great family guy he was, the loving wife he nursed through cancer, the young kids. And working where I was, I had seen it all. I didn’t judge the married men who came in to blow off a little steam or look for… whatever. Three-quarters of the guys in the club were married. I don’t even think they’re hypocrites-a man can love his wife and still want some side action, can’t he?”
Broome shrugged. “I guess he can.”
“But Stewart Green wasn’t like that. He was violent. He was crazy. I just didn’t know how much.”
Broome crossed his legs. What she was telling him about the beating and violence-it sounded a lot like Tawny’s description of Carlton Flynn. Another connection maybe?
“So what happened?” he asked.
For the first time, Cassie looked uneasy. She glanced over at Harry Sutton. Harry had his hands resting on his belly, his fingers interlocked. He gave her a nod. She looked down at her hands.
“Do you know the old iron-ore ruins by Wharton?”
Broome did. It was maybe eight, ten miles from Atlantic City-the start of the Pine Barrens.
“I used to go there sometimes. After work or whenever I needed just to unwind.”
Unwind, Broome thought, managing to keep his face blank. A lie. Her first? He couldn’t be sure. He was about to follow up with the obvious question: Why were you really there? But for now he left it alone.
“So one night-well, my last night in this town-I was up in the park by the ruins. I was pretty distracted, I guess. Stewart was getting out of control, and I really didn’t know how to handle it. I had tried everything to get him to back off.”
Broome asked her the same question he had asked Tawny. “Didn’t you have a boyfriend or anything?”
Something crossed her face. “No.”
Another lie?
“Someone you could go to for help? How about Rudy or a friend at the club?”
“Look, that wasn’t the way we worked. Or I worked. I took care of myself. People might suspect I was in over my head, but I was a big girl. I could handle it.”
She looked down.
“What happened, Cassie?”
“It’s odd. Hearing someone call me that. Cassie.”
“Would you prefer Maygin?”
She smiled. “You found that out, huh? No. Stay with Cassie.”
“Okay. You’re stalling, Cassie.”
“I know,” she said. She took a deep breath and dived back in. “I’d started to become desperate for a way to get rid of Stewart, so two days earlier, I dropped the big atom bomb on him. Or I threatened to. I mean, I would never go through with it. But just the threat, I figured, would be enough.”
Broome had a pretty good idea where she was going with this, but he waited.
“So anyway, yeah, I told Stewart that if he didn’t leave me alone, I was going to tell his wife. I would never have really done it. I mean, once that bomb is dropped, the radioactivity will blow back in your face. But like I said, the threat is usually enough.”
“But not in this case,” Broome said.
“No.” She smiled again, but there was no playfulness there now. “To paraphrase that guy giving the warning, I underestimated what would happen when I opened that big ol’ can of crazy.”