“Who is your friend?”
Andy Candy stepped forward. “Andrea Martine,” she said, shaking the prosecutor’s hand.
“And why are you here?”
“I needed some help,” Moth answered for her. “Andy is an old friend, and I hoped she could give me some perspective.”
This, Susan immediately realized, was probably not precisely true, nor completely untrue. She didn’t think she needed to care. She fully expected a short, somewhat sad, somewhat difficult conversation, and then her involvement in the uncle’s death would be over. She gestured the couple into chairs in front of the desk.
“I’m sorry about this,” she said. She reached down and produced a brown accordion file. “I was on duty the night your uncle died. It’s office policy that whenever feasible, an assistant state attorney be called to possible homicide scenes. This helps with the legal basis for chains of evidence. In your uncle’s case, however, it was pretty clear that it wasn’t a homicide from the get-go. Here,” she said, pushing the file toward Moth. “Read for yourself.”
As Moth began to open the file, Susan turned to her computer. “The pictures aren’t pretty,” she said briskly to Andy Candy. “There are copies in the file, and here, on the screen. Also the police report, the forensics team report, and autopsy and tox examinations.”
Moth began to pull sheets of paper from the file. “The toxicology report…”
“His system was clean. No drugs. No alcohol.”
“That didn’t surprise you?” Moth asked.
Susan responded slowly. “Well, in what way?”
“If he had fallen off the wagon after so many years, maybe then he would have been in such despair he shot himself. But he hadn’t.”
Susan again replied cautiously. “Yes. I can see how you might think that. But there was nothing in any tests that indicated anything other than a suicide. Stippling on the skin indicated the gunshot was from close range-pressed up against the flesh of the temple. The placement of the weapon on the floor was consistent with being dropped from your uncle’s hand as the force of the shot pushed him down and sideways. Nothing was taken from the office. There were no signs of any break-in. There were no signs of a struggle. His wallet, with more than two hundred dollars in cash, was in his pocket. I personally interviewed his last patient of the day, who left shortly before five p.m. She was a regular and had been seeing your uncle weekly for the last eighteen months.”
She pulled out a notebook. “Detectives also interviewed every other current patient, his ex-wife, his current partner, and some of his colleagues. We could find no evidence of any overt enemies and no one suggested any.” She flipped past a couple of pages in the notebook. “A check of his financials showed some stress: He owed more on his condo than it is currently worth-nothing new in Miami-but he had more than enough in stocks and investments to cover being upside down. He wasn’t a gambler owing some huge nut to a bookie. He wasn’t into some drug dealer for a small fortune. I wish he’d left a lengthy note, which would have been helpful. But there was one additional thing that contributed to our thinking…”
Moth’s eyes were traveling haphazardly over words on pages as Susan spoke. He looked up. His mouth opened as if to say one thing, then he shifted about and said another.
“What was that?”
“He wrote two words on his prescription pad.”
“What…”
“ ‘My fault,’ ” Susan quoted. “It’s in the photo of the desktop,” Susan said. “Do you recall seeing it when you found the body?”
“No.”
She handed a photo across the desktop to Moth, who studied it carefully.
“Of course, we can’t tell when he wrote it. It could have been there all day, maybe even a week. It might have been in response to worrying about you, Timothy, because, after all, you called him several times throughout the morning and afternoon-we pulled all his phone records. But it indicated to us a kind of suicidal apology.”
“It doesn’t look right,” Moth said sharply. “It looks like it was scribbled quickly. Not like something he ever meant for anyone to see,” Moth added stiffly. “It could mean something else, right?”
“Yes. But I doubt it.”
“You said his last patient was at five p.m.?”
“Yes. A little before, actually.”
“He told me he had another. An emergency. Then he was supposed to meet me…”
“Yes, that was in your statement. But there was no record of another appointment. His calendar had someone coming in the next day at six p.m. He probably just mixed them up.”
“He was a shrink. He didn’t mix things up.”
“Of course not,” Susan said. She tried to limit the condescending tone in her voice. What she didn’t say out loud was, Well, he damn straight mixed something up, because he wrote down “My fault” before shooting himself. Maybe not mixed up. Maybe just fucked up.
Susan looked over at Andy Candy. She had been silent, staring at a crime scene eight-by-ten glossy color close-up photo of Moth’s uncle facedown on his desktop, blood pooling beneath his cheek. She’s getting an education, the prosecutor thought.
Andy Candy had never seen this sort of picture before, other than on television and movies, and then it had seemed safe because it was unreal, a fiction made up for dramatic purposes. This picture was raw, explicit, almost obscene. She wanted to be sick, but she could not pull her gaze away.
“I’m sorry, Timothy, but it is what it is,” Susan said.
Moth hated this cliché. “That’s only if it is what it is,” he said, his voice stretching taut. “I still don’t believe it,” he said.
Susan waved her hand over the documents and pictures. “What do you see here that says something different?” she asked. “I’m sorry. I know how close you were to your uncle. But depression that can cause suicide is often pretty well concealed. And your uncle, given his experience, his training, and his prominence as a psychiatrist, would know this-and how to hide it-better than most.”
Moth nodded. “That’s true.” He leaned back in his seat. “So that’s it?”
“That’s it,” Susan said. She did not add, Unless someone somewhere comes up with something completely different that says I’m totally wrong so I’m forced to change my mind, which sure as hell isn’t going to happen.
“May I keep this?”
“I made copies of some of the reports for you. But Timothy, I’m not sure they will help you. You know what you should do,” she said.
Susan answered the question that wasn’t asked. “Go to a meeting,” she said. “Go back to Redeemer One.” She smiled. “See? The others there even have me calling it by the nickname you invented. Go there, Timothy. Go every night. Talk it out. You’ll feel much better.”
She smiled, trying to be gentle, but it wasn’t hard to feel the cynicism in her advice.
Moth silently collected the package of picture copies and reports that Susan Terry had prepared for him. He took a few moments to examine each picture, letting each one crease his memory, almost as if he could flow into the image and find himself back in his uncle’s office. His hand shook a little and he paused as he stared at a photograph of the gun next to his uncle’s hand. He started to say something, then stopped. He rapidly flipped through the pictures, until he came to a second one. He stared hard, then shuffled the photos quickly until he came to a third. He took the three pictures and spread them out on Susan’s desk. He pointed at the first: gun on the floor; outstretched hand.
“This is what I remember,” he said. His voice was ragged and dry. “Like, no one moved anything?”
“No, Timothy. Crime scene specialists never move anything until it is photographed, documented, and measured. They’re really cautious about that.”