"But it seems as if everything Yablonsky accused him of turned out to be true," Thomas said, his voice quiet, as if he was thinking aloud.
Janet shook her head. "Not according to Earl."
"What?"
"Come on, Thomas. Where's your healthy sense of skepticism? Every good clinician has one."
"I don't understand."
"It's all too neat. Everything, from the tapes to the chloroform to the hanging."
"The hanging?"
"Yeah. Apparently a researcher in New York hung himself exactly the same way fourteen years ago, and Stewart may have had a hand in what drove him to it."
"Wait a minute. Another researcher hung himself? Who?"
Janet downed her tea. "Come on, drive me home, and I'll explain on the way. But it all stinks to high heaven- too much like a package wrapped up in a nice ribbon. And to top it all, Earl thinks Stewart left a sign to say he didn't commit suicide, but had been murdered."
Thomas's eyebrows notched a quarter inch higher. "A sign?"
"I'll tell you in the car."
10:10 p.m.
Neighbors began to appear in the street, huddled under umbrellas. They stood around like clumps of black mushrooms despite the storm picking up force again.
"Don't touch the body, and treat the house as a murder scene," Earl had said to the first officers who arrived over thirty minutes ago. "Above all, protect this tape." He indicated the microcassette on the floor that continued to broadcast the whispered interviews. "You'll want to check it for fingerprints," Earl said, though if this was the clever setup he thought it to be, the only prints on it would be Stewart's. Then he added, "And by using the cue numbers, we can work backward to determine when someone started it."
The eerie questions and answers floating out of the miniature speaker had brought a frown to the fresh young face of the cop who knelt down to inspect it. "What the hell am I listening to?" she asked. A blond ponytail dangled out the back of her peaked cap. The big gun on her tiny hips seemed incongruous with her cheerleader appearance.
"I'm not sure," Earl had said, but in fact he had a damn good idea.
"Get me a set of gloves," she'd ordered her partner. Minutes later, her hands appropriately garbed in latex and holding the device by a corner so as not to smudge any traces of its previous handler, she pressed stop using a ballpoint pen. After writing down the cue number and the time, she again used the pen, pressing rewind. But when she started the tape at the beginning, and they heard the familiar strains of "Pretty Woman," he'd no clue at all what to make of that.
He'd called Janet and broken the news to her, then waited in the living room as more cop cars pulled up. Some of the newly arrived officers came inside and went downstairs. Through the front window he saw others run yellow tape around the perimeter of the property. He gave a brief statement about discovering Stewart's body to the woman with the ponytail, all the time thinking she couldn't be any older than J.S.
That had been ten minutes ago.
Now he had nothing to do but watch the onlookers outside as they watched him.
Finally, at 10:20, a pair of plainclothes homicide detectives walked in and said they'd be in charge of the investigation.
The older of the two, a tall, blond woman about Janet's age, introduced herself as Detective Lazar. She wore a Burberry raincoat and carried a sadness in her eyes that most cops eventually assume. Her colleague, a man of equal height but at least ten years her junior, his perfectly coiffed black hair and square jaw suitable for a recruitment poster, stood with pen and pad in hand, ready to take notes.
Earl gave his name, led them downstairs, and proceeded to explain why he thought Stewart had been murdered.
"First, look at his feet," he began.
Though the body remained suspended enough that it seemed to be standing tiptoed, the balls of the feet were pressed a good inch into the soft vinyl surface of the stool under them. "Have you ever seen hanging victims before, Detective?"
She nodded.
Her partner did the same but found it necessary to also flex his eyebrows in an attempt at a boy-have-l-seen-hanging-victims look.
Earl ignored him. "Then you know most end up dying slow, strangling themselves." He directed his comments only to Lazar. "They're ignorant about the benefit that a drop from a gallows provides- haven't a clue how the momentum causes the rope to mercifully snap the neck at the second cervical vertebrae and, if the victim's lucky, severs the spinal cord, bringing as near-instantaneous brain death as possible. Instead, they linger in the noose and suffer hideously. Stewart wouldn't make that mistake. If he wanted to die by hanging, he'd have launched himself at the end of a rope out a second-story window." He looked at his friend's limp body, the rumpled trousers stained with the indignity of death, and shuddered. "Never ever would he have set up something so amateurish as this. At the very least, he'd have kicked the stool away. I think he deliberately didn't do that, at the price of excruciating agony, to signal us this is not a suicide." A mix of pity, sorrow, and horror swept through him as the terror of Stewart's final moments hit home. He grimaced and grew angry. "You may be willing to render such a brave last act meaningless by ignoring it, but I'm not."
Detective Lazar studied him.
The young man furiously scribbled down notes.
Earl pegged him as a rookie, at least to the homicide business. Cops were just like medical residents. The ones who wrote everything down were the least experienced and would know squat.
"This is all very interesting conjecture, Dr. Garnet," Lazar said after a few seconds. "But presumably something else got you suspicious enough to be so skeptical. Frankly, I would have taken this as a suicide, however ineptly done. Stewart, you said his name was?"
"Dr. Stewart Deloram. Yes, there are reasons to believe someone did this to him. But they're very complicated."
"Try to keep it simple."
Her partner got ready with the pen again.
Earl took a breath. Maybe notes would be useful after all. "Well, it started over two weeks ago with the death of a terminally ill patient named Elizabeth Matthews…"
10:43 p.m.
One moment they were talking.
Then the car lurched right and roared forward.
Janet screamed and thought the accelerator had jammed.
They went over the edge of the road and plummeted down the bank. The headlamps carved a glistening tunnel through darkness pierced with a million silver streaks of rain. At the bottom a tree trunk loomed larger, like a crosshair in a target that drew them toward itself. And while their descent happened fast, it also appeared to unfold slowly. She got both knees up in time to brace her abdomen against the crash.
10:53 p.m.
When Earl finished speaking, Lazar regarded him with a puzzled frown that suggested she might at least consider his version of events. "How would this someone who'd been setting Dr. Deloram up get in the house?" she asked. "There's no sign of forced entry, and nobody can pick the kind of locks he has without leaving some marks."
"Stewart always left his keys lying around in the hospital. Anyone could have grabbed them and made a copy."
She looked over toward Tocco and frowned. "Then why didn't the dog bark at the killer and wake the victim up?"
"Maybe she did and Stewart didn't hear. He'd been up all night at the hospital, so he probably slept pretty heavily. And don't you read Sherlock Holmes?"
She smiled and nodded. "You mean the dog could have known the person and therefore not barked?"
"That's right. Tocco remained friendly with people once she got to know them."