She wanted to ask about their dinner out at Fellini’s. She wanted to ask him if he knew she was missing. But the look on Marley’s face answered her questions. Whatever hope she had that Jacob Marley may have had something to do with Joan Begley’s disappearance, Maggie knew that hope was squelched by the look of total confusion and surprise. Jacob Marley was hiding something, but it didn’t have anything to do with Joan. Instead, it was probably right in front of her inside this file.
Marley’s phone began ringing. He grabbed the receiver. “Yes?”
What should she be looking for? What was Marley nervous they would find?
“I’m with someone right now,” Marley said into the phone, unable to hide his irritation. “No, I won’t be able to pick up the body for at least another hour. Is Simon working today? Good. Send him when he gets in.”
He hung up the phone and turned back to Maggie. “Worst part of this job is that we always have to be on call and keep some strange hours.”
“Yes, I suppose it would be very unpredictable,” Maggie said, flipping through the pages. Then she noticed something that caught her attention. If she remembered correctly, Calvin Vargus was one of the men who had discovered the first body at the rock quarry. “You contract out with Calvin Vargus and Walter Hobbs to dig the graves?”
“Yes, that’s right.” He shifted his weight and the other leg began swinging this time. “They have the equipment to do it.”
“How long have they been doing it?”
“Oh, gosh—” Marley folded his arms over his chest “—I think as far back as when Wally’s father ran the business and he contracted with my father. So it goes back a ways. My father was a very loyal man, working with the same people for years.” He pointed to one of the photos on the wall, a portrait of the older Marley, looking somber as if ready for a funeral. “People felt the same way about him, too, God rest his soul. Even now when I try to do something different, make a few changes here and there, I can’t seem to do it without someone telling me, ‘That’s not the way Jacob Marley would do it.’”
Suddenly it struck Maggie. Maybe she was wrong after all. “Your father’s name was Jacob, too?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So you’re a junior?”
“Yes, but please, I really hate being called Junior. Anything but Junior.”
CHAPTER 38
Tully let her wait on him. She had insisted. It was the first time he had been inside her brownstone. The first time he had been invited. By default, of course, he reminded himself, but still, an invitation was an invitation.
She had decided they would be more comfortable here than at Joan Begley’s loft. There, she had been distracted. Tully had noticed her walking, stepping lightly, quietly, reverently. He knew Joan Begley was a client of Dr. Patterson’s, but he didn’t have to be a profiler to guess she had also been somewhat of a friend. Or if not a friend, then someone Dr. Patterson genuinely cared about. There was a connection. Even he could see that, feel that.
He studied her face while she poured the coffee into mugs, preoccupied with the task, and so it was safe to study her. He sat at the counter that separated her living room from her kitchen—a spic-and-span kitchen with hanging utensils and pots and pans in more sizes and shapes than Tully could think of uses for. Here, among her own things, she looked less vulnerable than she had at Joan Begley’s. But even here, she still looked…it was hard to explain. She looked tired. No, that wasn’t right. She looked…sad.
“Cream or sugar?” she asked with only a glance over her shoulder.
“No, thanks. I take it black.” He knew before she reached for the cream that she would pour a healthy dollop of it into hers, making it look like milky chocolate. Cream, but no sugar. And if available she preferred a cafe mocha.
The realization startled him. These days he couldn’t remember what color socks he had put on in the morning—hopefully they at least matched. And yet, here he was remembering how Dr. Gwen Patterson took her coffee.
“So you think Maggie’s right? That this Sonny has something to do with Joan’s disappearance?”
“He sends her e-mails every day that she’s in Connecticut, obviously every day after they met. Sometimes two and three a day. Then all of a sudden they just happen to stop on Saturday, the day she disappeared. Too much of a coincidence, don’t you think?”
“But from the e-mails we read, they sounded like friends, confidants. He didn’t sound like someone who would want to hurt her.”
Her cell phone interrupted them and Dr. Patterson managed to grab it before the second ring, like someone expecting news, any news.
“Hello?” Then her entire face softened. “Hi, Maggie,” she greeted her friend. “No, I’m okay. Yes, I did meet Tully at Joan’s apartment. Actually, he’s here. No, here at my brownstone.” She listened for a few minutes then said, “Hold on.” She handed him the phone. “She wants to talk to you.”
“Hey, O’Dell.”
“Tully, can you tell me anything about Sonny?”
“Well, we were able to get into her e-mail.”
“Already?”
“Dr. Patterson figured out the password. There’re daily e-mails from this guy, but we were just talking about that. They sound pretty chummy, in a friendly way, not a romantic way. Right?” He looked at Gwen for her agreement. “But here’s the thing. His e-mails stop the day she disappeared.”
“Can you track him?”
“I’ve got Bernard working on it. So far it looks like he uses a free e-mail account and there’s no customer profile on him anywhere that I can find. I’m betting he uses a public computer. Probably the local library or maybe one of those cafes that have computers available.”
“Have you talked to Cunningham today?”
“No, he’s in meetings all day. Why?”
“He managed to get out of a meeting long enough to call me.”
“Uh-oh. You’re busted?”
“Not sure. Look, Tully, I just don’t want you getting into trouble for helping me out on this.”
Tully glanced up at Dr. Patterson. She stood on the other side of the counter, sipping coffee and watching him, thinking he was focused on listening to O’Dell when he couldn’t take his eyes off of her.
“Tully, do you hear me?” O’Dell was saying in his ear. “I don’t want you getting into trouble over this.”
“Don’t worry about it, O’Dell.”
CHAPTER 39
He fixed her soup, hearty chicken noodle. It was just canned—that’s all he had—but it smelled good even after he had dissolved the crystals in it. She’d never notice the tiny white residue. Especially after he crumbled saltine crackers into it.
He placed the small bottle back behind his mother’s secret stash, her array of “home remedies” that included molasses and honey and vinegar alongside cough syrup and plenty of children’s aspirin. The brown bottle contained the magic crystals she insisted would make him well. It wasn’t until after she was gone, her control over him broken only by death, that he discovered the brown bottle with the real label hidden underneath an old expired prescription. The real label simply read in bold, black letters, “Arsenic.” He had kept it just as he had found it, realizing that some day he might need that kind of control over someone. And he had been right.
He found her sitting at the window, exactly where he had left her with the restraints now wrapped around the chair. She stared out at the woods through the tempered glass. He had specially ordered and installed the
