“From five P.M. on. I was packing for my trip.”
“Can anyone verify that you were here?”
“No. Paul had the night off. I freely admit I have no alibi. It was just me here, alone with my piano.” He banged the keyboard, playing a dissonant chord. “I flew out the next morning. Northwest Airlines, if you want to check.”
“We will.”
“The reservations were made six weeks ago. I had meetings already planned.”
“That’s what your assistant told us.”
“Did he? Well, it’s true.”
“Do you keep a gun?” asked Rizzoli.
Cassell went very still, his dark eyes searching hers. “Do you honestly think I did it?”
“Could you answer the question?”
“No, I do not have a gun. Not a pistol or a rifle or a pop-gun. And I didn’t kill her. I didn’t do
“Are you saying she lied to the police?”
“I’m saying she exaggerated.”
“We’ve seen the photo of her taken in the ER, the night you gave her a black eye. Did she exaggerate that charge as well?”
His gaze dropped, as though he could not bear her accusatory look. “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t deny hitting her. I regret it. But I don’t deny it.”
“What about repeatedly driving past her house? Hiring a private detective to follow her? Showing up on her doorstep, demanding to speak to her?”
“She wouldn’t answer any of my calls. What was I supposed to do?”
“Take a hint, maybe?”
“I don’t sit back and just let things
“What was Anna to you, exactly? Just another possession?”
“Not a possession.” He met her gaze, his eyes naked with loss. “Anna Leoni was the love of my life.”
His answer took Rizzoli aback. That simple statement, said so quietly, had the honest ring of truth to it.
“I understand you were together for three years,” she said.
He nodded. “She was a microbiologist, working in my research division. That’s how we met. One day she walked into a board meeting to give us an update on antibiotic trials. I took one look at her, and I thought:
“Why did she?”
“I don’t know.”
“You must have an idea.”
“I don’t. Look at what she had here! This house, anything she wanted. I don’t think I’m ugly. Any woman would’ve been thrilled to be with me.”
“Until you started hitting her.”
A silence.
“How often did that happen, Dr. Cassell?”
He sighed. “I have a stressful job…”
“Is that your explanation? You slapped your girlfriend because you had a hard day at the office?”
He did not answer. Instead he reached for his glass. And that, no doubt, was part of the problem, she thought. Mix a hard-driving executive with too much booze, and you get a girlfriend with black eyes.
He set the glass down again. “I just wanted her to come home.”
“And your way of convincing her was to cram death threats in her door?”
“I didn’t do that.”
“She filed multiple complaints with the police.”
“Never happened.”
“Detective Ballard says it did.”
Cassell gave a snort. “That moron believed everything she told him. He likes playing Sir Galahad, it makes him feel important. Did you know he showed up here once, and told me that if I ever touched her again, he’d beat the shit out of me. I think that’s pretty pitiful.”
“She claimed you slashed her window screens.”
“I didn’t.”
“Are you saying she did it herself?”
“I’m just saying I didn’t.”
“Did you scratch her car?”
“What?”
“Did you mark up her car door?”
“That’s a new one to me. When did that supposedly happen?”
“And the dead canary in her mailbox?”
Cassell gave an incredulous laugh. “Do I
She regarded him for a moment, thinking: Of course he denies it, because he’s right; we can’t prove he slashed her screens or scratched her car or put a dead bird in her mailbox. This man didn’t get where he is by being stupid.
“Why would Anna lie about it?” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But she did.”
TEN
BY NOON MAURA WAS ON THE ROAD, yet one more weekender caught in traffic as it streamed north like migratory salmon out of a city where the streets were already shimmering with heat. Trapped in their cars, their children whining in backseats, vacationers could only inch grimly northward toward the promise of cool beaches and salt air. That was the vision Maura held on to as she sat in traffic, gazing at a line of cars that stretched all the way to the horizon. She had never been to Maine. She knew it only as a backdrop in the L.L. Bean catalogue, where tanned men and women wore parkas and hiking boots while, at their feet, golden retrievers lolled on the grass. In the world of L.L. Bean, Maine was the land of forests and misty shores, a mythical place too beautiful to exist except as a hope, a dream. I am sure to be disappointed, she thought as she stared at sunlight glaring off the unending line of cars. But that’s where the answers lie.
Months ago, Anna Leoni had made this same journey north. It would have been a day in early spring, still chilly, the traffic not nearly as heavy as today. Driving out of Boston, she too would have crossed the Tobin Bridge and then headed north on Route 95, toward the Massachusetts-New Hampshire border.
At two, she crossed from New Hampshire into Maine, where the traffic magically dissolved, as though the ordeal up till then had been merely a test, and now the gates were opening to admit the worthy. She stopped only long enough to pick up a sandwich at a rest stop. By three, she had left the interstate and was traveling on Maine ’s Route 1, hugging the coast as she continued north.
The views Anna saw would have been different, the fields just turning green, the trees still bare. But surely Anna had passed that same lobster roll shack, had glanced at the same junk dealer’s yard where eternally rusting bed frames were displayed on the lawn, and had reacted, like Maura, with an amused shake of the head. Perhaps
