the past behind them and make a new start. In the past few weeks she often speaks about moving away. This is new. She says she’s grown tired of the firm, the hours, and the useless feeling she gets from some of her clients. She says more than once that she’s mostly tired of not being with him. Since he’ll only stay in the apartment for limited periods, her solution is to switch her career and move if he wouldn’t mind.
Wouldn’t mind? The thought makes him positively giddy, and he embraces the idea. Yes, sell the apartment. Yes, sell the house. He can bear it he says as he withholds his hope that he might never again see the red quarry tile floor. She even has a future career plan. A law school friend is a dean at Cal-Davis in California. There’s an associate professorship opening in corporate reorganization law available and she’s interested. What does he think? He doesn’t hesitate to affirm her idea. A new start for both of them. And it’s all her idea. Wonderful. Now all that’s left is to take care of the doctor.
He goes back and reenters the bedroom. He pulls the box from the closet and moves it to a shelf in the upstairs hall closet just feet off the living room. What better place to keep a weapon than near where he would entertain an unwelcome visitor. He moves back into the main room with the ocean view. He’s ready in case the doctor decides to pay a visit, although he has doubts the man would actually try.
CHAPTER 15
She leans into the cushioned backseat. Her eyes flutter closed.
“Relax. Grab some sleep if you like.” Ed Whelan’s voice is soothing. He’s even been told he sounds like warm syrup.
“It’s just past noon and we’re between rush hours, so we should be there in less than three hours.”
Ed and Frances sit in the front of the Volvo and listen to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony on a CD. The volume is down. They have an apartment a few blocks away from the Posners’ in Manhattan and a house just around the corner in Amagansett, which makes it easy to give Sara a lift to or from the city when the timing works out.
The music rolls through the car in quiet waves. There’s an image of a forest clearing. Red-and-yellow foliage enclose the open space. A spotted fawn stands nearby and arches its neck toward a low-hanging green morsel. After several minutes, Ed tilts his head toward the backseat and blinks his eyes a few times. Frances nods.
“Yes. She’s asleep. Let’s be quiet.” She mouths all of this.
There’s no need for speech. They’ve already played catch-up gossip an hour earlier while they waited in their car for Sara to come downstairs.
Frances keeps pivoting her head to view the front door of Sara’s apartment house while they speak. It wouldn’t seem right to have Sara interrupt them.
“She was really shaky when we met for a drink several months ago. First his old firm screwed him over for doing what they asked him to do. Then they hung him out to dry when the Feds got involved. He seemed to be handling it pretty well though until last spring. That’s when she said he fell into some kind of deep depression and shut everyone out. Especially her. I gather they might even have separated for a while. I know she hasn’t been out to the beach for months.”
“Is that when she thinks he started an affair?”
“She never said that. I’ve already told you, I just picked up some vibrations. It’s my hunch. But maybe I misread the signs. Maybe I was wrong.”
“Honey, you’re not usually wrong about these things. And what makes her so pure? Remember a few months ago I told you that I thought I saw her walking arm in arm with some guy out of a steak house on Forty-Seventh Street.”
“That means nothing. It was probably business.”
“Even so.”
“Even so nothing. Whatever either of them might have given into is gone now.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Simple. When she called and asked if we were going out this weekend and wanted a lift her whole attitude was different. She was anxious to see him. Even ventured that he’d changed. And all for the better, so I assume whatever it was he had going on was over. She also said they might be moving out West sometime soon. Said she might get a teaching job at a law school in California. I asked her if we could have first dibs on their apartment if they sell. She laughed at that. You don’t laugh at the idea of selling your apartment unless you’re either happily getting divorced or staying married. And I don’t think they’re getting divorced. Not after speaking to her.”
“I hope so. Amos is good people. They both are.”
Frances glances at the backseat just as Sara opens her eyes.
“We’re only about an hour and a half away if the traffic holds.”
Sara nods and smiles just as her cell phone rings.
“It’s Amos,” she says as she looks at the caller number unable to suppress a widening grin.
CHAPTER 16
Stern wakes just after six and curses after he sees that Posner’s car is gone. He resigns himself to wait. What else can he do? He wanders through the house he’s appropriated and searches the kitchen. He finds a plastic bag with frozen bread in the freezer along with a quarter pound of butter. The only thing in the refrigerator is a large bottle of Evian. He unscrews the cap and drinks a third of the bottle. He checks the taps and confirms the water is still on and so he uses the bathroom. His face in the mirror is somehow unfamiliar. The deep shadows under his eyes confirm his recent stress.
While he slept, thoughts spun through his mind about how to confront Posner and whether to somehow engage the police to be there. He knows that if they’re present he’ll have to give up any idea of harming Posner, at least at that time. He still wants to either follow the man or drag him back to the overlook area to the spot where Heidi is buried. And he’s sure of it. Sure that Heidi lies near where he saw Posner. That’s why he’s so mad at himself for not being awake when Posner left. He can’t search the whole area without Posner to show him exactly where. At that moment, almost in mid-thought, he decides right there that his best plan of action is to just knock on Posner’s door and take it from there. He finds a tube of toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and works a dollop of Colgate across his teeth with a finger. He needs a shave but doesn’t bother. He doesn’t need to be clean shaven to confront a murderer.
He moves back to the bedroom window with his binoculars and waits for Posner to return. He picks up his cell phone and turns it on for only the third time since he left the city. There are two messages. The first is from Detective Wisdom from the East Hampton Police Department. They’d like to meet with him as soon as possible to review some aspects of the case. They’d tried his New York apartment, but he wasn’t in, and would he please call them at his earliest convenience?
The second is from the neighbor he’d asked to get his mail. A policeman had stopped by to see if he knew where Stern was. That was all. He checks his home phone next. There’s just the one message from Wisdom that repeats the sense of the one on his cell phone. He looks up just in time to see Posner pull his car up the driveway. He watches as the man moves into his house with an almost carefree abandon.
“Have you decided something, my friend? Well, I have. I’ll see you soon. No doubt about it.” Stern laughs as he speaks, and the words tumble from his mouth with a hysterical edge.
He moves back to the kitchen and drinks more water. He checks the case holding the lethal needles. The only issue that remains is whether to contact Wisdom. For now, no one knows where he is. That’s good, he thinks. Fuck the police.
CHAPTER 17
Wisdom arrives at his desk later than normal, courtesy of his annual departmental physical. Except for a slightly elevated blood pressure reading, which will be rechecked in a month, everything else looks fine. A particular report he’s been awaiting sits in his in-box buried under assorted other matters. It takes him almost an hour to get to it.
The report is a GPS summary of Stern’s recent cell phone activity. There was a call to Welbrook’s home from
