“So, Gloria asked me to go with her. Can I?”
Mars looked at Chris across the table at Perkins. They’d skipped breakfast at the apartment to get a jump on weekend garage sales. The Fitzgerald investigation had kept them off the garage sale circuit for most of late spring and early summer. By July the investigation was in full stall and except for the Fourth of July weekend, they hadn’t missed a Saturday.
Mars said, “Gloria?”
Chris’s face struggled for control against the powerful forces of pleasure, embarrassment, and confusion as he waited for Mars’s response.
Gloria. Mars remembered who she was from Parents Career Day last spring. A birdlike eight-year-old with a precocious heap of curly black hair and dark brown eyes. Long lashes. Quick as a flea, but no beauty. Mars had observed that kids often confused pieces of beauty—Gloria’s glamorous hair and dazzling eyes—with being beautiful. Gloria’s eyes were too close together, set in a long, narrow face that was dominated by a nose that wouldn’t have been out of place on a prizefighter. But Chris saw only the eyes and the hair.
“So, what happens if you say yes?”
A quick look up from Chris to Mars. “So I can?”
“You can what? I don’t have a clue what going with someone means if you’re eight years old.”
Chris thought about what “going with” meant. Then he said, “I don’t know either.”
“Well, maybe the way to look at this thing is to agree on what ‘going with’ isn’t. Like, ‘going with’ doesn’t mean that Gloria would be more important to you than your other friends.”
Chris was quick to take the point. “No way. James is my best friend. I like him a hundred times better than I like Gloria.”
“Oookay. And ‘going with’ doesn’t mean you can’t be friends with other girls, besides Gloria.”
Chris was uninterested in this issue and raised no objection.
“And I don’t think ‘going with’ someone means you’re ready for a big physical relationship.”
“A what?”
“A physical relationship. Kissing, hugging, feeling each other up. Stuff like that.”
Mars could almost feel the heat coming from Chris’s blush. Chris was too embarrassed to answer. It was evident that the allure of Gloria’s black hair and brown eyes had not yet given rise to lust.
“I guess I don’t think you and Gloria are ready to go out on dates, either.”
“No way. I’m not gonna go out on dates until I can drive, anyway.”
Mars suppressed a grin. Age eight, and the kid decides romance requires wheels. Touchingly wide of the mark and yet exactly right. Did girls think about the rites of sexual passage in connection with a driver’s license? Had boys ever separated attraction from mobility?
“Well,” Mars said, “that pretty much does it for me. If ‘going with’ someone doesn’t mean you spend time only with Gloria, or that you can’t be friends with other girls, or that you’re going to mush around or go out on dates—I guess it’s okay with me if you want to go with Gloria.”
Chris pushed back in the booth and smiled with deep satisfaction.
It was the last Mars heard of Chris’s romantic life for several years.
Garage sales were symbolic of what had been wrong with Mars and Denise’s marriage. Denise would spend an entire weekend shopping garage sales in a random, compulsive style. He remembered Denise and her sister, Gwen, standing out in the driveway on a Sunday afternoon unloading stuff from the rear of Gwen’s van. “The whole thing—less than twenty-five bucks,” Gwen said when Mars came out. They were surrounded by neatly folded piles of clothes, kids’ toys, dishes, and a homemade pot with dried weeds that had been spray painted gold.
Denise patted a four-foot stack of kids’ clothes. “This will get Chris through the whole school year. And I got it all for less than four dollars.”
“If that’s what you got paid to haul it away, I’d say you got the short end of the stick.”
The only real source of contention between Mars and Denise in the divorce was Mars’s demand that Chris would never wear secondhand garage sale clothes. Lawyers on both sides had been flummoxed by the heat this point generated. Mars had agreed to give Denise 60 percent of his gross income as child support to assure that she could keep the house and not work until Chris was twelve. But Mars wanted Denise’s promise that she wouldn’t buy clothes for Chris at garage sales, and Denise wouldn’t give it.
“It goes against my grain,” Denise said, sitting in her lawyer’s office. “I just can’t walk into a store and put down good money for clothes that I could get for five cents on the dollar at a garage sale.”
Mars’s lawyer ruffled his hair with both hands and removed his glasses. “My client was raised in foster homes. A fact of which both parties are aware. He never had new clothes as a kid, and it’s important to him that his son not wear secondhand clothes. He has been more than reasonable in his child support commitment. He’s providing almost three times the state support guideline. If he wants the boy to wear new clothes, I don’t think that’s an unreasonable request.”
Denise had tears in her eyes. “I’m just saying that it would make me physically ill to walk into Dayton’s and spend fifteen dollars for some little sweatshirt that I could get, just as good, for seventy-five cents. I’d rather give up half of what Mars is giving me than do that.”
Denise’s attorney snapped to attention. “My client is not making an offer to change the stipulated support agreement—”
Mars interrupted. “Denise? Would it help if we just agreed that I’d take Chris shopping for his clothes, and you’d agree not to buy him anything to wear at garage sales?”
Everyone looked at Denise. Denise looked at Mars. “You’d take the tags and everything off before Chris brought the clothes home?”
“If that’s what you want.”
“That would be fine,” she said.
Mars’s lawyer said, “I’ll want to amend the support stipulation to reflect Mr. Bahr’s responsibility for clothing the child—”
Mars interrupted again. “That won’t be necessary. Money isn’t the issue here—” He held up a hand as his lawyer began
to protest. “I said, money isn’t the issue. I’m satisfied with this arrangement, and I want it left as is.”
When Mars and his lawyer left the conference room, Mars’s lawyer blew air and shook his head. “Man, you could have saved my fee. I can’t imagine a client making a worse deal on his own than we’ve just put together.”
“In my book, this isn’t a bad deal. You just don’t understand my priorities.”
“Well, lawyers keep saying we wish clients in divorce cases cared more about their kids’ well-being than killing each other. Then you get clients that see things that way, and it seems crazy. But I’ll tell you one thing. Your soon-to-be-ex-wife doesn’t have a clue. I mean, ‘Earth to Denise?’ You can’t touch a kid’s sweatshirt at Dayton’s for anything less than thirty bucks.”
So it had chilled Mars’s heart when, at age six, Chris had asked Mars to follow homemade garage sale signs to a driveway in Northeast Minneapolis. Chris jumped out of the car, walked around for maybe forty-five seconds, smiled politely at the woman sitting in a lawn chair with a shoe box full of bills and coins, said thanks, and climbed back into the car.
“Junk,” he said.
“You go to garage sales with Mom?”
Chris nodded. “Sometimes. If I’m home on Saturday afternoon.”
“You buy stuff at garage sales?”
Chris shook his head. “It’s mostly junk—Dad?”
“What?”
“Is there some way I could find out about when rich people have garage sales?”
Mars thought about this. “I guess you could look at ads in the newspaper. I think most of the garage sale ads must run Thursday, Friday. Look for Kenwood, Linden Hills, Edina addresses.”
The next Saturday Chris had turned up for breakfast with a garage sale notebook. Pasted on each page, in an order that corresponded to the route they would drive, were ads Chris had cut from the paper. Nettie had gotten a look at the garage sale notebook when they’d stopped down at city hall before setting off one Saturday.
“How’d you pick where you go? You know what you’re looking for?”
“Well, I figured rich people would sell better stuff. So I put in ads from neighborhoods Dad says are where rich people live.”
“Know what we could do? I could get a printout from the County Assessor’s Office of home sale prices for your target neighborhoods. Then you could check the garage sale address against the printout to make sure you’re only going to high-end neighborhoods.”
This was an innovation for which Chris had great enthusiasm. Mars was unsure that it materially improved the quality of their garage sale stops, but was pleased at Chris’s enthusiasm for precision, which marked him as a very different shopper from his mother.
By the end of their first garage sale season, Chris had refined his techniques to include limiting stops to moving sales only. This refinement was based on Chris’s accurate observation that people moving were more apt to get rid of good stuff cheap. “That’s what I’d do, if I was moving,” Chris said.
They left from Perkins shortly after 9:00 A.M. It was warm already, with a promise of deep afternoon heat.
“So. Where are we headed today?”
Chris unfolded the notebook. “Forty-two hundred Browndale. Edina. All the stops today are Edina.” Flipping the pages of his computer printout, he said, “None of the streets we’re going to today have had any houses that sold for less than three
hundred thousand dollars—except five-oh-two-four Windsor. I want to go there because it says ‘quality kitchen equipment.’”
It was the first time Mars had been to Edina since they’d cut back on the Fitzgerald investigation. He still spoke by phone with Bobby Fitzgerald in Boston because in June Doc Fitzgerald had had a stroke. He was in a nursing home, expected to survive, but it was unlikely that he’d ever walk again or that his speech would return to normal. Mars could not imagine how Mother Fitz was making do in the wake of her husband’s illness. The last time Mars spoke with Bobby, Bobby said he’d be in England for most of the summer and would get in touch with Mars when he returned.
Browndale Avenue was as different from Cornelia Drive as Cornelia Drive had been from Dakota Trail. If Mars had money, he wouldn’t have chosen to live on either Cornelia Drive or Dakota Trail. But Browndale Avenue would have been a temptation. The houses, broadly spaced between one another, were on flat lots with tall trees. There were no ranchstyle houses here, nor were there flashy contemporaries. These were houses of tradition, built in brick, two stories. There were dormers and shuttered windows. The front doors would open into center halls with polished parquet floors and graceful staircases, the dining room to the left, living room to the right, and a long hallway leading back to the study, kitchen, pantry, and a mudroom. At the rear or to the side would be a screened porch. There were no triple-glazed solariums with illuminated fountains in sight.
Chris’s strategy served him well on Browndale Avenue. He bought a set of mixing bowls for a dollar fifty that would have sold at Williams-Sonoma for thirty-five or forty dollars. He bought a garlic press for ten cents. “I’ve already got one,” he said under his breath to Mars, “but for ten cents, I’ll buy it to keep at your apartment.” He was sorely tempted by a
handsome Christmas crèche that he knew his mother would like. Her birthday was in November, and Chris knew she’d be pleased not only by the crèche but that he’d found it at a garage sale. The price on the crèche was fifteen dollars, which Chris felt was too much. Mars estimated it would have been over a hundred dollars new, but Chris was firm. He took his bowls and the garlic press over to the trim woman wearing Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt who was running the sale. Putting his things down on the card table, he said, “Can you do any better on the price of the crèche?”
This was a standard line for Chris to use, and one that usually produced the desired result. His success, Mars guessed, was more attributable to people being charmed by seriousness in an eight year old than by Chris’s bargaining skills. In this instance, the seller’s face softened and she smiled, but she was hesitant. Moving or not, she was clearly ambivalent about giving up the crèche.
Shamelessly, Chris added, “I wanted to get it for my mother’s birthday.”
She settled for twelve dollars for all three items.
Windsor Avenue was the last stop. There was indeed much quality kitchen equipment and Chris spent a long time considering his purchases. Mars wandered aimlessly along a table covered with books. Lying on one end of the table was an Edina High School yearbook, The Hornet. What surprised Mars was that it was a yearbook for the past school year. He picked it up and went to the index. Predictable. The entries under Mary Pat Fitzgerald’s name took up nearly four inches. He flipped to her senior picture and was startled to see, written under the picture, “Liz—Never again. You’ve been so brave. We’re almost home free. Love, MPF.”
Mars hadn’t seen Mary Pat’s writing, and the message, elliptical
as it was, gave Mars a shock. He carried the yearbook over to the woman running the sale and handed her a dollar.
“Kind of unusual, selling a brand-new yearbook. Liz your daughter?”
The woman’s face tightened with displeasure. “No, thank God. The book belonged to a girl who was over here with another friend. She left the book, and my daughter called her a dozen times, but she never came over to pick it up. It’s been sitting on our bookshelf since last April.”
“Your daughter didn’t just take it to school with her to give back?”
“Liz left school shortly after her friend left the yearbook. I could say more, but leave it at that.”
Mars tucked the book under his arm. “I feel kind of bad buying a kid’s yearbook, but a buddy graduated from Edina, and I just thought he’d get a kick out of it. What did you say the girl’s last name was? Maybe I’ll give her a call to make sure she doesn’t want it back before I give it to my buddy. Just to clear my conscience.”
“Take it. I’ll be glad to be rid of it. It belonged to Liz Wyman. Good luck finding her.”
Mars went back downtown after dropping Chris at Denise’s. He hoped Nettie would be in, so he could have her track down Liz Wyman. No Nettie. He’d have to do it himself. Doing it himself reminded him why it had been such a good idea to bring Nettie on as his partner. She was better and faster at this kind of thing than he would ever be. In addition to which Nettie liked doing it and he didn’t.
The White Pages on his lap, he flipped to the back of the book. There was a half column of Wymans, but only one—T. R. Wyman—had an three-digit prefix that placed it in Edina. He punched the numbers.
“Hello?” A woman’s voice, small and uncertain.
“Liz Wyman please.”
Immediately, a man’s voice answered. “Who is this?”
“This is Special Detective Bahr with the Minneapolis Police Department. I’m calling regarding the Mary Pat Fitzgerald investigation, I’d like to speak to Liz, please.”
“Liz is no longer at this number. I’d would appreciate your not calling here again.” He hung up.
Mars sat with the phone in his hand for a moment after the line went dead. He considered redialing, but decided against it. Looking again at the White Pages, he saw there was no street address with the number. He’d have to turn this over to Nettie. He plopped the White Pages back on the desk and picked up The Hornet. This time he looked for Liz Wyman in the index. He found her name, but that’s all there was. A name with no entries after it. How did a kid like that end up with Mary Pat as a friend? He remembered that Mary Pat had been a peer counselor on a school-sponsored phone hotline, and wondered if she’d connected with Liz Wyman through the hotline. He scooted over to the case file on his wheeled desk chair, and pulled the file that included back ground interviews. Nettie had attached a printout of people who’d been interviewed. He ran his finger down the list. No Liz Wyman.
Then he remembered that at some point early on they’d had Mary Pat’s address book. He found it in a sealed box sitting next to the file cabinet. Nettie had labeled the book: “Database entered April sixteenth.” Which meant that if he’d thought about it, and if Liz’s number was in Mary Pat’s book, he could have looked for the number on the computer. He flipped through the book. No Liz Wyman under the W’s. He went to the L’s. There was an entry for LW with two numbers, one of which had been crossed out. The crossed-out
number was the number Mars had called in Edina. The second number had a three-digit prefix that would put it in a south Minneapolis neighborhood near downtown.
Mars dialed the number. An Asian man’s voice answered.
“May I speak to Liz Wyman, please?”
“Who’s calling?” The voice was firm, but not hostile.
“I’m a friend of the Fitzgerald family. I’m calling about Mary Pat Fitzgerald.”
Mars could hear the man talking to someone. Then a woman came on the line.
“Who’s calling, please?”
Mars hesitated. Liz Wyman clearly had problems in her life. If he identified himself as a cop, he knew there was a good chance he’d lose her. He tried an oblique response.
“Liz, I’m investigating Mary Pat Fitzgerald’s death, and I came across your yearbook. I was interested in the message Mary Pat wrote in your book. I wondered if we could meet. A half hour would do it.”
“You a cop?”
There didn’t seem to be much point in denying it. “I’ve been in charge of the investigation. Let me assure you there isn’t any question of your being involved. ‘I’m pretty much tracking down anything we’ve got, and not being able to figure out what her yearbook message meant, I thought I’d see if you could shed some light.” He held his breath waiting for her response.
“What did she write?”
“You haven’t seen it?”
“Mary Pat and I had dinner one night, the week we got yearbooks. After dinner, we went over to Laura Gleason’s. Laura’d been out of school with strep, and Mary Pat was supposed to drop off her French notes for Laura. Somehow or other, I left my book there. Mary Pat had written in my book at dinner, but I didn’t look at it then. And the next
week I moved out from my parents. Week after that, Mary Pat was killed. The last thing I was thinking about was the yearbook.”
“How would it be if I dropped by with the book? Like I said, a half hour would be all it would take.”
“I don’t think so.”
Mars tightened and then took a shot. “Look. Liz. I’ve got no interest in messing up your life. I’m just looking for anything that will help us out on this thing with Mary Pat Fitzgerald. Now we can take care of this yearbook between the two of us, or I can get the County Attorney’s Office involved, which will make things more difficult for both of us.” He paused and on a hunch said, “You being underage, if I do that, I’ve gotta get your parents involved, which I guess, given your present circumstances, you’d just as soon avoid—”
“If my father finds out where I am, he’ll kill me and my boyfriend. You want more murders on your hands?”
“Liz, give me a half hour. I don’t want to involve your parents any more than you want me to.” The line was silent. Mars said, “Somehow I thought you’d want to help Mary Pat, that you’d want to help us to find who killed your friend.”
The line stayed quiet, but Mars could feel she was thinking about what to do.
“You promise you won’t let my dad know my number or where I’m living?”
“Promise.”
“Hold on a sec.” Mars could again hear conversation in the background.
“Can you get here before five o’clock?”
“No problem. Give me your address.”
She gave him the street address and the apartment number. Mars left immediately.
The guy who answered the door was a scholarly-looking young Korean, maybe twenty-two, twenty-three years old, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, khaki pants, and a striped, button-down Oxford-cloth shirt. He was pulling on a jacket as he opened the door. “You Detective Bahr?”
“In this neighborhood you should be sure before you open the door. Believe me.”
“Come on in.” He called over his shoulder, “Liz? The copper is here.”
From the back of the apartment, Liz Wyman came forward. She was plain, but like her boyfriend, intelligent looking. She wore a University of Minnesota sweatshirt, jeans, white crew socks, and loafers.
She said, “This is my boyfriend. Jared.” Mars and Jared shook hands.
Jared nodded, said, “I’m outta here.” He looked closely at Liz. “You okay with this?”
She nodded. “Go. I’ll get a bus and meet you over there around six.”
Inside, Mars handed over the yearbook. “Tell you the truth, I’m probably going to have to take that back with me. I’ll see you get it back eventually.”
“It’s okay. I don’t want it back. I just want to see what Mary Pat wrote. Where was it?”
“Right under Mary Pat’s senior picture.”
“Sit down.”
Liz sat lotus style on a rug on the floor. Mars eased down on a futon draped over a wood frame. The apartment was small but attractive. The wood floors shone, the furniture was simple. It appeared that, after a flying leap, Liz Wyman had landed on her feet.
She found the picture and the note and stared at it for much longer than it took to read. Her hand went to her
mouth and she pressed her lips together. When she looked up, her eyes were wet.
Mars spoke first. “Can you tell me what the message means?”
“Haven’t you figured it out?”
They maintained eye contact as Mars followed another hunch. “My first guess would be that you’ve been a victim of sexual abuse. Was Mary Pat your peer counselor in the hotline program?”
“Pretty good. You’re smart, for a cop. Keep going.”
“Well, that’s as far as I got.”
“My dad started having sex with me when I was five years old. I pretty much went on automatic pilot from then until I called the hotline when I was fifteen. I got lucky—for the first time in my life—when Mary Pat answered the phone. I was going to kill myself. I’d let myself into my dad’s car in his parking space downtown. I was going to cut my wrists, then my throat. I wanted my dad to come out of his office and find me in a pool of blood. He had a mobile phone in the car, and I called the hotline. First time. Mary Pat sort of got me stabilized, asked if she could call me back, which she did in about fifteen seconds. What I didn’t know was that she was calling me back on her cell phone. And while we were talking, she was driving downtown. Next thing I knew, she was at the car door. She didn’t say anything. She just opened the door and hugged me, crying. She kept saying, ‘You can’t let him win, you can’t let him win.’ Mary Pat was the only friend I had for the next three years. But when Mary Pat Fitzgerald is your friend, you don’t really need anyone else.” Liz began sobbing softly, but continued. “Was my friend.
“Anyway, Mary Pat convinced me that I had to confront my father and get my mother’s support to end what he was doing to me. I did that in March. My mother’s always been
totally under my father’s thumb—I mean, totally—but she stood by me when I told her. I wanted both of us to leave him. But she wouldn’t—or couldn’t. She couldn’t imagine life on her own. It’s crazy to say it—because in different ways he’s been as abusive to her as he ever was to me—but she loves him. And with my mother, she doesn’t see a future for herself. She can’t imagine getting a job, which she’s probably right that she’d have to do. My dad is shrewd. He’d put every ounce of himself into making sure we got as little as possible. So I left. I’m still hoping she’ll leave. I can’t even call the house. I called at first, and it turned out he had a bug on the phone, and he beat the shit out of my mom. He almost found out where Jared and Lare living, and I honestly think if he found us, he’d try to kill us.”
“You want some help with this situation? We’ve got good people in the Domestic Abuse Unit. They could hook up with Edina PD. You and your mother shouldn’t have to put up with this.”
She shook her head. “I know what the police can and can’t do. And I know my mother couldn’t go through what would happen if I filed charges against my dad. It took everything she had to get me out.” She stopped and looked at him. “You’re not here about me.”
He held her eyes. “No, I’m not.”
“You want to know if Mary Pat’s dad was abusing her.”
Mars maintained eye contact but said nothing.
Liz looked away. “I always thought so. The way she supported me—it was more than compassion. But she never said. She never said, ‘I know what you’re feeling because it happened to me.’” Liz silently read the message in the yearbook again. “Actually, what she’s written is as close as she ever got to admitting Doc abused her—‘We’re almost home free’—not ‘You’re almost home free.’
“Is there anybody she would have talked to? Becky Prince? Her mother?”
“Becky? Maybe. But I don’t really think so. Becky isn’t exactly the soft-shoulder type. Besides, I don’t think Mary Pat would allow herself the luxury of not being strong, of telling somebody she had a problem she couldn’t handle. Her mother? I doubt it. I mean, Mother Fitz was a total wuss. Besides. One of the reasons I thought it was happening was that it seemed to me like Mother Fitz knew, whether Mary Pat told her or not. If you were ever in that house with the three of them together—well, it was in the air.”
Mars thought about it, catching in his mind’s eye the brief impressions of perpetual distance between Doc and Mother Fitz, even when they were in the same room. He guessed that Liz was right.
Mars couldn’t get back downtown fast enough after talking with Liz Wyman. He wanted to go over to Doc Fitzgerald’s alibi file. There had to be something there that he’d missed first time around.
Going over Doc’s file, it struck Mars for the first time that the file was more substantial than what you’d expect for a guy who’d never been a serious suspect. Seven people had been interviewed to confirm Doc’s alibi. The file included copies of medical records that Doc had signed on the day that Mary Pat was killed. Most unexpected of all, Nettie had rechecked all the interviews herself. A routine alibi check like this, Mars had assumed Nettie would have accepted whatever the Edina PD turned up, unless something looked off. Nettie had ideas about Doc, or she wouldn’t have gone over his alibis herself.
He called her.
“Hey, Nettie.”
“Hey, Mars.”
“Guess what.”
“I don’t guess on my day off. Just tell me.”
“I bought an Edina High School yearbook at a garage sale. I found something Mary Pat wrote that didn’t make sense. I tracked down—without your assistance, please note—the kid she wrote it to and the kid tells me she thinks there’s a chance Doc Fitz was sexually abusing Mary Pat. How’s that for a nice bit of detective work?”
“So tell me something I don’t already know.”
“Whaddya mean, tell you something you don’t already know? You knew Doc had sexually abused Mary Pat and you didn’t bother to mention that little detail to me?”
“I checked his alibi first. It was tight, like I told you. Very tight. I interviewed every patient he was with that day—and we’ve got times he was with his patients in their charts—times entered by labor room and delivery room nurses, not Doc Fitzgerald—I interviewed delivery room staff, the guy who covered the gate in the doctors’ parking lot—Doc was there. Like he said, from first thing sunup until after eleven. Besides which, I figure I tell you what I’m thinking about the sexual abuse, it would send you off on a goose chase. And I didn’t have a lot to go on in the first place.”
“And what, may I ask, did you have to go on?”
“The picture. The picture didn’t look right to me.”
“What picture didn’t look right to you?”
“The one we cropped for Mary Pat’s picture. The one where she was standing on a golf course with Doc.”
Mars found the photo file and pulled the five-by-seven-inch snap he’d taken from Fitzgerald that first Saturday. He looked at it hard. Nettie was right. If you looked, it was there. The father’s hand on the daughter’s waist. You could see the pressure on her shirt from her leaning away from him. The father’s
sideways glance, a look that carried traces of guilt and anxiety in the eyes above the smile. And the daughter’s eyes. Fixed. Not smiling above the posed, camera-ready lips.
It had been there all along.
So. What to do? What he had was the possibility that Doc had abused Mary Pat, but no hard evidence. What hard evidence he had was that Doc was nowhere near the Father Hennepin Bluffs on the morning of April 3. And Doc himself, now an invalid in a nursing home. Put it all together and you had a lead that was a nonstarter. On an impulse, he looked up Bobby Fitzgerald’s number in Boston.
“Bobby? Mars Bahr in Minneapolis.”
“Mars—something new?”
“No. Just thought I should touch base. You said last time we talked you’d be going to England this summer, and I thought I’d try and catch you before you left … .”
“Your timing’s good. I leave day after tomorrow.”
“And you’ll be back when?”
“End of the month, early August. So there’s nothing new?”
Mars hesitated. Then he said, “One thing, and it’s probably nothing. I’m sorry to have to bring it up, but I can’t ignore it, either … .”
There was anxiety in Bobby’s voice. “What?”
“I talked to a young woman Mary Pat had met when Mary Pat was volunteering as a peer counselor. That woman had an impression—and there was nothing definite to back the impression up—that Mary Pat’s relationship with your dad had some problems—maybe even sexual abuse. I’m sorry, Bobby, but I’m sure you can understand. I can’t let a detail like that pass without checking.”
The line was quiet for a long time. When he spoke, Bobby’s voice was tight. “Christ. You were the one who told me that the family’s alibis were solid. What are you saying?
That my dad had been abusing Mary Pat and that he killed her because of that?”
“Not at all. I’m comfortable with the alibis where they stand. It’s what I said: I came across one person who raised a question. I didn’t feel I could let it go without checking. If your dad were well, I’d put the question to him. As things stand, I’m asking you.”
Bobby’s voice was hoarse with emotion when he spoke. “I never thought I’d be glad my dad is in the shape he is. But if being a physical and mental basket case protects him from that question, then I’m grateful he’s in no shape to be asked … .”
“Good. That’s what I wanted to hear. Listen, I’ll let you go. Sorry to have brought this up. Do me a favor. Give me a call when you get back, so I know where to reach you, and if you’d leave a number where you can be reached in England, just in case.”
“You’ve got my office number. They’ll know where to get hold of me. I’ll call when I get back.”
Bobby hung up sharply. Mars sat silent for moments after the call. It was predictable that Bobby would be offended by the suggestion that his father had been sexually abusing Mary Pat. But there was a trace of defensiveness in Bobby’s response that troubled Mars. He couldn’t bring himself to let it go altogether. What he needed was a fresh perspective. That’s why he called Karen Pogue.
He’d met Karen when he’d been an investigator in the Sex Crimes Division and she’d done an inservice on the emotional origins of particular types of deviancy. Mars kept up an association with her that he found useful. It had also occurred to him that Karen was close to being his best friend—if you could say that someone you saw only a half dozen times a year could be called a best friend. They both looked for opportunities
to get together and while the time they spent together usually involved professional issues, there was a connection between them that only occurs between people who genuinely like each other. What was different between them was that Karen was someone who made friends easily. Mars didn’t. Friends took time, and he never worked less than sixty hours a week and what time he had after work went to Chris. Those were true facts. Mars also knew that if he worked less and didn’t have Chris, he still wouldn’t have a lot of friends. And as long as Chris and his work were doing well, that wasn’t something that bothered Mars.
He called Karen’s university office and got an answering machine. He tried her home number and got her just as she was going out.
“Can I call you back? I was supposed to pick Ted up like ten minutes ago. I’ve been hoping you’d call to talk about this Fitzgerald girl—is that why you’re calling?”
“You got it.”
“Oh, good. Where are you going to be after six—or wait. I don’t want to talk about this on the phone. Why don’t you just come over for dinner. Anytime after seven. Ted’s got a big case on, so he probably won’t be able to join us, but I’ll make you dinner and you can tell me all about it.”
If Mars had had enough money and domestic talent, he would have lived exactly like the Pogues. It was a style of living, in a big frame house a couple blocks up from Lake of the Isles, that made him feel a little wistful. When he thought about it, the wistfulness was because he knew you didn’t live like the Pogues just by shopping at Dayton’s. You lived like the Pogues if you’d been born to well-to-do parents, gotten more than one degree from Ivy League schools, and had an IQ well above the national average.
Karen Pogue—she wouldn’t allow herself to be called doctor by friends or patients—had an irreverent sense of humor
Mars found particularly appealing and a gift for friendship that she extended to a diverse group of people she found interesting. He liked Ted Pogue much less than he liked Karen. Ted, he suspected, did not find Mars or what Mars did interesting. It also seemed obvious to him that Ted Pogue was used to liking people less than his wife did and that Ted’s frequent begging off from social occasions was for that reason, not the burden of work.
So Mars was grateful when he walked into the front hallway of the Pogues’ house on Humboldt Avenue to have only Karen there to greet him. She didn’t make excuses for Ted, and Mars didn’t ask. He followed her down the long booklined hallway to the kitchen. Over her shoulder, she said, “What have you been doing with yourself? I haven’t talked to you for ages. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’d fallen madly in love with someone … .”
Mars stopped flat in his tracks. “What’s that supposed to mean—if you didn’t know better you’d think I’d fallen madly in love with someone?”
“Just that in all the years I’ve known you, I can’t remember a time when a woman knocked you off your blocks.”
Mars groaned. “Oh, please. Don’t you start. Nettie’s been giving me grief about my ‘relationships’—or more precisely, what she perceives as my lack of relationships—every chance she gets. Just for the record, I do have a private life and it’s because it’s private that you and Nettie don’t know about it.”
Karen grinned. “My final word on the topic: What I usually find when men talk about relationships is they’re talking about sex. I’d be willing to bet that isn’t what Nettie is talking about and it’s not what I’m talking about. But enough on that. Let’s talk dead teenagers.”
The kitchen was at the back of the house. At a centerisland counter, Karen had set two places. She poured white
wine into a thin-glassed goblet without asking him what he wanted.
“Sit,” she said, “and talk. It’ll take me another five minutes with the pasta.”
He took a quick sip of the wine. This was also the only house in which he enjoyed a glass of wine. He would have preferred Coca-cola, but at Karen’s, wine was acceptable.
“Well. You’ve read what’s in the paper about the Fitzgerald girl?”
“Of course. Every word.”
“I’d be interested in your reaction. Off the cuff.”
She didn’t answer right away. She was chopping basil, but Mars could tell she was thinking about what she was going to say.
“Off the cuff, I’d say something doesn’t make sense—or at least, there’s something that’s missing from what I know about the case.”
“Unfortunately, there’s something missing from what I know about the case, too.”
“What do you know?”
He decided not to say anything right off about the possibility of abuse. He’d stick to the basics and see what Karen came up with on her own. “I know that Mary Pat took risks with strange men, which makes me think she took one risk too many and didn’t get back alive. I know the boyfriend didn’t kill her. I know she was dead drunk when she died and that it wasn’t usual for her to drink. Her best friend told me Mary Pat had trouble feeling emotion, which was part of why Mary Pat would take risks, to try and get her adrenaline going. To feel something. I know that even though it looked like she had a strong family, her mother and father are estranged and her mother is a lush. I know that she was killed by one clean shiv to the aorta. No evidence that she had any
physical contact with the assailant. Sometime before she died she stopped her watch, an action she would have had to plan. I know she wasn’t sexually assaulted—which is one of the reasons I didn’t call you first thing—”
“I wondered about that. I guess I assumed there wasn’t a sexual assault or you would have called—but now?”
“Truth is, I’ve been off base on this case pretty much from day one. At first I thought—no, hoped—it was the boyfriend, and there were some incidental details that supported that. But from my first look at him—and his alibi—not a chance. What my gut was telling me from the start—and this is consistent with the risk-taking behavior—is that she met someone she didn’t know and went off with him. They found her car with a flat tire in the parking lot at Southdale. My guess is she started to walk home and got picked up. But I don’t have one scrap of evidence to support that theory. The ME thinks the perp had her on her knees in front of him when he stuck her. What I’ve got is bits and pieces, but nothing that fits together. Which is why I’d like to know what you think.”
Karen walked back to the counter with two wide-lipped white bowls filled with perfectly cooked fettucine, sprinkled with fresh chopped basil, ground pine nuts, and freshly shredded mozzarella cheese. The mixed-green salad had a thin veil of vinegar and oil. She opened a heavy white linen napkin, uncovering a basket of hot, crusty rolls. Before she sat, she stood with the heels of her hands against the counter, looking out the glass doors that opened on a small backyard. It had turned dark since Mars arrived, and the glass in the doors was black.
Then Karen said, “Two things. The risk taking, the lack of emotion. You checked the male family members out pretty thoroughly?”
Mars stared at her. “Keep going.”
Karen took a forkful of pasta. With her mouth half-full, she said, “What you’ve said about the impulsive sexual behavior, the acting out with strange men, would be very consistent with a sexual abuse victim. Also the ‘dead’ feeling, the lack of emotion. Not being able to feel things. Very common in girls who’ve been sexually abused when they’re young, before they have control over the abuser’s access to them.”
Mars shook his head. “I hear what you’re saying, but the brother and dad’s alibis were tight.” It was his turn to talk with a mouthful of pasta. “Actually, that’s what got me off the dime to call you. I found some very thin evidence suggesting that Mary Pat might have been sexually abused by her dad. But when I look at his alibi—which is as tight as anybody’s—it doesn’t fit. And … at a gut level, it doesn’t click for me, either.”
Karen nodded. “Well, I’d have to say that while Mary Pat might fit the pattern for sexual abuse, the dad doesn’t sound like the perp in her murder.”
“Tell me why you say that.”
“I’d say the perp has a sexual object-identity problem. You know, the use of the sharp instrument for penetration, the lack of direct sexual contact. This victim is sexually stimulating to him, but in his mind at least, the figure is verboten—off limits. For arousal, he recreates a provocative image and thrusts with the knife. There’s anger, too. The alcohol involvement—especially with the kneeling behavior—is a form of degradation. He’s angry that this image has aroused him and he wants to humiliate the object. I’d guess without the image of drunkenness, he couldn’t achieve arousal or climax. He appears to have a highly organized personality. Very disciplined. He’s managing his anger against the sexual object in a very controlled way. He’s protecting himself from acting on that anger in a way that could trap him. Like shredding her to bits and covering himself with blood.”
Karen stopped, getting up for more wine. As she sipped, she shook her head. “None of that fits with the father as perpetrator. You’ll find a fair amount of dominance behavior, but degradation for its own sake, without there being physical contact, just doesn’t happen all that much. And the drinking—it’s not unusual to find adults using drugs or alcohol to induce sexual participation in children, but it’s a very class-correlated behavior. You’ll find it in families where there isn’t a lot of order or structure, where children are left alone with the abuser for long periods of time. Where the children are unprotected. In a situation like the Fitzgerald family, it wouldn’t be typical and it particularly wouldn’t be typical for a child who is an adult. My guess is that if he were abusing his daughter, that if he murdered her, it wouldn’t be this hands-off kind of thing you found down on the bluffs. And I’d have the same question about the site. It just doesn’t make any sense that he’d haul her all the way down to the river, to a place he doesn’t have any reason for knowing about. You also don’t find murder at this stage of abuse. If it’s going to happen, it will happen early in the abusive relationship, at the first flush of guilt and fear of discovery. Not after years of abuse, when the child is an adult with resources to protect herself. By the way, were you able to determine if anything that belonged to the victim was missing—jewelry, clothing—something he could use to reconnect emotionally with the murder?”
Mars rubbed his face hard with the heels of both hands. “We didn’t find anything.”
Karen walked over to a newspaper rack on the wall and pulled out a section of the newspaper. “This is reminding me of something I read in this morning’s paper—about the tsunami that hit Peru a year or so ago … .”
Mars said, “I can’t wait to hear how you’re going to link my perpetrator to a Peruvian tsunami.”
She put half-frame glasses on and spread the newspaper open on the counter. “Here it is,” she said, peering down her nose through the specs at the paper. “Listen to this. ‘Scientists have concluded that many tsunamis originate in faults on the ocean floor. When earthquakes occur along those fault lines, they generate subsurface waves that migrate toward shore. As the subsurface wave enters shallow water, its volume achieves waves of extraordinary height, capable of reaching inland for distances of several miles.” Karen looked up at him. “Your killer is like that, Mars. There’s a fault line deep in his psyche. When something trips that line, he moves—silently, invisibly—toward his victim. And the victim doesn’t recognize the danger until it’s too late. And after a tsunami, the only evidence remaining is destruction—the wave no longer exists.”
Karen folded the newspaper shut, and taking her glasses off, said, “That’s the MO on your killer, Mars. Tsunami Man.”
Mars swirled the wine in his glass, staring at it as he thought about what Karen had said.
Watching him, Karen said, “This isn’t making sense to you?”
Mars responded slowly. “What you’re giving me is a motive—which we’ve been missing all along. The problem I’ve got is—if you’re right—our perp is a psychopath. Someone who acts out of a deep psychological flaw. A guy like that, he’s gonna do this more than once. We’ve sent a wire out to other jurisdictions—twice, in fact. And nothing’s come back.”
For the third time that day, Mars drove back downtown. It was nearly 9:30 P.M., but there was something he needed to do.
He walked down the hall to the administrative support pool. His footsteps clattered in the empty halls. It was a quiet Saturday night and not much of anyone was around this end of city hall. Through the fogged windows of the chief’s office,
he saw a light beyond the reception area, but there was no sign of activity. In the admin pool he found what he was looking for: a stack of reinforced storage boxes. Grabbing five or six, he made his way back to the squad room.
He’d been working for an hour when he looked up to see the chief standing in the squad room door. “You’re here late, Marshall. I hope that doesn’t mean an addition to our annual body count.”
Mars sat back. He’d been so deep into his thoughts he hadn’t heard the chief coming. Glancing at his watch, he saw that it was nearly eleven-thirty.
“Nope. Old ghosts. Keeping too much stuff around on cases we haven’t cleared. Need to get some of this stuff boxed. Clear my head and the files.”
The chief walked over casually and sat on the edge of Mars’s desk. He picked up a thick black three-ring binder, glancing at it before dropping it back on Mars’s desk. The binder was clearly marked “M. P. Fitzgerald.”
“Little early to put this one to bed, wouldn’t you say?” the chief asked.
“Not putting it to bed. Just getting it better organized, clearing my head, like I said.”
“How’s Nettie doing on getting these files automated?”
Mars leaned back and stretched. With his hands clasped over the top of his head, he said, “As well as can be expected. If people’d quit killing each other she’d be doing better. That, and better hardware and software.”
“Ah. I should have mentioned. The mayor told me this afternoon we got the federal funding. Should be able to get you some new equipment.”
“How about the funding for the riverfront?”
“That too, I understand. They’re gonna start cleaning up the trails, build an interpretive trail on the history of the bluffs, the mills, all that. The mayor turned the Fitzgerald
murder to the city’s advantage. Used it as an example of why we needed to spend money reclaiming the riverfront for the public. She’s a genius, that lady.”
Mars didn’t answer. He half stood to lean across the desk and scoop up another pile of paper.
“You figure on being here all night, Marshall?”
“This is the last box. Spent too much time rereading, instead of getting it into boxes. I’ll be outta here in another half hour or so.”
The chief stood. “Well, I’ll be on my way. Managed to get caught up on a little paperwork myself. Never seems to be time during the day.” He moved toward the door, turning back before he left. “You get home now, hear? You look beat.”
“Like I said. Another half hour.”
“Good health. The most important thing.”
A small smile passed Mars’s lips as he wished the chief a good night. After the chief left, Mars picked up the phone.
Nettie’s voice was fuzzy when she answered.
Mars said: “You’ve got fifteen seconds: the chief just dropped in while I was working on some files. Before he left, he said, ‘Good health. The most important thing.’”
“Oh—give me a minute … you woke me up, by the way.”
“Sorry. The clock is ticking.”
“The Godfather, Part One, Marlon Brando to Al Pacino. They’re talking in the garden.”
“Ha! Wrong. The Godfather, Part Two. Lee Strasberg to Al Pacino when Pacino goes to see him in Florida.”
“Shouldn’t count when you wake someone up.”
“You’re a sore loser.”
“I suppose it makes a nice change, your being right about something.”