Chapter 14
We did some basic introductions—names only, no occupations—and then I asked Ben Middleton to tell us what happened on the night his wife was killed. “Be as detailed as you can,” I told him. “And be honest, even if you think the truth will make you look bad. If you lie to us, it isn’t going to help anyone.”
“So far the truth hasn’t done much for me, either,” he said. His voice was a little raspy, and it tasted like peanut butter.
“Try it, anyway,” I said with a smile.
He sighed, put his cuffed hands on the table, and idly twiddled his fingers, staring at them as he began to speak. “Tiffany and I were heading home after a romantic retreat to celebrate our anniversary and Valentine’s Day. We had rented a small house on the shores of Lake Michigan, up in Door County, and we’d been there for four days so far. A storm had come in overnight, dropping six inches or so of snow, and they were calling for a second storm that evening and throughout the night, with high winds and lots of lake-effect snow. At first we thought we would just ride the storm out, since we still had a couple of days left on our rental. I headed into town around noon that day to pick up some provisions to see us through. The nearest place to shop was about ten miles away, and the road to our place was narrow and it hadn’t been plowed, so the driving was slow. It took me almost two hours to make the trip. When I got back to the house, Tiffany was in a mood.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked him.
“She would get that way sometimes, quiet, withdrawn, distant. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, it always seemed to come on fast and without warning. When she got like that, she sometimes had panic attacks or crying binges, so I’d learned to leave her be unless she asked me for something. When I got back from the store, I saw that she was pacing and biting her nails, a sure sign that one of her moods had settled in. She kept looking out the windows of the house, like she expected to see a goblin out there or something. I asked her what was wrong, and at first she said nothing. But I persisted, and eventually, she told me that she didn’t want to stay in the house with the big storm coming. She said it made her feel claustrophobic and isolated.”
He paused, still staring at his fingers, but now they were still. “I should have agreed to leave right then. It was obvious from her behavior that she was close to a panic attack already. But our time together up until then had been so great, and she’d been so happy and calm and affectionate. I desperately wanted that version of Tiffany back, so I tried to convince her that we would be fine, that we had plenty of stuff on hand to keep us warm and fed, and that it would be cozy and romantic. But I couldn’t sway her, and when her voice turned shrill and she started looking like a trapped animal, I knew it was pointless to try any longer. So we packed up our stuff and headed out.”
He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes, letting his hands drop to his lap. “It was after five and getting dark out by the time we left. The storm had already begun, coming earlier than predicted. It was snowing heavily, and the road still hadn’t been plowed from the night before, because it’s a narrow back road that doesn’t see much traffic. The wind had picked up, gusting and drifting and making for whiteout conditions at times. It was a slow, white-knuckle drive, and after about ten minutes we’d gone only a couple of miles down the road.”
He paused, licked his lips, and his breathing sped up a hair. “All of a sudden I see this guy up ahead, standing in the middle of the road, waving us down. I thought he might need help or be in trouble of some kind, so I stopped and rolled down my window.” Middleton paused again and swallowed hard, his eyes still closed. “I started to ask the guy if he needed some help, and the next thing I know, he’s sticking a gun in my face and telling me to get out of the car. I . . . I tried to reason with him. I told him he could have the car and begged him not to hurt anyone. But he just repeated his demand for me to get out of the car, and I could tell from the look in his eyes that he meant business. So I—”
Mal stopped him and asked, “Was your car in park or in drive when this happened?”
Middleton opened his eyes and looked at Mal with a puzzled and slightly impatient expression. “I don’t know,” he said after several seconds. “I don’t remember shifting into park.”
“Was your foot on the brake?” Mal asked.
Middleton thought about it and grimaced. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I can’t remember. All I remember is grabbing for the gun, wanting to push it away from me and Tiffany.” He looked at Mal, and his expression turned sad. “If the car had been in drive, I could have hit the gas and gunned it, right?”
Mal said nothing, did nothing. Neither did any of the rest of us.
Middleton closed his eyes again, looking sad and remorseful. “I think the car must have been in park, or it would have lurched forward at some point. I can’t imagine that I managed to keep my foot on the brake during the struggle. The idea of hitting the gas never occurred to me at the time, though given the road conditions, I doubt it would have done any good. The wheels would have just spun. And all I could think about was that gun.”
“Tell us about the struggle,” I said. “Give us as much detail as you can remember regarding where your hands and body were, anything you said or did, any movements you made.”
Middleton opened his eyes and zeroed in on me. Then he nodded slowly. “I reached up and shoved the man’s arm with my left hand, and then I grabbed the barrel of the gun with my right. It fired, and I remember the sound was deafening and the barrel felt hot. The man tried to swing the gun back toward me, but I had the advantage, I think, because I was pushing straight out and he was trying to move his arms sideways. When he realized his efforts weren’t working, he started pulling back on the gun.” He shifted his gaze to the tabletop, and his face scrunched up with pain. “That’s when the gun fired for the second time.”
“Where inside the car was the gun when it fired the second time?” Tyrese asked.
Middleton furrowed his brow and held his cuffed hands in front of his face, about eighteen inches away. “About here,” he said. He stared at his hands for a moment and then readjusted their positions slightly. The right hand closed tighter, as if it was gripping something, and he bent the left one back at the wrist. “Like this, I think,” he said.
It was easy for me to imagine his left hand wrapped around a man’s forearm and the right one gripping the barrel of a gun. That jibed with the blood splatter evidence Tyrese had mentioned.
Middleton began to move his hands up and down, back and forth, covering an area about a foot square. “I can’t be sure of the exact positions, but we struggled something like this. And then the guy just let go of the gun, turned, and ran off. That’s when I looked over and saw that Tiffany was . . . that she’d been . . .” He swallowed hard and seemed unable to finish his sentence.
“Which way did the man run?” I asked.
“Toward the back of the car,” he said without hesitation. “I had my finger on the gun’s trigger, ready to fire, and I kept craning my neck around to see if he was coming at us from the back window or going around to Tiff’s side of the car. But he didn’t. He just disappeared into the night.” He hesitated and stared at all of us, his gaze moving from one face to another. His expression was expectant, querying, and a little suspicious, as if he was waiting for us to call a foul on his version of the events.
“What did you do next?” I asked after a period of silence.
Middleton looked away from us then and stared down at the tabletop. He winced and said, “I hollered at Tiffany, asking her if she was okay. There was blood and . . . other stuff all over the side of her head and neck and shoulder. I grabbed her arm and tried to find a pulse and couldn’t. . . . She had this empty, vacant stare.... I knew she was gone.”
Tears welled up in his eyes as he spoke, and the expression on his face was one of pure agony and despair. I had no doubt then that the man had loved his wife. But that didn’t mean he didn’t kill her.
“Where was the gun at this point?” Mal asked.
“In my lap,” Middleton said without hesitation. He leaned forward and swiped at his nose with one hand, the other one dangling below it within the cuffs. “I tried to call for help, but I couldn’t get a signal on my phone. So I started driving. I’m not sure how far I drove or for how long. It seemed like an eternity. When I reached a main road and finally got a signal, I called nine-one-one. I wanted to keep driving, but they told me to stay put. So I did.... I knew Tiff was gone,” he said with an expression of hopelessness.
“Did the cops find any prints in the snow?” I asked.
Middleton shook his head. “By the time they reached me and checked Tiffany, some time had passed. Eventually, one of the cops put me in his car, and we drove back the way I’d come, trying to find the spot where it all happened. But the wind and the snowdrifts had covered everything up. We couldn’t even see my tire tracks on the road.” He hung his head, and I saw a tear roll down his cheek.
“Mr. Middleton,” I said, “the evidence presented at your trial suggests that your wife was having an affair at the time.”
Middleton looked up at me, his face a thundercloud of emotion.
“Did you know about it?” I asked.
He shook his head. “I had no idea. I thought everything between us was fine.”
The taste of his voice changed with this statement. It went from its prior peanut butter to something more like a rancid nut. I narrowed my eyes at him. “You just lied to me.”
Middleton stared at me, eyes wide.
“I told you in the beginning that you had to be totally honest with us. No lying. Now that you’ve lied to us, it makes everything else you said seem suspect.”
“But I didn’t lie,” he insisted. “I didn’t know anything about Tiffany having an affair.”
With this, his voice returned to the peanut butter taste, momentarily making me doubt my reaction and interpretation. Then a lightbulb turned on in my head—both figuratively and literally, since I had a vision of an actual lightbulb coming on.
“You lied when you said you thought everything was fine between the two of you,” I said.
He looked startled and then chagrined. “How did you . . .” He left the question hanging, but I knew what he meant to ask.
“I have an ability to tell when people are lying to me,” I explained.
He stared at me, looking bemused. “Are you a mind reader or something?”
“Something like that.”
He weighed my proclamation for a few seconds and then said, “Okay then. Yes, things had been strained between me and Tiffany for a while, but we were getting it back on track. This trip was supposed to be a chance to reconnect.” He paused and frowned. “If I’d known she was seeing someone else, I probably wouldn’t have arranged the trip. But I didn’t know, I swear.”
As far as I could tell, this was the truth. “Were there specific issues between you and Tiffany that were causing problems?” I asked. “I apologize for getting personal, but how were things in the bedroom?”
“They hadn’t been good for some time. Several months, in fact. I knew something was bothering her, but like I said before, she sometimes had these moods. I knew my schedule was an issue for her a lot of the time. I worked long hours, and that didn’t leave us much in the way of together time. But I felt like I had to pull my weight financially, you know?” He gave me an appealing look, begging me to understand, and I nodded. Marrying into a rich family couldn’t have been easy. “If I had it all to do over again, I’d let the work stuff go and pay more attention to my marriage. In retrospect, I don’t think the money mattered all that much to her.”
I couldn’t help but draw comparisons between Ben and Tiffany’s relationship and mine with Duncan. Duncan’s long work hours often frustrated me. My expectations were pretty simple and basic, but the opportunity to share time together was important in any relationship. I wondered how the lack of it would impact Duncan and me.
“So you don’t have any idea who the other man was?” Mal asked.
Middleton shook his head. “I’ve thought about it, believe me.” He flashed his attorney a mirthless smile. “Christine nagged me on the subject, saying it would give us another suspect and the reasonable doubt we needed, but I didn’t have a clue. I still don’t.”
Christine nodded, verifying Middleton’s statement.
“You didn’t find anything in Tiffany’s e-mails or text messages or phone records that might have provided a clue?” Tyrese asked Christine.
She shook her head. “All her contacts were friends or family members. And the friends were largely female. There were a few men she knew as friends, but she hadn’t had contact with any of them in the month before her death and only minimal contact with one or two prior to that. If I remember right, the most recent one was around five weeks before, a guy who has been a friend of the Gallagher family for years and is now married, with kids.”
“That doesn’t mean he can’t have an affair,” Mal said. “And these days, maybe folks are smart enough not to leave an electronic trail. If you watch any crime TV at all, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that that kind of stuff is the downfall for many people.”
Christine smiled, with a hint of smugness. “Valid points,” she said. “But the fact that this guy and his family were in London at the time of the murder and several months before that kind of ruled him out.”
“Oh,” Mal said.
Oh, indeed. “What about girlfriends Tiffany was close to?” I asked Middleton, remembering Alicia’s idea about confidantes. “Was there anyone she might have shared something like this with?”
“Melanie Smithson was her closest friend,” he said. “The two of them grew up together, and they’ve been best buds since before kindergarten. Melanie was the maid of honor at our wedding, and she and Tiffany get together—” He stopped abruptly and winced. “She and Tiff got together at least once a week for drinks or lunch or dinner. I imagine if anyone knew Tiff’s secrets, it would be her.”
Tyrese wrote down the name, and as he did so, Christine said, “I talked to Melanie already, months ago. She said she wasn’t aware of Tiffany having any affairs.” She shrugged and added, “I suppose she could have been lying.”
“Maybe I can figure that out if I have a chat with her,” I said.
Mal had been frowning for the past minute or so, and when he posed the next question, I got an idea as to why. “Mr. Middleton, if we assume that your version of the events is true, and this man approached you, stuck a gun in your face, and said to get out of the car, why didn’t Tiffany do just that? Why did she stay in the car?”
“I have no idea,” Middleton said, raising his cuffed hands and rubbing at his forehead with the sides of his thumbs. “I’ve often asked myself that same question. The only thing I can think of is that she was so scared, she froze.”
It was a good question. Most people under those circumstances would have hightailed it out of the vehicle. “You said Tiffany was prone to panic attacks,” I said. “Do you think she had one during all of this?”
Middleton gave me a sad smile. “I suppose it’s possible. To be honest, I wasn’t focused on Tiffany when it all went down. I was focused on the man and that damned gun. But like I said before, Tiffany had these moods where she’d often become withdrawn . . . closed off. There were times when she looked frightened . . . not of me, but rather of some ethereal thing. She would stare out the window or at the door with a panicky expression, as if she expected someone or something to be lurking out there. And she’d had that look when she said she wanted to leave the rental house and head home.” He hesitated, his eyes staring off into space. “I asked her father about it once, and he told me Tiffany had always been that way. He told me Tiffany needed someone who was strong, someone who could keep her safe and secure.” He scoffed and shook his head.
“You sound a little resentful,” I said.
“I am,” he admitted. “Not of Tiffany per se, but of her father, Colin Gallagher. That man put me through the wringer when Tiff and I got engaged. He kept questioning me about how I was going to give Tiff the kind of lifestyle she deserved. And he came right out and asked me if I was marrying her for her money. Several times he told me that I wasn’t good enough for her, that she deserved someone better. And to top it off, I found out that he hired a private detective to do an extensive background check on me.”
“How did you figure that out?”
“The bastard told me,” Middleton said irritably. “But not until after I accused him of it.” He smiled bitterly. “This PI he hired wasn’t very good, and he’s also rather distinctive looking. He’s quite tall, like six-six or something, and has a ruddy, pockmarked face and a big beak of a nose. That combo made him stand out in any crowd. At first I thought he might have been one of Tiffany’s exes or someone who was fixated on her, because when I first noticed him, it was always when the two of us were together. But then I started seeing him when I was on my own. It didn’t take me long to figure out the guy was stalking me, and since I’m not a very stalk-worthy person otherwise, I guessed that Colin had to be behind it. So I asked him about it, and he admitted it. He acted like it was no big deal and like he couldn’t understand why I was so upset over it. He said it was SOP for a guy like him with a daughter like Tiffany.”
“So you and your father-in-law didn’t get along,” Mal said.
“That’s an understatement,” Middleton said with a sardonic chuckle. “Though in fairness to the guy, I suspect he would have done the same thing to anyone who showed an interest in Tiffany.”
“When did things start to go bad between you and Tiffany?” I asked. “Was there a sudden increase in the frequency or the number of these mood swings she had?”
Middleton furrowed his brow. “Things were really good with us in the beginning. Yes, Tiff sometimes had one of her moods, but I figured out early on how to deal with them. And whenever she’d get scared, I could often reassure her. But that started to change about six months before . . . well, before the night in question. We went to this family gathering the Gallaghers had for Tiffany’s brother Rory when he finished grad school. When we went home that night, she seemed distant, distracted, upset about something. I tried to ask her what was wrong, but she just kept blowing me off and saying everything was fine, that she was just tired. I figured it was one of her moods and gave her the space she needed to get through it, letting her know I was there if she needed me. In the past her moods had never lasted more than a day or two, but this time it hung on for weeks. I kept asking her if something was bothering her, but she gave me the same brush-off and feeble reassurances every time.”
He sighed. “I didn’t buy it. I could tell something was different with this episode. She never wanted to go anywhere or do anything with me, and she gave up her volunteer work at the animal shelter. She started spending nights in our guest room instead of in our bed, and our sex life dried up. Hell, our entire life dried up. Before this happened, we used to talk all the time, sharing our days with one another or indulging in long, friendly debates about current topics. But all that stopped.” He gave me a forlorn, miserable look. “That was what the anniversary trip was for, to bring us back together without any other distractions . . . to give us some quality time together. And at first, it seemed to be working. The first few days we spent in that house were like old times.”
“You said this change occurred after a family gathering,” I said. “Are you aware of any dealings or exchanges she had with anyone during the event that might have triggered it?”
Middleton shook his head. “No. It was a fun event. Tiffany seemed to be enjoying herself. I didn’t see her argue with anyone, and she didn’t mention anything to me that would indicate she was having a problem with anyone.”
“I take it the two of you didn’t stay together the whole time?” I said.
“No, maybe half of the time. There were a lot of old friends present that Tiffany hadn’t seen in a while, so she kept wandering off to chat. I didn’t know anyone there other than the Gallagher family, so I kind of stayed to myself for most of it.”
“Did any of Tiffany’s other family members seem to have a dislike for you?” Mal asked.
“I don’t think so. If they did, they hid it well. But then the rest of that family is a lot more polite and tactful than Colin is.” He paused and then amended his statement. “At least her mother and her brother Aidan are. Rory’s kind of quiet. I never got to know him very well.”
I was out of questions, but I had a lot of new ideas about where we could go from here. I looked over at Mal, Clay, and Tyrese. “Do you guys have anything you want to ask?”
They all shook their heads, so I turned to Middleton. “Do you have any questions for us?”
“Yeah . . . one. Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you doing this? What are you getting out of it? And what is it going to cost me?”
“That’s three questions,” I said in a light, joking tone, but Middleton didn’t smile, so I continued on a more sobering note. “As for cost, there is none, at least not in any monetary sense.” I paused to see if he would ask for further clarification on this point, but he remained silent. “As for what we get out of it, we get the satisfaction of finding the truth, and if that truth exonerates you, we get the satisfaction of knowing we righted a wrong. If that does turn out to be the case and we can figure out who really did it, we also get to see justice properly served. That’s compensation enough.”
This wasn’t the whole story, of course. I suspect many of the Capone Club members did what they did for these reasons, but also because their lives were less boring and ordinary thanks to their involvement. For me, the motivation was a bit different. My synesthesia was something I’d always considered a quirk, a flaw, a handicap. It was something that made me stand out, and not in a good way. But once I saw how my synesthesia could be useful . . . valuable even . . . I was hooked. The intrinsic reward for me was validation and the feeling that I was unique in a good, special way, as opposed to a weird, creepy way. I was shrugging off the mantle of a lifelong stigma, and I found the process not only highly satisfying but also addictive.
Middleton took a few seconds to weigh my answer. “Fair enough,” he said finally. “Are you going to continue to look into my case?”
“I am,” I said. “And I imagine the rest of the group will follow suit. But I have to reiterate that we can’t make any promises.”
“I understand.”
There was one more thing I wanted to do. I hesitated because I knew it might upset Middleton, but it had to be done, so I pushed on. “I do have one last question for you. Did you kill your wife?”
Ben Middleton didn’t blink. He didn’t move. He didn’t look away. Without hesitation, maintaining eye contact with me the entire time, he said, “I did not.”
Peanut butter all the way.
I looked at the others. “Does anyone else have anything to say?”
Everyone shook their heads.
“Then let’s get to it,” I said.