‘Please believe me, Shelby,’ Harris said. ‘I never meant for any of this to happen.’
Shelby tried to speak behind her gag, but it was no use. All that came out were noises and grunts.
‘Turn your head,’ Harris said.
Frowning, Shelby did as she was told. Harris untied the gag and gently pulled it loose from Shelby’s mouth.
Shelby began to scream. Or at least, she tried to scream. What came out was a hoarse, strangled cry.
‘Don’t. Don’t bother with that,’ said Harris. ‘We’re all alone here. Nobody’s going to hear you.’
Shelby tried to lick her lips with her tongue, although her tongue felt swollen, and too dry to moisten her cracked lips. Harris frowned. Then he disappeared from her field of vision, and she heard water running. In a moment, he returned, and dabbed her lips with a swab that looked like a large Q-tip.
She started to thank him, and then realized how ridiculous that was. It was his doing that she was a prisoner here. ‘Is this your office?’ she asked. She remembered that Harris’s office was only a few blocks from the neuroscience center at Jefferson Hospital. On weekdays it was a bustling area. On Sundays you could park a Winnebago on the street with no problem.
Harris nodded. ‘This is my examining room. The office is closed on Sunday. There’s no one here. There’s no one in the whole building.’
Shelby closed her eyes. ‘How did you get me in here? Someone must have seen you.’
‘There’s a service elevator at the back of the building,’ he said. ‘It really wasn’t difficult. Look, I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. After your call, I just knew I had to act quickly. I need some time to think. I didn’t know where else to take you.’
Shelby felt sick at heart, realizing she inadvertently let him know that she suspected him. Now, it seemed, all her effort was for nothing.
Harris fiddled with some apparatus on the examining table, and Shelby was startled to feel the table starting to rise at her waist. In a few moments, she was in a sitting-up position, though still securely strapped to the table, her hands pinned with cloth wraps.
‘There,’ he said, sitting down in a swivel chair opposite her. ‘It makes it easier to talk. I don’t want to hurt you. I didn’t want to hurt Chloe. You have to believe me. Things have spun completely out of control.’
Shelby gazed at him balefully. ‘My daughter thought the world of you,’ she said. ‘She admired you so much.’
Harris lowered his gaze.
‘How could you do this?’ Shelby asked. ‘You had her murdered.’
Harris’s face bunched up, almost as if he was experiencing pain. ‘How did you know? How did you find out? I mean, that 800 call was no shot in the dark. You already suspected me.’
Shelby felt a small, worthless feeling of satisfaction, to think that she had stumbled across the clues that led her to his terrible secret and he didn’t know how. She was not about to satisfy his curiosity. At least, not until he satisfied hers. ‘Why did you have my daughter killed?’ she asked.
‘Look, Shelby, you probably won’t believe me,’ said Harris. ‘But if it had just been about me, I wouldn’t have . . . I would never have hurt Chloe. She was a lovely girl. I was fond of her. But she was always a little bit jealous of Lianna. And a little vindictive, to tell the truth.’
Shelby stared at him. ‘You killed her because she was jealous of Lianna?’
‘No, no, of course not,’ said Harris. ‘And by the way, just to set the record straight, you were all too quick to assume that your daughter had gone through Lianna’s medical records to find out about Molly’s father. Chloe would never have done that. She was far too professional to do something like that. It would never have occurred to her. You should have realized that.’
‘Don’t you dare,’ said Shelby. ‘You’re defending my daughter to me. You bastard.’
‘I don’t blame you for being angry,’ he said.
‘Why?’ she pleaded. ‘Why did you have to . . .’ She couldn’t continue. Tears slid down her cheeks and fell on her shirt.
He sat on the swivel chair, frowning. His feet, in sturdy shoes, were planted on the floor, his arms folded across his chest. He looked, for all the world, like a doctor trying gently to reveal a difficult diagnosis to a patient.
He sighed. ‘A few weeks ago, a man named Norman Cook showed up at their house – Chloe and Rob’s house. He was Molly’s real father. He had come looking for Lianna, but he found Chloe, who was only too happy to listen. Imagine her surprise – Molly was not Rob’s child! She finally had something major on Lianna. Chloe gave Norman Cook our address. Told him how Lianna had left Rob and married me. After he left, she started thinking it over, and I guess she got a little worried. She showed up at my office determined to tell me all about it.’
Shelby shook her head helplessly. ‘I don’t get it. None of you seemed to care that much about Molly’s real father. Why did Chloe have to die, just because she knew?’
Harris sighed. ‘Because by the time Chloe came to see me, Norman Cook was already dead. I had killed him.’
Shelby gasped. ‘You . . . Oh my God.’
‘What Chloe didn’t know – what Norman Cook didn’t tell her – was that he had escaped from prison a week earlier. He was doing life for killing a clerk and a customer at a convenience store. One of the people he killed was a medical student – some Indian kid with a wife and young baby – tragic. The police knew he had an accomplice, but he never gave up the name of his accomplice. The police thought it was another boy. Actually, it was a young woman. It was Lianna. Cook knew Lianna was pregnant with his child, so he took the fall, and kept quiet. At least, that’s how he saw it. He thought he was her knight in shining armor.
‘I’m sure she didn’t have anything to do with the killings. She’s much too gentle a creature. But, she was there. She did run.
‘Anyway, after Cook was arrested, Lianna married Rob. She told Norman it was just to have someone help her support the baby. He wasn’t happy about it, but he endured it. Then she stopped writing to him and he started getting angry. That’s no way to treat a knight in shining armor.
‘When he arrived in Philly, and Chloe told him that Lianna had married again, was pregnant again, he became incensed. He came to our house. I was the only one home at the time. I was completely stunned. He was raving. He told me that he was going to expose Lianna as his accomplice in that convenience store killing. He said it would almost make it worth it to go back to prison. Just to know that she would have to go to prison too. That she would have to suffer.
‘I tried to reason with him. I offered him anything he wanted. I offered to fix him up with a car and money and time to get away, but he wasn’t interested. He knew the cops were hot on his tail, and would catch up with him before long. The only thing he wanted in this world – the only desire he had left – was for revenge. He wanted Lianna to pay.
‘I knew he meant it. I couldn’t let that happen,’ Harris said.
‘You killed him?’ Shelby said.
‘He had a gun. I used it. I dumped the body in the Schuylkill,’ Harris said. Then he sighed. ‘Chloe was the only one who knew he had come to our house. Because she sent him. Of course she was itching to tell Rob about Molly’s real father, but she wanted to wait until the cruise was over. I’m listening to her tell me this, and thinking that I had to do something quickly.’
Shelby closed her eyes. ‘Oh God.’
Harris shook his head sadly. ‘I decided to arrange for Chloe’s accident to happen during the cruise. I was thinking of trying to hire someone, but I didn’t have the first idea of how to do that. And then, I was treating Bud Ridley and he was saying how he could never repay me. That’s when I thought of it. I told him that Chloe was blackmailing me. I asked him to accept the cruise tickets and take care of it for me. He knew he had no choice.’
‘He could have gone to the police,’ Shelby said bitterly.
The room was silent for a moment.
Then Harris said, ‘I knew he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t betray me. He was too honorable.’
‘Oh very honorable,’ Shelby groaned. ‘He killed an innocent girl whom he didn’t even know.’
‘I told him to meet her. To find an opportunity. Peggy helped with that – without meaning to, of course. She’s just one of those people who makes friends easily. Anyway, that night, after the Ridleys and that other couple helped Chloe back to the state room, he wedged something in the door so that it wouldn’t lock behind him. I just want you to know that I gave him a drug to sedate her. When he went back to the state room, she was out. Completely unconscious from the drug he put in her drink during bingo. Chloe wasn’t aware of anything that was going on. He threw her over the balcony. She never knew what happened. Never even cried out, according to Bud.’
Tears ran down Shelby’s cheeks. ‘Do you know what Bud’s suicide note said?’ she demanded.
Harris raised his eyebrows. ‘Do you?’
‘It said that he couldn’t live with himself,’ Shelby spat at him. ‘Because of what he’d done for you. How can you live with yourself?’
‘Honestly,’ he said grimly, ‘that remains to be seen. I know you don’t believe me, but I am so sorry about Chloe. And about Bud’s death. I used to be . . . good. A good man. I was an idealist.’
‘Chloe admired you,’ Shelby said.
‘Once you start down this road . . .’ he said, shaking his head. He peered at Shelby. ‘It’s almost a relief to be able to tell someone. How did you find out about me?’
‘I uncovered your connection to Bud Ridley,’ she said.
‘How?’
‘We know someone in common,’ she said. ‘I kept pushing it. And it was partly luck. If you can call it luck,’ she said.
‘I admire you for that, Shelby. For being so determined.’
Shelby was somewhat amazed at the quiet tone he was taking, but the air in the room was electric with danger. He had told her his secrets. Keeping her alive meant jeopardizing his own life. She knew she had to try to save herself. Despite her deep desire to make him suffer, she also tried to maintain the most reasonable of tones.
‘You know, there’s no reason,’ Shelby said, ‘to make this worse than it already is.’
Harris, who was sitting with his arms crossed over his chest, his head lowered, looked up at her skeptically.
‘Look,’ said Shelby. ‘Anybody could understand what happened with Norman Cook. That was probably self-defense.’
‘I never thought for a minute that I would kill him,’ Harris admitted. ‘It was his own gun. I didn’t even have a gun.’ He glanced over at the gun which was lying on a metal cart beside his stethoscope. ‘Now I have his gun, of course.’
‘But you understand what I’m saying,’ Shelby persisted, trying not to look at the deadly firearm on the rolling tray beside him. ‘You might not even have to go to prison for that. Anyone in your position might have done the same thing.’
‘And Chloe?’ he said.
Shelby was silent for a few moments, and then she replied in a voice that shook despite her best efforts. ‘I’ll admit I was desperate to know what happened to her. But nothing we say or do will ever bring her back.’
‘Sadly, no,’ said Harris.
‘As for Bud. He killed himself. Believe me, his family does not want to know the reason why,’ said Shelby.
‘You’re right about that,’ said Harris. ‘But it doesn’t change the facts.’
‘You can’t get away with this,’ Shelby cried. ‘People already know that I suspected you. That I was trying to trap you. At Markson’s. They know. My sister knows. I was supposed to meet a friend this afternoon. Pretty soon she is going to sound the alarm and they are going to come looking for me. If you let me go now I will not make it worse for you.’ Shelby was bluffing. Her lunch arrangement with Jen had been vague, and she had not told anyone but Talia whom she suspected. Talia never paid a bit of attention to what she said. But Harris didn’t know that.
Harris seemed to ponder her suggestion. Then he shook his head. ‘If you aren’t alive to tell them what happened to you, I might be able to finesse this. People respect me. I’m a doctor. That will count for something. If I go to prison I’ll lose everything. My life with Lianna. The baby . . .
‘You know, everyone thinks Lianna married me because I was a doctor, and because I was well off, but that’s not actually true. It was a love story, pure and simple. I never thought something like that would happen to me. But it did.
‘And now, we have a baby on the way. A son. That changes a person,’ he said. ‘I don’t even recognize myself. I’ve done things I never could have imagined. As you can tell, I would do anything to keep this life I have with them. Have you ever loved someone that much? Loved someone so much that you’ll kill in order to protect them?’
Shelby hesitated. ‘Only my daughter,’ she said.
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘That’s why I felt I had to tell you. You were pretty dogged about this whole thing. It seems only right that you should know the truth about what happened. But there’s no way you would just let it drop. No way you would let them go easy on me. After all, I am responsible for Chloe’s death.’
‘You have to believe me,’ she said, trying to keep her voice from shaking.
‘I’m afraid not. But I promise you,’ he said picking up a hypodermic needle from the metal tray table beside him, and holding that needle aloft, flicking the tip with one finger. ‘This will just be like going to sleep.’
THIRTY-THREE
A
lex Ortega looked down at the awkward-looking teenager who had answered the door. ‘Molly?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ said Molly frowning.
‘Is your mother at home?’
‘Yes. She’s at home,’ said Molly.
‘Can you get her for me?’
Molly nodded and disappeared. A minute later she was back. ‘She’ll be here in a minute.’
‘Molly, you might want to go out to the squad car out there. There’s somebody in that car who wants to see you.’
‘Who?’ asked Molly suspiciously.