Cross the Line, Page 3

  Bree and Muller went to McGrath’s widow. Muller said, “Got to be hard, Viv. Even after everything.”

  Bree forgot about Gordon and focused on Vivian as tears leaked from her eyes and she swallowed against emotion.

  “It’s true,” she choked out. “I’d already lost him. But this. It’s just…”

  Muller patted her shoulder awkwardly, said, “Viv, this is Detective Bree Stone. We’re part of a task force working on Tom’s case. Alex Cross is leading.”

  Vivian smiled weakly. “Nothing but the best for Tommy.”

  Then she put a well-manicured hand on Bree’s arm and said, “He talked of you often, Detective Stone. Please come inside. Can I offer you coffee?”

  “Please,” Bree said, and Muller nodded.

  She led them through rooms that could have been featured in Architectural Digest and ushered them into a kitchen with exposed-beam ceilings, cream-colored cabinets, and a maroon stove.

  Gleaming copper pots hung over a prep station. Every surface was spotless. Every knife and utensil looked in its place, so much so that it felt sterile to Bree. There were no pictures taped to the fridge, no stacks of mail on the counters, and no dishes in the sink.

  “Sit, sit,” Vivian said, gesturing to stools at a breakfast counter. “What do you want to know? How can I help?”

  “We understand you and Tom were getting divorced,” Bree said.

  “We’d separated, yes.” She sniffled. “What would you like? Espresso? A latte?”

  Bree said, “Espresso would be fine.”

  “Latte,” Muller said, and he touched his mustache.

  In one corner of the kitchen was an espresso maker that Bree figured would have set her back a month’s pay. Vivian pushed a button, and the machine steamed and hissed and spilled black coffee that smelled like heaven.

  When Vivian set the cup and saucer down in front of her, Bree said, “The separation.”

  McGrath’s widow hardened, crossed her arms, and said, “What about it?”

  “Tom’s idea?” Muller asked. “Or yours?”

  “Tom never told you?”

  “Assume we know nothing,” Bree said.

  “I suggested the separation, but it was because of Tom,” she said forlornly. “I’d always believed we could make it work. He was so unlike anyone who ran in my social circles, but we worked for seventeen years, and then, for reasons I’m still trying to figure out, we just didn’t anymore.”

  She broke down sobbing.

  Chapter

  7

  Bree took a breath, feeling more frustrated than sympathetic.

  When Vivian got control again, Bree said, “Can you be more specific about how it wasn’t working?”

  She wiped at her eyes with a tissue, glanced at Muller, and then said, “He stopped touching me, if you must know. And it felt like he had secrets. He kept a second phone. Spent money he didn’t have. I figured he had a mistress.”

  Bree didn’t comment on that.

  “Did Tommy have a mistress?” Muller asked.

  “I don’t know,” Vivian said. “I think so. You tell me. I never hired anyone to look, I mean. But I could see Tom was unhappy with me, so three months ago I asked him if he still loved me. He wouldn’t answer the question. I asked him if he wanted a separation, a divorce, and he said that was up to me.”

  “If you wanted to stay with him, why did you suggest the separation?” Bree asked.

  Vivian wiped at her eyes, pulled herself up straight, and gazed at Bree evenly. “I thought it might knock some sense into him, make him come back to me.”

  “I gather he didn’t,” Muller said.

  She looked humiliated. “No.”

  “Had you filed for divorce?” Bree asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I still loved him,” she said. “I hoped…”

  “Must have hurt,” Bree said.

  “It hurt, it demeaned, and it saddened me more than you can imagine, Detective Stone,” she said with a stricken expression.

  “And angered you?”

  Vivian looked right at Bree. “Of course.”

  “Enough to kill him?” Muller asked.

  “Never. We used to watch those television shows like Forty-Eight Hours and Dateline where there’s always one spouse killing another. We always said we couldn’t understand that; if the marriage wasn’t working, you left. Found a way to be friends or not and just moved on.”

  “How did your marriage work financially?” Bree asked.

  “There was a prenup, if that’s what you’re asking,” Vivian said. “The day we married, seventeen years ago, Tom knew he’d get nothing if we divorced.”

  “He angry about that?” Muller asked.

  Vivian snorted. “Quite the opposite. Tommy was fine with the agreement—proud of it, in fact. He said it proved he’d married me for…”

  Tears welled in her eyes again. She took a deep breath. “He liked the personal independence it represented, and the self-reliance.”

  “How did your lives mix?” Bree asked. “I mean, you’re out here, leading a country-club life, while Tom was in the city doing a dangerous job.”

  Vivian’s face went through a slow flurry of emotions—resistance, then consideration, and finally acceptance. Her shoulders slumped.

  “The more I think about it, Detective Stone, the more I see that Tom and I did live in separate worlds, right from the beginning. Here we had a safe, fairy-tale life, but out there in DC, on the streets—well, Tom liked to fight dragons. Being a cop made him feel alive, and all I could feel when I went into the city with him was fear.”

  Muller said, “He was killed with a younger woman.”

  “I heard that,” she said. “Who was she?”

  “Edita Kravic, early thirties, studying law at American University, damned attractive.”

  Vivian took the news that the woman her estranged husband had died with was in her early thirties and damned attractive like a one-two punch.

  “Was she his mistress?” she asked in a strained voice.

  “We don’t know,” Bree said. “He ever mention that name to you?”

  “Never.”

  “Just for the record, Mrs. McGrath,” Bree said, “where were you at seven twenty this morning?”

  Vivian looked at her incredulously. “You honestly think I could kill Tom?”

  “We have to ask, Viv,” Muller said. “It’s part of the job. You know the drill.”

  “I was probably taking a shower.”

  “Anyone see you?”

  “I should hope not. I’ve been living alone.”

  “Who was the first person you saw this morning?”

  “Catalina Monroe. My massage therapist. I had an eight o’clock.”

  “You have a way we can contact her?”

  McGrath’s widow rattled off a phone number, then said, “You know who you should be looking at?”

  “Tell us,” Bree said.

  “Terry Howard,” Vivian said with spite in her voice. “He threatened Tom on multiple occasions.”

  “Cross is working that angle,” Muller said.

  “Good. Good. I was afraid it might be…well, you know.”

  “Are you planning a memorial?” Bree asked.

  Vivian seemed more confused than ever; she looked down and whispered, “Is that something I’m supposed to do? I don’t know if Tommy would even want me to be involved.”

  Muller said, “I suppose you make that decision by first taking a moment to honor the good times you had with Tommy, figure out what they meant to you. If Tommy’s love during those years was enough, you do it, you see him buried. And if those years of love weren’t enough, you don’t.”

  “If you decide not to do anything, I’ll take care of the arrangements,” Bree said.

  McGrath’s widow looked around as if in a daze, her chin trembling, and then said, “No, Kurt’s right. Honoring our love and burying the husband Tommy was is the least I can do
.”

  The dam burst, and she wept. “It’s the only thing I can do for him now.”

  Chapter

  8

  Edita Kravic’s apartment in Columbia Heights looked like it had been decorated right out of the Sundance Catalog—high-end furniture, nicely framed prints on the wall—and given the place’s location, the rent had to be two, maybe three thousand a month.

  That was strange, I thought, because law students were usually starving. Edita evidently did quite well with the whole Level 2 Certified Coach thing.

  The kitchen was stocked with culinary gadgetry, and there were fine wines chilling in the fridge along with gourmet cheeses and spreads. Nice crystal in the cabinets, but no photographs anywhere in the living area, nothing that suggested Edita Kravic’s private life, nothing that could tell us more about her.

  The apartment had three bedrooms. The smallest one had been turned into an office. There was a business phone with several lines and an open laptop on the desk.

  “I’ll look here,” I said.

  “I’ll take the bedrooms,” Sampson said.

  Just as in the living area, there was nothing personal on the shelves or the walls. Just a basic desk, a backless chair, and two wooden filing cabinets. I tugged on the drawers of one and found them locked. The top drawer of the other slid open, revealing standard office supplies.

  The next drawer down was full of files. I looked through them, found out that she owned a late-model Audi A5 and that she vacationed in the Caymans—a lot, as in three times in the prior year. But there was nothing that gave me a clear idea of how she’d paid for it all.

  I was thinking she’d have to have an income of over a hundred grand to live like this. Did Level 2 Certified Coaches make that kind of money? If so, maybe I was in the wrong business.

  I thought about breaking the lock on the first cabinet but decided to take a look at the computer first. To my surprise, when I ran my finger across the touchpad, the screen lit right up and showed me the desktop. Several different applications were running.

  One was Edita’s law school e-mail account. I sat down and scanned through the e-mails, seeing nothing from Tom McGrath. Most of the messages were to and from professors and classmates. One classmate, JohnnyBoy5, had sent six e-mails to her in the eighteen hours preceding her murder.

  Really? read one sent around ten thirty the previous night. Standing me up again? This was your meet, remember?

  I did a search of her entire in-box, looking for all e-mails from JohnnyBoy5. There were more than a hundred, going back eighteen months. I rearranged them so they were in chronological order and read a tale of growing obsession.

  JohnnyBoy5 had evidently been smitten by Edita Kravic from the get-go, and he was not shy about saying so. Though she seemed to flirt with him at times, for the most part, she did nothing to encourage him.

  For the first year, she’d managed to keep JohnnyBoy5 at bay. But after that, his tone became irate, and then depressed.

  I don’t know what’s come over me, JohnnyBoy5 had written back in March. I’m terrified that I won’t see you again, Edita. I know it’s irrational, but there it is. I can’t shake this dark, dark feeling that I’m going to lose you somehow, that something bad is going to happen to you, that you’re never going to see the real me, and that you’ll never understand how much I truly care about you.

  Edita wrote back, This is no good, Johnny. Go away or I get a restraining order. A third-year told me how to do it.

  For three weeks after that, there was no contact between Ms. Kravic and JohnnyBoy5. Then he e-mailed her again.

  I know what you are, Edita, what you do out of class.

  No return e-mail. No follow-up for months. Three weeks before Edita was murdered, however, JohnnyBoy5 wrote her again.

  Who is he? The big meathead who threatened to break my face? Really? This is how things are between us? What if I just posted on Facebook about you and the life you don’t want anyone to know about? Will that do it?

  Two weeks passed.

  Sorry for the rants, JohnnyBoy5 wrote. God, I read back through some of it and that wasn’t me, Edita. The doctor put me on this asthma medicine called montelukast and I had a rare but bad side effect, which put me in a dark way. But I’ve returned to the living! Study group’s starting up again. Love to have you back, of course. No worries about anything else. Everyone’s got skeletons in the closet, am I right?

  Edita did not respond. Every day after that, leading up to the day before her death, JohnnyBoy5 wrote—chidingly, in worry, in despair, and in anger.

  In so many ways, meeting you was the ruin of my life, he’d written just two days before she died. Everything I built was reduced to rubble the moment I met you. Ruin deserves ruin, Edita. Ruin deserves ruin.

  Obsession has been a staple in the recipe book of murder since time immemorial. Sometimes obsession is a major ingredient. Other times, obsession is the oven that makes things too hot to handle.

  Some obsessives were taught to be that way through neglect or cruelty. Others developed hatred as the basis of their obsession. This was especially true of organized serial killers. They ritualized their killings, taking their rage out on surrogates for the people who’d spawned their hatred.

  But love can be the basis of obsession too, especially if one party or the other is spurned. You see that kind of gradual tick-tick-tick change in a person as he goes from being smitten to being crazy in love to—when he’s rejected—feeling sad, then worthless, then angry, then enraged, and then he grabs a gun because If I can’t have the object of my desire, no one will.

  Was that what had happened with JohnnyBoy5? Had he taken the romantic spiral toward homicide and killed Edita and Tommy McGrath, the big guy who’d threatened to break his face? Or was that someone else?

  Sampson walked in. “I got something you need to see.”

  “Me too,” I said, getting up. “She’s got a stalker.”

  “That fits,” he said. He turned and led me into her bedroom.

  Big four-poster bed. Matched linens. New dresser. Nice mirror. A walk-in closet with racks bulging with clothes and shelves holding dozens of beautiful shoes.

  There were built-in drawers at the far end of the closet.

  Sampson had pulled two of them open. The first was filled with fine lingerie. The second featured a wide selection of sex toys and lubricants.

  “So she had a kinky side,” I said. “So what?”

  He pushed shut the two drawers and opened the ones directly below. I took both in at a glance and said, “Oh, well, that changes things.”

  “Damn sure does,” Sampson said, looking into the right drawer, which was filled with hard-core S&M equipment.

  I was more interested in the drawer on the left, the deeper one, the one filled with stacks and stacks of banded fifty-dollar bills.

  Chapter

  9

  Sampson and I left Edita Kravic’s apartment shortly after seven that evening. We’d found the sex equipment and the cash, which we estimated at forty thousand dollars, but little to explain how a second-year law student had come to have that kind of money stuck away in a clothes drawer.

  When you see that much dough and the sex gear, your investigative instincts tend to drift toward hooking or drugs or smuggling or organized crime. But we’d found no direct evidence of anything illegal, not even in the locked file cabinet, which we’d opened after we’d located the key.

  The cabinet had more of Edita Kravic’s personal files, one of which revealed that she was from Slovakia and had a green card. Another file showed an account with Bank of America with a balance of fifteen hundred dollars. She owed less than that on her Visa and American Express cards. I found her lease. I’d predicted the rent would be two or three grand a month; it was actually four thousand. But she wasn’t writing checks for the rent, or not any that I could see.

  “She paid cash for everything,” I said when we got back to the car.

  “Bought high-end stuff wit
h it,” Sampson said. “Classic way to evade taxes.”

  “Still doesn’t explain where the money came from,” I said. “There were no files from the Phoenix Club, no record of payments.”

  “Maybe the club’s evading taxes too,” Sampson said, starting the squad car. “Where to?”

  “Swing by Terry Howard’s place before heading back to the office.”

  “Make the chief rest easier?”

  “Exactly.”

  We drove to a shabby, four-story apartment building off New York Avenue in Northeast.

  “This the right one?” I asked.

  “Google Maps don’t lie,” Sampson said.

  The seedy neighborhood sobered me, made me realize just how far and how hard Tommy McGrath’s onetime partner had fallen since his days with the Major Case Unit. Terry Howard had had a formidable reputation for playing the tough guy. He had never been above intimidating a source to get what he wanted. In fact, he’d been accused of it multiple times, and because of that, and because Tommy had ultimately turned on Howard, we were here.

  But the former detective who opened the door of his one-bedroom apartment didn’t look like a tough guy; he looked like a tired man pushing seventy rather than fifty-five. He wore a faded Washington Redskins ball cap, a plain black T-shirt, and jeans that sagged off him. The big frame I remembered was still there, but he’d gone soft and lost weight. His eyes were rheumy. He smelled of vodka.

  “Figured I’d see you two before too long,” Howard said.

  “Can we come in, Terry? Ask a few questions?”

  “Not tonight, I got lots of jack shit to take care of. Sorry.”

  I said, “You know we have to talk to you, and you know why. Now, we can continue standing here in your doorway where everyone on the floor will know your business, or we can come in, or we can take you down to the station. Any way you want to do this is fine by us.”

  Howard’s bleary eyes got hard and beady. “In here.”

  He stood aside. We walked into his sad little world. The apartment reeked of cigarette smoke. The muted television was tuned to a cable station rerunning classic baseball games. Beer cans and three empty bottles of Smirnoff vodka crowded the coffee table. The parakeet in the cage between the easy chair and the couch looked like a miniature plucked chicken. It had no feathers except for a crown of baby blue and orange.