Fear the Darkness: A Thriller Page 26

  “Was this Annette there?”

  “No, Mallory gave her some time off.”

  “What did you have?”

  “Quiche.”

  “What kind?”

  I thought I detected a more culinary curiosity. “Artichokes, mushrooms … Swiss cheese.”

  “Who made it?”

  “Annette did. Wine. More of that blue cheese and garlic like at the restaurant. We all had the wine, and quiche, and the cheese. Mallory didn’t have any dessert, but Carlo did. Something called spotted dick with lemon curd.”

  “You’re shitting me.”

  “Seriously. It wasn’t bad.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “On the way home I’m so off-kilter I maybe start to hallucinate about red snakes in the road, although I could swear right now there was at least one. That’s when I ran into a cactus and the cop thought I was drunk. We went to the hospital in an ambulance, and they x-rayed both of us for anything broken besides Carlo’s nose and treated the abrasions on our faces. If they’d found elevated levels of blood alcohol I would have been arrested.”

  “Then you came home, and we both know what happened then. You went off on me like a meth addict.”

  “I did not go off on you like a meth addict. And if I did I had good cause.”

  Gemma-Kate didn’t argue with me. She was too busy filling out her flow chart of the days since I started to get sick. “That brings us to today. Still sick?”

  “No. Yes. I’m so befuddled I can’t tell anymore how I’m feeling.”

  Gemma-Kate stretched her neck muscles as if she had been a little tense herself. “I’m going to have some lunch. Do you want anything?”

  “I’ll get something for myself.”

  She wandered off studying the flow chart. When I followed her into the kitchen she was microwaving a can of chicken soup she had dumped into a bowl. While it heated she scribbled on her pages. She looked at the chart and began circling certain areas and frowned at them. I thought I heard her murmur “cheese” but couldn’t be sure. The microwave timer went off, and she got the bowl out, arranged it with a spoon, napkin, and her papers at the sit-down counter, and studied her notes while she slurped the noodles.

  She had pulled me in despite myself and I couldn’t help my curiosity. “What do you think?” I asked, getting my own can of lentil soup that couldn’t possibly have been doctored, but pretended not to care about her answer as I popped the metal lid off the can, and dumped it in a bowl. I didn’t bother to heat it.

  Gemma-Kate sat back in her chair, apparently satisfied that she had finished the soup and found a plausible theory at the same time.

  “Here are the facts I have so far,” she said to my back. “A doctor didn’t find a clinical cause for the way you were immediately feeling. He fell back on a diagnosis of depression like a lot of doctors do, especially with women. If you have been poisoned it seems to be with an overdose of that same antidepressant, one which has a cumulative effect, and that you can’t detect immediately after dosing.”

  “So far you’re not giving me anything new.”

  “I’m reviewing for my own sake. An interesting sidelight is that the drug is one that other people can take a single small dose of now and then without it affecting them. You’re the only one who would react because you’d already ingested so much. Also, I tasted one of your pills and it’s flavorless so it could be ground up and even, say, brushed onto the powdered sugar of the doughnut at church. Either someone is doing a very poor job of poisoning you, or they don’t want you dead. Maybe they want to incapacitate you without killing you, someone who fears that it would be too easy to trace back to them. If you knew why they wanted to weaken you, it might lead you to them.”

  I got a tablespoon out of the drawer and started in on the cold lentils. “Still no surprises,” I said.

  Gemma-Kate did not seem cowed by my remarks. She tapped the pages in front of her with her spoon, not realizing there was still a little chicken soup on it. “If you can trust Carlo, there are two other people who were in contact with you more often than any others, which means often enough to deliver doses of the substance.

  “I’d say at this point it’s either me or your BFF, and I know it’s not me.”

  Forty–nine

  Gemma-Kate stared at me as if there was dramatic organ music playing. But there was only the silence of my utter amazement.

  “That’s what all this has been leading up to? All this paper and charts and shit? You’re trying to pin this on Mallory Hollinger?” I didn’t know whether to laugh or smack the kid.

  “Why not?” she said.

  “Because Mallory is the only person in the world I could trust not to poison me. Okay, Carlo, too. I wouldn’t even put it past my own mother if she thought she had a good reason.”

  “What if you found out a good reason?”

  “Exactly. The question is, why believe you? I’m going back to the assumption you’ve poisoned a dog, me, and were at least an accessory to Frank Ganim’s death. What are we, home science experiments?”

  “That would be really stupid, wouldn’t it? Just like looking up poisons on your computer. Also buying toxicology books with your credit card and leaving them lying about. Likewise stupid. Do you think I’m that stupid?”

  “No. Maybe you just underestimate the rest of us. I saw bufotenine in the history. You knew that toad was poison.”

  “PS, any digital investigation would show I accessed that page after you took the Pug to the vet, not before. Think differently. Maybe the dog isn’t connected to you and Frank Ganim. Think about that.”

  “Maybe Ganim and I aren’t connected.”

  “Go back to Mallory, just give me that, for God’s sake.”

  We were firing ideas back and forth pretty good now. It would have been exhilarating if my life wasn’t at stake. “Okay. Maybe you’ve figured out a means and the opportunity. What could the motive possibly be for Mallory Hollinger to poison me?”

  “Not poison you, but give you something to weaken you enough so you’d give up. The question really is, give up what?”

  “You’re trying to get me to say asking questions about Joe Neilsen, because that’s the only variable in my life other than you. And that’s absurd.”

  “Is it? No disrespect, Aunt Brigid, but have you been in any condition to judge absurdity? If you weren’t so strung out from the overdose of drugs you’d probably see it yourself.”

  I shook my head, partly to reject what Gemma-Kate was saying but also to clear some remaining fuzz from my brain. “But that still doesn’t give us a motive. What would she want to keep me from discovering?”

  “Maybe if you stopped investigating Joe Neilsen and started investigating Mallory Hollinger, you’d find out.”

  Not so long ago I had accused Carlo of a lack of imagination when it came to suspecting Gemma-Kate. Now I paused a moment to consider whether she was right, and I was doing that locking-out thing that investigators do sometimes. I thought.

  Apparently I wasn’t thinking fast enough for Gemma-Kate. In a rare show of emotion, this one impatience, she grabbed me by the hand and pulled me over to the microwave over the stove. She set the timer. “There,” she said. “I’ll make a bet with you. You take thirty minutes to do a quick background check on Mallory Hollinger. If you don’t find anything that you don’t already know in that amount of time, I’ll go back to Fort Lauderdale.”

  “It’s just—”

  “Otherwise you’ll never get rid of me. Unless they get me for murdering that man. Then you’ll have to come visit me in prison.” She glanced at the time. “Twenty-nine minutes forty-eight seconds.”

  I thought I knew what there was to know about Mallory, and even more. But what secrets had Mallory and I really shared? We had both kept the truth to ourselves. I thought I was so circumspect, not talking much about my own past and the role I’d had with the Bureau, while having no idea how much she wasn’t talking about hers. When did she find out
about me exactly? Was it when she had been in the house by herself when she brought over the Pugs and the chicken tikka? She had plenty of time to look through my office files, see the awards on the wall, even find my weapon in the nightstand.

  The dilemma was, I wanted to prove Mallory was innocent. But for Marylin’s sake, for the sake of the screwed-up family I loved, I also wanted Gemma-Kate to be innocent. And I couldn’t have both.

  Gemma-Kate interrupted my thoughts. “Twenty-eight minutes nineteen seconds. But even with that I think you’re good enough. Do we have a bet?”

  “No. I’m not playing your game.”

  Gemma-Kate glanced at the timer. “Remember when you said I brought you the cup of coffee at church the other day?”

  I sighed, tiring of her pressure. “Yes, I remember.”

  “I didn’t pour that coffee. Mallory handed it to me. There was already cream in it. I thought that was strange because I know you like it black, and I told her. She said, ‘I know, but if it’s coffee she’ll drink it.’ That’s why I remember so clearly, because she said that with a kind of I’m-her-friend-you’re-not attitude and I wanted to smack the smirk off her face. And she gave me the doughnut, too, with the powdered sugar on it.”

  “But if there was antifreeze in the coffee, why would she drink it?”

  “Are you sure she drank any?”

  I put the bowl of lentil soup on the counter, appetite gone. Noting twenty-seven minutes four seconds on the timer, I went into my office and got on the computer. Starting with the latest event that had been corroborated, I pulled up past issues of the Arizona Daily Star and found the article about the Hollingers’ car totaled in a train wreck. Nice that you can now do this on a computer rather than going to the library and fiddling with microfiche. At least the train wreck story was factual. There was even a photo of her looking stricken, and without lipstick. Her blouse was torn, and the blood on the sleeve was likely hers. A cut down the side of her face reminded me of the thin scar she still carried. And the car. Made you wonder how Owen got out of that thing with even the life that had been given him. Score one for Mallory. Maybe.

  The Internet had made background checks much easier than they used to be, and Mallory hadn’t tried to cover her trail. Covering your trail means there’s a trail that needs to be covered. It was shrewder this way. Unless you suspected she was poisoning you to prevent your investigating someone’s increasingly suspicious death, her past would have appeared to be sad, somewhat fraught with fortune both good and ill, but not incriminating. What was suspicious was that, in all the talking we did, she never really told me about that past.

  I called a contact in D.C. to get her Social Security number. Yes, my dears, there really is a Big Brother, and I am him. Getting the Social Security number took some doing because it turned out Mallory had lied to me about her date of birth. I had to get a list of Mallory Hollingers and match her up to the most likely birth date. One I found would have made her eighty-three, while another only forty. The one that was the closest was still suspicious, not because she lied about her age, something a woman like Mallory would likely do, but because she lied in the wrong direction. She always said we were the same age and shared the same birth month, July. Leo. But turned out she was four years younger than me. And a Pisces. Why would she do that?

  Lock in.

  As I mulled, I realized Gemma-Kate was standing at my side. “Time’s up,” she said. “You’ve been at this for nearly an hour. You found something, didn’t you?”

  “Go away,” I said.

  She did.

  The rest was just remembering what Mallory had told me and finding out if it was true.

  In the early days of our friendship she had too casually let drop facts about herself in a way that she might not have if she knew who I really was, that I was a criminal justice professional.

  I had art galleries in Boca Raton, New York, and Shaker Heights.

  I checked that now. Nothing. And I mean nothing. No Mallory Hollinger with any tax identification number for the galleries she said she’d owned. Nor any other business listed with her as the owner. If she lied about that, what else did she lie about?

  The marriage license between her and Owen Hollinger listed the date of their union as six years ago. That was what she had told me. The two of them must have had a whirlwind life for all those travel photos to be taken in such a short time, a little over five years before his “accident.” When they had traveled, was it on his dime?

  Not all, as it turned out. She had money, and she got it from a former marriage. Her name on the marriage license was Pope. But that wasn’t her maiden name. She had been married once before to Geoffrey Pope, in Cleveland, Ohio.

  Frank Ganim’s pacemaker had placed him in Cleveland, Ohio. Granted, it’s a big city, but the coincidence was too enticing.

  Google Earth showed the last known address for Geoffrey Pope, and a fine mansion it was. Made his money off some patent in the seventies. And what had happened to dissolve the marriage between herself and Geoffrey Pope? Death.

  More money, less Pope. She was so convinced she was smarter than anyone, she could indulge in private jokes like that. Lock on.

  The information kept building. Cause of death: pneumonia. Obituary: Deceased is survived by nurse and loving wife of three years, Mallory, and one child by a previous marriage, Geoffrey Pope II.

  Long marriage? Not hardly. The obituary said nurse and loving wife of three years, the subtext oozing from the words, which must have been composed by someone other than herself, probably the son; otherwise the duration of the marriage wouldn’t have been mentioned, nor the fact that she had been his nurse. When she married him she would have been, what, forty-six? Something like that. Just past middle age and not wanting to spend the rest of her life changing catheters.

  Nurse. Then I found out she hadn’t been schooled abroad, and the precise enunciation and phrases that she used sometimes, that sounded vaguely British, were faked. She’d gotten her degree at Oklahoma State.

  One more document I found online: a lawsuit brought against Mallory Pope by Geoffrey Pope II, contesting the last will and testament of Geoffrey Pope.

  Phone numbers are easy to find. I called Mr. Geoffrey Pope II at Pope Engineering. When I told the receptionist I was looking for information on Mallory Pope he came on the line immediately.

  “Who is this?” he asked without introducing himself.

  “Is this Geoffrey Pope?”

  “Yes it is. Who are you?”

  “My name is Brigid Quinn. I’m a private investigator.”

  “What has she done?”

  I said, “I’m the investigator. You tell me.”

  He barely chuckled but stopped, because this was after all about his father. “Please, after you.”

  I said, “Okay, I don’t mean to be vague, because the fact is I don’t know much. I only suspect that there is a second husband who is in danger. Plus I’m not feeling so good myself, so I’d appreciate it if you just laid it out for me.”

  I could hear his deep breath over the phone. “My father had Lou Gehrig’s disease. Mallory was his nurse. She got him to marry her. I always supposed she figured he’d just die naturally within a short enough time. But I don’t think he was going fast enough for her taste. He hung on for three years. I always thought she did something with pool chemicals to bring on the pneumonia, but I couldn’t prove it. I contested the will, though. She ended up settling for half the estate, which was still considerable. She probably knew I wouldn’t be able to prove anything but opted for the safest route. Is that enough information to hang the bitch?”

  If I hadn’t already been looking for the dark side I might not have trusted this man. But he could provide some facts that would tell me the extent of her lies. “Did she ever own an art gallery?”

  “Not that I know of. As far as I know she was always a nurse. What did you say your name was?”

  “Brigid Quinn.”

  “Well, whatever yo
u are, and whatever you’re doing, I hope you get her, Ms. Quinn. Because now you know.”

  “One thing I still don’t know. You ever hear of a guy named Frank Ganim? Balding with a ponytail?”

  “Nope, can’t help you there.”

  I thanked him, hung up the phone, and thought about what I had shared with this woman I knew as Mallory Hollinger. Feelings of betrayal, rage, were still mixing with a steady infusion of nah, couldn’t be. Everything I had told her. About Gemma-Kate, about my most personal fears. About Carlo’s and my sex life, for Christ’s sake. And what had she told me? About her fears for what might happen to Owen if she died.

  Please tell me you’ll look after Owen if anything happens to me.

  About her dreams and wishes and everything she had done in her life, and that meant everything. She had certainly shared, but was any of that true, was there anything about her that was real? I thought of the photographs I’d seen, Mallory on exotic trips and Mallory and Owen in tango poses. How fucking heartbreaking.

  I flirt with everyone, just to stay in practice.

  I could picture how it might have been with Joe, gay or straight, how she flattered him into trusting her. He was used to getting that attention from his mother, so it felt right with Mallory. Have a beer, Joe. Ever done a tequila shot? I’ll show you how, only promise me you won’t tell your parents. Oh, your parents already let you have it. It made me remember the first time I had seen Carlo talking to Mallory in the parish hall at St. Martin’s. How I thought she could have any man in the room. Even Joey.

  We’re either the eagle or we’re nothing.

  She even got me. I, who had lived undercover among the criminal element most of my life; who thought I was so smart no one would ever be able to scam Me. I was royally pissed because she’d used my pride and my need, and played me for a sucker. A gun or a knife I might have been prepared for. But not a friend.

  You had to admire her. I’ve always bragged about how cops are so naturally suspicious. I’ve said I did a background check on Carlo, if not the first time we had sex then certainly before we married. But you don’t do a background check on someone you go out to lunch with. That’s where a healthy cynicism crosses the line into paranoia. So I had had lunch with Mallory Hollinger once or twice, and then we got to be as close as two unrelated people can be, and there was no reason that I could ever see for investigating who my friend was.