Point Of Departure

“I didn’t lie. I just didn’t tell Abrams everything. It shouldn’t matter anyway. My fight with Kaye is not relevant to any of this.”

“How the hell do you know that?”

“Because! Because I just know!”

“Oh, so now you have a crystal ball? Tell me, oh great one, what are my odds of winning the lottery next week? Probably one hell of a lot better after you look into your crystal ball and give me the numbers ahead of time.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Listen to me, shit-for-brains. I hate to tell you this, but relevant or not, that divorce petition is a matter of public record. It’ll take the cops about ninety seconds to unearth it. When they do, you can be sure they’ll come knocking at your door again. If you’re on their short list—which we don’t know for sure yet—right now all they have is suspicion. Once they get their hands on that—” she indicated the legal papers “—then they’ll have motive. In my experience, cops are quite fond of motive.”

“You know damn well I didn’t do anything to Kaye.”

“Well, the cops don’t know it, and they’re the ones that matter. It’s time to come clean with them, Sam, before this gets any worse than it already is.” She eyed him speculatively. “Unless there’s some reason you don’t want her to be found.”

“Jesus, Mia, I can’t believe you’d say that.”

“Why not? Your wife just filed divorce papers. Maybe she’s leaving you for another man. Maybe your ego can’t take it. Maybe she’s threatening to take you to the cleaners. Leave you with nothing but a toothbrush and a pup tent. Take away your daughter. Lie to the courts and tell them you’re an abusive husband, a lousy father. So maybe you decide there’s only one way to shut her up, and that’s to get rid of her—”

“Stop it!” he shouted. “Just stop it!”

“What do you expect, Sam? That’s exactly what the cops will be thinking once they find out about the divorce petition. You have to tell them before they stumble across it.”

“You don’t know, do you?” he said. “You really don’t know.”

There was more? Awash with dismay, Mia clasped her hands in front of her and stared at him, not sure she wanted to hear it. She hadn’t slept worth beans last night. She’d skipped breakfast, she was exhausted, and it wasn’t yet ten-thirty. She still had a lot of day to get through. “What?” she said wearily. “What is it I’m supposed to know now?”

“If the cops start digging, they’ll find ample motive. Kaye’s been cheating on me.”

“What?”

Her brother’s eyes softened. “You really didn’t know, did you?”

“Come on, Sam. You must be wrong.”

“She admitted it, Mia. I confronted her, and she admitted it to my face.”

“Oh, Sam,” Mia said. “I’m so sorry.”

He tucked his hands into his pockets, walked to the window and stared out at the back of the brick apartment building across the alley. “Yeah, well, it’s not the first time.”

“She’s done it before?”

He turned away from the window, his eyes as bleak as a January afternoon. “The first time—or at least the first time I know about—was last winter. I found out about it in March, but by the time I discovered it, the affair’d been going on for months. His name was Mickey Slattery. She met him at work. He was a client.”

Her brother paused, as if waiting for a response from Mia. What the hell did he expect her to say? “I don’t know him,” she said, resenting the defensiveness she heard in her own voice, “if that’s what you’re asking.” She had nothing to feel defensive about. It wasn’t her fault his wife hadn’t been able to keep her knickers on.

“We had one hell of a go-round over it. I yelled a lot and threw a few of her precious knickknacks. She cried and swore to me that she was sorry, promised she’d clean up her act and kick Slattery to the curb. Promised it wouldn’t happen again. Being the sucker that I am, I believed her.”

“But…?”

“A week ago, I found condoms in her purse. And before you ask, no, I wasn’t snooping. She’d borrowed my car that day because hers was in the shop. I needed to run to the store to pick up milk. She was busy doing paperwork in her office, and she told me the keys were in her purse. I went to get them. I wasn’t expecting to pull out a fistful of Trojans along with the keys.”

Mia didn’t know what to say. Because she didn’t, she said nothing. The Kaye Winslow she knew was not the kind of woman to allow herself to be derailed by stupid slipups, not the kind of woman to be blindsided by unfortunate, avoidable little accidents. She conducted her life with deliberation and forethought, leaving nothing to chance. She would never have forgotten those condoms were in her purse. Which led to an obvious conclusion, one Mia hated to even consider because it seemed so cruel: Kaye had wanted her husband to find the evidence of her infidelity.

This wasn’t a burden Mia’d expected to have dropped in her lap. She didn’t want to become entangled in her brother’s marital difficulties, didn’t want to find out that her sister-in-law wasn’t the woman she’d thought her to be. But Sam had been carrying this burden alone, and he needed to share it with somebody. It was only natural that he’d turn to her. Even though he was three years older, Mia had been taking care of him for most of their lives. She’d been the one who protected him from their father when he became drunk and violent. She’d been the one who stepped into the breach when Rachel died, leaving Sam alone with a seven-year-old daughter. And now, like it or not, she would be the one to see him through this.

“How much sleep did you get last night?” she said.

“An hour. Two at the most.”

“Go home, Sam. Get something to eat, take a sleeping pill if you have to, and get some rest. I’ll call you later. Okay?”

He stood in front of her, shoulders quivering, a pathetic wreck of a man. Nodding, he said, “Fine.” He scooped up the divorce papers and, without another word, strode from her office, leaving her sitting there with her mouth hanging open. The bell over the front door jangled when he opened it, sounding slightly less melodic and slightly more affronted when he slammed the door behind him.

“Damn it,” she said. “Damn it all to hell.” And for lack of any other solution to her frustration, she picked up a fat black marker from her desk and hurled it at the wall.

Six

Back Bay Community College was located in a butt-ugly post–World War II cinder block building that had probably started out life as a warehouse. Tucked away on a narrow side street just off Kenmore Square, its campus sat within spitting distance of Fenway and the bars and clubs that lined Lansdowne Street. Lorna hadn’t thought it was possible to find a building less aesthetically pleasing than Boston City Hall, but she might have been wrong about that.

They stood on the sidewalk for a moment, breathing in the school’s ambience. Policzki cleared his throat and said, “It has a solid, no-nonsense, academic look to it.”

She glanced over at him, but his eyes, hidden behind dark lenses, gave away nothing. “Looks like a junior high school,” she said. “Or a penitentiary.”

“Which, if memory serves me, is pretty much the same thing.”

They went inside. The interior wasn’t much of an improvement over the exterior. The lobby sported cracked green-and-white floor tiles. Somebody had made an attempt to brighten up the place by painting the walls a pale yellow. It was a dismal failure. Instead of sunny and cheerful, the walls looked sallow and jaundiced, like somebody in the advanced stages of liver disease. It wasn’t a look that BBCC wore well.

Lorna walked up to the reception desk and asked a corpulent woman in a fuchsia dress and a black telephone headset where she could find Sam Winslow. “Down the hall on the left, Arts and Sciences Department,” the woman said, and segued back into her telephone conversation without missing a beat. The two detectives followed her directions, passing a room full of vending machines, a couple of empty classrooms, then a bulletin board laden with notices: a reminder about the annual flu shot clinic; an announcement of a poetry reading taking place on Sunday afternoon at a nearby café; a photo of a 1999 Toyota Celica. Runs great, low mileage. $1500 or B.O. Call 555-3372.

The Arts and Sciences office was marginally more welcoming than the lobby had been. The secretary’s desk was sleek and modern. The overhead fluorescents had been left off in favor of the gentler, more muted glow of floor lamps, and the carpet, while an ugly dirt-resistant brown, appeared to be relatively new. A slender young woman with a magnificent head of red curls sat behind a flat-screen Gateway computer. She glanced up, gave them both the once-over. Lorna could see it in her eyes, the instant she recognized them as cops. It didn’t seem to faze her too much. Red’s gaze returned to Policzki. In spite of his aloof manner—or perhaps because of it—women always took a second look at Doug Policzki. Being a pretty boy was sometimes useful.

“Can I help you?” she said to him, pretending Lorna didn’t exist.

“Detective Policzki.” Doug held up his badge. “This is Detective Abrams, and we’re looking for Professor Winslow.”

“Sam? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“No, ma’am,” Policzki said in that earnest, by-the-book manner that women seemed to find irresistible. “We just want to ask him a few questions. If you could point us in his direction, we’d greatly appreciate it.”

“I’d love to,” she said, “but I’m afraid you won’t find him. He came in earlier and worked in his office for a while, then he left. He isn’t scheduled to teach today, so I don’t have any idea where he went or when he’ll be back.”

Neither of them bothered to tell Red that they already knew they wouldn’t find the good professor on the premises. She might have turned really frosty if she’d known they’d seen him leave a half hour ago, then sat in a parking space halfway down the block and waited until they were pretty sure he wasn’t coming back.

“In that case,” Lorna said, “we’d like to speak to his supervisor.”

Red looked a little surprised by this rude reminder that there were three people in the room instead of two. Tearing her gaze away from Policzki, with his lantern jaw and his pure heart, she said, “That would be Lydia Forbes. Dean Lydia Forbes.”