Cover-up (34 page)

“Hey!”

The eagerness in Dan’s voice made Melanie wish desperately that last night had never happened. If only she could trust him without reservations, love him without doubts, like she had yesterday. She couldn’t bear to think those feelings were gone.

“Hey,” she replied, feeling battered, her voice flat.

“I’m so glad you called. I was getting worried that you’d never talk to me again.” He laughed nervously.

“I’m calling about the case. I need you to do something.”

“Oh.” She could hear his voice tighten up.

“Here’s what I need.”

“Melanie,” he broke out, “can’t we make this up? All that happened was Diane calling to tell me her father died.”

“That’s hardly the only thing that happened! Either you’re being deliberately obtuse or you really don’t get it, and I’m not sure which is worse.”

“Enough with the below-the-belt comments there,” he said.

“I’m not upset because Diane called to say her father died. You were seeing her without telling me! Maybe you’ve forgotten. My father abandoned me when he left my mother for another woman. My husband cheated on me when I was pregnant. Do you have any idea what alarm bells your behavior sets off, with my history? So take the consequences. Tell me the whole truth. Apologize. Tell me how you’re going to fix this. Don’t act like
I’m
the one hurting
you
.”

“You
are
hurting me. I know all about your husband cheating, okay? I know about your father, too. I was there in Puerto Rico when you went to see him. I saw your face when you came out of that house. We’ve both had our heartaches, but that’s got jack to do with you and me. I’ve treated you right, yet I get no credit. You’re suspicious over nothing.”

“Seeing your ex-wife behind my back is not nothing,” she said.

“Behind your back? That’s bullshit, Melanie. It’s two days since I
first saw Diane. Days where you and I were crazy busy and never alone for a second. I didn’t have a chance to tell you.”

“You were too busy to tell me you were seeing your ex-wife?” Melanie asked incredulously. “That’s baloney.”

“If you think I’d go back to Diane after how she treated me, you don’t know the first thing about me,” he insisted.

Of course, deep down, that was what Melanie feared most. She knew his past had great power over him. But she wouldn’t let herself utter that terrible thought aloud.

“We can’t talk about this now,” she said instead. “There’s too much going on, and this conversation is making me too upset.”

But he wouldn’t let go. “You think I’ve been calling up Diane crying in my beer over old times? Is that what you think?”

“We should just let this drop, Dan,” she said.

“I barely even talked to her. The dinner lasted thirty minutes tops, and it was all about her old man. Seriously. I had a burger and she had a tuna-fish sandwich. Melanie, please, there’s no reason to flip out.”

“If this is such a nothing thing, why is her number in your phone? How many times did you talk to her?”

“Not a lot.”

“How many?”

“What am I, Mark Fuhrman on the stand with the bloody glove now? I don’t like being cross-examined. Either you trust me or you don’t.”

“How can I possibly trust you after what happened? And when you won’t answer a direct question? Do you think I’m a fool? When you put somebody’s number in your phone, it means you talk to them a lot. Everybody knows that, and now you just proved it to me.”

“I got a ton of stuff in my phone. Some snitch who called me three weeks ago with a bogus tip. The pizza place on the corner. Diane’s number’s in there, too, but it doesn’t
mean
anything. There is nothing going on between us. End of story.”

“This is a woman you’ve been in love with since childhood who broke your heart. I’m supposed to believe she’s the equivalent of a pizza place?”

“You’ve been in this job too long. You’ve lost the ability to trust. That makes me sad.”

“It’s what you did that’s sad. Even with my history, I managed to put my faith in you. And what did you do? You withheld information from me that you had every reason to believe I would want to know. I don’t trust you anymore, and I don’t know if I ever will, and it’s your own fault.”

Dan fell silent. Melanie’s heart was pounding after her speech. She wanted to hang up on him. She wished she weren’t in the middle of an investigation. She would go somewhere dark and quiet and cry really hard, then go to sleep for a long, long time.

“I got to confess, I’m surprised,” Dan was saying. “I’m surprised this made such a big impact. It was really nothing. But I’m starting to see how upset you are over it. I’m finally getting that through my thick skull.”

She said nothing.

“What do you want me to do?” Dan asked. “I have to see her, at least for a while, around this funeral stuff. Do you want me to tell you when I see Diane, like you do when you see your husband?”

“He’s my ex-husband.”

“Your ex?”

“That would be nice,” she said bitterly.
It would have nice to begin with!

“I’m not used to having somebody looking over my shoulder. But maybe I could, if that would make you feel better.”

She didn’t answer. They fell silent. Melanie closed her eyes and felt them stinging. She knew if she backed down now, and told him she was sorry for making such a fuss, and said please, please, indulge my insecurity, they could patch things up. That’s what Dan wanted, but
she couldn’t give it to him. Not now. Not without more of an apology. She was like a crab that had been poked with a stick—closed up tight within her shell, unable to open herself to him. If she held back, she risked pushing him into his ex-wife’s arms. So be it. If Dan went back to Diane, then it was meant to be.

“As I stand here, I’m not sure what would make me feel better, but certainly not the half-assed response I’m getting from you,” Melanie said in a dead tone.

“Ah, crap, I don’t know then,” Dan said.

Melanie heard silence on her phone. She looked at the screen. It said
CALL ENDED
. He’d hung up. She felt like hurling the phone against the wall. Instead, she remembered her responsibilities—to her job, to her life—and forced herself to hit redial. Listening to the rings, she felt strange, like time had stopped, like she was watching herself from a distance.

“What?” Dan snapped.

Melanie took a deep breath and focused on the here and now. “I need you to arrange a DNA test for Benedict Welch.”

45

B
enedict Welch’s apartment was situated
in a premier Fifth Avenue building and boasted treetop views of Central Park from every window. The living room was brimming with sofas and wing chairs and ottomans and benches, all pricey-looking, all done in shades of white that contrasted dramatically with the enormous black grand piano. The overall effect was beautiful and luxurious, if cold. It certainly didn’t look like the lair of a psychotic killer, but Melanie told herself not to be taken in by appearances. People were so twisted these days. Once the rich and the powerful were done amassing their material wealth, they sometimes found themselves bored, with time on their hands, looking for the next thrill. If Welch had turned to darker pastimes to keep himself amused, would that really be so shocking? She’d seen it before.

By the time Melanie reached the apartment, the agents were nearly done searching, and Welch’s wife, Gloria, was splayed out on a Biedermeier settee staring into the far distance with the eyes of a woman on heavy meds. She didn’t fit the stereotype of a killer’s wife, if there was such a thing, and yet she wasn’t wrong for the part, ei
ther. She wore a bloodred dinner suit that made a gash against the white upholstery and petted a tiny Chihuahua as serenely as if she’d be heading out any minute to her regular table at Le Bernardin. Melanie envied Mrs. Welch her pharmaceutical calm. She could’ve used a sedative herself right then, but unfortunately she needed full command of her faculties to make sense of what Agents Waterman and Mills had discovered in the apartment. They’d struck pay dirt in the form of Suzanne Shepard’s investigative file—the one Miles Ortiz had lifted from Suzanne’s apartment at Welch’s behest. Welch had kept it. Melanie was so anxious to get her hands on the contents that she couldn’t wait for the agents to make copies. She snapped on rubber gloves, sat down at a lacquered table beneath a curving Art Nouveau chandelier, and dug in, determined to find some connection to the man of the house, whom she had locked up in the MCC.

The manila folder was marked with Benedict Welch’s name in Suzanne Shepard’s handwriting. Melanie opened it with a racing heart. Inside, she found copies of the newspaper articles Miles had described in his proffer session.

Thirteen years earlier, in Los Angeles, a man named Edward Allen Harvey had been convicted of the murder of a woman named Cheryl Driscoll and sentenced to fifteen to life. Cheryl had been twenty-four when she died, a wannabe actress earning her living on the seedy fringes of the sex industry, dancing at a strip club called Playground and landing the occasional part in a porno film. The microfilmed copy of the black-and-white newspaper reprint of Cheryl’s high-school-yearbook photo from South Bend, Indiana, was grainy and blurred but still conveyed her megawatt smile and beautiful wide-set eyes.

Cheryl had been missing for three days, Melanie read, when her body was discovered rolled up in a blanket in a remote state park north of Los Angeles. She’d been raped and slashed to death. The
L.A. Times
said that the autopsy confirmed seventeen separate stab wounds on her face, chest, neck, and arms. But her stomach was oddly un
touched, except for the word
SLUT
cut into her flesh with a carving knife.

Melanie read that, and the bright white room faded momentarily to black. This old murder had to have been committed by the Butcher himself.

When her vision cleared, Melanie pulled herself together and continued reading. Scandalmonger or no, Suzanne Shepard had been one kick-ass investigative reporter, and she’d assembled a thick file on the Driscoll homicide. Melanie pored over articles on the pretrial hearings that spelled out the course of the investigation in detail. The homicide detectives’ path to the convicted man, Edward Allen Harvey, had been a straight shot. The murder weapon was a ten-inch-long butcher knife with an acrylic handle found lying in a gully twenty feet from the victim’s corpse, and it had fingerprints on it. The fingerprints matched ones already on file for Harvey, who had a rap sheet for other sex crimes. Homicide detectives showed Harvey’s mug shot around at Playground and established that he was a regular customer, one who’d had a few run-ins with the bouncers for getting rough with the girls. Melanie paged through the file in vain looking for a picture of Harvey. Every paper that had run a photograph had gone with the gorgeous young victim instead, who naturally would have sold more copies at the newsstand.

Melanie found an article describing Harvey’s arrest. He’d been working as a handyman for a company that managed a bunch of motel-like apartment buildings in the San Fernando Valley. Homicide detectives had located him at work with no difficulty, which gave Melanie pause. Three days after a murder, and Harvey was going about his business? In Melanie’s experience of killers, that wasn’t normal behavior. Men who committed heinous crimes had the sense to run, or at least to hide. They made more of an effort to cover their tracks than Harvey had, anyway. Either Harvey was a complete psychopath, accustomed to killing and getting away with it, skilled at hiding in plain sight like BTK and others of that ilk. Or else he was innocent—which
of course was what he’d claimed. Melanie skimmed through a number of articles in which Harvey’s lawyer loudly trumpeted his innocence, promising an acquittal at trial. Buried at the bottom of one of them, she finally found the connection to Benedict Welch that she’d been looking for all along.

In her rush, she’d almost skipped right over it. The page trembling in her eager fingers, Melanie read about the alternative suspect whom Harvey’s lawyer had offered up to the media. The lawyer claimed that the real killer was a second-rate plastic surgeon named Howard Vine. Harvey had met Vine at Playground, where they both hung out and ogled the girls. According to Harvey, Vine had bragged to him repeatedly about having sex with patients while they were under, and had let it slip that Cheryl Driscoll was a patient of his, one for whom he had sinister plans.

The investigative reporter covering the Driscoll case had followed up on the lawyer’s claims and actually found evidence to back them up. There had indeed been a plastic surgeon named Howard Vine who had been practicing out of an office in a small strip mall, performing cosmetic procedures on young actresses and models who couldn’t afford anyone better. At the time of the Driscoll murder, Vine’s medical license was in the process of being revoked because of patient complaints combined with certain irregularities in his licensing application. Even more critical, it turned out that Cheryl Driscoll had indeed been a patient of Vine’s, that she’d been reported missing the day after she was scheduled for a mole removal in Vine’s office, and that Vine himself had skipped town shortly after her body was found.

Melanie had years’ worth of practice listening to bogus claims of innocence. A large percentage of the guys she’d put away—even those who’d pleaded guilty—filed appeals and habeas corpus petitions trying to divert suspicion onto somebody other than themselves. And they were usually careful to pick straw men who were dead or beyond the reach of due process, since things got complicated if your “true
killer” showed up in court to defend himself. The fact that the mysterious Howard Vine was in the wind gave him every appearance of being a figment of Edward Allen Harvey’s imagination. Yet, despite her ingrained skepticism, Melanie thought the whole scenario had the ring of truth—or at least plausibility—about it.

But the jury hadn’t agreed. They’d had trouble with the fact that Edward Allen Harvey’s fingerprints were on the bloody knife. Okay, Melanie had to admit she had a little trouble with that herself. They deliberated for twenty-six minutes before returning a guilty verdict.