Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (11 page)

contains secrets that often either convict or free a suspect.
 
But even

if Dr. Gunson had seen a photograph of the woman who lay before her

when she was in life, she could not have said that it was this

victim.

Her eyelids were blackened and swollen closed and her face was so

misshapen.

Beneath those closed lids, the dead woman had worn soft contact lens,

tiny circles of transparent material that gave her myopic eyes perfect

vision.
 
The contacts had either been displaced during the violent

beating she had endured or lost in a mass of blood and tissue.

Dr. Gunson could only speculate about what kind of weapon had been

used to inflict such terrible wounds.
 
Certainly, it would have to have

been dense and heavy and something with many sides and varying

surfaces.

A wrecking bar?
 
A tire iron?
 
A heavy flashlight, maybe?
 
Unless the

weapon itself was found, no one would ever know for sure.

When she completed her examination, Dr. Gunson knew how this woman had

died.
 
She could not know why, or by whose hand.
 
It would not have

taken a particularly powerful person to do so much damage, but it

certainly would have taken a person so full of rage that heþor, again,

sheþkept striking and hitting.
 
Again and again and again and again.

Twenty-four times.

It had, of course, been too good to last, a love affair too wonderful

in a world where nothing perfect ever seems to endure.
 
Sara and Brad

would never be able to resume their untroubled, romantic courtship.

From the moment he called her at 6:30

A.M. on September 22, Sara knew that everything had to change.
 
And

she knew, too, that Brad and his little boys would need her more than

they had ever needed her.

Sara couldn't feel any personal sense of loss for Cheryl Keeton,

although all human life mattered to her.
 
That was why she was a

physician.

When she learned that Cheryl had been beaten to death, Sara, long

inured to disasters of the flesh, would shudder.
 
The police believed

that she had been murdered, and Brad seemed to agree with them.
 
But

how could Sara grieve personally for Cheryl?
 
She had never known her,

she had never seen her except at a distance.
 
She had never talked to

her.

The last time she saw Cheryl, it was through a car window, and her

voice had been muted by distance and rainy wind and thick glass so that

Sara had only seen her mouth moving.
 
Cheryl had seemed angry, liar

ried, and rather desperate on that last Friday night before she was

murdered.

From what Brad had told her, Sara knew that Cheryl's life was untidy

and full of unsavory characters.
 
She had not been a fit mother for the

children, Brad had said that often enough, too.
 
But now Cheryl was

gone, and her little boys had loved her, as all children loved their

mothers.

Sara's heart broke for Jess, Michael, and Phillip, and she vowed to try

to be there for them.
 
She wondered what part she would play in their

lives now.
 
She loved them, that was certain.
 
Would they be with Brad

all the timeþor would they go to Cheryl's parents?

Brad had denied having any part at all in Cheryl's murder.
 
He had been

at home with the three boys at the time of her death.
 
It was true that

his voice had sounded rather flat when he told Sara about Cheryl, but

he had probably been in shock.
 
When you lose someone who has been a

part of your world for as many years as Cheryl was part of Brad's,

shock is natural.
 
And then he had been furious with Cheryl for

blocking him at every turn in his efforts to give his children a

peaceful home.

Sara reasoned that Brad couldn't be expected to mourn the woman who had

made his life miserable for so long Sara had continued with her

scheduled surgeries that Monday morning.

Once she was masked and gowned, she had always been able to shut away

the outside world.
 
Her only concern was for the patient beneath her

hands.
 
She had to monitor pulse, respiration, oxygen content in the

patient's blood.
 
For those hours she was in the operating room, she

didn't have to think about how Cheryl died.

rad paged her sometime before ten that morning.
 
He said he had lost

the single car key she had given him for her Cressida.
 
He needed to

come and pick up his Suburban, which was parked in the hospital lot.

Sara arranged to meet him between surgeries.

Carrying two-year-old Phillip, with his two older boys trailing behind,

Brad hurried into the hospital cafeteria and told Sara that he had

taken the MATS, Portland's rapid transit light rail system, to get to

Providence.
 
If he had lost the key to her Cressida, Sara wondered why

he hadn't driven his father's pickup truck, it was parked at the

Madison Tower.
 
Brad shook his head impatiently.
 
Maybe he hadn't even

remembered the pickup.
 
He said he wanted his Suburban.
 
He needed to

consult with an attorney.

Sara watched the little boys as they ate breakfast in the cafeteria.

They seemed completely normal.
 
They hadn't caught the nervous energy

that seemed to vibrate from Brad.
 
When they had finished eating, Sara

gave Brad his keys and walked with him and the boys as far as the

parking lot.

"Do the kids knowþabout Cheryl?"
 
Sara asked.

"I told them she was killed in a car accident," Brad said.

After he drove off, Sara returned to the operating room.
 
She had

backto-back surgeries scheduled until three or four that afternoon, and

when she was finally able to come up for air, she realized that she had

no way to get home.
 
Her Cressida was at the Madison Tower.
 
She called

her sister Margie and asked for a ride there.
 
On the way, she stopped

at the Broadway Toyota dealership and arranged to have keys made so

that she could drive her car.
 
It had been such a weird, upside-down

day.
 
Who could remember keys and cars and details when the specter of

Cheryl's death loomed over everything?
 
Sara just wanted to get to Brad

and the boys and help them through whatever might lie ahead.
 
Then

suddenly, incongruously, she remembered that Michael's birthday was

only three days away and asked her sister to turn into the Toys S[' Us

parking lot to buy him a present.

When she got back to Brad's apartment, to her shock, Sara found him in

a state of silent terror.
 
She had neverþeverþseen him like that

before.

He had always been a man totally in control, fully capable of handling

whatever came his way.
 
But she could see that something was very

wrong, something more than Cheryl's strange death.
 
Brad drew Sara away

from the windows and asked her to sit down.
 
He told her softly that he

had no choice but to warn her that they might all be in terrible

danger.

Cheryl's murder was only the beginning, he said, only the "first shoe"

dropped in a massive plot to eliminate himþand everyone connected to

him.

"But who?
 
W?"
 
Sara gasped.

"It's too complicated for me to explain.
 
You'll just have to trust me

to take care of us."

Brad showed Sara a loaded handgun he was carrying for protection.

Then he led her around his apartment, showing her where he and Brent

had tied ropes between interior door handles to prevent anyone who

crawled through a window from gaining entrance to the center of the

apartment.

He and Brent had also arranged pop cans and coffee cans filled with

pennies so that they would crash and warn them of any unexpected entry

through the main door.
 
Brad had even loaded another gun and given it

to his fifteen-year-old son, two guns would be better than one.
 
Even

though they were in a security building, he told Sara they couldn't

count on protection.
 
The people they were dealing with were far more

sophisticated than the rent-a-cop security guards at the Madison

Tower.

'^Who?"
 
Sara asked again, baffled.
 
"Who would try to hurt us?"
 
But

Brad wouldn't tell her whom he feared.
 
It was enough for her to know

that they all might be in danger.
 
He said the little boys would sleep

in his king-sized bed, and Brent would stay in his own roomþwhere he

had a good view of the walkway around the eighteenth floor.
 
If someone

could murder Cheryl, Brad said tightly, that meant that none of them

was safe.

At 9:15 that night, a loud knock sounded at the door and Brad signaled

Sara to he quiet.
 
They peered out a security peephole and saw a

uniformed man standing there.
 
He was an extremely big man, probably

six feet four or five and solidly built.
 
He looked to Sara like either

a Portland policeman or a state trooper.
 
The uniformed man waited,

balancing on one foot and then the other.

Brad held a finger to his lips, shushing them, and shook his head.

He wouldn't let anyone answer the door.

"But, Brad, wlfy?"
 
Sara asked again, appalled.

He sighed and said he guessed he would have to level with her.
 
He told

Sara he had every reason to believe that Cheryl's family was going to

come after him and that, quite possibly, they meant to murder him.

If they didn't come in person, he felt they would hire someone in a

cop's uniform to do it.

Sara, who had never led anything but a safe existence, who had never