Dead by Sunset: Perfect Husband, Perfect Killer? (55 page)

father, a damaging father who was not fit to be with his sons.

Never before had she made those accusations to his face and now she had

not only said it, she had said it for the record.
 
Cheryl had covered

for Brad for all the years of their sons' lives, sticking colored pins

on maps, telling the little boys that their daddy loved them and would

be home with them if he weren't working so hard, letting them believe

that their daddy was perfect.

Now she had spoken what she felt to be the truth.
 
As a father, Brad

was a monster.

When Brad returned to his Madison Tower apartment that evening, Sara

Gordon saw "the most anger I'd ever seen him exhibit."
 
He was furious,

pacing back and forth, repeating to Sara over and over again that

Cheryl had lied about everything.
 
He was consumed with his rage over

her deposition, the veins standing out on his forehead.
 
He would talk

of nothing else.
 
Finally, he strode to his bedroom to call Cheryl.

Sara sat on the bed and listened.
 
"He was so angry that his speech was

pressured," she recalled.
 
"Brad was actually having trouble getting

his words out.

"You lied at the deposition today," he growled at Cheryl through a

throat tight with fury.
 
"I'm going to get evenþor you're going to

pay...."

Sara sat, frozen, on Brad's bed, her mind recording this previously

hidden facet of her lover's personality.
 
She had never seen him out of

control.
 
She had never known him to make such a call before and she

was shocked at his venom.
 
And yet, she was amazed to see how rapidly

Brad's fury dissipated once he hung up the phone.
 
It was as if he had

blown out a pressure valve and everything was back to normal.
 
He

stopped pacing.
 
He stopped repeating his epithets about Cheryl.

Internally, something had changed.
 
Perhaps he had made some

decision.

He had told Cheryl that he would have his revenge, and that seemed to

make him feel better.

From the nineteenth to the twenty-first of September, Sara Gordon spent

what was, at least for her, a fairly normal weekend.
 
She had always

worked harder and longer hours than any of her friends.
 
That was a

characteristic she shared with Cheryl, both of these brilliant women

had fought for an education, fought for a career usually enjoyed by

men, and once they attained their toeholds, they had worked twice as

hard as any man to succeed.

During the summer of 1986, Sara was totally in love with Brad and she

would have preferred to spend far more time with him than her practice

allowed.
 
But in a way, she was working for both of them, for their

future.
 
She continued her usual fifty to sixty hours a week on call at

Providence.
 
It seemed even more important now that she and Brad had

begun to talk about marriage.
 
He had reluctantly told her that Cheryl

was a profligate spender, and that he had had to file for bankruptcy.

Although he had high expectations for the eventual windfall that would

come from the suit Vinson and Elkins had filed on his behalf in

Houston, the bottom was still falling out of the Houston economy and he

had been temporarily brought to his financial knees.

How difficult it must have been, Sara thought, for this proud man to

tell her the details of his bankruptcy filing so he could save what

little he had left.
 
She admired him for his honesty and she had no

doubt that Brad would regain his financial footing soon.
 
The man was a

genius, and he had vision.
 
He saw what the American public was going

to need, and he set out to provide it way, way ahead of the pack.

Brad hadn't lost everything, of course.
 
He had his new job as an

upper-echelon executive with U.S. Bank.
 
And he told Sara that he had

formed his own corporation, also called Spectrum, and that it was a

going concern, untouched by the bankruptcy.
 
Although things were in

the hush-hush stage, he said confidentially, his biotechnical division

scientists had come up with a drug that would alleviate almost all the

pain and symptoms of herpes.
 
It was called Symptovir and he said there

was great excitement in the medical community about early test

results.

Sara was impressed.
 
As a physician, she knew that the drugs in current

use were often ineffective, they were little more than placebos.

With studies projecting that a third of the population of the United

States would contract genital herpes sooner or later, any company with

a better drug to treat the disease would make not millions but

billions.

Sara's talent wasn't business acumen, but she knew what Symptovir could

mean.

Brad would be back on the top of the heap.
 
And she was working double

shifts to help him get enough money together to rebuild his financial

empire.

Brad wanted her to mention Symptovir to her ex-husband Dr. Geoff

Morrow, but she was understandably hesitant to do that.
 
He didn't

really need her to pave the way for him, anyway.
 
But she was fully

prepared to back Brad in his business, and to help him take care of his

children.

From those confidences he had told her so haltingly and with such

embarrassment, she realized that he had never had a woman who really

loved him.
 
Sara cared deeply for him, and it seemed sad that a man

with so much love to give had been so unlucky with the women in his

life.

Even his own mother had apparently been cold and selfish, although Brad

spoke about her only vaguely, and Sara didn't know whether she was

alive or dead.

But Brad had loved his father, and he had been desolate in July when

Sanford Cunningham succumbed to his third heart attack, suffered while

on a fishing trip.
 
Sara knew that Brad was still hurting from the

loss.

Sanford's pickup was parked in the basement of the Madison Tower

virtually unused now.

On Friday, September 19, 1986, Sara rode along with Brad in his Chevy

Suburban van when he drove to Cheryl's house to pick upSess, Michael

and Phillip.
 
It was his weekend to have the boys.
 
Sara waited in the

car as always, she had yet to meet Cheryl, although she was extremely

curious about the woman who was putting Brad through such an emotional

wringer.

And like any woman, she was curious to learn what she could about all

the women who had come before her.

A wild and gusty storm hit the Portland area that Friday night and Sara

could barely see through the Suburban's windows as sheets of water shut

out the world beyond the glass.
 
She could see that Cheryl's brother

Jim's car was still parked there.
 
He was usually around when Brad

picked up his sons.
 
Squinting, Sara watched Brad dash into the house

to get the kids.
 
Even without sound and at that distance, she could

sense that Cheryl seemed "frazzled" as she moved quickly past the

windows, getting the boys' coats, helping them push their arms into the

sleeves, running back to get someone's "special blankey."

Brad's mouth moved constantly.
 
Sara wondered what he was saying to

Cheryl.
 
She felt like the outsider as she watched the two of them

interact with each other in the warm light of Cheryl's home.
 
They must

have been in loveonce, they had three children together.
 
Sara felt a

little shiver of jealousy, but she told herself not to be dumb.

Brad cared only about his sons.
 
He had said often enough how he

detested Cheryl.
 
If Sara just thought rationally, she knew she had

nothing at all to be jealous about.
 
Cheryl looked attractive, but she

also appeared to be a nervous wreck.
 
Her movements were stilted and

awkward.
 
If everything Brad said about her was true, she had good

reason to be nervous.

Sara could see now that Brad was carrying Phillip as he herded Jess and

Michael ahead of him through the rain.
 
Cheryl stood silhouetted in the

doorway, looking after them as if she were straining to catch a last

glimpse of the boys, almost as if they were going away from her for

more than a weekend.
 
That was odd, Sara thought, since Brad said that

the kids drove Cheryl nuts and she could hardly wait to be rid of them

so she could go out and have fun.

"What were you talking about in there?"
 
she asked Brad as they buckled

the boys into carseats and seat belts.

"Remember how I told you I'd never eat anything at home when we lived

in Gresham7" Brad said.

She nodded.
 
Sara had heard this before.
 
Brad had told her that just

before he moved out of the house he shared with Cheryl, things were so

bad that he was actually afraid to eat anything she cooked.
 
He had to

have the boys taste it first because he suspected that Cheryl was

trying to poison him.
 
He told Sara now that he had reminded Cheryl

that he was fully aware that she and her mother, Betty, had been trying

to destroy him.

"I was telling her about how I listened in on those phone calls she had

with her mother when I had to go over there to be sure the boys were

okay," Brad said, "the calls where they talked about poisoning me to

get rid of me.
 
HOW they said that nobody would ever prosecute a case

where a husband died like that."

Sara said nothing.
 
It always struck her as bizarre that Brad could be

so matter-of-fact about his estranged wife and her mother talking about

poisoning his food.
 
And she had to admitþat least to herselfþthat it

was odd that he would risk the boys' safety by having them taste food

he thought was poisoned.
 
Maybe it was like Solomon and the two women