Nightshade (42 page)

A white shirt that was soaked with blood.

His stomach knotting, he climbed down the ladder, careful to touch as little of it as possible. At the bottom, he crouched over the crumpled body that was clad in the bloody white shirt and jeans. Though the face was badly slashed and covered with blood, he recognized Becky Adams. He reached out and touched her neck, searching for a pulse.

There was none.

Struggling against the nausea that was threatening to overwhelm him, Pullman turned the light away from Becky Adams, and a moment later was staring into the face of Emily Moore.

Or, more accurately, at what had once been her face. Her skin was torn and bruised, and dried blood was crusted around her mouth and nostrils. Pullman’s pulse quickened when he saw a movement, and then he realized that it wasn’t a movement at all, but a mass of ants that were already feeding off the old woman’s corpse.

He moved the beam again, and saw Kelly Conroe.

She too was lying still, her face bruised and bloodied, but when he reached out to feel for a pulse, she jerked away from his touch.

“No . . .” she whispered. “Please . . . no more.”

“Kelly?” Gerry Conroe cried out from above. “Oh, God! Kelly!” A moment later, ignoring Pullman’s orders, he was at the bottom of the ladder, kneeling over his daughter, reaching out to touch her, but hesitating at the last second, as if afraid he might hurt her.

Kelly was silent for a moment, and then, with a soft moan, opened one of her swollen eyes. “Daddy?” she whispered, reaching out to him.

As Conroe gathered his daughter into his arms, he looked up at Dan Pullman, his eyes glittering with rage. “I’ll kill that son of a bitch. I swear, I’ll kill him for what he did!”

Kelly’s hand closed on her father’s in a weak squeeze. “No!” she whimpered. “N-not Matt! His mother! It was his mother. . . .” Then, the realization that she was finally safe sinking in, she began to sob quietly.

As Gerry Conroe tried to soothe his daughter, stroking her hair and cradling her as if she were a baby, Dan Pullman used his radio to issue orders. “We’ve got a real mess out here,” he said after telling the dispatcher to get a second ambulance out to Hapgood Farm. “Make sure someone gets on the gate right away — the last thing we need is a bunch of rubberneckers up here.” Putting the radio back in its holster, his gaze shifted to Gerry Conroe. “What was that all about up there?” he asked. “When we were with Joan.”

Conroe’s eyes stayed on his daughter. “It was her clothes — her hair — everything,” he replied softly, his glance flicking toward Pullman before returning to his daughter’s bloodstained face. “When I first saw her in the light, I thought I was looking at her sister. I mean, I could swear that dress was Cynthia’s, and the way she’s got her hair and her makeup . . .” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “I just don’t know,” he finished. “It was almost like seeing a ghost.”

Pullman was silent for a few seconds, then rose to his feet. “Will you be okay if I leave you alone down here?”

Conroe nodded, and a moment later the police chief climbed back up out of the root cellar.

*                                     *                                     *

“WHY CAN’T I go to the hospital?” Joan Hapgood was seated at the kitchen table, her body tense, and when she spoke her voice was as tight as an overwound clock spring. “Why can’t I see my son?”

“Let’s just wait until Trip Wainwright gets here,” Dan Pullman said for the third time in the last five minutes.

When he’d emerged from the basement, Pullman said nothing to Joan Hapgood. He went directly to the telephone on the kitchen counter and called her attorney. “I think we’re going to need you,” he told Wainwright. “I want to talk to Joan, but I don’t want anyone saying I questioned her improperly.”

Joan, who heard him as he spoke to her lawyer, tried to protest. “Why are you calling him? I already told you — I can’t remember what happened. I just want to see my son. Can’t he meet us at the clinic?”

Pullman had said nothing. Hanging up, he sat down at the kitchen table, resisting the impulse to go through the house looking for something that might explain what had happened. What he’d found in the basement provided far more than the legal definition of “probable cause,” but he knew that without a warrant, Trip Wainwright could tie up for months whatever evidence he might find.

Better to wait a few minutes for Wainwright now than churn through paperwork for months later.

Better to do it by the book.

The attorney arrived on the heels of the ambulance that came to pick up Kelly Conroe. As the medics, followed by two state troopers, disappeared down the basement stairs, Joan Hapgood’s eyes widened in surprise.

Surprise that looked to Dan Pullman to be absolutely genuine.

“What are they doing?” she asked. “What did you find down there?”

Before Pullman replied, Trip Wainwright broke in. “Would you mind telling me exactly what’s going on here, Dan? I thought we agreed that you wouldn’t talk to either Matt or Joan without me being present.”

As briefly as he could, the police chief explained what had happened to Matt Moore. “I haven’t talked to Joan,” he said. “I just asked her to show me where the entrance to the basement was, and I didn’t need a warrant for that, given what Matt said.”

Wainwright’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “And did you find anything?”

His eyes fixed on Joan Hapgood, Pullman said, “I found Emily Moore, Becky Adams, and Kelly Conroe.”

Joan Hapgood gasped, and her hand flew reflexively up to cover her mouth. “M-Mother?” she stammered, standing up and taking a step toward the basement door. “My mother is down there?” Pullman nodded, and she uttered an unintelligible cry.

“Sit down, Joan,” Pullman said.

The gentleness in his voice caught Joan’s attention, and she froze. Then, the horror in her eyes dissolving into fear, she sank back onto her chair. Wainwright took a seat next to her, at the table.

“She’s dead, Joan,” Pullman went on, his eyes remaining on her. “So is Becky Adams. And Kelly Conroe has been beaten so badly she can barely speak.”

As the horror returned to Joan’s eyes, Wainwright slipped a protective arm around his client. “Is there any proof that Matt did it?” he asked. “I mean any real proof?”

Again Pullman’s eyes stayed on Joan as he spoke. “When we found him, there was a shovel lying next to him, smeared with bloody fingerprints that I suspect will match Matt’s. And there was a piece of the shirt Becky Adams is wearing, with her father’s monogram.”

Wainwright’s lips compressed as he digested this. “There has to be an explanation — ”

“Kelly Conroe says it wasn’t Matt.” Pullman went on, still watching Joan. “She says it was you.”

Again the look of shock on Joan’s face seemed genuine. “No!” she cried. “How could she — ”

“She did,” Pullman interrupted. “She said, ‘Not Matt. His mother. It was his mother . . .’ ” As he repeated the words Kelly Conroe had spoken, he saw a change come into Joan’s eyes. The horror — and the confusion — seemed to clear. She shifted position, and the dress she wore somehow seemed to fit her better. And when she spoke, her voice was calm and clear.

“The Conroe girl said I did it?” she demanded. “That’s ridiculous.”

Trip Wainwright put a restraining hand on her arm. “You don’t have to say anything at all,” he cautioned, but she brushed his hand aside and gave him a withering look.

“I hardly think I need your help,” she said, then turned back to Pullman. “It was Joan,” she said. “It was always Joan.”

Wainwright was about to say something, and Pullman silenced him with a gesture. “And who are you?” he asked softly, though he was certain he already knew the answer.

“I’m Matt’s mother,” the woman sitting at the kitchen table said. “I’m Cynthia Moore.”

The color drained from Trip Wainwright’s face, and his eyes flicked between Dan Pullman and the woman he knew as Joan Hapgood. Pullman broke the silence that had fallen over the room. “Do you know why she did it?” he asked.

“He was going to take Matt away,” Cynthia said.

Pullman frowned. “Who? Who was going to take Matt away?”

“His father,” Cynthia replied. “Bill Hapgood.”

“I thought Bill Hapgood wasn’t his father — ” Pullman began, but Cynthia Moore, her nostrils flaring angrily, cut him short.

“Don’t you think I know who the father of my own son is?” she asked, her voice turning bitter. “Let me show you something.”

She stood up, and Wainwright was suddenly on his feet too. “Joan, I don’t think this is a good idea. Before you show him anything, or say anything else, we have to talk.”

Cynthia ignored him. Slipping her arm through Dan Pull-man’s, she drew him with her as she moved toward the dining room. Turning on the chandelier that hung over the table, she glanced around the room, her eyes lingering on the glass-fronted cabinet that held the half-dozen sets of fine china the Hapgood family had amassed over the generations, along with dozens of crystal goblets in different sizes and patterns. “All this should have been mine, you know,” she said to Pullman. “He never loved Joan — not like he loved me.”

They moved on, passing through the entry hall and into the living room. It was Trip Wainwright who first noticed the photographs on the piano. There were three, of Bill and Joan Hapgood.

Except that Joan’s image was gone, replaced by Cynthia’s.

“I’m going to call Dr. Henderson,” Wainwright said softly as Cynthia led them into the den and his eyes moved from one picture to another, each one altered in the same manner as the ones on the piano in the living room.

Pullman nodded in silent agreement as Cynthia went to the desk, picked up a file folder, and handed it to him. He opened it and saw a letter from a laboratory in New York City. It confirmed that DNA tests on samples of both Matthew Moore’s tissue and William Hapgood’s established the relationship of the man and the boy.

“He was going to take him away,” Cynthia said as Pullman read through the file. “I couldn’t let that happen. Don’t you see? That’s why I had to make Joan kill him. Otherwise he was going to take Matt away from me.”

Pullman looked at her uncertainly. “You ‘made’
Joan
kill Bill? But it was Matt who — ”

“He was there,” Cynthia told him. “But it was Joan who made him pull the trigger.” Her eyes took on a faraway look. “She stood behind him, with her arms around him. She loved to hold him, you know. She loved to go into his room at night, to watch him sleep.” Her voice grew husky. “And touch him. She loved to feel his skin against hers, his body . . .” Her voice trailed off, then she looked anxiously into Pullman’s eyes. “They both loved me,” she whispered. “Bill and Matt both loved me. But she took them away.”

Tony Petrocelli appeared at the door. “Dan?” he said. “We’re ready to bring them up.”

Pullman signaled curtly, but before Petrocelli left the room, Cynthia said, “Mama? Is he talking about Mama?” Before anyone could answer, she turned back to Dan Pullman and spoke to him with a pleading tone. “I want to see her. Please? Can’t I see my mama?”

Wainwright had returned to the room, and Pullman’s eyes met his, an unspoken message passing between them. The lawyer nodded. “I don’t have any objection.”

They got back to the kitchen as two state troopers emerged from the basement, carrying a stretcher. Pullman asked if they were carrying Emily Moore, and, after the trooper nodded, the police chief eased the sheet off the old woman’s face so her daughter could look down at it.

“It was Joan,” Cynthia Moore said, as she always had when she’d done something wrong. “It wasn’t my fault, Mama. It was Joan . . . it was always Joan. . . .”

EPILOGUE

KARL RHINEMANN’S VARIOUS degrees hung in gilt-framed splendor against his office’s rich, oiled-walnut paneling. His diploma from Harvard, denoting a Bachelor of Arts degree in biochemistry, hung in the center. Surrounding it were the rest. The medical diploma from Harvard Medical School. The Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia. The L.L.D. and J.D., also from Columbia. But neither the years of schooling nor his equal number of years in practice had prepared him for the woman who sat across the desk from him, perched nervously on the edge of the deep red leather wingback chair that usually made his subjects feel more relaxed than they had any right to be. Rhinemann’s practice was in forensic psychiatry, and on this day it had fallen upon him to do an initial evaluation of Joan Moore Hapgood.

As his subject watched him warily, he quickly reread the file in front of him. According to the report made out by Daniel Pullman, who had been the chief investigator of the crimes Joan Hapgood was accused of committing, she had killed her husband, her mother, and an unrelated teenage girl, attempted the murder of her son, and battered a second, unrelated teenage girl.

His eyes shifted from the file to the woman who sat before him. She did not look like the monster the file depicted. Indeed, she did not look like any sort of monster, but like a very frightened, very worried woman, whose face was etched by a grief that was engulfing her prettiness. “Would you like to tell me what happened?” Rhinemann asked, leaning forward and resting his chin on his folded hands, his attentiveness letting her know he would see through any lies she might tell.

“I don’t know what happened,” Joan Hapgood said softly. Her eyes, wide and frightened, met his with no hesitation. “I know what they say I did, but I don’t believe I did any of it. I loved my husband and my mother. I still love my son.”

“And the girls?” Rhinemann asked. “How did you feel about them?”

“Kelly Conroe is my best friend’s daughter. I loved her. I — ” She faltered. “ — I hardly knew Becky Adams. But I know she was a sweet girl. Shy, but very sweet. When we lived across the street from her, I always liked her very much.”

Rhinemann leaned back in his chair, unfolding his hands and idly picking up a pencil he had no intention of using. Whatever notes he took would be committed to paper after the subject was gone. “Would you like to tell me what happened the day your son had to go to the hospital?” Joan Hapgood tensed, and he could see her debating something in her mind. He nodded — an almost imperceptible gesture that he knew would probably not even register in the subject’s consciousness. It would, however, suggest to her subconscious that she could trust him. Sure enough, she shifted in her chair, making herself more comfortable.