The Widower's Wife: A Thriller (19 page)

The cruise line interviewed all passengers near the Bacons. One couple in the adjacent stateroom was at dinner during Mrs. Bacon’s fall and has nothing to add to the investigation. The other neighbor is willing to speak with you, though he has asked that his name not be included in this e-mail, as he is concerned that his information could be forwarded.

We hope this satisfies your requests.

Mr. Groves’s contact numbers were listed in a postscript, along with the telephone number for the nameless neighbor. The number had a New York City area code.

Ryan reread the message’s penultimate section, pitting the timeline against Tom’s prior testimony. Tom and Ana had returned from the day’s beach excursion at 6:25
PM
. Then, according to Tom, he’d gotten his wife settled on the balcony and headed to the pool, leaving the room at 6:58
PM
. The door locked behind him. Thirty minutes later, Ana fell overboard.

Tom had said he returned around 8:00
PM
to an empty stateroom. The cruise line evidently believed that he had attempted to open the door at 8:03
PM
but wasn’t successful until 8:05
PM
.

Ryan stirred the Thai food on his plate. What if Tom’s key had worked fine? What if he’d opened the door two minutes after his wife’s killer had left?

Ryan chewed a thick piece of tofu that tasted of soy and boiled carrots. He liked the theory, but it had a problem. He couldn’t explain how the killer had gotten inside the Bacons’ stateroom in the first place. The assailant couldn’t have slipped past Tom as he was leaving at 6:58
PM
. Surely Mr. Bacon would have mentioned seeing a strange attendant.

Ryan set down his plastic utensils. He could think of only one plausible scenario that put a killer in the room with Ana: Tom
hadn’t returned to the room. Mr. Bacon had lied about seeing his wife sleeping on the balcony. He knew the policy wouldn’t pay if it looked as though Ana had jumped, so he’d put his wife on the balcony, recovering from nausea, to add credibility to his accident theory. Maybe part of him even feared that Ana had killed herself and he’d wanted to cover it up.

But Ana
hadn’t
committed suicide because, at two minutes to seven, she’d opened the door for her murderer.

22

August 23

A
finger pressed to disembodied lips on a large white sign. The words for “quiet” in a dozen languages were scattered around like the spray from a firecracker. The library had at least seven posters urging patrons to keep silent. No one listened. Two women behind the checkout desk discussed their families at a volume intended for the hard of hearing. An elderly man shouted into a cell phone. A vacuum ran in a back room. Two kids played hide-and-seek amid the bookcases while their mom read loudly enough to entertain an entire classroom.

Sophia sat at a long desk of computers, coloring book open to the letter
R
. The monitor in front of her reflected a serious face.

“
R
. Ruh. Ruh,” I said, opening up a web page.

“Ruh,” she repeated.

“Color the pictures on the page that begin with the letter
R
.”

I moved my cursor to the search bar and typed in the address supplied by my mother that morning, after I’d sworn that the info was only for a friend’s nanny: www.RTT.com. An acronym, she’d explained, for Return Trips Travel Inc. Times had changed. The smugglers had become incorporated.

Sophia tugged on my arm. She pointed to a rabbit in her notebook. Her cheeks puffed from the force of her smile. I beamed back at her. “Right. Rabbit starts with
R
. Can you fill it in with a color beginning with
R
?”

She scanned the five fat magic markers beside the keyboard. Her fingers rested briefly on the purple before shaking her head vigorously. She grabbed the red. “Red. Ruh. Ruh.”

A picture of the globe loaded. Red lines arched across the image to the United States’ seaboard cities. Bold black text ran across the screen: Come to the Land of the Free. Financing Available. One-Ways Starting at $5,000. Many Trips Available. Employment Opportunities. Aztec Guided Tours, Canadian Wilderness Retreats, Miami Sailing, Caribbean Cruise Passages.

The listed five-thousand-dollar amount had to be the initial required payment. My breath quickened. I’d been unable to get a grand for my parents. How would I possibly scrounge up several thousand dollars?

Sophia’s hand moved back and forth across her coloring page. Red zigzags spilled over the rabbit’s thick outline. I would have to teach her to color inside the lines. One thing at a time. First letter sounds. We would work on marker control later.
If there was a later
 . . .

I pushed the thought from my mind and tousled her dark hair. “Red rabbit is right.”

Sophia moved on to a rhino, trying, in vain, to stay within the thick black borders. The point of her tongue protruded above her lower lip in concentration. My diligent little girl. How could I leave her?

The web page had a phone number. I borrowed a blue marker from Sophia’s pencil case and printed it on the inside of my wrist. As I did, I made a mental tally of all the cash sources I could tap. My last work check would arrive in the mail soon, two weeks’ pay, or two thousand dollars, after taxes. Unemployment would pay something, though surely not three thousand dollars. Where could I get more? Would the coyotes let me pay less upfront and work off a larger amount?

My daughter finished the rhino. She scanned the remaining animals and then pressed the marker’s felt tip to a picture down in the corner. A mouse.

“That one doesn’t get colored, baby. Only
R
animals, like ruh-rabbit.”

Red zigzags, less controlled than the ones filling in the rhino, scrawled across the animal’s pointy nose and whiskers.

“No, Soph. That’s
M
. Muh-muh-mouse. Like Mommy.”

She continued to scribble over the animal’s fat body. “It’s all
R
.”

“Not mouse.”

“Look.”

A long, hairless tail protruded from the animal’s oversized backside. Whiskers stretched nearly to its knees. I hadn’t recognized a rat.

*

Sophia skipped on the Newark sidewalk, all the while rotating a lollipop stick in her mouth. The library kept them in a dish by the checkout counter. I couldn’t fail to give her one after she’d waited for me to finish researching something without any entertaining pictures.

“Sophia, no skipping. It’s a busy sidewalk and the pavement is uneven.” I didn’t add,
We may not have health insurance since Mommy lost her job
. My tone conveyed the sentiment. She slowed to a walk, still sucking the lollipop.

I searched the sidewalk for a payphone. Few places outside of America’s poorest inner cities possessed such relics. Cell phones had eradicated the demand for a box that charged a quarter a minute to place a call while standing on a corner.

I knew that Newark still had stalls. I was accustomed to passing one on the way to the bodega where I wired my parents money at a fraction of the cost of Western Union. The booth was a corroded metal relic covered in peeling stickers advertising unknown bands and taped-up fliers for long-passed street sales. I hoped it still worked. I couldn’t risk calling the coyotes on my cell. Tom would kill me.

Sophia spotted it first. Her distance vision could have qualified her as a fighter pilot.
Mom, look at that plane. What? That speck by the skyscraper a mile away?

We sped walked the remaining block to the metal case. Wadded gum, blackened by dirt, stuck to the inside of the walls. I’d discovered the one place more diseased than a subway public restroom. Sophia’s hand gripped mine. I instructed her to keep a tight hold and stand outside.

I slipped in sideways, pulling in my shoulders to avoid touching anything other than the phone. I held the mouthpiece away from my face while pressing the top circle to my ear. There was a dial tone. Four quarters jangled into the machine. I flipped my free arm over to see the number copied from the website. The smugglers had a local area code.

A man answered on the third ring. “Return Trips Travel.”

“Hi. I’m calling because I need to get to the U.S. from the Bahamas.”

“Do you have the down payment?”

“Mostly.” I swallowed. My unpaid salary was less than half the required amount. “Can I work off a larger amount?”

“No. You’ll need the entire five before booking your trip.”

I looked longingly through the open payphone door. Sophia stood outside, twisting the lollipop in her mouth. When she caught me looking, her nose wrinkled. She grinned.

“I’ll get it.” I promised Sophia as I spoke. “I have to come home.”

23

November 28

R
yan was on his way to Tom’s when a call from Vivienne made him turn around and head back over the bridge. The prior night, a prosecutor had given the Financial Crimes Unit authority to sift through Michael’s personnel accounts for evidence that he’d been blackmailed or, more precisely, taken action to stop being blackmailed. Vivienne had already found something.

He picked her up outside the precinct. His old stomping ground was a squat gray box on the corner of Fifty-First and Third Avenue. Windows, each coated with gray film to block out prying eyes, covered the facade. The precinct recalled the Bauhaus building, save for the smart-car-sized American flag waving from above the bulletproof glass entrance. Police cars lined the street out front, parked beneath signs that threatened high fines for standing.

Vivienne hovered by a squad car in her long, black coat with a laptop bag slung over her shoulder. A lanky cop with wire-frame glasses hung behind her. She introduced him as David Parish, her new partner.

Ryan tried not to resent his replacement’s presence as the guy climbed into the dodge’s backseat. Vivienne slid into the navigator’s spot and directed him to drive out to the island. He headed to the FDR, trusting that wherever Vivienne wanted him to go was where the investigation needed to take them.

As he drove, she brought him up to speed on the progress of the FCU’s Friday night. There’d been two eye-popping expenditures in Michael’s records: a fourteen-thousand-dollar check, made out to cash, withdrawn four days before Ana’s death, and a twenty-thousand-dollar wire to the Bahamian bank account of a Charles Pinder, made two days after Ana’s fall. A web search hadn’t revealed any businesses associated with Pinder’s name, but a man with the same moniker had served ten years for human smuggling. “Maybe Pinder was more careful with his other crimes,” Vivienne said.

Ryan struggled to process the new information and keep his eyes on the road. “So where am I driving to?”

“Michael’s house,” she said. “He knows we’re coming. State attorney thought he deserved the courtesy given his financial clout.”

“Course he did,” Ryan grumbled.

“Thought you should do the honors, as you’d interviewed him before,” Vivienne said.

Twenty-five minutes later, Ryan stood at the gated entrance to a massive Long Island estate. This mansion didn’t require a qualifying prefix. A colonial home, it was every bit as large as the Bacons’ house but also sat on acres of green. Three dozen blue pines lined the property. A snow-speckled tennis court was just visible behind the gray gables of the attached four-car garage.

Ryan hung back as David rang the guard bell. An accented female voice invited them in through the speaker attached to the automatic gate. Iron bars buzzed open and vanished in a stone wall surrounding the home.

As they ascended the cobblestone driveway, the front door peeled back. A middle-aged man stood in the opening wearing a trust-me gray suit. He identified himself as “Mr. Smith’s personal attorney.”

Business cards were exchanged. Afterward, Michael’s lawyer led them through a grand foyer to a den of sorts: an oak paneled room with a billiard table and a large fireplace, over which hung massive antlers. The room smelled of tanned hide, though there
weren’t any visible animal skins. Michael lounged just to the right of the hearth in a leather club chair. He glowered at them, a spoiled brat in the principal’s office waiting for his parents to speak to the headmaster.

Ryan heard a door close behind him. The lawyer gestured for the group to join Michael in the four additional leather seats, arranged facing their host. As they sat, the lawyer stood between his and Michael’s chairs and set the terms of their “voluntary interview.” Mr. Smith wanted to be helpful but would refrain from answering unfounded accusations and addressing rumors. Mr. Smith also reserved the right
not
to discuss any
sensitive
personal matters—whatever that meant.

During the drive, Ryan had considered starting with a few softball questions about Ana’s flirtatiousness intended to lower Michael’s defenses. But the attorney ruined any chance of that. He threw his hardest pitch.

“Did you sexually assault Ana Bacon when she worked for you?”

Michael’s jaw dropped. His lawyer patted his shoulder, silencing him before words could emerge.

Vivienne withdrew the laptop from her bag and turned the screen to face the accused. She’d set the video to the most damning part: Michael pinning Ana to the bench.

Michael’s tan grayed. “You can’t use that. I was at—” Again, the attorney pressed a hand on his shoulder.

“Where did you get that?” The lawyer asked.

“It’s the restaurant’s security tape.”

“It’s illegal to record a private dinner.”

“The bar has a CCTV monitoring notice,” Ryan said. “And your client hasn’t answered.”

The attorney stepped forward. “Ana Bacon surely isn’t making any allegations about my client. This interview is ov—”

“Is that the way you want to play it?” Vivienne stood. “Because sexual assault is the least of the considered charges.”