The Widower's Wife: A Thriller (8 page)

Ryan liked the theory. It explained the parents’ accusations without calling into question Tom’s airtight alibi. Ana’s husband had caused her death, but indirectly. And Michael’s callous attitude toward the abuse had helped.

He pushed through the revolving glass door and headed to the long security desk flanking the turnstile gates preventing nonemployees from entering. The one snag in his plan was that the security guards didn’t
have
to allow him upstairs. His
investigator badge didn’t convey that kind of authority, at least, not to anyone trained to examine the shiny shape in his wallet.

He sized up the guards, trying to determine whether the older African American woman and middle-aged Hispanic guy sitting behind the desk had the look of former beat cops. The man was too young to have already retired from the force, he decided. The woman could have served, but the warm smile she flashed as he approached lacked the customary suspicion.

He asked for Michael, flashing the “private investigator” badge, purchased off eBay for ten dollars after he’d had to turn in his real one. The glint of metal did the trick. The male guard nodded respectfully and flashed an ID over a sensor to open the gate. The woman picked up her phone. “I’ll tell him you’re on your way up.”

Ryan could hear her announcing him as he walked through the gate. He entered the fourth of six elevators and hit the button for the twenty-eighth floor. When the doors opened, Michael’s admin stood directly in front of him, inappropriately dressed as ever in a white button-down tight enough to be a bodysuit. She slipped through the open doors and double tapped the first-floor button.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“Helping,” she hissed.

Ryan snaked around her to the elevator panel, intent on reopening the doors. “I need to talk to Michael.”

She stepped in front of him, blocking the buttons. A flowery perfume assailed his nostrils as she drew close. Her shoulder bag bumped into his thigh. “You want to know about Ana, right?”

Tile pressed against Ryan’s feet as the elevator began its descent. He tried to read the woman’s expression. Her intent look didn’t give away what she wanted to tell him, only that he was unlikely to get to Michael until he listened.

“I heard you on the phone last time,” she said. “I wanted to talk to you then, but Michael was watching. He’s out this week. Bahamas.”

Ryan’s anger ebbed. Was this a friend of Ana’s? “Yes. I’m investigating the case.” He deliberately left out why. The woman might not talk to the guy trying to void her pal’s life insurance policy. “Did you know her?”

“No.” She tilted her head to the side. “But I met her once. And I know what happened from the news. I know she died strangely.”

Her word choice heightened Ryan’s attention. Most people would have said that they’d heard she’d suffered a terrible accident.

“I thought you should know that she and Michael didn’t part on good terms.”

“He’d mentioned. He claims he more or less fired her because she left work early often—”

“No.” Her face screwed with disgust. “I asked around about her when I first started. You know, see what she’d done wrong so I could avoid getting on Michael’s bad side. People didn’t have one negative thing to say. But there was something up between her and Michael. She showed up at work, I’m guessing several weeks after she’d already left, and barged into his office. He shut the door when they were talking, so I didn’t hear what about, but I could see them through the walls. Michael was angry and she looked really shaken, like she was about to—”

The elevator stopped. As the door opened, the secretary faced front and pressed her lips together, a clear sign that she would not talk where others could overhear. Two suits entered. They chatted to each other as the elevator continued its journey to the lobby.

The secretary waited to resume the conversation until they all had exited the lift and the men were several steps ahead of them. “I talked to HR after she left and they’d had no idea that she’d quit. They’d still been paying her. Our HR head had thought Michael had hired another admin because he’d wanted to transition Ana to a better role or something.”

She walked as she talked, high heels clacking on the lobby’s marble floor. Ryan struggled to drag his bum leg to the beat of her determined New York stride. “Something was going on between them,” she said.

“You think they were having an affair?” Infidelity between coworkers wasn’t commonplace, but it wasn’t rare. Somewhere between 15 and 41 percent of men cheated, according to studies. About 36 percent of the unfaithful strayed with a coworker.

The secretary strode through the security turnstile. Ryan caught the questioning glance of the guards.

She scanned the crowd exiting into the gray scene outside the building’s glass doors and then headed to a corner obscured by a display of orange lilies. “I don’t really want to talk here,” she whispered as he approached. “And if you tell anyone I said any of this, I’ll deny it. This job pays three times what I made for my old accounting firm.”

“But their relationship seemed about more than just work?”

“All I know is that Michael was upset and she’s his type.” She gestured to her half-buttoned shirt. “Busty.”

“When I spoke with him, he implied that Mrs. Bacon had been flirtatious,” Ryan said. “He seemed uncomfortable with it.”

The admin rolled her eyes. “If she was, I’m one hundred percent sure that he reciprocated. Michael’s a pig. He told me that part of my job was to make people want to wait for him outside his office. But the clients don’t care. It’s for him. When I’m not dressed sexy, he says I’m ‘lacking initiative.’”

The back of Ryan’s neck got hot. If he’d been at his old job, he would have tried to make Smith pay for his sexual harassment. “You don’t have to put up with that, you know. You can report him.”

She shook her head like a petulant teenager. “No way. He’ll just deny it and I’ll be out the best paycheck of my life.” She again lowered her voice to a whisper. “But I do think that he should be held accountable if he did anything to drive some woman to . . . Well, you know.”

“Suicide?”

Her eyes darted around the room as she nodded. “I saw on the news that she was pregnant. He could have knocked her up and then refused to cop to it or something. Divorce would not be cheap for Michael.”

Ryan flipped through his mental files. In the United States, more than four hundred thousand paternity tests were taken each year. That meant there were roughly half a million guys who doubted they had fathered their child. Could Ana have feared what Tom would do to her and Sophia if he discovered that he was not the father? Was that why she’d killed herself?

Three men came in through the revolving door. The woman nearly jumped backward. They must have worked in her office. She waited until they had passed through security to resume speaking.

“Anyway,” she whispered. “I thought you should know. And I bet if you look into it, Mr. 
Initiative
will at least have to stop being such a lech.”

The revolving glass door turned again. Ryan sensed the woman was about to hurry through it. He touched her arm. “How can I contact you?”

She dug into her purse and withdrew a business card. “My cell’s on this.” She slipped the linen stock into his hand and then hurried through the human centrifuge before it stopped rotating. Ryan watched her escape out to the street, knowing he’d never catch her without yelling and drawing unwanted attention. He read the name on the card:
Fernanda Alvarez. Administrative Assistant to Michael Smith
.

He mentally erased his neat little theory. Ana sleeping with her married boss changed everything.

10

August 12

A
series of steady beeps drowned out the television. The house security system was warning me about an open door. I shut off the reality-show repeat that I’d half-watched while waiting up for Tom and then stared at the keypad blinking beside my bedroom door. A code, known only to Tom and me, needed to be entered within fifteen seconds. The correct numbers would disarm the system with a doorbell’s ding. The wrong numbers would set off screeching alarms—not only in my house, but in police headquarters eight blocks away.

The police would come then, but they hadn’t for a missing thirty-four-year-old man. When I’d called headquarters, the desk sergeant had told me to send an e-mail with a recent photo of Tom and the Maserati’s license plate. He’d forward it to the local hospitals on the “off chance” something was “actually wrong” and tell the patrolman to watch for the car, but he wouldn’t take a report until Tom had been missing for at least a full day.

“Most of the time, guy goes out with his buddies and forgets the hour,” he’d said. I hadn’t explained that Tom no longer had buddies or the money for a bender—or that he’d mused about faking his death.

I tapped my phone screen. The time showed eleven thirty
PM
. Was Tom downstairs or was it an opportunistic burglar who’d realized my husband wasn’t home? I got up from the bed and took an instinctual step toward Sophia’s room. The alarm beeped
good-bye. The message on the security pad’s LED screen changed from “fault garage” to a request to arm the system.

A breathless rage squashed my relief. Tom hadn’t hurt himself. But if he could disable the alarm, he’d been capable of getting to a phone to calm his wife. I readied my body for a fight and watched the door, battling the urge to barrel downstairs and confront my husband.

My mind played devil’s advocate to my emotions: the Maserati could have had trouble, as Tom had told the daycare staff the other day. Perhaps it had broken down, leaving him stranded with a dead cell phone. Or maybe he’d suffered an accident and the hospital had just discharged him. Even more likely, he could have driven buzzed to some errand, been arrested, and had just been released from the drunk tank.

I sat on the edge of the bed as the door peeled back. My husband’s broad frame filled the space between the dim hallway and our room. He closed the door behind him, slowly, the way I shut Sophia’s room after putting her to bed.

“You’re home.”

He whirled in the darkness. His head turned right and then left. He rubbed his eyes. “Ana? You’re awake.”

“I couldn’t sleep. I was worried something had happened to you.”

“I’m a grown man. What could happen to me?” Tom strode past me into our bathroom. He slipped a T-shirt over his head as he walked. I followed him.

My feet hit the cool marble floor. I flicked on the light. He squinted, as if he’d been in blackness for too long. He unbuttoned his shorts. Clothing puddled around his ankles. He stepped from it and then flung open the glass shower door.

I talked to the fault line running down his naked back. “A lot of things could happen. I wasn’t sure if you’d been in a car crash or if you’d fallen and hit your head or if you
did
something . . .”

Tom closed himself inside the glass cage. Water blasted from the showerhead. Steam frosted the walls.

“The daycare called me at work,” I continued. “I rushed home, thinking the worst.”

His face tilted beneath the stream. Water poured over his pectorals and defined stomach, touching him in ways that I hadn’t in months.

“Tom. Talk to me.”

“I can barely hear you.” He gargled the words beneath the waterfall while rubbing his hands back and forth over his face. He grabbed blindly at the shower shelf. Fingers clasped a green bar of deodorant soap.

I cracked the shower door. The mist covered my face like a veil. “Where were you?”

“An old coworker called asking to meet in the city. I ran out without charging my phone and it died.” He ran the soap over his chest and stubble, painting on a foamy turtleneck. “I didn’t realize the meeting would last so long and then I lost track of time.”

A former colleague had finally reached out? I didn’t want to demand a name. It would make it seem like I doubted him. “Didn’t this person have a phone?”

“I didn’t think to ask. I drank too much. Sorry that I didn’t get Sophia. I knew that the daycare could keep her and then you could pick her up on the way home.”

“They charge way too much for her to stay. I had to come back early.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I thought something happened to you.”

Tom opened his mouth beneath the stream again. He gargled and spat at the bathroom floor. “I’m sorry you were worried. I just lost track of time.”

He switched off the water and then opened the door. His hands reached out toward me. I batted them away and folded my arms across my chest.

He exited the shower and strode over to the towel rack, making a trail of wet footprints. “I always get you one.”

“I never forget our daughter at daycare and fail to pick up my phone.”

“My phone died. I’ve said I was sorry.” His tone didn’t contain any contrition.

I didn’t care anymore if he thought that I doubted his story. “Who did you even go out with?”

He rubbed the towel over his face as he talked. The fabric muffled the words. “This recruiter I used to work with all the time. I thought it would be a good way to get some leads on a job.”

Investment banking was a male-dominated industry. Recruiting was the opposite. More than half of all recruiters were women, and his deliberate avoidance of a pronoun confirmed the gender. “So you got bombed with some bimbo.”

Tom scowled. “You are so fucking dismissive, you know that? I met with someone who might be able to help me get a job.”

“Well, did she have anything for you?”

“Not right now. But it’s a good relationship to keep up.”

“Until nearly midnight?”

He picked something from his teeth. Steak? An olive? He frowned at his reflection, or perhaps the realization that whatever he’d dislodged had been visible at least part of the night.

“Look.” He finally faced me with a conciliatory expression. “I jumped at the chance to meet an old colleague who might be able to help me find something and I lost track of time. Once I got into the city, she had to postpone for a couple hours because of a client, so I had to hang around. My phone died. She took me out to dinner to apologize for the wait and talk about prospects for me. It can take an hour to get home from the city with traffic. You know that. I was trying to help our—” He made a praying motion that opened up into a plea for sympathy from an unseen chorus. “You know what? Forget it.”