The question hung there for several seconds.
Finally, I said, “Duckworth may be covering for the FBI. She might be a relocated witness. Maybe she testified against someone and no one can say, for the record, that she had to take on a new identity.”
“You told this to Duckworth,” she said.
I nodded. “I don’t think, when I told him, he believed a word of it. I’d already told him about Jan’s depression, but that story was falling apart whenever he talked to anyone else.”
“So he may not even have checked the FBI thing.”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you explain the fact that you’re the only one who witnessed your wife’s change in mood?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I was the only one she felt she could be that honest with.”
“Honest?” Natalie said. “We’re talking about a woman who’s been hiding from you, since the day she met you, who she really is.”
I had nothing for that.
“What if this depression thing was an act?” she asked.
I had nothing for that, either.
“An act just for you.”
Slowly, I said, “Go on.”
“Okay, let’s rewind a bit here. Forget this business about the FBI getting your wife a new name and life. The FBI doesn’t have to troll around looking for people who died as children to create new identities for people. They can make them right out of thin air. They’ve got all the blank forms for every document you could ever need. You want to be Suzy Creamcheese? No problem. We’ll make you up a Suzy Creamcheese ID. So what I’m asking is, has it occurred to you that your wife might have gone about getting a new identity all on her own?”
I took a second. “I’ve thought about it, but I can’t come up with a reason why she’d do such a thing.”
“David, it wouldn’t surprise me that as we sit here the police are drawing up a warrant for your arrest. Finding Leanne Kowalski’s body only a couple of miles from where you were seen with your wife will have shifted them into overdrive. All they’ve wanted is to find a body, and now they’ve got one. Don’t think that just because it isn’t your wife’s, that’s going to slow them down. They probably figure you killed Jan, that Leanne found out or witnessed it, so you killed her, too. They don’t even need to find your wife’s body now. They’ll be able to put together some kind of case with Leanne’s. Maybe you did a better job at hiding Jan’s body, but you screwed things up and panicked and did a shitty job with Leanne’s. If I were them, that’s how I’d be putting this together.”
“I didn’t kill Leanne,” I said.
Natalie waved her hand at me, like she didn’t want to hear it. “You’re in a mess, and there’s only one person I can think of who could have put you there.”
My head suddenly felt very heavy. I let it fall for a moment, then raised it and looked at Natalie.
“Jan,” I said.
“Bingo,” she said. “She was the one who ordered the Five Mountains tickets. She was the one who fed you—and you alone—a story about being depressed. Why? So when something happened to her, that’s the story you’d tell the cops. A story that would look increasingly bogus the more the police looked into it. Who had access to your laptop to leave a trail of tips on how to get rid of a body? Who could easily have put her own hair and blood in the trunk of your car? Who went in and told the Lake George store owner that she had no idea why her husband was taking her for a drive up into the woods? Who persuaded you to take out life insurance, so that if she died you’d be up three hundred grand?”
I said nothing.
“Who’s not who she claims to be?” Natalie asked. “Who took on the identity of some kid who got hit by a car way back when?”
I felt the ground starting to swallow me up.
“Who the hell is your wife, really, and what did you do to piss her off so badly that she’d want to frame you for her murder?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
Natalie Bondurant rolled her eyes. “There isn’t a husband on the planet whose wife hasn’t thought of killing him at one time or another. But this is different. This takes things to a whole new level.”
“But why?” I asked. “I mean, if she didn’t love me anymore, if she wanted out of the marriage, why not just leave? Tell me it’s over and walk away? Why do something as elaborate as what you’re suggesting?”
Natalie mulled that one over. “Because there’s more to this. Because it isn’t enough for her to get away. She doesn’t want anyone to come looking for her. She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s alive. No one’s going to come looking for her if they figure she’s dead.”
“But I’d come looking for her,” I said. “She’d have to know I’d do everything I could to find her.”
“Kind of hard to do from a jail cell,” Natalie said. “And if the cops think they’ve closed this thing, so what if they haven’t actually got a body? They’ve got you, their work is done. And your Jan’s off living a new life somewhere.”
I sat, numb, in Natalie’s leather chair.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “She couldn’t have set it all up.” I struggled to get my head around it. “What about that Lake George trip? How could she have known I was going to go there Friday to meet that source?”
Natalie shrugged. “Who knows? And who the hell ran off with Ethan at Five Mountains? Who caused that distraction? How does Leanne Kowalski fit in? No idea. But right now, based on what you’ve told me, the only thing that makes sense is that your wife is behind this. She wanted to get away, and she wanted you to be her cover story. Her patsy. Her fall guy. And she’s done a pretty fantastic job of it, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Why would she do this to me?” I whispered. But there was a bigger question. “Why would she do this to Ethan?”
Natalie crossed her arms and thought about that a moment.
“Maybe,” she said, “because she’s not a very nice person.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
“Something’s wrong,” Jan said.
They were sitting in a Braintree McDonald’s on Pearl Street. Dwayne had ordered two double-sized Big Macs, a chocolate shake, and a large order of fries. Jan had bought only a coffee, and even that she wasn’t touching.
His mouth full, Dwayne said, “What’s wrong?”
“It’s too much.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s too much money.”
Jan could see fries and bun and special sauce when Dwayne said, “If you don’t want your half, I’ll take it off your hands.”
“Why would he offer us so much right away?” she asked.
“Maybe,” Dwayne said, continuing to talk with his mouth full, “he knew the stuff was worth a hell of a lot more and he’s actually cheating us.”
A woman about Jan’s age, with a small boy in tow, sat down two tables over. The boy, maybe four or five years old, perched himself on the chair and swung his legs a good foot above the floor. Jan watched as his mother put a Happy Meal in front of him and unwrapped his cheeseburger. The boy put a single fry into his mouth like he was a sword swallower, leaning back, pointing the fry in slowly.
Jan was just turning to look at Dwayne again when she heard the woman say, “Don’t be silly, Ethan.”
Jan whipped her head to the side. Did she hear that right?
The mother said, “Can you open your milk, Nathan, or do you want me to do it?”
“I can do it,” he said.
“You just worry too much,” Dwayne said. “We’ve been waiting years for this moment and now you’re getting all antsy.”
“I never expected that kind of money,” Jan said quietly. “Come on. The stuff is hot. You’re never going to get retail value for it, you’re not even going to get wholesale. Best you can expect is maybe ten percent, okay, maybe twenty.”
“That’s probably what he was offering us,” Dwayne said. “What we got could be worth way, way more than we can even imagine.?
??
“He didn’t even look at all the diamonds,” she said. “He only looked at a few.”
“He did a random sampling, and he was impressed,” Dwayne said authoritatively, putting his mouth over the end of the straw and sucking hard. “Fuck, these are hard to get up.”
The mother glanced over at Dwayne.
“Watch your language,” Jan said. She looked over and smiled apologetically. The mother was not pleased. Nathan did not appear to have noticed. He was holding his cheeseburger firmly with both hands as he took his first bite.
“Chill out,” Dwayne said. “You think the kid’s never heard that word before?”
“He might not have,” Jan whispered. “If she’s a good mother, watches who he hangs out with, makes sure he doesn’t watch anything bad on TV.”
She thought about how upset David had gotten when his mother allowed Ethan to watch Family Guy. A smile crossed her lips ever so briefly.
“What?” Dwayne asked.
“Nothing,” she said and refocused. “I just don’t like it.”
“Okay,” Dwayne said, actually allowing his mouth to empty before continuing. “What exactly is the downside? So maybe he’s offering us more than you were expecting. What are you worried about? That he’s going to come after us later and ask for some of his money back?”
“No, I don’t think he’s going ask for some of his money back,” she said. “Did you see the photos on his wall?”
Dwayne shook his head. “I didn’t notice.”
Jan thought, There’s a lot you don’t notice.
Dwayne glanced at his watch. “Couple of hours, we go pick up our money. I was thinking, to kill time, we go find some place that sells boats.”
“I want to find a jewelry store,” Jan said.
“What? If you want a diamond, I’m sure you could keep one of the ones we’ve got. There’s so fucking many, Banny Boy won’t even notice if he’s one short.”
The woman shot Dwayne another look. He returned it, and said, in an exaggerated fashion, “Sorry.”
“I don’t want to buy something,” Jan said. “I want a second opinion.”
The woman was gathering up her son’s lunch onto the tray and moving them to another table on the other side of the restaurant.
Dwayne, shaking his head, said to Jan, “You know, if you don’t allow your kids to be exposed to certain things, they’re not going to grow up ready to face the world.”
“This is a dumb idea,” Dwayne said as they sat in the truck out front of Ross Jewelers, a storefront operation with black iron bars over the windows and door.
“I want someone else to have a look at them,” Jan said. “If this guy in here looks at a few and says they’re worth such and such, then I’ll know what we’re being offered isn’t out of whack.”
“And if we find out they’re worth even more, when we go back we’ll just have to renegotiate,” Dwayne said. “We’ll tell him the price has gone up.”
Jan still had the bag of diamonds in her purse.
“Don’t you go thinking about sneaking out a back door,” Dwayne said. “Half those diamonds are mine.”
“Why would I run off with them now when someone has promised to give us six mil for them?”
“Did I tell you that was my lucky number?”
Only for about the hundredth time.
Jan got out of the truck, opened the outer door of the jewelry store, and stepped into a small alcove. There was a second door that was locked. Through the iron bars and glass, Jan could see into the store, but not get in. There was a woman in her fifties or sixties, well dressed with a hairdo that appeared to have been pumped up with air, behind the counter. She pressed a button and suddenly her voice filled the alcove.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“Yes,” said Jan. “I need a quick appraisal.”
There was a loud buzz, Jan’s cue to pull on the door handle. Once inside, she approached the counter.
“What were you looking to have appraised?” the woman asked politely.
Jan set her open purse on the counter and discreetly picked half a dozen diamonds from the bag inside. She held them in her hand for the woman to examine.
“I was wondering if you could give me a kind of ballpark idea what these might be worth. Do you have someone who can do that?”
“I do that,” the woman said. “Is this for insurance purposes? Because the way it usually works is, you leave these with me, I’ll give you a receipt for them, and when you come back in a week I can give you a certificate of appraisal—”
“I don’t need anything like that. I just need you to give them a quick look and tell me what you think.”
“I see,” the woman said. “All right, then. Let’s see what you have.”
On the glass counter was a desktop calendar pad, about one and a half by two feet, a grid of narrow black rules and numbers on a white background. The woman reached for jeweler’s eyepiece, adjusted a counter lamp so it was pointing down onto the calendar, then asked Jan to put the diamonds in her hand onto the lit surface.
The woman leaned over, studied the diamonds, picked a couple of them up with a long tweezerlike implement to get a closer look.
“What do you think?” Jan asked.
“Let me just get a look at all of them,” she said. One by one, she studied each of the six stones. She never said a word or made a sound the entire time.
When she was done, she said, “Where did you get these?”
“They’re in the family,” Jan said. “They’ve been passed down to me.”
“I see. It sounded as though you had more of them in your purse there.”
“A couple more,” Jan said. “But they’re all pretty much the same.”
“Yes, they are,” the woman said.
“So what do you think? I mean, just a rough estimate, what would you say they were worth? Individually, that is.”
The woman sighed. “Let me show you something.”
She set one of the diamonds on its flattest side directly on one of the black rules on the calendar. “Look at the stone directly from above.” Jan leaned over and did as she was told. “Can you see the line through the stone?”
Jan nodded. “Yes, I can.”
The woman turned and took something from a slender drawer in a cabinet along the wall. She had in her hand a single diamond. She straddled it on the black line beside Jan’s stone. The two diamonds looked identical.
“Now,” the woman said, “see if you can see the line through this stone.”
Jan leaned over a second time. “I can’t make it out,” she said. “I can’t see the line.”
“That’s because diamonds reflect and refract light unlike any other stone or substance. The light’s being bounced in so many directions in there, you can’t see through it.”
Jan felt a growing sense of unease.
“What are you saying?” Jan asked. “That my diamonds are of an inferior quality?”
“No,” the woman said. “I’m not saying that. What you have here is not a diamond.”
“That’s not true,” Jan said. “It is a diamond. Look at it. It looks exactly like yours.”
“Perhaps to you. But what you have here is cubic zirconium. It’s a man-made substance, and it does look very much like diamond, no question. They even use it for advertisements in the diamond trade magazines.” To prove it, she reached for one sitting atop the cabinet and turned through the pages. Each one was filled with dazzling photos of diamonds. “That’s fake, that’s fake. This one, too. The security costs for photo shoots would be astronomical if they used real diamonds for everything.”
Jan wasn’t hearing any of this. She hadn’t taken in anything after the woman said what she had were not diamonds.
“It’s not possible,” she said under her breath.
“Yes, well, I suppose it must be a bit of a shock if your family’s been leading you to believe these are real diamonds.”
“So this stone,” Jan
said, pointing to the real diamond and thinking ahead, “wouldn’t break if I hit it with a hammer, but mine would.”
“Actually, they both would,” the woman said. “Diamonds can chip, too.”
“But my diamonds, my cubic …”
“Cubic zirconium.”
“They must be worth something,” Jan said, unable to hide the desperation in her voice.
“Of course,” the woman said. “Perhaps fifty cents each?”
THIRTY-NINE
Barry Duckworth pulled his car over to the shoulder. Fifty yards ahead, police cars were parked on either side of this two-lane stretch of blacktop northwest of Albany. The road had been built along the side of a heavily wooded hill. The ground sloped down from the left, then, just beyond the shoulder where Duckworth had parked, it dropped off steeply into more forest.
That was where a passing cyclist had noticed something. An SUV.
When the first rescue team had shown up, ropes were used to get down to the vehicle safely. The rescue team members knew it was going to be tricky, moving an injured person back up the hill to the ambulance, but it turned out that wasn’t going to be a problem.
There was no one in the Ford Explorer, and nothing to indicate that an occupant had been injured inside it. No blood, no matted hair on the cracked windshield.
A check of the plates showed that the Explorer belonged to Lyall Kowalski, of Promise Falls. Soon the locals learned that the wife of the man who was the registered owner of the vehicle was missing. And that was when someone put in a call to Barry Duckworth.
The night before, about twelve hours before getting the call about the SUV, Duckworth had paid a visit to the Kowalski home to tell Lyall that his wife, Leanne, had been found in a shallow grave near Lake George.
The man wailed and banged his head against the wall until it was raw and bloody, and then his dog began to howl.
Duckworth didn’t get in touch with the man when he heard about the car being found. He decided to take a drive down, see it for himself, and learn what he could before informing him of the development.