The Winner, page 26
Rational, responsible adults didn’t murder randomly. They almost always have a motive, and the police had hinged whatever case they appeared to be building against Conor on the inheritance as the primary motive. That was now gone.
“Did you ever visit Catherine again?” Sousa asked. “After those first few weeks?”
“Emily and I had a drink with her once, when I went to her house to get money for a lesson and Emily happened to be outside at the same time,” he said.
“That’s it?”
“That’s all I can think of.”
“Did you see her during the daytime on Monday, August twenty-fourth?”
If they were asking, it was because they knew he’d been there. But he’d been very careful to turn his phone off each time he’d gone to Catherine’s house after the murder, to ensure that Emily didn’t call or text while he was there.
Except that day he’d ordered groceries and had called Emily, from his phone, asking her to go to the drugstore for him. He’d left his phone on the entire time he was waiting for her to leave, to make sure she didn’t reach out with a change of plans.
“I did go one day, I can’t remember when,” he said. “It could’ve been then.”
“Why’d you go?”
He’d arrived there in the late morning; a casual drinks invitation was implausible. He needed a more significant excuse for why he’d been at his tennis client’s house than a mundane social visit.
“She’d somehow figured out I was dating her daughter,” Conor said. “Once she knew we were together, she wanted to talk to me about something private concerning Emily.”
“What was it?”
He felt guilty for the pain that this would cause Emily—they’d have to share this information with her—but it was the only explanation he could come up with that was exculpatory enough, and the story also planted more seeds of doubt about Catherine’s mental health at the time of her disappearance.
And fuck her parents, both of them. They’d kept Emily in the dark too long. She deserved to know, too.
“She said that she’d been keeping a secret from Emily her whole life, and she wanted my opinion on whether she should tell her. She always struck me as a little unstable, so I can’t be sure if she was telling me the truth, but it seemed like she was.”
He related the few details he knew about Jacob. Neither Clark nor Sousa appeared all that perturbed by it, likely being accustomed to tragic family histories.
“Why’d she tell you this?” Sousa asked. “Why not just tell Emily directly?”
Conor took a deep breath. “Emily was—I think she’ll be okay with me telling you this—she was involuntarily committed to a mental health center her senior year of college, with a nervous breakdown. And she checked herself back in in the spring. She kept the second stay secret from her parents, but her mom told me she found out about it from her accountant. She was concerned the breakdowns were somehow the result of what had happened to her brother—she said because Emily was never allowed to process it—and she wanted to know if I thought Emily was emotionally strong enough to handle hearing about it now.”
“Who else knows about her brother that could corroborate it?” Sousa asked.
“I imagine the adults on Cutters knew about it but kept it under wraps all these years, so you could ask them. Or Emily’s dad, of course.”
“And Emily has no idea about it? Her brother died when she was three, all these people around her knew, and she never found out or remembered him?”
“She’s never mentioned it to me, and she tells me everything. So either it isn’t true—and the way her mom was talking about it, I don’t think that’s the case—or she really did wipe out the memory.”
Clark and Sousa glanced at each other. They were dubious, just as Conor had been.
“If you have to ask her, I hope you’ll handle it with as much sensitivity as possible,” Conor said. “Learning she had a brother who died, and that everyone hid it from her, will be very traumatic for her, and she was just starting to get back on her feet again before all this happened.”
“Understood.” Clark took a paper out of a folder and pushed it toward Conor. “I think that’s all we have for now. Before you go, would you mind signing this consent-to-search form?”
“Consent to search wh—” Conor’s lips moved wordlessly behind his mask with a loud insuck of air. “—ut?”
The eyes of both detectives registered his stammer. He couldn’t let it happen again. No verbal tic was a clearer sign of guilt, and his issue didn’t even sound like a normal stutter.
“Your cabin,” Clark said.
They had declined an informal search on their visit to the neck, when they’d had no reason to suspect him. This wouldn’t be the two of them poking around; it meant a full crime scene search. If he refused, they’d be able to secure a warrant, and it would only make him look evasive. A request for a lawyer at this point would also be damning.
“Sure,” he said. “I’m staying there for free, if you need the owner’s signature, too.”
Clark nodded and waited for Conor to sign the form. “We’d also like to fingerprint you, to rule out your prints,” he said. “And do a quick cheek swab.”
They’d seen he hadn’t drunk from his soda, and he couldn’t reasonably fend off the DNA test any longer. He gave his consent.
After they returned his phone, they fingerprinted him and swabbed the inside of his cheek, his second such swab within a few months: the first at the beginning of his affair with Catherine; this one marking, with forensic precision, its termination.
Chapter 32
How’d it go?” he asked Emily in the car when she emerged from the station a solid hour later. She shrugged. Judging from her neutral face, it was obvious they hadn’t asked yet about her brother.
“It sounds like they’re going to search my cabin,” he said. “As a precaution.”
“My cottage, too. And they’re getting a warrant to search my mom’s house.”
“Good,” Conor said. “They’re doing their job.”
They didn’t speak as he drove over the drawbridge out of the village and back to Cutters. Maybe he hadn’t gone far enough by just covering and mixing the blood. He didn’t know how accurate the analysis would be—whether they took just a few small samples and catching her three drops would be like finding a needle in a haystack, or if they were somehow able to survey the entirety of the bloodstain—and he’d been afraid to research it on the internet and leave behind a trail. It was too late to buy sandpaper, and he’d rejected that idea for a reason, anyway.
If they were going to get him, it would be from this. At least dried semen from over two months ago was hard to see. Bloodstains were impossible to overlook.
As they entered the gate to Cutters, she asked, “Did you give my mom tennis lessons? Beyond that one time?”
“Yeah,” he said. “We started before you and I met. Sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“When I realized you were her daughter, I thought it might be weird if you knew I was giving her lessons. Like maybe you’d stop me or her from doing it, and I needed the money badly. And she also asked me not to tell you. I don’t know why.”
“And you came to her house? For drinks?”
“Only before I met you. Once we were together, I stopped.”
“Why’d you go in the first place?”
“It’s common to get a drink with someone you give a lesson to,” he said. “I used to do it all the time with students in New York.”
“But at nine, ten at night?”
“I can’t study after I’ve had a drink, so I agreed to come over after I finished work for the day,” he said. “She seemed like a lonely, kind of sad woman. I thought if my mom was in the same position, I’d want someone to visit her.”
“And then you saw her after the Beresfords’ party?”
“Yes,” he said. “Not right after. A few days later.”
“So you were the last person to see her here?”
“I don’t know. Maybe someone else saw her, too, and they just don’t realize when it was.”
“Why’d you visit her then? It was in the morning—it couldn’t have been after a lesson.”
“She’d figured out we were together, probably from when we all had cocktails together that time. She wanted to talk about all of that.”
“All of what?”
“I don’t know.” He didn’t want to be the one to tell her about Jacob if he could avoid it. “Just . . . stuff. You said she never met any of the guys you were with at Bard, so maybe she was just curious.”
“Well, that’s really fucking weird,” she said. “Conor—Jesus. Why didn’t you say you were the last person who saw her?”
“I had no idea what date I came over, or that I was the last person. The days all blur into each other here. The police told me just now myself.”
“My mother disappears off the face of the earth, and you don’t remember that you saw her just a few days before, at her house?”
“You know what?” he said as he parked by her cottage. “I’ve got a lot on my mind these days. I’ve got a mom with diabetes who could die any day if she breathes in the wrong air. I’m studying for the bar exam and applying to jobs every free minute of the day so I can buy her insulin to keep her alive and pay off a hundred and forty-four grand in loans, plus my dead dad’s credit card debt. Sorry if I don’t remember the exact date of every social call I make.”
“The police think it’s weird, too,” she said.
“Jesus fucking Christ, Em,” he said, banging the steering wheel. “You do understand what they’re doing, right? We learned about this in law school. When these small-town cops don’t have any real leads, they need to pin the blame on someone so they’re not accused of incompetence or negligence. So I guess they’re going after me. What a coincidence, that they’d pick the one person on Cutters who’s not from here and doesn’t come from money and therefore looks the part of a criminal. And, as a bonus, who wouldn’t be able to pay for a good lawyer if they charged him. I’m really glad to learn you’re siding with them. You, of all people, who says the criminal justice system is corrupt.”
“I’m not siding with them. I’m only saying they thought it was—”
“And by the way, when they were talking to me, they were making all sorts of nasty allegations about you.”
“What?”
“They were suggesting you were after your mom’s money. Trying to get your inheritance early.”
She looked horrified. “What’d you tell them?”
“I got pissed off and told them you’d never do anything like that in a million years. So either they think you have something to do with this on your own, or we’re in cahoots and they were hoping I’d slip up covering for you or sell you out. And apparently they were doing the same thing when they talked to you. It’s a classic interrogation technique. Split up the suspects and use the prisoner’s dilemma to get them to turn on each other, even when they’re both innocent. But the difference between you and me is that I defend you.”
Emily looked at her lap. He’d never come close to expressing this level of anger at her. He let her silence linger for a while, though he was feeling the same self-loathing she must have been. But he’d had no choice. If Emily told the detectives that she, too, suspected him and pointed to moments that suggested guilt or a motive, it wouldn’t matter to a jury how well he’d covered it up—a fiancée’s accusations held too much water.
“This is just like Lawrence Newcomb blaming the burglary on me when it was his own entitled, fuck-up son,” he said. “I thought you were different.”
“I am different,” she said. “I’m different, Conor. I’m sorry. You’re right. I’m out of my mind now and I’m not thinking straight. I didn’t know police really do that. Can you forgive me for this? Please?”
He brooded through the windshield at the ocean in the distance, chewing his thumb. “It makes me think you don’t know me at all.”
“Please, Conor.” She touched his forearm, over the bandage hidden by his sleeve. “I’m so sorry.”
After a drawn-out moment, he nodded grudgingly.
“Should you get a lawyer?” she asked. “Or should we get one together? If they’re trying to blame us?”
“Of course not,” he said. “We have nothing to hide, and we want to cooperate and do everything we can to help find your mom. I think they’re just throwing everything at the wall right now to see what sticks. Even crazy ideas.”
Emily nodded. But after another silence, she asked, “What exactly did my mom want to talk about with you? The last time you saw her?”
He’d been evasive on the subject too many times. And the detectives would ask her about it soon enough, once her father confirmed it; it was better for her if she heard it from him.
He still didn’t want to have this conversation.
EMILY HAD CRIED SEVERAL TIMES THAT WEEK OVER HER MOTHER’S DISAPPEARANCE. But, aside from the expected shock and disbelief, she was otherwise strangely composed as Conor, still in the parked Prius, repeated what he’d told the detectives about her infant brother. When he was done, they sat in silence for a few minutes.
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?” she finally asked.
“She made me swear not to say anything,” he said. “Since she told me, I assumed she was going to tell you soon.”
“But if not, you were just going to keep it to yourself forever? We’re married and live to a hundred, you still wouldn’t tell me?”
“It was a heavy thing to learn about, and I didn’t know what to do. And after she—I would’ve said something eventually. I’m sorry.”
“I’m gonna go for a walk,” Emily said. She left the car, and he waited inside the cottage for her.
She could have easily gone the rest of her days without being aware of this, if he hadn’t needed an excuse for the detectives. There was no benefit to knowing a torturous truth when you could be living a painless lie in ignorance. He’d not only killed her mother but now he’d also, in a sense, killed her brother.
Emily returned after an hour, reeking of cigarettes. She didn’t look as though she’d been crying. When she went to the kitchen sink, Conor followed.
“Maybe I shouldn’t’ve told you,” he said as she scrubbed her hands. “It wasn’t mine to know, and it wasn’t my place to say.”
She rinsed.
“I wish I hadn’t gone to her house that day.” He could feel the radiant heat from the sink. “I wish I’d never—I wish none of this had—”
Her hands were turning lobster red. He yanked them away from the scorching water. They were limp and burning in his grip. He ran the cold tap over them.
The dam finally broke in her. Unlike the times her and Catherine’s crying had had an aphrodisiac effect on him, this was only painful to watch.
“I’m sorry, Em,” he said as he held her and stroked her head. “I’m sorry this is all happening at once. But she’ll turn up. And you can talk about all this with her then, too.”
BY NOW THE ENTIRE NECK HAD BEEN INFORMED OF THE INVESTIGATION into Catherine’s disappearance, though they’d been asked to keep it quiet and not speak to the media. The detectives had interviewed Emily’s father over the phone, and his alibi was unassailable: he’d been on his yacht with his family for the past three weeks in the Caribbean.
The next day, a crime scene team conducted a search of Catherine’s house, Emily’s cottage, and, with John Price’s sign-off, Conor’s cabin. Emily and Conor were ordered to remain off the premises during the investigation, which would take most of the day.
They set up camp at the yacht club. Conor attempted to prepare for his interview but was too anxious about what was happening out of sight.
In the late afternoon, the detectives summoned Conor and Emily to meet them in Catherine’s driveway.
“Did you find anything?” Emily asked.
“We have to wait for the labs to process any samples,” Clark said. “You’re free to return to your house here. We’re sealing up your mother’s house for now and also Conor’s cabin. If you need anything from there, you should tell us now so we can get it for you.”
“You’re sealing up his cabin?” Emily asked, glancing over at Conor. “Why?”
He should have scuffed the floor with sandpaper. Calling attention to the spot was preferable to the alternative. They were going to process the samples, identify Catherine’s DNA beneath his, and arrest him.
“Just standard procedure,” Clark told her.
FORCED TO DEAL WITH A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT AND GRUELING assignment—seven hours of Zoom interviews with John’s firm—Conor managed to shift gears and acquitted himself well. He capably handled the generic softballs and did even better answering concrete queries about his internship experience.
But each new person concluded by asking him why their firm made sense for him, and, having come up with no more original answers in his preparation, he reverted to the same stodgy, jargon-clotted response he’d employed in the first round. After citing two of the firm’s recent litigation cases that suited his skills and interests, he said, “I’m also drawn to the altruistic values you embody, as demonstrated by your lawyers’ average of over eighty hours of pro bono work per year, and its culture of inclusivity.” In his final interview, the two senior-most partners, even more patrician-looking than John, appeared as uninspired as all his other interlocutors.
