Philip Margolin - Gone ,but not forgotten

"And Oberhurst returned to Portland and what?" Stewart said.

"Blackmailed a serial killer? You'd have to be nuts."

"who's the John Doe, Reg?"

The line was quiet for a moment, then Stewart said,

"oh, shit."

"Exactly. We know Oberhurst lied to Lisa. He told her he hadn't started investigating the Hunter's Point case, but he was in Hunter's Point. And he's disappeared.

I talked to every lawyer I could find who's employed him.

No contact. He doesn't return calls. The John Doe is Oberhurst's size and build. What do you want to bet the corpse has a broken nose?"

"No bets. What are you going to do?"

"There's nothing we can do. Darius is our client. We're his agents.

This is all confidential."

"Even if he killed the guy?"

"Even if he killed the guy."

Betsy heard a sharp intake of air, then Stewart said:

"You're the boss. What do you want me to do next?"

"Have you tried to set up a meeting with Wayne Turner?"

"No go. His secretary says he's too busy, because of the confirmation hearings."

"Damn. Gordon, Turner, Grimsbo. They all know something. What about the police chief? What was his name?"

"O'Malley. Lenzer says he retired to Florida about nine years ago.,

"Okay," Betsy said with a trace of desperation.

"Keep trying to find Samantha Reardon. She's our best bet."

"I'll do it for you, Betsy. If it was someone else… I gotta tell you, I usually don't give a fuck, but I'm starting to. I don't like this case."

"That makes two of us. I just don't know what to do about it. We're not even certain I'm right. I have to find that out, first."

"If you are, what then?"

"I have no idea."

Betsy put Kathy to sleep at nine and changed into a flannel nightgown.

After brewing a pot of coffee, Betsy spread out the papers in Friday's divorce case on the dining room table. The coffee was waking her up, but her mind wandered to the Darius case. Was Darius guilty?

Betsy could Dot stop thinking about the question she had put to Alan Page during her cross-examination: With six victims, including a six-year-old girl, why would the mayor and chief of police of Hunter's Point close the case if there was any possibility that Peter Lake, or anyone else, was really the murderers It made no sense.

Betsy pushed aside the documents in the divorce and pulled a yellow pad in front of her. She listed what she knew about the Darius case. The list stretched for three pages. Betsy came to the information she had learned from Stewart that afternoon. A thought occurred to her. She frowned.

Betsy knew Samuel Oberhurst was not above blackmail. He'd tried it on Gary Telford. If Martin Darius was the rose killer, Darius would have no compunction about killing Oberhurst if the investigator tried to blackmail him. But Betsy's assumption that John Doe was Samuel Oberhurst made sense only if Samantha Reardon identified Martin Darius as the rose killer. And that's where the difficulty lay. The police would have questioned Reardon when they rescued her. If the task force suspected that Peter Lake, not Henry Waters, was the kidnapper, they would have shown Reardon a photograph of Lake. If she identified Lake as her kidnapper, why would the mayor and the police chief announce that Waters was the killer?

Why would the case be closed?

Dr. Escalante said that Reardon was institutionalized. Maybe 'she couldn't be interviewed immediately.

But she would have been interviewed at some point.

Grimsbo told Reggie that Nancy Gordon was obsessed with the case and never believed Waters was the killer. So, Betsy thought, let's assume that Reardon did identify Lake as the killer at some point. Why wouldn't Gordon, or someone, have reopened the case?

Maybe Reardon wasn't asked until Oberhurst talked to her. But wouldn't she have read about Henry Waters and known the police had accused the wrong man? She could have been so traumatized that she wanted to forget everything that happened to her, even if it meant letting Lake go free.

But if that was true, why tell Oberhurst that Lake was her kidnapper?

Betsy sighed. She was missing something. She stood up and carried her coffee cup into the living room. The Sunday New York Times was sitting in a wicker basket next to her favorite chair. She sat down and decided to look through it. Sometimes the best way to figure out a problem was to forget about it for a while. She had read the Book Review, the Magazine and the Arts section, but she still hadn't read the Week in Review.

Betsy skimmed an article about the fighting in the Ukraine and another about the resumption of hostilities between North and South Korea. Death was everywhere.

Betsy turned the page and started reading a profile of Raymond Colby.

Betsy knew Colby would would be confirmed and it upset her. There was no more diversity of Opinion on the Court. Wealthy white males with identical backgrounds and identical thoughts dominated it. Men with no concept of what it was like to be poor or helpless, who had been nominated by Republican Presidents for no reason other than their willingness to put the interests of the wealthy and big government ahead of individual rights. Colby was no different. Harvard Law, c.e.o. of Marlin Steel, governor of New York, then a member of the United States Senate for the last nine years. Betsy read a summary of Colby's accomplishments as a governor and senator and a prediction of the way he would vote on several cases that were before the Supreme Court, then skimmed another article about the economy.

When she was finished with the paper, she went back to the dining room.

The divorce case was a mess. Betsy's client and her husband didn't have children and they had agreed to split almost all of their property, but they were willing to go to the mat over a cheap landscape they had bought from a sidewalk artist in Paris on their honeymoon. Going to court over the silly painting was costing them both ten times its value, but they were adamant. it was not the painting that was fueling their rage. It was a case like this that made Betsy want to enter a nunnery. But, she sighed to herself, it was also cases like this that paid her overhead. She started reading the divorce petition, then remembered something she had read in the article about Raymond Colby.

Betsy put the petition down. The idea had come so fast that it made her a little dizzy. She walked back to the living room and reread Colby's biography. There it was.

He had been a United States senator for nine years.

Hunter's Point Chief of Police John O'Malley retired to Florida nine years ago. Frank Grimsbo had been with Marlin Steel, Colby's old company, for nine years. And Wayne Turner was the senator's administrative assistant.

The heat was on in the house, but Betsy felt like she was hugging a block of ice. She went back to the dining room and reread her list of important facts in the Darius case. It was all there. You just had to look at the facts in a certain way and it made perfect sense. Martin Darius was the rose killer. The Hunter's Point police knew that when they announced that Henry Waters was the murderer and closed the case.

Now Betsy knew how Peter Lake could walk away from Hunter's Point with the blood of all those innocent people on his hands. What she could not imagine was why the governor of New York State would conspire with the police force and mayor of Hunter's Point to set free a mass murderer.

The sun was shining, but the temperature was a little below freezing.

Betsy hung up her overcoat. Her cheeks hurt from the cold. She rubbed her hands together and asked Ann to bring her a cup of coffee. By the time Ann set a steaming mug on her coaster, Betsy was dialing Washington, D.C.

"Senator Colby's office."