Archer Mayor - Fruits of the Poisonous Tree

She rose and greeted me warmly. “I hear you have a problem.”

The three of us sat in a tight circle of chairs, like conspirators sorting through details. This was the one aspect of our revitalized investigation that I most wanted kept under wraps. Given the bumbling image of us that was about to appear in the headlines, I didn’t want Goss’s services misconstrued-or even identified. But if my hunch was right, her special knowledge of the criminal mind was going to be of enormous assistance.

“Have you been following the case?” I asked her.

She nodded. “Yes. And I’ve been working with Susan Raffner in dealing with some of the emotional fallout. An assault of this nature never has just one victim.”

“We’re now thinking Bob Vogel was framed by someone who copied his MO.”

She raised her eyebrows but otherwise remained silent.

“Would you be willing to review this case from the ground up-to visit the crime scene, study Vogel’s style, interview Gail, look at everything we’ve got-to see what we might have missed?”

Goss sat back in her chair, tapping her lips with the index finger of her right hand. “Yes. But I want to concentrate first on the actual crime. I don’t want to see any evidence or any suspect profiles-not yet. If that is how you were led astray, it might be helpful for me to avoid it.”

I couldn’t repress a grin. “Great. When can you start?”

“The crime took place in the middle of the night, correct?”

“Right.”

“Then perhaps we should begin immediately. Can you take me to the scene now?”

The odors that had once given Gail’s house life-the smell of fresh food, live plants, clean laundry, and myriad others that arose from her daily routine-had been replaced by a deadened staleness. It reminded me of visits to the homes of the very old, whose tenuous grasp on life saturated the walls around them.

Without a word, I led the way up the familiar set of stairs to the lofty bedroom high overhead, noticing as I went the dead plants, their leaves gray with a fine coat of dust.

I reached for the light switch.

“No. Wait,” Megan said quietly, placing her small hand on mine. She stood in the doorway, looking into the darkness ahead of her. “Can we turn off the downstairs lights from here?”

“Sure.” I reached back onto the landing and plunged the entire house into obscurity.

“Thank you.”

We stood there for a minute or two, motionless, before she added, “Does she always leave the drapes open?”

Thinking back, I stared at the disheveled bed, dimly glowing in the indirect moonlight, remembering how we’d enjoyed chatting side by side, gazing up at the night sky. “Damn,” I muttered, “the moon was directly overhead that night.”

Megan kept her voice very still, as quiet as ours had been on those evenings. “A full moon?”

I furrowed my brow, berating myself for having missed the obvious: “No, not quite, but it was much brighter in here.”

I saw her nod thoughtfully in the near gloom. “That’s quite the clock.”

Surprised, I looked across the bed to where the radio alarm’s large glowing numbers were still counting off the minutes on the night table, to the right of the headboard. The clock was the most prominent feature of the room in the half light, apart from the large, pale expanse of the bed. I was beginning to see things the way Megan was-the way Gail’s attacker had. It made me grateful we hadn’t waited twenty-four hours to do this, when the weather report was calling for a freak, premature snowstorm straight out of the Canadian north.

“When you two were together, did Gail sleep on the right or the left side?”

“The right. The side nearest the clock.”

Megan stepped farther into the room, her eyes fully adjusted to the gloom. She stopped at the foot of the bed. A small shiver went down my spine while I imagined the attack just a few weeks earlier, coming as Gail slept peacefully.

Megan moved silently to the night table on the far side of the bed. She picked up the radio alarm clock and balanced it in her hand. She then replaced it and took one last long look around the room. “All right. You may turn on the lights now.”

What leapt up around us was a blinding, chaotic contrast to the sinister, half-seen mystery of seconds earlier. Now it was the crime scene I knew all too well, where one life had ended, and from where a new one would have to be rebuilt.

And yet Megan Goss altered it, even now. She didn’t proceed with Tyler’s scientific detachment, with cameras and tweezers and small white evidence envelopes. Instead, she hovered, paused in thought, only rarely touched something, and that usually with just the tip of one finger, as if checking for signs of latent energy.

As she proceeded, she had me read aloud from Gail’s statement, made on the morning following the rape. When Gail told of being assaulted, Megan moved to the foot of the bed, staring at it throughout that part of the transcript; when I read of the rapist’s rampages around the room, Megan mimicked his movements, pausing before the shards of the broken plate that used to hang on the wall, and running her fingertip across the dusty surface of the expensive, uninjured television set.

Two hours later we were both back at the door, as I read of Gail listening to her attacker putting his clothes back on before leaving the house.

I finally stopped and waited. Megan stood silently, peering into the room, lost in thought. At last, she turned to me. “She didn’t smell him?”

I stared at her in astonished embarrassment, remembering Vogel’s rank breath in my face, just before he stabbed me. “I… It didn’t come up.”

“Odd, don’t you think?” Her smile was kind, conspiratorial, as if together we’d opened the last lock of an intricately closed box.

Susan Raffner's voice was fogged by sleep. “Hello?”

“It’s Joe Gunther. I’m sorry to be calling in the middle of the night, but I need to talk to Gail-and to you, too.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Is she there?”

Gail’s voice, clear and wide awake, came on over an extension. “I’m here.”

“Can I come over?”

“Yes.”

The porch light was on at Susan’s house, and the front door swung back as I reached the top of the porch steps. Susan, her hair tangled, her dressing gown awry, her eyes still at half-mast, stepped back to let me in. “In the kitchen,” was all she said.

I knew where to go, down the dark hallway next to the staircase and through a swinging door at the rear. I’d been in the house before-aside from my recent visits-for the occasional politically correct cocktail party, where people like Tony and me usually killed time together, nursing fruit juice from paper cups, our backs to the wall.

The kitchen suited the house-painted wood trim, mottled linoleum, steel-tube furniture from thirty years earlier. It made me feel instantly more at ease. Gail was standing at the stove, her back to the door, fiddling with a tea kettle.

“Hi.” She turned and smiled but stayed put, indicating the reserve remaining from our last encounter.

“How’ve you been?”

“Better,” she answered. “Thanks.”

Susan came up behind me and cut straight to the point. “I was fine, too, until 2:45 a.m. What do you want? And what the hell happened in court yesterday? Or is that privileged?”

Even Gail gave her a weary look. “Sit, Susan. Give him a chance.”

I smiled at the strength in her voice-the underlying sense of humor. She was improving. I could see it for myself.

I pulled out a chair at the small breakfast table and sat down. “Between these walls, nothing is privileged. What happened yesterday is that the shit hit the fan. Tomorrow, unless Tom Kelly has lost his mind, he’s going to move for a mistrial-and get it.”