John Lutz - The Ex

She saw him in the corner of her vision and spoke to him. “They said-”

She and David both heard a slight noise and turned toward the door.

It was wide open, and Craig Chumley was standing in the doorway. His gray suit was wrinkled, his tie was loosely knotted, and there were perspiration stains on his pale blue shirt. He entered the apartment as if lost in a dream, glancing at the damaged door.

“What’s going on here?” he asked. He was obviously confused and afraid.

“What are you doing here?” David asked before Molly could speak.

“I don’t see where it’s any-”

“Where are they?” Molly interrupted. Her rage erupted and she flung herself at Chumley, clutching his shirt with both hands. “Tell me!”

She lost her reason entirely, her place in time, as she tried to shake Chumley, to throw him to the floor, to kill him with the raw anger that devoured her senses.

Stunned, Chumley spun in a wild dance, giving in to Molly’s efforts rather than fight her.

Finally she felt David’s hands on her shoulders, pulling her away. Chumley gripped her wrists, not as hard as he might have, and gradually forced her arms back so she lost her grip on his shirt. The expression on his face was strangely kind as well as stricken.

She was in control of herself again, but breathing as if she’d run for miles.

“Calm down, Mol,” David was saying. He was up against her back now, his body turned sideways, one arm lowered to encircle her waist. He took a few unsteady backward steps, dragging Molly with him.

David hugged her hard. “Easy, easy…” She could feel his breath in her ear.

She willed her body to relax. His grip on her midsection seemed to loosen. Or was it simply that she’d stopped struggling?

“Gonna be okay?” David asked.

“Yeah. If you can call it that.” She was breathing easier. Her throat was raw. Her display of violence had achieved nothing; everything was the same, even the weight of her fear in her stomach.

“Deirdre’s taken Michael,” David said to the florid and flustered Chumley.

“Your son?” Chumley put his hand to his forehead as if he’d just been assailed by a terrific headache. “Oh, Lord!”

“What’s your story, Chumley?” David asked. “The police are on their way here, and you’ll be telling them soon enough.”

Chumley moved his fingertips around to his right temple and bowed his head. His brow creased. Molly saw that his scalp was mottled beneath his thinning hair.

“I’m married,” he said. “Have been for sixteen years. Deirdre made me forget that. Then, while she didn’t actually threaten me, during the last few days she made it clear…if I didn’t keep her on as an employee as well as a lover, my wife, Shirley, might find out about us.” He glanced up for only a second. “Lately, we haven’t been getting along.”

“You and your wife?” Molly asked.

“Me and everybody,” Chumley said despondently. “Friday evening, after Deirdre had gone home, a man named Stan Grocci showed up at my office. He was abusive, desperate. And he was searching for Deirdre.”

“That’s her former husband,” David said.

“He said he was still her husband. He also said she was diagnosed as psychotic and dangerous after attacking and injuring a sales clerk with one of those spikes used to spear receipts. Later, she escaped from a psychiatric hospital in Missouri.” He looked at Molly, then down at the floor again. “He also said there was an arrest warrant out for her in Saint Louis for the murder of a woman named Christine Mathews he became involved with while Deirdre was in the mental institution.”

Molly’s insides turned cold. “Jesus, David! The woman in the clipping! Deirdre must have pushed her from the roof!”

David was looking hard at Chumley. “You talked to Grocci Friday, you said. Have you seen Deirdre since then?”

“All weekend I thought about what Grocci had told me, wondering what I should do. This morning, when Deirdre came in to work, I confronted her with what he’d said.”

“How did she react?”

“She denied it all and told me Grocci was the mental case and his accusations were preposterous. At that point I didn’t really care. I knew I was in something I couldn’t handle, so I fired her.”

“And she went without a fight?” David asked incredulously.

Chumley smiled sadly. “Yeah. That should have alerted me to trouble. But I’d been thinking with my dick for so long…” He glanced apologetically at Molly. “Sorry.”

“Think with your head now,” she snapped.

“I noticed a while back that my files had been disturbed,” Chumley said. “I think she made copies of some papers and took them with her, maybe even had them before I fired her. If she gives them to the wrong people…Well, I’ve been playing a little loose with my taxes. I came here to get the copies back, and to offer Deirdre money so she wouldn’t go to the IRS or to my wife.”

Molly didn’t care about Chumley’s troubles with his wife or the IRS. She didn’t want to hear about them. She only cared about her son.

“Do you have any idea where she might have taken Michael?” she asked.

“No. I really know next to nothing about Deirdre.”

There were noises in the hall. Voices. Footsteps.

Then, in the corridor outside the open door, a startling amount of dark blue. Cautious, emotionless eyes.

The police entered the apartment.

The uniformed officers listened patiently to Molly and David, then one of them made a phone call while the other gave Deirdre’s apartment a cursory examination.

Soon afterward a pair of NYPD plainclothes detectives arrived. The shorter, heavier of the two, a graying man named Salter, with the face of an amiable but combative bulldog, was in charge. His partner, a much younger man named Marrivale, took notes while they listened to Molly and David.

At first Chumley refused to talk before consulting with his attorney, then at Molly’s urging he changed his mind. With an air of doom and resignation, he told the detectives what he’d told Molly and David.

Neither cop showed any reaction to his story.

“Has anybody got a photograph of this Deirdre?” Salter asked. He had a rough, heavy smoker’s voice. Three cellophane-clad cigars jutted from the breast pocket of his gray suit coat.

“Not even an old one,” David said, glancing at Molly.

Salter looked at Chumley, who shook his head no. “Like I said, she’s really not much more than a stranger to me-in a way.”

The young detective, who had the wan, wasted look of an esthete, stared at Chumley until Chumley looked away.

“What about a photo of the boy?” Salter asked.

“I have several,” Molly said. “They’re downstairs in our apartment, if they haven’t been destroyed.”

“Let’s go,” Salter said. “It’s time we looked at the destruction down there.”

He accompanied them downstairs while Marrivale stayed behind and continued questioning Chumley.

In the elevator, Salter said nothing. Molly saw him glancing out of the corner of his eye at David, as if he were suspicious of him. She’d read that the police always suspected the parents first in the disappearance of a child. But this was different. They knew who’d taken Michael. A psychopath who’d left a taunting message on the parents’ answering machine.

When they entered the apartment, Salter cautioned them not to touch anything. “The place will be dusted for prints,” he said. “We want to know who’s been here recently and handled whatever was vandalized.”

Molly knew that made sense, but she felt somehow violated again, being unable even to touch her possessions in her own apartment. She and David stood near the center of the room with their arms at their sides, looking like awkward trespassers in their home.