Linwood Barclay - Broken Promise - A Thriller

“Sarita, what are you talking about?”

“It’s all my fault,” she said, and started to cry. “If that’s what happened, it’s all my fault. I should have kept quiet. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

We were heading north out of Promise Falls. With lighter traffic, it was easier to concentrate on what Sarita was saying. Although I was having a hard time figuring out what she was talking about.

“Said anything about what?”

“I knew about Marla,” she said. “I knew about your cousin. I knew what had happened at the hospital.”

“About her trying to take a baby?”

Sarita nodded. “I have friends who work at the hospital who also work at Davidson, and everyone was talking about the girl who tried to steal a baby. That she was out of her head because her own baby had died a few months earlier. And I heard that it was Dr. Sturgess who was the crazy lady’s doctor.”

“You know Dr. Sturgess,” I said.

Sarita nodded. “He is the Gaynors’ doctor. And he and Mr. Gaynor are old friends, from a long time ago.”

I glanced in my mirror. There was a car there, a black sedan that looked a lot like a car I’d seen in my mirror a few minutes ago. It did not look like a police car.

“They talk a lot,” Sarita said.

“What do you mean?”

“The doctor would come over, and they would go into Mr. Gaynor’s office. He has an office in the home. They would close the door and they would talk many times.”

“About what?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I hear bits and pieces. Usually about money. I think Mr. Gaynor had a problem. And maybe the doctor, too.”

“What kind of problem?”

“Gambling, I think. They both had troubles like that. Ms. Gaynor, sometimes she would talk to me, tell me her husband made good money working for the insurance company, but there were times when they still had money problems because Mr. Gaynor liked to bet on things. Dr. Sturgess, too. He was way worse.”

While I believed some of what Sarita was telling me, I felt she was holding back. I couldn’t help but think she was more involved in this than she was letting on. I kept coming back to my earlier theory.

That Marla’d been set up.

Maybe Dr. Sturgess and Bill Gaynor had planned the murder and needed someone to pin it on. Marla was a perfect patsy. Sturgess knew her history and how to exploit it.

But how did Marla end up with the baby?

Then it hit me.

“What do you wear?” I asked Sarita.

“Excuse me?”

“When you work at Davidson House. What do you wear? Do you wear a uniform?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Would you show up for work sometimes at the Gaynors’ in your uniform?”

“Yes,” she said again. “A lot of times I would get changed at their house, get back into my regular clothes.”

“Describe it,” I said.

“What?”

“Describe your uniform.”

She shook her head, not understanding the question, or at least not what I was getting at by asking. “Pants, a top. Simple.”

“White pants? A white top?”

Sarita blinked. “Yes. All white.”

An angel.

“You delivered Matthew to Marla,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “When I found Matthew, found he was alive upstairs in his nursery, I wanted to get him out of the house. I grabbed him, a few of his things, the stroller, left the house, and locked it.”

“You left that smudge on the door. At Marla’s house. You left some of Rosemary Gaynor’s blood on the door.”

Slowly she nodded. “I don’t know. I guess that is possible. There might have been blood on my hand; I might have touched something. I don’t exactly remember. But I think... when I got there, I felt like I was going to pass out from what I had seen, and I put my hand up so I would not fall down.”

I believed I’d just saved my cousin from a lifetime in prison.

But there was more I needed to know.

“There’s more you haven’t told me,” I said. “You were in on it with them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I had nothing to do with Ms. Gaynor getting killed. I didn’t do anything with her husband or her doctor. But... my boyfriend, that’s a different story.”

“What?”

“Marshall is being very, very stupid. He’s been trying to get money out of Mr. Gaynor, and it’s very wrong what he’s doing, but he wouldn’t listen to me. And I don’t know what’s happened to him. He was supposed to come back to the house, but he hasn’t been answering his phone. I haven’t been able to get in touch with him.”

Jesus, there was more going on here than I could have imagined. But I moved ahead with my argument.

“Come on, Sarita. They — Sturgess and Gaynor, or maybe just one of them, I don’t know — decided Rosemary was better off dead.” She’d just told me Gaynor needed money. Maybe there was a hefty life insurance policy on his wife.

I continued. “So they set out to frame Marla for it. And you made the delivery. You took the baby to her and knew eventually the police would find out. You’re the connection.”

“No,” Sarita said. “You have it all wrong. I was trying to do a good thing.”

“A good thing. What the hell—”

That was when I started hearing a horn.

The black car that had been trailing behind us was on our bumper. The driver was leaning on the horn and flashing his lights.

While Marla was being booked and fingerprinted, Barry Duckworth went over to his desk and sat down.

Exhausted.

He wasn’t sure about Marla, but when the lab reported back that the blood on the door of her house did indeed match up with Rosemary Gaynor’s, the chief and the district attorney made the decision: Bring her in.

And so he did.

She hadn’t said a word the entire way to the station. Just sat in the back of the cruiser as if in some kind of trance. Duckworth had to admit he felt sorry for this girl, even if she had done it. The things that had happened to her had left their mark. The girl was damaged. And her parents weren’t making her life any better. He’d heard them screaming at each other while he waited for someone to open the door.

You met a lot of fucked-up people in this line of work.

He moved his computer mouse and the screen came to life. He had two new e-mails. He’d heard his phone ding a couple of times in the last hour, but hadn’t had a moment to look at it.

The first one was from a Sandra Bottsford, manager of the Boston hotel where Bill Gaynor had been staying when his wife had been murdered. She wrote that she had information for him, and asked him to call her.

The second e-mail was from Wanda Therrieult, the coroner. It was short. Call me , it said.

Duckworth decided to call the hotel manager first. He got bounced around some. Bottsford was somewhere in the building, so they transferred him to her cell when he explained who he was.

Finally she answered. “Bottsford.”

“It’s Detective Duckworth, in Promise Falls. I just got your e-mail. Thanks for getting back to me.”

“No problem. I could have explained it in the e-mail, but I thought you might have extra questions, so I figured we should just talk.”

“Great. So, I was trying to confirm whether Mr. Gaynor was at the hotel Saturday midday through Monday morning.”

“Yeah. Terrible thing, what happened to his wife. Anyway, he checked out of the hotel at six in the morning on Monday. I even checked the security footage, and he was there at the front desk bright and early yesterday morning.”

A six a.m. checkout sounded about right. If he’d stopped once or twice to get a coffee or hit the bathroom, that departure would have seen him getting home at the very time he did.