She pulled her attention back to his face. "Benjamin Kean. Angela's husband. He backed out of the entire conference at the last minute, claiming illness."
Wyatt suspected he knew the answer, but he still asked the question. "Do you know why?"
"Of course. He was down here screwing the little receptionist who just escorted you back here and filled your head with lots of rumors and speculations."
Wyatt didn't try to deny it, staying on the offensive. "Was that a frequent occurrence?"
"Ben's a slave to his own penis and his own legend. He nails any woman who will say yes, singing the poor-put-upon-husband song to anyone who will listen."
"Including you?"
The woman shrugged. "Occasionally. If I was bored or was angry at my husband for some reason and wanted to punish him."
Wyatt allowed himself a second to process it-Ben Kean sounded like a slime; the condition obviously spread like a cancer in this family. But he did not sound like a man who shared his late brother-in-law's tastes. That didn't mean the men hadn't been friends, and he hadn't helped Roger in his moment of utmost need, but Wyatt doubted it. He couldn't see Underwood turning to a man who'd had an affair with his wife. Men like Roger tended to dislike it when other people played with their possessions.
"When did you next see your husband after the night of the banquet?"
Judith met his eye directly. "About forty-eight hours later, on Monday night. He showed up at the house looking like he'd been at a Roman orgy."
"You hadn't reported him missing?"
She shrugged, as if to say it had not been the first time. Probably it hadn't.
"Any explanation as to where he'd been?"
"None."
"Did you have any suspicions?" he asked, making no insinuations either way. He wasn't sure how much Judith knew, and didn't want her to clam up now by his bringing up the one subject she wouldn't touch.
To his surprise, she didn't just touch it; she hit it with a sledgehammer. "Sure. He was probably out at some sick party where rich perverts paid lots of money to partner swap, to see someone being tortured, or to have sex with helpless little children."
Wyatt didn't react with as much as a blink. She might have thought she was going to shock him, might have worded her answer to do exactly that. But it hadn't worked. "So you did know."
She nodded once. "He'd gotten tangled up in a role-playing Web site a few months before and I found him acting out the kinds of fantasies that would land most people in a mental ward."
Satan's Playground.
"You hadn't known before then?"
She finally rose, her slim body graceful and elegant, innately sensuous. How on earth had she ended up in Roger Underwood's bed? "His cruel streak was a thing of legend, though of course nobody filled me in on it until after we were married." She wrapped her arms around herself. "I don't know if I can explain it. Some people are just… magnetic. Sadistic-you can see it in their eyes-but seductive just the same. They become almost an addiction."
Wyatt began to see the answer to his own unasked question. For a while, anyway, Roger had been her obsession.
"He cared about no one and could be utterly vicious, which just made you want him even more."
Underwood had obviously been a charming sociopath. Wyatt had met a few like him. Manson, so they said, had possessed that same quality to inspire utter devotion to the point of insanity, his cruelty never driving away those who were madly in love with him.
"There was no depravity too low. I found out things about him after we married____________________" She shook her head, glancing toward the door, then back at Wyatt. This time, she lowered her voice, visibly shaken for the very first time since she'd opened up. "No one was off-limits if he wanted that person. You understand? No one."
He understood. It made him sick, but Wyatt understood.
"How long had it gone on, do you think?"
"Oh, years. I know he started in with his stepbrother, Philip, when the boy was eight years old and Roger was in medical school. Philip's teenage sister, too."
And his own sister? The one who'd hated him, loved him?
Vile. But not impossible.
So Roger had been molesting children for decades. He'd found his victims close at hand. Which led Wyatt to believe that his plans on the night he'd attacked Lily had involved far more than a sexual attack. Had those children really existed, Wyatt truly believed Roger would have kidnapped, then slaughtered them, choosing strangers with whom he had absolutely no connection in an effort to cover his crime. The homeless man who'd assisted him would more than likely have been found dead the next day, too.
"His father never suspected?"
"Who knows what that old man thinks?" Bitterness oozed from her. "Precious Roger could do nothing wrong, and if he suddenly decided he wanted to fuck the family dog, Alfred would have found a reason to justify it."
It was only eleven thirty, but Judith seemed to need a bracer. She walked over to a small wet bar, opened a miniaturized wine refrigerator, and pulled out a pricey-looking bottle. "Care to join me?"
Though he couldn't blame her, he declined.
"Suit yourself." Judith was almost ruthless in her movements as she peeled the foil off the bottle. Retrieving a small device, a plastic tube holding a tiny air canister, with a long, slim needle at the end, she plunged the sharp point into the cork, pushed a button to release the compressed air, and watched as the cork erupted out.
Violent, but expedient.
"That's unusual-looking," he murmured.
Judith pushed the cork off the needle with her thumb. "Wine has always been the unhappy wife's best friend, hasn't it? Anything that gets the cork out of the bottle a little faster is okay by me."
He hadn't been thinking of how fast that needle could get a cork out of a bottle, but of all its other potential uses. "Your husband was opening a wine bottle when he died, wasn't he?"
Glass clinked against glass as she poured herself a generous helping of Chardonnay. "He was a connoisseur, had already gone through a few bottles earlier that night with his sister and her husband, who had come over for dinner."
Wyatt narrowed his eyes in concentration. "You mentioned that when I was here the other day. Can you tell me more about that night? What happened?"
Carrying her drink, she returned to her seat. "There's not much to tell. We ate, drank. Roger and his sister were very tense with one another, so she and her husband left early to walk back to their place." She smiled bitterly. "I assumed they were having a lovers' quarrel."
Seeing the flint in her eyes, and remembering how little she and Angela liked each other, he took that for nothing more than spite. "Go on."
"There's nothing else. After they left, I told Roger I was going to bed. I came down the next morning and found him on the floor in the living room, surrounded by broken glass and reeking of wine." She shook her head. "Unfortunately, he'd been opening a bottle of really nice white Burgundy he'd brought back from France last year. What a waste."
Wyatt leaned forward in his chair, dropping his elbows onto his knees. "Can you back up a little, to before the dinner? What had you noticed that week?"
"Roger had been gone a lot and his mood vacillated between foul and violent. He wasn't happy when I reminded him we had dinner plans. Considering he was the one who invited his obnoxious sister and her weak little husband over, I wasn't going to let him bow out."
"They were close?"
Judith merely stared.
Good God. "Even at that point?"
"She was absolutely insane for him and had been for years."