Boynton shrugged. “The cop she was sleeping with, and died with.” Something about the way he moved just then made me recognize him-this was the guy with the knapsack who’d run out of McGrath’s apartment.
“Can I go to a hospital, please?” he whined.
“When we’re done talking,” I said. “You’re not going to die from a nosebleed. Why did you break into Chief McGrath’s place?”
He hesitated. Then he said, “She asked me to.”
“Bullshit,” Sampson said.
“She did,” he insisted.
Boynton claimed that Edita had called him and said that she’d done some research and now believed him about the medicine. She’d also said she was in trouble and needed his help. They met, and she asked him to steal McGrath’s laptop.
“She said McGrath had stuff on the computer that could get her in big trouble, prevent her from becoming a lawyer,” Boynton said.
“Like what kind of stuff?”
“She wouldn’t tell me, but she was convincing,” Boynton said. “You could hear it in her voice and see it in her body language. She was scared by whatever he had on the laptop.”
Recalling the e-mails I’d seen in Edita’s computer, I said, “You were supposed to meet at ten the night before she was killed?”
He nodded and said she’d come over later than that, around eleven, to give him McGrath’s apartment key and to have sex.
“Edita was sleeping with you both?” Sampson asked, eyebrows raised.
“She was going to break up with McGrath after I gave her the laptop,” he said, looking crestfallen. “She was finally going to be mine.”
Before she’d left Boynton’s apartment that night, Edita had told him she was taking McGrath to an early-morning yoga class and then to breakfast at her place. Boynton would have plenty of time to use the key and get the laptop. I thought about it, remembered Boynton running with the backpack from McGrath’s place. It all fit in a strange way.
Boynton said he had the laptop at his apartment. We got him to his feet, handcuffed him, and told him we’d swing by his place on the way to the hospital.
“Am I under arrest? They’ll throw me out of school.”
“You’re in custody for now,” I said.
In the car on the way to his apartment, I turned around in the front seat and looked at him.
“In one of your e-mails during your manic phase, you wrote something like ‘I know what you do, Edita, and I’ll tell everyone.’ What was that all about?”
Fear flickered across Boynton’s swollen face. “I was just bluffing, you know? Everyone has a secret, so I figured-”
“You’re lying to me, Mr. Boynton,” I said with a sigh. “Every time you lie, you get closer to an arrest and the end of law school. So what do you know?”
“I… I followed her a few times.”
“You stalked her?” Sampson said.
“Just followed her. I wanted to see what she did when she wasn’t at school. That’s all.”
“Get to it,” Sampson said. “Where did she go?”
“This place in Vienna, Virginia, called the Phoenix Club.”
Edita went there three or four days a week, he told us. She’d often stay until after midnight. Boynton tried to get inside once but was told it was a private club. He said he stopped following her once he realized someone else was following her.
“Who?” Sampson said.
“Another cop,” Boynton said. “At least, he talked like a cop.”
“He caught you following Edita?”
“Twice. The second time he told me he had her under surveillance and I had to stop or he’d have me arrested for obstructing justice.”
“Name?”
“He never said.”
“Never showed you a badge?”
Boynton shook his head. “But like I said, he acted like a cop.”
“What did he look like?” I said.
“Tall, big, but he didn’t look too good, like he was sick or something. He coughed a lot. And he wore a red Redskins cap.”
27
BREE MANAGED TO get away from all her paperwork, and three hours later, Kurt Muller, Bree, and I pulled up in front of Terry Howard’s depressing apartment building in Northeast DC.
We’d retrieved McGrath’s laptop and taken it and Boynton downtown. The laptop went to Detectives Lincoln and O’Donnell, along with marching orders to look for anything related to Edita or the Phoenix Club. Sampson stayed behind to take Boynton’s full statement.
We stood in the foyer and buzzed Howard’s apartment three times but got no answer. We buzzed the other five apartments, but it was a weekday and everyone was out. No response.
“Call him,” I said.
Bree looked up Howard’s number and punched it into her cell phone. No answer. Straight to voice mail.
We were turning to leave when Muller noticed a beater Dodge four-door parked across the street. “That’s Howard’s. He’s here, just not answering.”
“He could have walked somewhere,” Bree said. “Taken the Metro.”
“Not the way he was coughing and wheezing the last time I saw him,” I said.
“Where’s his apartment?”
“The third floor, back.”
We walked around into the alley and located Howard’s apartment and the fire escape. I picked Bree up; she grabbed the ladder and pulled it down. We climbed up the three flights and stopped outside the kitchen window.
The sink overflowed with dishes. Liquor and beer bottles crowded the small table and just about every other surface. A second window was raised slightly and looked into a small dining area and part of the living room where Sampson and I had spoken with Howard. We could see the television was on, tuned to ESPN.
“Call his number again,” I said.
Bree did, and almost immediately I heard the jangle of an old-fashioned rotary phone coming from the apartment. The ringing stopped.
“Voice mail,” Bree said.
“That’s probable cause to do a well-being check, don’t you think, Chief?”
She hesitated, and then said, “No fruit of the poisonous tree.”
Nodding, I pushed up the sash and climbed in, calling, “Terry Howard? It’s Alex Cross. We’re just checking on your well-being.”
No voice replied, but almost immediately I heard a bird squawking.
“That’s Sylvia Plath,” I said, helping Bree and Muller inside. “His neurotic parakeet.”
“Howard always had a twisted sense of humor,” Muller said.
We moved deeper into the apartment, past a dining table buried in stacks of old newspapers to the parakeet that was pacing back and forth on its perch, screeching, bobbing its head, and pecking viciously at its featherless skin, clearly agitated.
We stepped into the living area and saw why.
Terry Howard sat in his easy chair facing the television; a film of blood and gore spattered the ceiling and walls around him. He had apparently put a gun in his mouth and shot himself. A sizable chunk of his skull was gone. A bloody, red Redskins cap was on the floor beside him.
An empty bottle of Smirnoff and a Remington 1911.45-caliber pistol, the same kind of gun that had killed Tom McGrath, lay in his old partner’s lap.
On the floor beside him, there was a note scrawled in ink.
Rot in hell, Tommy McG, it read. You and your lying bitch of a girlfriend.
28
“CASE CLOSED?” SAMPSON asked as we drove past the Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Northern Virginia.
“Bree thinks so,” I said. “So does Michaels. Tough one to swallow, but there it is.”
“You’re not sold?”
“Just trying to understand the entire situation before we declare it a revenge killing and a suicide. Take a right.”
Sampson did, and then he made a left, and we were into big-money properties, sprawling estates, some with high walls and security gates. It was dusk and lights were blinking on.
“Coming up on your right,” I said.
Sampson slowed, put on a blinker. We drove up a narrow road maybe a hundred feet long with gardens on both sides. At the end of it was a guardhouse, a turnaround, and a steel security gate set in a high wall.