“Credibility with whom?” I said.
“He brags that he is partnered with an international revolutionary enterprise.”
“His language?” I said.
“Yes,” Susan said. “An international revolutionary enterprise.”
“He say how they are partnered?”
“He implied that they finance his part of the revolutionary enterprise,” Susan said.
“Last Hope?”
“Yes.”
“What do they get back?” I said.
“He says they like the prestige of associating with him, and implied that he was also a source of intelligence for them.”
“As in spying?” I said.
“That was my understanding.”
“Do you know the name of the people who help fi nance him?”
“No.”
“Why would he tell you all this,” I said. “This is very close to a confession.”
“He cannot keep himself from bragging,” Susan said. “From trying to impress me.”
“And since you have a client-therapist relationship,” I said,
“your testimony would probably not be admissible, if it ever got to court.”
“Probably not,” Susan said. “And, if you are correct about him, he may think I’ll not be available to testify against him.”
“Does he ever wonder why I let him slide? Why I just don’t blow the whistle on him and turn the tapes over to Epstein?”
“I don’t know,” Susan said. “I could speculate that he still assumes your goal is blackmail, and that if you turn over the tapes, you’ll lose all the money you are trying to extort.”
“That would be my surmise, as well,” I said.
“Surmise,” Susan said. “Do you speak more elegantly to me than to others?”
“Yes,” I said. “Except sometimes.”
“When you speak very inelegantly to me.”
“Yes.”
“At those times,” Susan said, “I am a bit inelegant, myself.”
“I’ll say.”
“I wish it were one of those times,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you come home soon?”
“I got some cops to talk with tomorrow, and then, unless they open something up for me, I’ll come home.”
“Yay!” Susan said.
“You think he’s telling you the truth about his father?” I said.
“He seems to be speaking of an actual person,” Susan said.
“Feds looked pretty hard back along the counterculture path,” I said. “You’d think if they came across a guy named Alderson they’d record it. Even if it wasn’t Perry.”
“His father’s name was Brad,” Susan said. “Bradley Alderson.”
I was quiet for a moment.
“What?” Susan said.
“Before he changed it,” I said, “Perry’s name was Bradley Turner.”
We were both quiet. I imagined the silence hovering above the small dark towns of Ohio and Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.
“Which means what?” Susan said fi nally.
“Damn,” I said. “I was hoping you’d know.”
55.
The laurel heights police station was across the town square from an upscale shopping mall. It was like it was a detached part of the mall, with the kind of pseudo small-town America décor that you find in theme parks. I parked in a visitor’s slot out front and went inside.
The cop on the front desk directed me to the detective squad room on the second floor. I sat down in a straight chair beside the desk of a detective named Coley Zackis.
“Name’s Spenser,” I said. “I called you yesterday.”
We shook hands.
“After you called,” Zackis said, “I got out the Turners’ fi le.”
He patted a thin manila folder on his desk.
“Not much,” he said.
“You want to show it to me,” I said, “or you want to tell me.”
“You been a cop?” Zackis said.
“I have.”
“Then you know what a file looks like,” he said. “Be easier if I tell you.”
“Illegibility is one of the first things you learn on the job,” I said.
Zackis grinned. He was a heavy guy with a noticeable belly and thick hands.
“And you got to spill coffee on them,” he said.
“What’s in this one?” I said.
“Hardly enough to spill coffee on,” Zackis said. “Turners stopped paying the mortgage. Eventually the bank sent somebody over there. Place looked deserted, so they called us. Patrol guys went up and took a look. Mail was piled up, grass wasn’t cut, unopened newspapers all over the front walk. Phone was disconnected. They went in. No sign of life or anything else. It was like one day they just up and left.”
“Bank inventories the stuff they left behind,” I said. “I went over it last night. It looks like they didn’t take much. No car.”
“Couple of our detectives went up and looked around.”
“You one of them?”
Zackis nodded.
“Yep,” he said. “Just made detective at the time. We found nothing. There were still suitcases in a closet. His and hers. Makeup in the master bath. Couple purses hanging on a knob in the front hall closet. No way to know how many suitcases they had, how many purses. Makeup looked like it was used, but . . . you married?”
“Sort of,” I said.
“How do you be sort of?”
“Takes practice,” I said.
“Well,” he said, “you probably know that your sort-of wife has more makeup than anyone would believe and that when she packs to go away she takes it all, but when you look at her bathroom, or wherever, there’s, like, still a ton of makeup.”
“I know that,” I said.
“And you know she got a half-dozen purses.”
“I do,” I said.
“So we got no way to know what there was to start,” Zackis said. “Did they take suitcases? Did she take a purse? Did she pack makeup?”
“Beds made?” I said.
Zackis glanced at the report for a moment.
“Nope,” he said. “King-sized bed in the master bedroom was not made.”
“People usually make the bed before they take a trip.”
“So they don’t have to fi nd it unmade when they come back.”
“Or have someone else fi nd it so,” I said.
“Like wearing clean underwear,” Zackis said. “In case you’re in an accident.”
“Like that,” I said.
“For most people the house is their biggest investment,”
Zackis said. “They don’t just walk away and leave it.”
“They left about a hundred grand on the table,” I said. Zackis shook his head.
“It smells bad, doesn’t it,” he said.
“It does,” I said.
“No signs of foul play,” Zackis said. “No blood, nothing broken, no sign of forced entry. No hint of a weapon. Neighbors saw nothing.”
“You put out a Missing Person?”
“Yep. Nothing. Not a peep,” Zackis said.
“Neighbors shed any light?”
“Nope, pleasant couple,” Zackis said. “She was a little older than he was. Both of them were friendly enough. Didn’t bother nobody.”
“How about the car?” I said.
“Missing,” Zackis said. “Turned up a few months later in a parking lot at a mall in Toledo.”
We were quiet for a time. At the next desk another detective, with his feet up, was cleaning his nails with a pocketknife.
“This ain’t Cleveland, you know? Or Chicago. This is a little-city police department. Most of the time we get it done, but we don’t have a ton of resources. Anne Marie Turner has a sister in Lexington, Kentucky. I actually went over there and talked with her.”
He shook his head.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Mail?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said. “Bills, flyers, bank statements, no per sonal letters to either one of them.”
“Credit card statements?”
“Usual, nothing caught your eye and after . . .” He looked at the file. “August twenty-sixth, no activity at all. He cleaned out both their bank accounts on September seventeenth.”