Gone, but not forgotten

Chapter Fifteen.

Reggie Stewart eased himself into a seat across the desk from Dr. Pedro Escalante. The cardiologist had put on weight over the past ten years.

His curly black hair was mostly gray. He was still cheerful with patients, but his good humor was not second nature to him anymore.

They were meeting in the cardiologist's office in the Wayside Clinic. A diploma from Brown University and another from Tufts Medical School hung on one wall. Beneath the diplomas was a child's crayon drawing of a stick-figure girl standing next to a yellow flower that was almost as tall as she was. A rainbow stretched from one side of the picture to the other.

"That your daughter?" Stewart asked. A photograph of Gloria Escalante holding a little girl on her lap stood on one corner of the doctor's desk. Stewart figured the child for the artist and asked about her as a way of easing into a conversation that was certain to evoke painful memories.

"Our adopted daughter," Escalante replied sadly.

"Gloria lost the ability to conceive after her ordeal."

Stewart nodded because he could not think of a single thing to say.

"I'm afraid you've wasted your trip, if it was made solely to talk to my wife. We have tried our best to put the past behind us."

"I appreciate why Mrs. Escalante wouldn't want to talk to me, but this is literally a matter of life and death.

We have the death penalty in Oregon and there's no doubt that my client will receive it, if he's convicted."

Dr. Escalante's features hardened. "Mr. Stewart, if your client treated those women the way my wife was treated, the death penalty would be insufficient punishment."

"You knew my client as Peter lake, Dr. Escalante.

His wife and daughter were killed by Henry Waters. He suffered the same anguish you suffered. We're talking about a frame-up of the worst kind, and your wife may have information that can prove an innocent man is being prosecuted."

Escalante looked down at his desk. "Our position is firm, Mr. Stewart.

My wife will not discuss what happened to her with anyone. It has taken ten years to put the past behind her and we are going to keep it behind her. However, I may be of some help to you. There are answers to questions I may be able to give you."

"Any help will be appreciated."

"I don't want you to think her hard, Mr. Stewart. We did consider your request for an interview most seriously, but it would be too much for Gloria. She is very strong.

Very strong. Otherwise she would not have survived. But as strong as she is, it is only within the past few years that she has been anything like the woman she used to be.

Since your call, the nightmares have returned."

"Believe me, I would never subject your wife to Mod "No, no. I understand why you're here. I don't blame you. I just want you to understand why I can't permit her to relive what happened."

"Dr. Escalante, the main reason I wanted to talk to your wife was to find out if she saw the face of the man who kidnapped her."

"if that's why you came, I'm afraid I must disappoint you. She was taken from behind. Chloroform was used.

During her captivity, she was forced to wear a leather hood with no eyelets whenever… whenever her captor… when he came."

"She never saw his face?"

"Never."

"What about the other women? Did any of them see him?"

"I don't know."

"Do you know where I can find Ann Hazelton or Samantha Reardon?"

"Ann Hazelton committed suicide six months after she was freed. Reardon was in a mental hospital for some time. She had a complete breakdown.

Simon Reardon, Samantha's husband, divorced her," Escalante said with obvious distaste. "He moved away years ago. He's a neurosurgeon. You can probably locate him through the American Medical Association. He might know where Mrs. Reardon is living."

"That's very helpful," Stewart said as he wrote the information in his notebook.

"You could ask the other investigator. He may have located her."

"Pardon?"

"There was another investigator. I wouldn't let him speak to Gloria either. He came during the summer."

"The disappearances didn't start until August."

"No, this would have been May, early June. Somewhere in there."

"What did he look like?"

"He was a big man. I thought he might have played football or boxed, because he had a broken nose."

"That doesn't sound like anyone from the d.a's office. But they wouldn't have been involved that early. Do you remember his name or where he was from?"

"He was from Portland and I have his card." The doctor opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a white business card. "Samuel Oberhurst," he said, handing the card to Stewart. The card had Oberhurst's name and a phone number, but no address. The number was the one Betsy had given him.

"Dr. Escalante, what happened to your wife and the other women after they were kidnapped?"

Escalante took a deep breath. Stewart could see his pain even after -all these years.

"My wife told me that there were three women with her. They were kept in an old farmhouse. She isn't clear where the house was situated, because she was unconscious when he brought her there and she was in shock when she left. Almost dead from starvation. It was a miracle."

Escalante paused. He ran his tongue across his lips and breathed deeply, again.

"The women were kept naked in stalls. They were chained at the ankles.

Whenever he would come, he was masked and he would make them put on the hoods. Then he… would torture them." Escalante closed his eyes and shook his head, as if trying to clear it of images too painful to behold. "I have never asked her to tell me what he did, but I have seen my wife's medical records."

Escalante paused again.

"I don't need that information, Doctor. It's not necessary."

"Thank you."

"The important thing is the identification. If your wife can remember anything about her captor that would help us to prove he was not Peter Lake."

"I understand. I'll ask her, but I'm certain she won't be able to help you."

Dr. Escalante shook hands with Stewart and showed him out. Then he returned to his office and picked up the photograph of his wife and child.

Betsy had a trial scheduled to start Friday in a divorce case and she was putting the file in her attache case to bring home when Ann told her Reggie Stewart was on the line.

"How was your trip?" Betsy asked.

"Just fine, but I'm not accomplishing much. There's something weird about this business and it's getting weirder by the minute."

"Go on."

"I can't put my finger on what's wrong, but I know I'm getting the runaround about the case when no one should have any reason to lie to me."

"What are they lying about?"

"That's just it. I have no idea. But I know something's up."

"Tell me what you've learned so far," Betsy said, and Stewart recounted his conversations with Frank Grimsbo and Dr. Escalante.

"After I left Escalante, I spent some time at the public library going over newspaper accounts of the case. I figured there would be interviews with the victims, the cops. Nothing. John O'Malley, the chief of police, was the mayor's spokesman. He said Waters did it. Case closed.

The surviving women were hospitalized immediately.

Reardon was institutionalized. Escalante wouldn't talk to reporters.

Ditto Hazelton. A few weeks of this and interest fades. On to other stories. But you read the news reports and you read O'Malley's statements, and you still don't know what happened to those women.

"Then I talked to Roy Lenzer, a detective with Hunter's Point P.D. He's the guy who's trying to run down the case files for Page. He knows Gordon is missing. He searched her house for the files. No luck. Someone carted off all of the files in the case. I mean, we're talking a full shelf of case reports, photographs. But why?

Why take a shelf-load of paper in a ten year-old case?

What was in those files?"

"Reg, did Oberhurst visit the police?"

"I asked Lenzer about that. Gave Grimsbo a call, too. As far as I can tell, Oberhurst never talked to anyone after he talked to Dr. Escalante.

Which doesn't make sense. If he was investigating the case for Lisa Darius, the police would be his first stop."

"Not necessarily," Betsy said. Then she told her investigator about her meetings with Gary Telford.

"I have a very bad feeling about this, Reg. Let me run something by you.

Say you're an unscrupulous investigator. An ex-con who works on the edge. Someone who's not averse to a little blackmail. The wife of a prominent businessman hires you because she thinks her husband is having an affair. She gives you a scrapbook containing clippings about an old murder case.

"Let's suppose that this crooked p.i. flies to Hunter's Point and talks to Dr. Escalante. He's no help, but he does tell the investigator enough information so he can track down Samantha Reardon, the only other surviving victim. what if oberhurst found Reardon and she positively identified Peter Lake as the man who kidnapped and tortured her?"

"And Oberhurst returned to Portland and what?" Stewart said.

"Blackmailed a serial killer? You'd have to be nuts."

"who's the John Doe, Reg?"

The line was quiet for a moment, then Stewart said,

"oh, shit."

"Exactly. We know Oberhurst lied to Lisa. He told her he hadn't started investigating the Hunter's Point case, but he was in Hunter's Point. And he's disappeared.

I talked to every lawyer I could find who's employed him.

No contact. He doesn't return calls. The John Doe is Oberhurst's size and build. What do you want to bet the corpse has a broken nose?"

"No bets. What are you going to do?,"

"There's nothing we can do. Darius is our client. We're his agents.

This is all confidential."

"Even if he killed the guy?"

"Even if he killed the guy."

Betsy heard a sharp intake of air, then Stewart said:

"You're the boss. What do you want me to do next?"

"Have you tried to set up a meeting with Wayne Turner?"

"No go. His secretary says he's too busy, because of the confirmation hearings."

"Damn. Gordon, Turner, Grimsbo. They all know something. What about the police chief? What was his name?"

"O'Malley. Lenzer says he retired to Florida about nine years ago.,

"Okay," Betsy said with a trace of desperation.

"Keep trying to find Samantha Reardon. She's our best bet."

"I'll do it for you, Betsy. If it was someone else… I gotta tell you, I usually don't give a fuck, but I'm starting to. I don't like this case."

"That makes two of us. I just don't know what to do about it. We're not even certain I'm right. I have to find that out, first."

"If you are, what then?"

"I have no idea."

Betsy put Kathy to sleep at nine and changed into a flannel nightgown.

After brewing a pot of coffee, Betsy spread out the papers in Friday's divorce case on the dining room table. The coffee was waking her up, but her mind wandered to the Darius case. Was Darius guilty?

Betsy could Dot stop thinking about the question she had put to Alan Page during her cross-examination: With six victims, including a six-year-old girl, why would the mayor and chief of police of Hunter's Point close the case if there was any possibility that Peter Lake, or anyone else, was really the murderers It made no sense.

Betsy pushed aside the documents in the divorce and pulled a yellow pad in front of her. She listed what she knew about the Darius case. The list stretched for three pages. Betsy came to the information she had learned from Stewart that afternoon. A thought occurred to her. She frowned.

Betsy knew Samuel Oberhurst was not above blackmail. He'd tried it on Gary Telford. If Martin Darius was the rose killer, Darius would have no compunction about killing Oberhurst if the investigator tried to blackmail him. But Betsy's assumption that John Doe was Samuel Oberhurst made sense only if Samantha Reardon identified Martin Darius as the rose killer. And that's where the difficulty lay. The police would have questioned Reardon when they rescued her. If the task force suspected that Peter Lake, not Henry Waters, was the kidnapper, they would have shown Reardon a photograph of Lake. If she identified Lake as her kidnapper, why would the mayor and the police chief announce that Waters was the killer?

Why would the case be closed?

Dr. Escalante said that Reardon was institutionalized. Maybe 'she couldn't be interviewed immediately.

But she would have been interviewed at some point.

Grimsbo told Reggie that Nancy Gordon was obsessed with the case and never believed Waters was the killer. So, Betsy thought, let's assume that Reardon did identify Lake as the killer at some point. Why wouldn't Gordon, or someone, have reopened the case?

Maybe Reardon wasn't asked until Oberhurst talked to her. But wouldn't she have read about Henry Waters and known the police had accused the wrong man? She could have been so traumatized that she wanted to forget everything that happened to her, even if it meant letting Lake go free.

But if that was true, why tell Oberhurst that Lake was her kidnapper?

Betsy sighed. She was missing something. She stood up and carried her coffee cup into the living room. The Sunday New York Times was sitting in a wicker basket next to her favorite chair. She sat down and decided to look through it. Sometimes the best way to figure out a problem was to forget about it for a while. She had read the Book Review, the Magazine and the Arts section, but she still hadn't read the Week in Review.

Betsy skimmed an article about the fighting in the Ukraine and another about the resumption of hostilities between North and South Korea. Death was everywhere.

Betsy turned the page and started reading a profile of Raymond Colby.

Betsy knew Colby would would be confirmed and it upset her. There was no more diversity of Opinion on the Court. Wealthy white males with identical backgrounds and identical thoughts dominated it. Men with no concept of what it was like to be poor or helpless, who had been nominated by Republican Presidents for no reason other than their willingness to put the interests of the wealthy and big government ahead of individual rights. Colby was no different. Harvard Law, c.e.o. of Marlin Steel, governor of New York, then a member of the United States Senate for the last nine years. Betsy read a summary of Colby's accomplishments as a governor and senator and a prediction of the way he would vote on several cases that were before the Supreme Court, then skimmed another article about the economy.

When she was finished with the paper, she went back to the dining room.

The divorce case was a mess. Betsy's client and her husband didn't have children and they had agreed to split almost all of their property, but they were willing to go to the mat over a cheap landscape they had bought from a sidewalk artist in Paris on their honeymoon. Going to court over the silly painting was costing them both ten times its value, but they were adamant. it was not the painting that was fueling their rage. It was a case like this that made Betsy want to enter a nunnery. But, she sighed to herself, it was also cases like this that paid her overhead. She started reading the divorce petition, then remembered something she had read in the article about Raymond Colby.

Betsy put the petition down. The idea had come so fast that it made her a little dizzy. She walked back to the living room and reread Colby's biography. There it was.

He had been a United States senator for nine years.

Hunter's Point Chief of Police John O'Malley retired to Florida nine years ago. Frank Grimsbo had been with Marlin Steel, Colby's old company, for nine years. And Wayne Turner was the senator's administrative assistant.

The heat was on in the house, but Betsy felt like she was hugging a block of ice. She went back to the dining room and reread her list of important facts in the Darius case. It was all there. You just had to look at the facts in a certain way and it made perfect sense. Martin Darius was the rose killer. The Hunter's Point police knew that when they announced that Henry Waters was the murderer and closed the case.

Now Betsy knew how Peter Lake could walk away from Hunter's Point with the blood of all those innocent people on his hands. What she could not imagine was why the governor of New York State would conspire with the police force and mayor of Hunter's Point to set free a mass murderer.