Most Wanted

Chapter Fifty

Christine braked, startled to see the Mercedes driver get out of her car, slam the door behind her, and hustle toward her in tan heels, splashing through the watery gravel, heedless of the downpour. Rain flattened the woman’s fancy salt-and-pepper coif and drenched the shoulders of her pink pastel suit.

“Can I help you?” Christine lowered her window, blinking against the rain just as the woman got there, her forehead buckled with pain and her mascara running, as if she had been crying, too.

“Who are you?” the woman demanded, distraught. She hooked her manicured fingernails over the top of Christine’s window, her brown eyes desperate.

“What? Who are you?” Christine drew back from the window, and raindrops sprayed inside the car.

“What’s your name? Do you work at the hospital? Are you another nurse?”

“Who are you? Why do you ask?” Christine said, bewildered.

“I’m Grant’s wife Joan. I need to speak with you.”

“Grant who?”

“Grant Hallstead, please don’t pretend you don’t know.” Joan’s bloodshot eyes filled with tears, and mascara dripped a black drop down her cheek. Rain poured down on her, drenching her suit, but she seemed not to care. “We’re trying to work on our marriage, we’re in counseling now, and he swore everything was going to be different now that Gail’s gone. I’m asking you, I’m begging you to end your affair with my husband.”

“What?” Christine asked, astounded. “I’m not having an affair with your husband!”

“I knew you were going to deny it, but please, I’m begging you, woman-to-woman, to leave him alone. We have three kids, still in high school, and I’m trying to keep my family together for them.” Joan clung to the edge of the window in the pouring rain, and Christine felt terrible for her.

“Look, come inside the car, we can talk about this. You’re getting soaked out there.” Christine motioned her inside, and Joan scurried around the front of the car, and Christine slid the window up and unlocked the car doors as Joan jumped inside. “Joan, I’m not having an affair with your husband, I swear to you.”

“Just hear me out, we can talk about this in a civilized way.” Joan put up both palms, with slim fingers. “I don’t want a fight or anything like that, I’m not going to make any trouble-”

“-no, really, I’m not having an affair with your husband-”

“-I just wanted to try to reason with you, and try to explain to you what’s going on in our marriage, so that maybe you would respect it.” Joan spoke fast, her words running together, powered by emotion, but Christine had to get a word in edgewise.

“Joan. I’m really not having an affair with your husband-”

“I see that you’re married, too, and I hope that you can understand what it’s like in a long-term marriage. I can see I’m older than you, he always picks younger nurses”-Joan’s lower lip trembled, still bearing the traces of pink lipstick-“and I thought it would change after Gail, he swore to me it would, so I was so surprised to see you at the vigil with Dink-”

“-I’m not a nurse. I don’t know your husband. I never met him before.”

“You didn’t?” Joan blinked a few times, then wiped a smudge of mascara from under her lower lashes.

“I’m not from here. I’m a teacher from Connecticut, and-”

“How did you meet Grant?” Joan frowned, bewildered, but she seemed to be slowing down, breathing more normally.

“I don’t know Grant. Truly, I never even saw him before today at-”

“But why were you at Gail’s vigil if you’re not a nurse? Are you a friend of hers?”

“Joan, please, relax. I can explain.” Christine dug in her purse, pulled out one of Griff’s business cards, and handed it over. “My name is Christine Nilsson, and I’m working as a paralegal with Francis Griffith, a lawyer in town who’s representing Zachary Jeffcoat. I’ve been investigating Gail’s murder for the defense, and I should really apologize to you because I mistakenly thought that your husband could have been a suspect. I was wrong.”

“Oh my.” Joan looked up from the business card, and an astonished smile began to appear on her lovely face, which was heart-shaped and delicate, even fragile. She must’ve been in her late forties, but she barely looked thirty-five. “Are you serious?”

“Yes, completely. I really am sorry that I embarrassed your husband and you.” Christine almost welcomed the opportunity to absolve herself. The rain picked up, thundering on the roof of the car and fogging the windows. “Were you part of that group after the vigil?”

“Yes, I was there with some of the administrators and the other wives. I was parked in the doctors’ lot, and I saw you get into your car, so I followed you.” Joan sighed happily and handed Christine back the business card. “I’ve never been so happy to find out that my husband was falsely accused of murder.”

“Ha!” Christine liked Joan immediately. Any wife who could find the humor in the situation probably deserved a better husband, but Christine didn’t say so.

“You have no reason to apologize.” Joan met her eye, her crow’s-feet wrinkling with irony. “Grant has a lot to answer for, God knows, but he wouldn’t kill anybody.”

“I’m sorry, though.”

“Don’t be, he deserved it.” Joan’s smile flattened. “I can’t say that I mind that he got called out in front of his boss for the affair. That’s the kind of thing that will make him think twice, too. He says he wants to save our marriage, so we’ll see.”

“Right.” Christine was in no position to give marriage advice, so she kept her own counsel.

“You represent Jeffcoat?”

“The lawyer I work for does.”

“You don’t think that he killed Gail? You don’t think he’s the Nurse Murderer?”

“No, I don’t,” Christine answered, because she had to give the party line.

“Why did you think Grant did it?”

“I overheard Dink in the ladies’ room, saying that Gail was having an affair, so I went to Dink, who said it was with Grant, but then she flew off the handle. Evidently, I’m not as good a detective as I thought.” Christine felt uncomfortable talking about it so frankly, but Joan didn’t seem to mind. With the pounding rain and the foggy windows, the conversation turned girlfriendy.

“You know, I did some snooping myself, when I started to suspect that Grant was fooling around with Gail.” Joan pursed her lips, with a sheepish half smile. “I looked up where she lives and started to go by her house, to see if I could catch his car in the backyard.”

“Really?” Christine shifted forward, interested.

“Yes, and I did catch him, and I confronted him and he admitted it.”

“That must’ve been sad.”

“It was, but it was also good in a way because it gave us a chance to turn it around. I think he deserves a second chance. I think everybody does.”

“Right,” Christine said, thinking of Marcus.

“You know, I saw Jeffcoat there one night, I think it was on a Thursday.”

“Really?” Christine remembered that that was the same night that Jerri Choudhoury had seen him, too.

“Yes, it was late at night. I went to Gail’s because Grant had told me that he had a meeting at the hospital and I didn’t trust him. It’s hard to break the habit when you find out someone’s been unfaithful. You check receipts, you check his phone and email, things like that.” Joan paused, her expression darkening. “I even checked Gail’s house the night she was murdered.”

“You did?” Christine asked, surprised. “Did you see anything?”

“I went there because Grant said he had a business trip with Milton Cohen, you heard him.”

“Yes, I did.”

“But I wasn’t sure I believed him. I looked up online to see that the seminar was being held, which it was, but I didn’t know if Grant was really going or if it was just his story. I worried that he could sneak back to see Gail, so I drove over to her house.”

“Did you see Jeffcoat’s car or did you see him going up the stairs?”

“No I didn’t.”

“Do you know what Jeffcoat looks like?”

“Yes, he’s blond, but the man I saw wasn’t blond.”

“Oh my God. You saw a man there the night she was murdered?” Christine’s juices started to flow. Joan could have seen Gail’s murderer, and it evidently wasn’t Zachary.

“Yes, but I left after I saw him because I got a call from Grant, and I knew he really was at the seminar in New York.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

Joan met Christine’s eye, newly defensive. “They said on the news that they caught the murderer red-handed, right at the scene, so I knew it couldn’t be the man that I saw.”

“Who did you see? Did you know him?” Christine had to contain her excitement.

“No, and I never saw him there before.”

“Did you take any pictures of him?”

“No.” Joan shook her head. “If it wasn’t Grant, I didn’t care who it was. I just wanted to make sure that he wasn’t lying to me anymore.”

“What did the man you saw look like?” Christine felt her heart start to pound.

“Let me think a minute. It was starting to get dark at that hour, too.” Joan frowned in thought. “He was white, decent-looking. I forget what he had on. A sweatshirt and pants?”

Christine knew that could be anyone. “Tall or short?”

“Medium?”

“What kind of car did he drive?”

“He drove a-” Joan stopped abruptly. “Come to think of it, he didn’t drive any car there. I just saw him on the steps going upstairs to Gail’s, without pulling into the parking lot in the back.”

“So he walked to her house?”

“I don’t know.” Joan shook her head. “All I know is, he didn’t drive there.”

“So he could have been anyone.” Christine’s mind raced through the possibilities. “A transient who parked somewhere else, maybe because he didn’t want his car to be seen at Gail’s house-”

“This man didn’t seem like a transient. He walked with purpose, went right up the stairs. Like he knew where he was going, like he’d been there before.”

“He could have been a man who lived within walking distance, even a neighbor.” Christine felt appalled by the thought. “I interviewed the neighbors to see if they had seen anything that night. Most of them were women, but they all had husbands or boyfriends. Maybe it was one of the husbands? One who was cheating with Gail?”

“Well, we know that’s possible.” Joan sniffed.

“Sorry.” Christine hadn’t intended to be so tactless, but she was getting excited. She looked over, apologetically, then happened to see in the rearview mirror that a car was coming down the road behind Joan’s Mercedes. “Oh, a car.”

“Does it have room to pass? I can’t see a thing for the fog and rain.” Joan turned around in the seat, and Christine squinted at the rearview to see that the car had just enough room to get by.

“It’s okay. We don’t have to move.”

“Good, I’m wet enough.”

“It’s also possible that the killer targeted Gail without their being in a relationship, because she was a nurse. They all knew she was a nurse. She gave block parties.” Christine grabbed her phone from her purse and started scrolling through the pictures she’d taken when she canvassed to see if they yielded anything, though she hadn’t been thinking of the neighbors as suspects.

“A neighbor killed her?”

“It’s possible. The only male neighbors I met were Phil Dresher, a student at West Chester who lives a few doors down from Gail, and Dom Gagliardi, who lives with his wife around the block. They were both at Gail’s vigil.” Christine realized that the car hadn’t passed yet, so she checked the rearview again. The car was parking behind Joan’s Mercedes, which seemed strange. “The guy’s pulling over, God knows why.”

“Probably thinks we need help.”

“In the rain?”

“That’s how people are here. They help each other.” Joan smiled.

“If he wanted to help, why not pull up beside us?”

“He couldn’t see inside my car, maybe.” Joan gestured at the phone. “So, you were saying.”

“Right.” Christine returned her attention to her phone and scrolled through her photos, which were all exterior shots of Warwick Street, but none of Phil. “Damn.”

“No luck?”

“Not yet.” Christine checked the rearview and saw that a man was getting out, hurrying toward them. She couldn’t see his face because he had the hood on his parka up against the driving rain, but she’d deal with him when he got here. Instead she scrolled ahead to the photos she had taken at Linda Kent’s, then pressed to enlarge one of Linda’s backyard, and in the corner of the picture, almost out of the frame, was Dom’s face.

“That’s him.” Joan pointed to the photo. “I recognize him. I saw him going up Gail’s back steps that night she was killed.”

“Oh my God. He told me he didn’t know Gail, but if you saw him that night at her place, then he lied.” Christine remembered with a jolt that Dom was the one who had found Linda Kent’s body. What if he was the one who had put it there? He could have surprised Linda in her apartment. He knew that she smoked outside at night.

“Of course he’s going to lie if he thinks he’s getting away with cheating. Or murder.”

“Joan, we have to go to the police with this.” Christine’s heart hammered. “Will you go with me?”

“Yes.” Joan nodded, grave. “I couldn’t live with myself if my silence caused a serial killer to go free.”

“Or an innocent man to stay in jail.” Christine looked at the rearview to see that the man had almost reached the car. The hood of the parka hid his eyes and nose, but he gave her a friendly wave and flashed a smile that she realized she had seen before. On Daley Street.

It was Dom.

Christine reached for the ignition and started the engine. “Joan-”

“What’s going on?”

Suddenly Dom wrenched Christine’s car door open, but she floored the gas pedal. The car lurched forward, but Dom clamped powerful hands down on her shoulders and lifted her bodily from the seat.

“No!” Christine screamed, terrified.

Dom yanked her from the moving car.

Joan yelled for help.

The car careened forward from momentum.

Christine felt an agonizing blow to the head.

And her world went black.