Before I Say Good-Bye (35 page)

They were anxious to know what might be lurking in that locked box, but they also didn’t want to be away from the station if Karen Renfrew, the homeless woman whose soup kitchen card had been found at the Vandermeer mansion the night of the fire, had been located. If she was brought in, then they wanted to be around to question her.

It was three o’clock before they got to eat the sandwiches. Sitting in Jack’s office, while they ate they also began reading the detailed report on Adam Cauliff that had come in from North Dakota.

“We ought to tell the D.A. to hire this guy in Bismarck,” Sclafani observed. “He dug up more dirt in a couple of days than most gossip columnists dig up in a lifetime.”

“Pretty disturbing stuff too,” Brennan commented.

“From a broken home. A juvenile record that was expunged, but look what it was for. Shoplifting. Petty theft. Questioned in the death of an uncle when he was seventeen, but no charges were filed. Cauliff’s mother inherited a chunk of money from the uncle. That was Cauliff’s ticket to college.”

“How did our contact get all this stuff?”

“Good police work. Got hold of a retired sheriff with a long memory. Found a professor at the college who wasn’t afraid to speak up. Keep reading.”

“Chronic liar. Braggart. Believed to have acquired advance knowledge of college final exams. Faked letters of reference for first job in Bismarck. His boss allowed him to resign. In his second job, he romanced the owner’s wife. Fired. On another job, suspected of selling contents of sealed bids to rival firms.

“The report concludes, and I quote,” Sclafani read, “His last employer in Bismarck said, ‘Adam Cauliff believed absolutely that he had a right to anything he wanted, be it a woman or a simple possession. I presented this file to a friend who is a psychiatrist. On the basis of the information I gave him, he concludes that Adam Cauliff has a serious personality disorder and is probably a full-fledged sociopath. Like many such people, he may be very intelligent and have ample surface charm. His general behavior may be acceptable, perhaps even impeccable. But if events turn against him, then at that point, he will do anything necessary to secure his personal aims.
Anything.
He appears to have a complete disregard for, and to be in conflict with, the normal social code by which most people conduct their lives.’ ”

“Wow!” Brennan exclaimed after completing the report. “How did a woman like Nell MacDermott get involved with a guy like this?”

“How do a lot of smart women get involved with guys like that? I’ll tell you what I think,” Sclafani responded. “It’s because, if you’re not a liar yourself, you have to get burned at least once before you understand that the Adam Cauliffs of this world are different from the rest of us. Dangerously so, sometimes.”

“The question now is, if somebody
did
get off that boat, was it Adam, or was it Winifred Johnson?”

“Or, did
anybody
get off? Once they open that box, we’ll know if one of them was there and cleaned it out.”

The phone rang. Sclafani picked it up. “Good, we’re on the way.” He looked at Brennan. “They’ve found Karen Renfrew; she’s at the 13th Precinct. Let’s go.”

eighty-three

E
VEN HER OVERSIZED GOLF UMBRELLA
could not keep Nell dry for the few steps across the sidewalk from the cab to the door of Bonnie Wilson’s building. Once inside the outer vestibule, she closed the umbrella and dried her face with a handkerchief. Then, taking a deep breath, she pushed the button to Bonnie’s apartment.

Bonnie did not wait for her to announce herself. “Come right up, Nell.” As she was speaking, the buzzer unlocked the lobby door.

The elevator lumbered to the fifth floor. As she stepped out into the hall, Nell saw Bonnie standing in the door of her apartment. “Come in, Nell.”

Behind her, the apartment was dimly lit. Even so, Nell gasped, feeling a sudden catch in her throat. The faint light around Bonnie was beginning to darken.

“Nell, you look so worried. Come in,” Bonnie urged.

Numbly, Nell obeyed. She knew that whatever happened in this place in the next little while was inevitable. She had no choice, and she had virtually no control. The events ahead of her had to be played out to the end.

She stepped inside, and Bonnie closed the door behind her. Nell heard the click of double locks, then the slide of the dead bolt.

“They’re doing some emergency work on the fire escape,” Bonnie explained, her voice soft. “The superintendent has a key, and I don’t want him or anyone else barging in while you’re here.”

Nell began to follow Bonnie as she moved from the foyer. In the deathly quiet, their footsteps resounded on the bare wood. As she passed the mirror, Nell paused and stared into it.

Bonnie stopped and turned. “What is it, Nell?”

They were standing side by side, their reflections gazing back at them.
Don’t you see?
Nell wanted to shout.
Your aura is almost completely black, just like Winifred’s was. You’re going to die.

Then, to her horror, as she watched, the darkness began to spread and encircle her as well.

Bonnie tugged at her arm. “Nell, dear, come into the study,” she urged. “It’s time to talk to Adam.”

eighty-four

D
AN HAD GONE
to the hospital to check on two postoperative patients, and it was four-thirty before he was able to get away. Once again he called Nell’s apartment, but there still was no answer. Maybe Mac has heard from her, he thought.

Cornelius MacDermott reported that while he had not talked to his granddaughter, he
had
heard from his
sister. “It’s not bad enough that she sent Nell to some loony psychic, but now Gert is pulling the same stuff on
me.
She’s worried because she has some kind of premonition that something bad is going to happen to Nell.”

“What do you think she means by that, Mac?”

“It means that she has nothing better to do than to sit around and fret. Look at the way it’s raining. Gert’s arthritis is probably kicking up, and she’s turning her own discomfort into some kind of psychic warning. It’s like she’s channeling the pain for all the rest of us to enjoy. Dan, tell me I’m the sane one here. You should see the look that Liz is giving me. I think she believes in that nonsense too.”

“Mac, do you think there really is any reason to be concerned about Nell?” Dan asked sharply. Worry begets worry, he thought. This whole day has just been one unsettling thing after another.

“What’s there to worry about? I told Gert to come over here to my office and listen to what those two detectives have to tell us about Adam Cauliff. Gert thought he was tops because he danced around opening doors for her, but according to what that Brennan told me, they’ve dug up a lot of dirt on that guy. They wouldn’t tell me over the phone what all was in the report, but from the sound of it, seems like we’re well rid of him.

“The detectives said they’d be here in about an hour. They were stopping at the 13th Precinct, where you and I were today. They said they’d located the woman whose soup kitchen card was found at the mansion fire, and she’d been taken there for questioning.”

“I’d like to know what she had to say to them.”

“I think you should know,” Mac said, his tone becoming gentler. “Come on down now so you can
hear everything firsthand. Then, when we hook up with Nell, we’ll go out for an early dinner.”

“Just one more thing. Is it like Nell to ignore messages? I mean, do you think she’s home and maybe is not picking up the phone because she doesn’t feel well?”

“Good God, Dan, don’t
you
get started.” But Dan could hear the concern in Cornelius MacDermott’s voice. “I’ll call over to her doorman and see if he’s seen her either coming or going.”

eighty-five

“I
REPORTED MY BAG
with my good things stolen hours before that fire,” Karen Renfrew said angrily. She was with Captain Murphy and Detectives Sclafani and Brennan, seated in the same conference room in which they had met earlier with Cornelius MacDermott and Dan Minor.

“Who’d you report it to, Karen?” Sclafani asked.

“A cop who passed in a squad car. I waved him down. You know what he said?”

I can only imagine, Brennan thought.

“He said, ‘Lady, haven’t you got enough junk in those carts without worrying if one bag fell off?’ But I tell you, it didn’t fall off. It was stolen.”

“Which probably means that whoever stole it was cooping in that mansion,” Captain Murphy said, “and that person started the fire that killed Dr. Minor’s mother.
That
means—”

Karen Renfrew interrupted the Captain. “I can tell you just what that cop looked like. He was too fat, and he was in the squad car with another cop he called Arty.”

“We believe you, Karen,” Sclafani said soothingly. “Where were you staying when your bag was stolen?”

“On One Hundredth Street. I had a nice doorway across the street from where they were fixing up that old apartment building.”

Suddenly alert, Sclafani asked, “What is the avenue that One Hundredth Street crosses there, Karen?”

“Amsterdam Avenue. Why?”

“Yeah, what difference does that make?” Murphy asked.

“Maybe none. Or maybe
a lot.
We’re following up something on a guy who was foreman on that job. According to his wife, he was extremely upset because of a change-of-work order that had canceled a job he was doing up there. We can’t find, though, that any such thing ever happened—there’s no trace of any order like that. So we figure maybe he was upset about something else. It also just happens that this all took place the same evening as the fire at the Vandermeer place, and while it could be pure coincidence, based again on what his wife told us, we’ve been looking for some way to connect him to both sites.”

George Brennan looked at his partner. There was no need to vocalize the rest of the connection they had just made. Jimmy Ryan had been working across the street from where Karen Renfrew was cooping. She was a wino. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to have lifted one of her bags and thrown it in the trunk of his car while she was sleeping. It would be a good way of planting phony proof that the mansion fire had been set
by a squatter. It was a twist of fate that he grabbed the bag with her soup kitchen card, and that the card wasn’t burned in the fire. The pieces of this puzzle were finally beginning to fall into place, and the picture they were getting was far from pretty.

If this line of reasoning panned out, Brennan thought with disgust, Jimmy Ryan was not only guilty of arson that resulted in a felony murder, but of stealing from a homeless woman who had a pathetic, compulsive need for the scraps and rags and trash he took from her.

eighty-six

“N
ELL,
I can sense that you are very troubled.”

The two women were seated at a table in the center of the room, and Bonnie was holding Nell’s hands.

Bonnie’s hands are ice cold, Nell thought.

“What is it you need to ask Adam?” Bonnie whispered.

Nell tried to withdraw her hands, but Bonnie gripped them even more tightly. She is frightened, Nell thought—and
desperate.
She doesn’t know how much I know or suspect about Adam and the explosion.

“I need to ask Adam about Winifred,” Nell said, trying to keep her voice calm. “I think she may still be alive.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because a little boy who was on a ferry coming from the Statue of Liberty saw the explosion. He says he saw someone dive off the boat, someone dressed in a wet suit. I know Winifred was a strong swimmer, and I suspect it may have been her that the boy saw.”

“The child might have been wrong,” Bonnie said, her voice low.

Nell glanced about. The room was filled with shadows. The shades were drawn. The only sound she could hear, other than their own breathing, was the rain pelting on the windows.

“I don’t think the child was wrong,” Nell said firmly. “I think someone
did
escape from that boat before the explosion. I also think you know who it is.”

She felt a tremor run through Bonnie’s body, convulsing her hands, and it was then that Nell was able to pull her own free.

“Bonnie, I’ve seen you on television. I believe you do have genuine psychic powers. I don’t really understand what causes some people to have those special abilities, but I
do
know that I have had several psychic experiences myself—experiences that were very real but are not explainable as part of the rational world. I know that my Aunt Gert has had these experiences as well.

“But you’re different from us. You have a rare gift, and I think you have been guilty of misusing it. I remember Gert told me years ago that a gift of psychic power must only be used for good. If it is abused, she said, the one who possesses it will be severely punished.”

Bonnie listened, her eyes fixed on Nell, her pupils darkening with every word she heard, her complexion draining to alabaster white.

“You came to Gert, claiming that you had been contacted by Adam. I don’t believe in channeling, but I was distraught enough at his death to want to try to be in touch with him myself. When my mother and father died, they came to say good-bye to me because they loved me. I thought Adam had not come to say good-bye
because we had quarreled. So I wanted to be in touch with him; that way we could reconcile. I needed to part from him with love. That’s why I wanted so much to believe in you.”

“Nell, I am sure that on the other side, Adam—”

“Hear me out, Bonnie. If you
did
channel to Adam, what you claim he said to me was untrue. I know now that he did
not
love me. A man who loves his wife does not have an affair with his assistant. He does not open a safe-deposit box with her under another name. I am
sure
that Adam didn’t love me because that is precisely what he did.”

“You’re wrong, Nell. Adam
did
love you.”