Broken Saint, The (19 page)

Chapter 32

“How did you find me?”

“Your secretary told us you like this spot,” I
said.

Al Gerson was sitting on a bench on the Greenpath,
looking out at the river. Ryan was standing a few feet away, a grim look on his
face. We were a hundred yards upriver from where Maricel’s body was discovered.
In the dirt, next to the bench, was a stone with a brass plaque on it about
someone who died in 1996. Most of the benches on the Greenpath were paid for by
people who bought a memorial for someone.

I wondered if Al Gerson was going to buy a bench
and a plaque for Maricel.

Gerson’s long legs were out in front of him,
crossed at the ankles, and his hands were buried in the pockets of his black
wool overcoat, just like the one Ryan was wearing.

“That took a lot of courage,” I said. “What you
said at the service.”

He looked at me, his eyes bloodshot. “I’m not sure
a willingness to endure public humiliation and shame is the same as courage.”

“You did put it on the line. There could be
repercussions, at the university. In your church.”

“That’s probably true.” He shrugged his shoulders
inside his coat. “I’m not sure I will lose my job, but I think my days as acting
provost are numbered. And it’s safe to conclude that I will no longer be
permitted to serve in
the Church as bishop of
my ward.”

“Are you okay with that?”

He smiled sadly. “I feel better than I have in
many years,” he said. “A terrible burden has been lifted from my shoulders.”

“We want to talk to Mark,” I said.

His eyes looked clouded. “Oh, Detective, please,
do you have to?” His right eye started to twitch.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Gerson. I know he’s been through a
lot, but we think he’s the key.”

Gerson sat up abruptly. “You’re not saying you
think he hurt Maricel, are you? Please tell me you’re not thinking that.”

“We think Maricel confided in him, more than in
you or Andrea, and we think he can help us understand who would have wanted to
hurt her. That’s all we want from him.”

He shook his head. “I have … I have no idea where
he is.”

“Can you tell us about yesterday afternoon, when
you told your wife and son about Maricel being your daughter?”

“There’s very little to tell. I asked them to sit
down, in our living room, and I told them there was something important I
needed to say. It took three or four sentences. I had fallen in love with
Esperanza when I was a very young man. Maricel was born. I made clear that it
was a betrayal of my obligations to the Church, a betrayal of Andrea, and a
betrayal of Esperanza and Maricel.”

“Can you tell us how your wife and son reacted?”

“Andrea began to wail. Long, horrible wailing
sounds that I hadn’t heard since Mitch died. She was seated, on a couch. She
doubled over, as if she had been kicked in the stomach, and she began to lose
her balance. She tipped over on her side, on the couch. She began to … to have
trouble breathing. I helped raise her feet onto the couch, and I got her her
tranquilizers. She takes these pills. I finally got her to swallow one of them
with some water. After a while, perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes, she was able
to bring her breathing under control.”

“Did she say anything?”

“No, she did not say anything.”

“How did Mark respond when he saw his mother like
that?”

Al Gerson paused. “He didn’t see it. When he heard
what I had said, he got out of his chair. He started to cry. He said ‘Maricel
was mine.’ He repeated that several times as he hurried out of the house.”

Ryan said, “What do you think he meant when he
said that?”

Gerson shook his head. “I don’t know.” His big hands
came up and covered his eyes. He sat there like that for a few moments. “I know
only that I have hurt my family very badly.”

Ryan said, “Do you think Mark meant that he was
having a romantic relationship with Maricel?”

Gerson looked at Ryan, then at me. “I don’t believe
Mark has had a romantic relationship with anyone.”

Ryan said, “The way I read it, when Mark said
Maricel was his, was that she was not yours. Does that make any sense to you?”

“As I said, I cannot believe Mark had an adult
relationship with Maricel. Whether he believed he did—that I cannot say. From
my understanding of his disease, I think it’s possible that he thought he did,
or he thought that Maricel was, in some way, his girlfriend.”

“But about the ‘not yours’ part,” Ryan said.
“Would there be any reason that Mark might think you were having a sexual
relationship with Maricel?”

Gerson looked at Ryan. Then, his head bent down, he
leaned forward and rested his arms on his legs. Ryan walked around and stood
right in front of him. “Detective, what I said in the service this morning was
the truth. Maricel was my daughter. I made it very clear that I did not act as
a father should. I did not provide the love and encouragement and support that
I should have. But I never acted inappropriately with her. I never thought of
her in that way, and I never took any action that anyone could interpret in
that way.” Then he looked up again, directly at Ryan. “Never.”

“But what Mark might have thought?”

He shook his head. “I do not know, from one moment
to the next, what Mark might be thinking, about anything. About his mother,
about me, about Maricel. About anything.”

“Dr. Gerson,” I said, “would you please get in
touch with me immediately if you learn where Mark is. I promise you, we will
not hurt him. But we do need to talk to him.”

We left him there, on the bench, and started to
walk back on the Greenpath toward the university, where I’d parked the cruiser.

“You still think Gerson might be lying?” I said.

We had disturbed a blue heron, down by the river,
which flapped its massive wings, skimming the water and climbing into the chill
air.

“Yes,” Ryan said, “I still think he might be
lying.”

We kept walking. In the distance was the little
grove where Maricel’s body was discovered a full week ago. The crime scene tape
was now gone, the site just like it had been.

“He describes his wife reacting like he kicked her
in the stomach,” Ryan said. “Okay, that might be just from hearing about his
infidelity twenty years ago. But remember when she told us that her husband has
always been attractive to women? She could have had suspicions about what was
going on with Al and Maricel under her roof. She could have known he was having
an affair with her.”

“With his daughter?”

“We still don’t know she’s his daughter,” Ryan
said, like a lawyer raising an objection.

I said, “And Mark saying ‘she was mine’?”

“On the one hand, it could be a perfectly innocent
interpretation. Mark thought he had some kind of adult relationship with her,
then he finds out she’s his half-sister. Instead of having an adult
relationship with her—something separate from his parents—he learns that it was
just like it’s always been: like him and his sister, Judy. Or him and his twin,
Mitch. He’s still the kid in the family. He’s in the back seat of the car with
Maricel, with Mom and Dad sitting up front.”

“On the other hand?”

“On the other hand, Mark thinks—or knows from
talking to Maricel—that she was not his half-sister. And he thinks—or knows
from talking to her—that his father was having an affair with her. What better
get-out-of-jail card could Al have than that his son is a schizophrenic. They
have hallucinations. That’s what they do. Anything his son accuses him of is automatically
suspect—if I were on the jury, I’d have to vote for reasonable doubt.”

I said, “So what do you think we should do next?”

“I think we should try to find Mark. And see if
Maricel had a bank account.”

We made our way back to the cruiser and drove back
to headquarters.

“I’ve got an idea,” Ryan said as we walked over to
our desks. “Let me get in touch with Verizon, see if Mark’s got GPS tracking on
his phone.”

“His phone has that?”

“Maybe it does. And he has to have it enabled or
it doesn’t work. He’s smart enough to understand the technology—and know how to
turn it off.”

“You do that. I’ll work on Maricel’s financials.”

I routed the request through the chief’s office,
which officially requisitioned Maricel’s banking information from the state
banking association. I wasn’t worried that the chief would try to block it:
since she was a deceased adult whose murder we were investigating, his
authorization was automatic.

But I knew that financial forensics were getting a
lot more complicated. In the old days, the banker’s group would give us
whatever they had about accounts authorized to do business in Montana, and that
would cover anyone except the really rich shitheads who did their banking in
the Caymans or Switzerland. But today anybody can have accounts in Internet
banks anywhere in the world. For all we know, Maricel could have an account in
a click bank in Monaco that was sucking a thousand bucks a month from the
account of another customer, Al Gerson. The Internet is a terrific thing for
cops—and crooks.

I met up with Ryan again an hour later. “What’d
you get?” I said.

“Mark has a smartphone with GPS, which he turned
off.”

“Maricel had eighty-two dollars in a checking
account at a bank in town. No big deposits.”

“Where do you want to start looking for Mark?”
Ryan said.

“He doesn’t have his own car, so we can’t put a
plate number out,” I said.

“The game store?”

Ryan opened his notebook and picked up his phone.

“No, no,” I said. “I don’t want to tip off the guy
who runs the place. No telling if he’d say something might scare Mark off.”

“Good point,” Ryan said.

“Let’s take a drive.” We stood up and walked over
to the coat rack.

Five minutes later, we were at Game World. “What’s
this guy’s name?” I said as I parked on the street and put the visor down to
show the police ID.

Ryan looked at his notebook. “Richard Williams.”

We walked past a couple of Goth assholes shivering
on the sidewalk and opened the heavy glass doors. There were five boy nerds inside
looking at the crap on the shelves and in the metal bins all around the main
room.

Richard Williams recognized us and came over. He
nodded. “Detectives,” he said.

Ryan peeled off to go look in the back room where
we interviewed Mark the other time we’d come in. Richard turned his head to see
where Ryan was going but didn’t try to stop him.

“Richard, we wanna talk to Mark Gerson. You seen
him today or yesterday?”

“He was in late yesterday. Stayed about an hour.
Haven’t seen him today.”

“What was he like yesterday?”

“The truth?”

“Sure,” I said. “Let’s go with the truth.”

“Really fucked-up.”

“Really fucked-up how?”

“You know, herky-jerky, his eyes real big, loud,
saying all kinds of shit I couldn’t understand.”

“Did he go into the back room to work on the
machines?”

“Yeah.” Richard’s eyes were focused on a couple of
guys in oversized black coats with floppy sleeves who were examining some used
software in a bin on the other side of the room. I wondered whether he sold as
much as the kids lifted.

“Did he talk to you, tell you what was going on?
Tell you where he was going?” Satisfied that the two guys weren’t stealing the
disks, Richard looked back at me.

“If he did, I couldn’t understand it.”

“Does he hang with any guys in particular you know
about?”

“No, the vibe he puts out, he’s kinda scary—even to
this group.” Richard’s eyes swept the room.

“Any idea where he is now?”

“From the way he was yesterday, I’d say some other
planet.”

Ryan came over to us, holding a cell phone. “Do
you know if this is Mark’s?” he said to Richard.

“Could be,” he said. “It’s not mine.”

“All right.” I handed Richard my card. “You know
where Mark is, you give me a call, okay?”

He nodded, and we left.

In the car, Ryan turned on the phone and pushed
some buttons.

“Anything?”

“Just a second,” he said, pulling a notebook out
of his briefcase. “Last call he made was to Maricel.”

I was surprised. “He hasn’t used his phone in over
a week?”

“He called her last night.”

“Last night? Great,” I said. “He phones dead
people. If she’s Mormon, where is she now?”

“She’s in the spirit realm.”

“That’s a dead zone, right, even for Verizon?”

“I’m pretty sure of that,” Ryan said, “but he
might have left her a message.”

“Can we get that from Verizon?”

“Should be able to. I’ve worked with them before.
Let me try back at headquarters.”

Chapter 33

“Play it again, please.” Ryan had the phone cradled between
his ear and his shoulder as he typed. “‘I am so sorry about what has happened.
But I know now that you and I are sealed together, and I will be with you soon.’
Great. Thanks a lot.” He hung up the phone.

“What’s ‘sealed together’ mean?”

“‘Sealed together’ is LDS for the permanent bond
between a married couple—or any family member, really. And ‘I will see you
soon—’”

“I know what that means,” I said. “Shit.” I picked
up the phone and dialed Al Gerson at the university.

“This is Detective Seagate, Rawlings Police
Department. I need to speak to Dr. Gerson.”

“This is Mary, his assistant, Detective. He’s in a
meeting now. Can I ask him to—”

“I want you to call him, right now.”

“Detective, the provost is meeting with the dean—”

“Mary, listen to me. If you can’t reach him by
phone, have someone go to wherever the hell he is and give him a message. Tell
him it’s about Mark. Tell him it’s urgent. Have him phone me immediately.” I
gave the secretary my cell number and hung up.

Thirty seconds later, my cell rang. I looked at
the screen. It was Gerson. I put it on Speaker.

“Dr. Gerson, thanks for getting back to me. I
wanna let you know where we are with Mark—”

“Is he hurt?” His voice was fast, high. He was
panicked.

“No, Dr. Gerson, slow down. We haven’t found Mark
yet, but we think he’s having another psychotic episode.”

“Oh, my Lord. What happened?”

“Listen, Dr. Gerson, we don’t know what’s going
on. But he called Maricel—”

There was a pause. “He did what?”

“He phoned Maricel yesterday. Called her cell
phone. He left her a message that the two of them are sealed together, and
that’s he’s gonna join her soon.”

“Can you figure out where he is from the phone?”

“No, we tried that. The best thing you can do
right now is help us find him as soon as possible.”

“Of course, of course. What can I do?”

“I’m gonna ask you once more: Can you tell me
anything about where he might be? If you know where he is, you have to tell me
right now.”

“No, Detective.” The terror was coming through
loud and clear in his voice. “I have no idea where he is.”

“Is one of your cars missing? If we had a plate
number and a vehicle description—”

“No, both of our cars are accounted for. He’s not
in one of our cars.”

“All right, Dr. Gerson. I know I’m scaring you—and
I don’t mean to do that—but I need you to understand how important this is—”

“Yes, Detective, I understand. I’m going to call
Andrea immediately, and if there’s anything either of us can do, I beg you—”

“That’s good, sir. You call Andrea. And call me at
this number immediately if you get any information about where Mark is. If you
can think of any friends, any places he might be, you call me, all right?” I ended
the call.

Ryan was looking up at the ceiling. “Where’d you
go, Mark?”

“He’s not at home, not at the game store. Out at
the dump site at the river?”

“Want to head over there?”

“Let’s send a team of uniforms, in case we need to
look somewhere else.” I paused. “Anyone he’d get in touch with?”

“It’s not Hector, that’s for sure.”

“No, it’s not Hector,” I said. “Assuming he hasn’t
gone home to Mommy, the only other players are Amber and Jared.”

“I don’t see Mark going to Jared,” Ryan said. “Mark
would know that a guy like Jared wouldn’t have any patience with a freak like
him. Besides, if Maricel told Mark about that three-way with Jared and Hector,
Mark wouldn’t go near Jared.”

“That leaves Amber.”

Ryan nodded.

“We might as well try her,” I said. “Maybe she was
the bridesmaid when Mark and Maricel got sealed together.”

We got up, grabbed our coats, and drove out to
Amber’s apartment.

I knocked on her door, announced who we were. One
set of footsteps approached the door. She let us in. She was dressed for
classes: jeans and an oversized CMSU hoodie, hair pinned back by plastic clips.
She had on tan suede boots, calf-high, crepe soles, like she had just come in
or was about to go out.

“Amber, we’re looking for Mark Gerson. You know
where he is?”

“Mark Gerson? No,” she said, a puzzled look on her
face. “Why would you think he’d be in touch with me?”

“No reason, really,” I said. “It’s just we need to
find him. We think he’s kinda freaked out and he needs medical attention.”

“I haven’t seen him.”

I turned and headed toward the door. “By the way,
I saw you made it to the memorial service. No Jared, huh? You break up with
him?”

She nodded her head and put on a you-were-right expression.
“Yeah, like you said, he’s not who I want to be with.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “If you learn where Mark
is, you give me a call, okay? It’s real important.”

“Yeah, no problem.”

I was reaching for the doorknob when Ryan touched
my arm. I turned and looked at him.

“Amber,” he said, “you say you broke up with
Jared?”

“That’s right.”

“How did that go?”

Amber hesitated, like she didn’t think she had to
talk about it. “Not good,” she said. “He called me some names.”

“Really,” Ryan said, nodding.

“Yeah,” Amber said. “You know, ‘bitch,’ things
like that. ‘Cunt.’” Her hand came up to her face.

“So he’s gone, right?” Ryan said.

“Couple of days now.”

I didn’t know quite what Ryan was up to. Then I
saw him looking at the kitchen area. It was a pair of men’s Nikes under the
little table. He walked over to the shoes, picked them up, and turned back the
tongue to read the size. “Size 11,” he said. “Karen, what’s the size on the
prints we’ve got from the river?”

We didn’t have any prints from the river. “Size
11,” I said.

Amber gasped. “Oh, shit.”

Ryan looked at her hard. “We’re taking these in.”

“You can’t just do that,” she said, walking toward
Ryan to grab Jared’s sneakers, but Ryan put his hand out to stop her. “They’re
not your property.”

“Sit down, Amber,” he said.

“No,” she said, “I won’t.”

“All right, stand,” he said. “Let me explain the
law to you. You let us into your apartment. We didn’t have a search warrant,
but you let us in voluntarily, right?”

“I didn’t say you can take my stuff.”

“These sneakers were in plain view under the
kitchen table, right?”

She nodded.

“Police officers have a right to examine what
might be relevant evidence in a capital murder case. That is what I did. I
examined the sneakers to determine that they are size 11. Are we in agreement
so far?”

Amber looked to me like she thought I might step
in and stop Ryan. I stood there, my arms folded against my chest.

“But you are right, Amber,” Ryan said. “I don’t
have a right to take the sneakers in without your permission.”

“Good. Then leave them here.”

“Okay,” Ryan said. “Here’s what I’m going to do.
I’m going to call my chief, get a search warrant, bring a forensics team over
here, send another one over to Jared’s place. We’ll need probably three or four
hours, tops, at the two places. And we’ll need to bring both of you in for
questioning.”

She looked shocked. “Oh, my God, no, not again …”

Ryan gave her a look that said she was forcing him
into it. “We’ll hold a press conference tomorrow …”

“What do you mean, a press conference?”

“You know, microphones, lights, cameras. We’ll
give your name, Jared’s.” Ryan turned to me. “You think the chief would let us
talk about the three-way with Maricel and Hector?”

I shrugged. “I don’t see why not.” None of this
would happen, of course. But cops are allowed to lie to witnesses. Good thing,
or else I’d want to choose another line of work.

Amber burst into tears. “Okay, what do you want?”

Ryan said, “Let us take the sneakers in. The print
matches the print we have from the murder scene, we talk to Jared. The print
doesn’t match, I’ll personally return his sneakers to you—or to him, since you
two are not together anymore.”

“Take the fucking sneakers,” she said through her
tears, turning her back to Ryan.

Back in the cruiser, Ryan said, “Thanks for
playing along with Amber.”

“No problem,” I said. “You wanted to scare the
shit out of her?”

“No,” he said. “All I wanted to do was encourage her
to break it off with Jared. I saw my parents do it once to one of my younger
sisters. I didn’t expect Amber to go all legal on me.”

“I got a pretty strong feeling she’s on the phone
to Jared right now.”

Ryan nodded. “I’m good with that. If he thinks he
might have left any footprints at the river, he’ll be hitting the road.
Otherwise, he’s got nothing to worry about. Either way, I think Amber might be losing
some of that lovin’ feeling for him.”

“Make a note for us to pay him a visit tomorrow.
We get in his place, we’ll be able to tell if he’s gone.”

“Got it,” Ryan said.