Chat (25 page)

“Because with Metz, you had more than one person in on it,” Joe suggested.

“Yeah,” she agreed. “So, who was stuck alone with Nashman?”

He looked up at them. “I think it’s time for that chat with the Leppmans.”

Chapter 26

T
he initial sound was slight to almost unnoticeable, making Joe look up from his paperwork for no reason he could fathom. Its source, once revealed, however, held no mystery whatsoever. A woman was standing like a wraith at the office door Joe had left open for circulation. Her features were indistinct, the only lighting coming from Joe’s desk lamp, but her intent seemed clear. She had a gun in her hand.

Joe had seen only one photograph of this woman—from a brochure that Sam had collected while visiting her medical practice—and it was hardly reflective of the person standing before him now. But it seemed reasonable when he asked, “Dr. Gartner?”

“Don’t move.” John Leppman’s wife’s voice was a taut monotone.

“I’m not. What do you want?”

“That you leave us alone.”

“Am I bothering you?” Joe’s brain was working overtime, trying to bridge the gaps between what she knew, what he knew, and what she thought he might know. Incongruously, he also made a mental note to address the building’s lax security—the door downstairs had no metal detector, and a lock so flimsy, Joe himself had popped it open one night when he forgot his keys.

At the time, that had been a good thing.

“Spare me. You people have been digging into every corner of our lives.”

“Are you surprised?” Joe switched to considering his own survival. No one rational walked into a cop’s office with a gun—not that someone hadn’t done precisely that in his home just twenty-four hours earlier. But what was this one hoping to gain? Joe doubted that it was her own self-preservation. Sandy Gartner was here for her sole surviving daughter.

“Nothing wrong was done by anyone.”

“Those two men deserved to die,” Joe suggested.

“They were hoping to rape teenage girls—children.”

“So, you wanted to be helpful.”

After a moment’s pause, Gartner said, “Yes.”

Joe was torn between the conversation and its context. The gun was no prop, and its eventual use depended on the depth of Gartner’s self-delusion. On the other hand, if he played this right, her very words could close the case, here and now.

He decided to try inching her back toward reality, while fantasizing that if the movies were right, a sudden leap by him—as he whipped out his own gun in midair—would result in a full confession and his not lying dead on the floor.

“And you did that by using the stolen Taser on the first man, and the chemical cookie on the second. You know, according to our lab, the DMSO probably wasn’t needed. The fentanyl would’ve worked on its own.”

Sandy Gartner took a few paces toward him, revealing more of her face to the light. Joe could tell from the confusion in her eyes that his comment had hit home. The problem was that he was now approaching the very edge of his knowledge and had already taken a huge, albeit calculated, risk. He and his squad had assumed that those two drugs had materialized via the horse vet route, despite the vet clinic’s having told them that none had gone missing. But as Joe had uttered Gartner’s name out loud, it occurred to him for the first time that the easiest, least complicated source of both chemicals could have been a doctor’s office.

But what about Wendy? Joe had convinced himself that she’d delivered the cookie to the second victim and stolen the Taser cartridge used on the first, both with her father’s involvement.

The woman with the gun suggested otherwise.

“Did you know their names?” Joe asked her, hoping her answer would start to clarify who had done what.

Her eyebrows rose slightly. “They don’t have names.”

“These two did. One of them even had a wife and child.”

Gartner held out the gun and sighted along it. Joe watched her eye floating just above the black hole of the barrel as she aimed at his face. Her hand was trembling slightly.

“They were monsters,” she said. “I saw them.”

Maybe now’s the time to jump, he thought. I might get lucky.

A soft male voice floated into the room. “Sandy? Sweetheart? Put the gun down.”

She startled. Joe winced, surprised that, in fact, she didn’t fire and he didn’t jump.

But the gun didn’t go off. Nor was it lowered.

A second shadow entered and stood quietly by the door.

Gartner shifted her weight. The gun wavered.

“Go away, John,” she said. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“Of course it does,” he said gently.

Joe slipped his oar into the water, hoping to normalize the mood. “Mr. Leppman? Your wife and I were starting to sort all this out. My name’s Joe Gunther.”

Leppman picked up his cue. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Gunther. Sorry about the intrusion.”

“That’s okay. I was planning to talk with you both anyhow.” He made the smallest of gestures with his hand. “Would you like to sit down?”

That was too much. Sandy Gartner poked the gun at him. “Don’t move. I told you.”

Joe remained silent. Leppman took two silent steps farther into the room. “Sandy? I wouldn’t mind sitting down. I’m very tired. I bet you are, too. There’re two chairs—one right beside you.”

She glanced to her side, which Joe took as a good sign. Apparently, so did her husband, since he finished approaching, grabbed the other chair, and sat down. In a typical mental aside, so often rued later, Joe hoped this shrink knew his business and wasn’t acting without a single thought toward Joe’s survival.

Gartner hesitated, seeing her husband unbutton his coat and get comfortable. She glanced at Joe, who did his best to appear the genial host, and finally folded at the knees, perching on the chair’s edge. The gun stayed pointed at Joe.

“What are you doing here?” she asked Leppman.

“I followed you,” he said simply. “I overheard the phone call you got from the stable, telling you the police had been asking questions, I heard you say the same had happened at your office, and I saw you take the gun.”

“Where’s Wendy?”

“She’s at home,” he reassured her. “She doesn’t know anything. She’s fine, Sandy. Like I want you to be.”

Gartner looked down at the gun and watched it slowly lower to her lap as if it belonged to someone else.

“What did you want to have happen here?” her husband asked her.

With her left hand, she reached up and touched her forehead fleetingly. “I wanted some peace and quiet. I thought maybe we could talk this out.”

Joe saw what he hoped was his opportunity. “I’m listening,” he said.

“I am, too,” her husband echoed, which struck Joe with its implied ignorance.

“You had your police consulting,” she said to him, her eyes fixed on the floor. “You had a way to channel losing Gwennie.”

Joe saw her husband’s brow furrow. He imagined what was going on inside the man’s brain. The psychologist battling with the spouse and fellow mourner—one wishing to counsel and soothe, the other urging to argue and fight for turf.

Joe was having some of the same problem. Intrigued as he was with the direction this was taking, his right arm, as slowly as a minute hand, was also moving to where he could casually drop it into his lap—and closer to his holstered gun.

“You could get your revenge,” she was saying. “Putting all those men in jail. I had nothing. I had to put on a brave face for Wendy, keep running my office, listen to all my patients complaining, even encourage you as you bragged about how you nailed this guy or the other. I wanted to find some relief, too. But no one was listening.”

The husband in Leppman slipped out for a moment. “You never told me.”

“You never asked. You never looked. John, we left our home on your recommendation, to ‘leave it all behind us,’ you said. We were supposed to get a fresh start in Vermont. Well, I tried that, but you didn’t. You started right up with all this Internet police work. That wasn’t leaving it all behind. You were the only one of us who never even tried.”

She suddenly straightened in her chair. “My God, John, you planted the seeds of all this. Remember that night you went riding around with your cop friends? You came home with a Taser—like it was a talisman you’d found on the edge of Gwennie’s grave, instead of something you’d stolen. What were you thinking? That damn thing took on a life of its own. You moved on—forgot all about it. But I kept thinking about it, wondering how a Taser had so cleverly worked its way into our home.”

Leppman’s brow furrowed. “My God,” he said. “I didn’t know. I stole it from impulse, because of what it represented. I never thought . . .” He rubbed his eyes. “Maybe, subliminally . . .” He lapsed into silence.

Joe watched them both—highly schooled, well spoken, respectfully mannered—their emotions muffled under the careful professional language of their analytical training. Still, what they were saying didn’t differ from what he’d heard between the down-and-out of his experience. People made assumptions, took one another for granted, behaved selfishly, maybe even acted to correct the wrongs the other refused to address.

He wondered if, given the mood, that last point might not be broached, the half-forgotten gun notwithstanding.

“Dr. Gartner,” he began, “what made you focus on these two? Were they like the man who went after Gwennie?”

“I thought so,” she agreed. “They were so quick to assume . . .”

She paused. He waited a couple of seconds and then tried a slightly different approach. “What made you go online in the first place?”

That seemed to help. Her face became more animated, the latent researcher brought to life. “I wanted to find out what the appeal was. I wanted to understand what Gwennie was looking for. It was amazing. I only read the exchanges at first, people going back and forth. Some of it was like eavesdropping on any conversation—even most of it, I guess. But there was this undertone. Maybe I was looking for it, too, reading into the comments. But I began to see where a lot of the chats were leading. I could see how seductive so many of the men were, and how willing the girls were to follow them—the total anonymity breeding a lack of inhibition.”

She stopped again, still staring at the floor, but neither man interrupted. They could instinctively tell she was gathering her memories, putting them in order to get them out at long last.

“I began to get angry,” she continued. “All the sadness, the loss. Everything we’d gone through was brought together in my head. It was like a laser beam gathering light. I began to fantasize putting an end to it all. It made me feel better.”

Joe glanced at John Leppman, trying to read his mind. His face was slack with remorse and guilt—his closest and most valued patient had been overlooked or, perhaps worse, dismissed.

“I don’t know why I chose those two,” Sandy said. “Something clicked with the first one’s name. Gwennie loved the Rocky movies, and I always loved Norman Rockwell. Maybe that was it. And he was so horrible, too. When I started chatting as Mandi, he came on like a boy in high school, all awful one-liners and disgusting innuendos. He thought he was such a Don Juan.”

Her cheeks had colored as she spoke, and her voice grew in strength. The growing rage she was describing hardly needed better illustration.

“I began fantasizing about him—what I would do if I ever got him into a room alone.” She laughed once, very quietly, almost a sob. “I came up with plan after plan, each time making it more real. The Taser had to be a part of it—the same thing that pig had used on Gwennie. That seemed only fair.”

“You got Wendy to steal the cartridge without her dad knowing?” Joe asked.

She looked up at him, a sad smile on her face. “Poor Wendy. I didn’t ask her to do that . . .” She stopped in mid-thought, reconsidering. “Not directly, but I suppose I did. I’d been telling her of my fantasies.”

Her husband groaned next to her, barely audibly. Her head jerked in his direction, and Joe thought she’d break from her monologue to give him a tongue-lashing. But she stopped at the last second and merely stared at him for a moment.

She returned to Joe, ignoring Leppman. “She was feeling as I was. Dangling. She needed an outlet, too. She wanted to help, and when she was with
him
on that tour of the police department and she suddenly saw the cartridge we needed, she took it.”

By now Leppman had slumped into his chair, his hands in his lap, his eyes unfocused, all energy seemingly drained from his body.

“She also helped you drop his body into the river,” Joe suggested.

She shook her head but answered affirmatively, “That was wrong. I shouldn’t have involved her so much. But I believed she wanted to. She told me the two of us had to do everything together, every step of the way. I went along because I wanted the company. And she was so enthusiastic.” She said this with emphasis, her eyes bright.

Joe stoked the mood of the moment. “You were like sisters,” he suggested.

She nodded. “After we dropped him into the water, we hugged and laughed. It was the best I’d felt in years.”

Joe knew he should probably get as much detail as possible—the gap between using the Taser in the motel and subsequently drowning Metz miles away suggested a horrifying picture of many repeated electrical impulses in order to keep the man subdued. But he wasn’t sure how much longer this moment would last. It had come about spontaneously, and could just as quickly vaporize. These kinds of confessions were tricky enough in the best-planned environments, let alone something like this.

He forged ahead to get as much as he could. “But by the second time, things had changed.”

Her face fell. “Yes,” she conceded. “That’s when I realized how wrong I’d been. Such a fool. I should have thought of that. We planned it together, worked out all the details. But when it came down to actually doing it, Wendy balked.”

Joe was watching her every gesture, every shadow that crossed her face. She was discussing this as if she’d chosen the wrong dress for her daughter’s coming-out party—an important glitch in an otherwise well planned event. The fact that they were discussing a double homicide had slipped into irrelevance.

Not that Joe was outwardly behaving much more rationally. Since Sandy Gartner had brought herself to this level of reality, Joe wasn’t about to disabuse her.